Boss of Bosses (37 page)

His note-taking had become a compulsion, perhaps a reaction to spending hours alone locked in one room. Occasionally he would listen to music – some hymns, or gentle background crooning: Julio Iglesias. He had the soundtrack to
The Godfather
, an old favourite he had seen in Palermo with his friend Pino Lipari. He set a chair so that he could sit, after his hospitable gaoler opened the door in the mornings, and look out of the crack above the door to enjoy the sunlight without being seen.

Down in Corleone, reactions were mixed at having the Boss back on their doorstep. Tensions were heightened by a subtle increase in police presence.

Those who were recruited to provide material support, security and postal services to the Boss were constantly on call. He did not go out or hold meetings but wrote letters constantly, several a day, and wanted them collected immediately. His presence, though invisible, was keenly felt.

Provenzano’s return to Corleone was not an easy time for his family. Saveria and the boys were under more surveillance than ever. Every time they left the house there was a camera monitoring their movements.

Life definitely got more complicated. Saveria was happy to have her man within range so she could attend to his needs on a daily basis, but those needs were becoming more unmanageable. She seldom went out in case someone needed to drop something off or pick something up. The letters between her and her husband during this period were mostly about family business and banal practicalities. He would asked for food, fresh cheese, more coffee; and ‘please don’t send any more pasta al forno’. She complained of a bad leg keeping her at home; he commiserated with her on having a cold. They also exchanged notes about Angelo’s impending wedding. With his continuing prostate problems there was a continual flow of reeking garments to wash.

For the boys, looking after their father was a heavy burden, and he was testing them with his demands, asking to see them all the time.
They had never been involved in Cosa Nostra – their father was most insistent on that – but now that there were fewer old friends to rely on, the immediate family were drawn into his support system.

More than that, after they had moved to Corleone, they had got quite used to living without him, through school and university. They and their mother were a unit. And then, all of a sudden, he was back among them. Francesco Paolo had begun to make a life elsewhere but had to return.

Both young men were fed up. Angelo could not stand the life he was leading. It was not easy being Provenzano’s son, organizing meetings and everything he needed. When he summoned them, they arranged to meet him, under considerable stress. ‘The whole family was circling around him and his needs’, said one investigator. ‘He was obsessed with the details and arrangements of his life in hiding and his protection, and he wasn’t really paying attention to anyone else’s needs. And the boys were tired, tired and fed up with this life.’

The launderette that Angelo had tried to set up with his mother in Corleone had been closed by the authorities after a couple of years, on the basis that the family had failed to prove that it had not been bought and set up with illegally earned capital. When the police came to serve them notice to close the business, Saveria was visibly upset. In all their dealings with her, they had never seen her so emotional, and in their embarrassment they were brisk and businesslike. But this represented a major defeat for Saveria and the boys. Angelo, who saw it as a failure on his part, became withdrawn and depressed, and it was some months before he summoned the determination to challenge the closure in court. Grimly determined not to let his mother down, he got a job as a sales rep for a household goods company, selling electrical appliances. Among all the painfully unglamorous possibilities in the straight world for someone trying to steer away from a life of crime, selling vacuum cleaners door to door has to be high on the list.

Provenzano was always affectionate towards his sons in his letters, and they were warm and respectful in return, but private conversations between the brothers revealed a deep unhappiness.

In the spring of 2005 Paolo graduated with a first-class degree in languages from Palermo University (his dissertation was an ethnic
study of the Goths). At his graduation a reporter snapped a picture of him in a mortarboard being congratulated by two female friends, and he ended up on the cover of a magazine.

From Paolo’s point of view, he had satisfied his father’s wishes by finishing his studies, but his specialism in languages was going to help him get away from the family. While Angelo was stranded, packing bags and phoning for pick-ups, working at his dreary job, Paolo got away: out of 300 candidates he was one of the thirty-six picked to teach in Germany and promote Italian culture. During several trips he and his brother made to Germany, police recorded conversations in which he vented his rage.

By this stage the search for their father had intensified, and their lives were utterly disrupted. There were cameras and microphones everywhere, picking up their every word. When the brothers got a plane to Germany, there was a policeman in the row behind, wearing what looked like an iPod, which was recording their conversation. Angelo’s fiancée, who worked in a clothes shop in Corleone, argued with him about his reticence on family matters. Her father worked for a transport agency in Palermo, and she simply was not used to accepting certain things without questioning.

The boys had been brought up to respect their father, but they had developed a critical sense of his world. They had to live with that world but not within it; there was no getting away from it, but no entry either. When Paolo and Angelo packed the car to the roof with Paolo’s stuff and set off for Germany in September 2005, the police were with them every step of the way. They booked a cabin on the Palermo–Genoa ferry, and agents stuck microphones in every conceivable spot. Agents listened in to their heart-to-heart.

‘Some things have always bothered me’, said Paolo, ‘when he said we had to leave [to go and live in Corleone], we had to go, because of all our fucking problems, and who ever gave a damn about us? And when I got back on my first Saturday home from Germany, right? And we ended up going over there . . . I don’t know why he even wanted us there. I can’t see the point of going to see him: he’s never even talked to me properly. When I was graduating and I had to take my last exam, no one gave a fuck about whether I might be
having any problems, no – I had to go and stand around over at his place. Because that’s all I ever do, stand around in his presence. Whether you like it or not, you’ve always been more involved – at least he talks to you, but I’ve always stood there saying nothing, since I was a kid.’

‘For what it’s worth . . . I don’t think he planned to come back’, Angelo said.

‘So what, I’m supposed be happy about it? I’m supposed to be happy that we’re rebuilding this weird sort of “family unit” and it wasn’t even planned? And then he calls it the will of God.’

‘We’re all to blame’, said Angelo gloomily: their mother was to blame as she had never stood up to him, and they were to blame for putting up with everything. ‘If there’s personal responsibility, I can take it. We can say it’s down to destiny, to God’s will . . . but the fact is we have put up with a whole lot of difficult situations and we carry on putting up with them. We can’t rebel against it, we can’t even shift this cross we bear, to make it easier to carry. I’ve never said this to anyone, but when you think about the situation we’re in, what we’ve had to go through, could it really be any worse if our father was dead?’

Although some mafiosi have educated their children and allowed them to train for a legitimate profession, most end up getting drawn into the Mafia’s weir. Pino Lipari, who counselled his friend to educate his sons and keep them out of the organization, had a son who worked in the family contracting business and a daughter who trained as a lawyer. Whether it was what she originally intended, once she was qualified, and her father got caught up in legal difficulties, Cinzia Lipari specialized in criminal law and became her father’s legal representative. She saw it as filial duty, she later explained to investigators, an inescapable obligation to ease her father’s burden. It did not mean she shared his choices.

After Lipari’s arrest in 1998, his son devoted himself to running messages and painstakingly reconstructing his letters, which were cut up and sewn into the hems of trousers. There was a lot of work and organization involved in rewriting and delivering the messages to the next ‘postman’.

In 2002 the whole family was arrested for aiding and abetting a fugitive. In prison, separated from her two small daughters, Cinzia suffered from depression and went into a dramatic decline. Her father professed feeling desperately sorry for what he had done to his family. She later co-operated with the police, admitting she had worked for her father. She agreed that he had ruined her life but said she could not have denied him. The Mafia had ruined him; she just wanted to help.

She blamed not her father, but Provenzano. ‘That man has destroyed our family’, she told magistrates.

Although the ever-loyal Lipari was evangelical about his friend’s good intentions, his family did not share his view. His wife called Provenzano ‘Saint Brigit’, lacing a code-name with a sharp edge of sarcasm: ‘We need Saint Brigit here. If he was a man with enough balls he’d turn up and say, “Here I am” – he’s got nothing to lose any more, he’s practically dying – he should be locked up, and let fathers with families go home.’

Alone in his farm cottage, the Boss’s thoughts were very far from on turning himself in. Night and day he kept working. Whatever happened, the
pizzini
must not ever stop: he had to keep the lines of communication open. If something happened to one of his postmen, he would have him replaced immediately. Any delay, or a pause, and the organization would grind to a halt. Day and night he typed his letters painstakingly, copying out carefully selected sections to send to different people. His careful and profitable management of the organization had become an obsession: he was a sick old man working tirelessly on his legacy.

One of Provenzano’s major achievements was to restore the loyalty of the prison population. Men who had been caught in the great sweep following Riina’s arrest, most of them from Riina’s faction, would be coming out soon, and some of them could be dangerous. To prevent any revenge attacks Provenzano kept the prison population happy: paying into a fund for their legal expenses, seeking their views on major decisions, making sure their families were taken care of. It was an old-fashioned approach, one disapproved of by the young guns, who were overheard wondering why on earth
Provenzano should bother himself about people in prison when there was money to be made. ‘We overheard some of the younger mafiosi complaining about Provenzano wasting his time on prisoners’, said Alfonso Sabella. ‘But he understood that keeping the prison population on your side was vital to prevent Cosa Nostra imploding. He was extremely successful at this – and we don’t know quite how he did it.’

Those who had behaved themselves, who had kept a low profile and remained silent, were promoted on their release. ‘When I was chief prosecutor in Palermo,’ recalls anti-Mafia chief Pietro Grasso, ‘I happened to meet two mafiosi whom I had convicted fifteen years before, in the maxi-trial. At that time they were soldiers, on the bottom rung of the organization; now they were regents. I said to them, well done, you’ve made a career of it. They had done their time, paid their debt to society and proved they were trustworthy. When they’d been released, they got their reward: promotion.’

During the summer of 2005 Provenzano’s mediation skills were called on to deal with an increasingly inflammatory situation in Palermo. He had apparently been paving the way for two powerful Palermo bosses, father and son, to run the organization.

Salvatore (Totuccio) Lo Piccolo, the most powerful boss in Palermo, had been in hiding for over twenty years. It was no secret that he expected to be the next Boss of Bosses. He was known as ‘the Watch Guy’ or simply ‘Cartier’ after he produced stainless-steel Cartier watches as gifts for Provenzano and Giuffré. An experienced capo who lived modestly and worked hard doing business behind the scenes, he was a dramatic contrast with his son Salvo – a flashy, violent upstart apparently loathed by both investigators and mafiosi.

At the same time Provenzano was dealing with the ambitions of another Palermo boss, Nino Rotolo, a hot-headed capo presently under house arrest, trying to balance the two men’s power and influence and avoid a war of succession. It was a lesson he had learned from his mentor Luciano Liggio, who had put him and Riina in harness together, drawing on their different strengths – knowing that there was so much rivalry between them that they would never unite to oust him.

Lo Piccolo had been manoeuvring to build up his power base within Cosa Nostra by linking up with the Inzerillo family – survivors of the Mafia war in the early 1980s and Sicily’s foremost drug traffickers, who had been routed by Riina’s men and fled to the USA. Lo Piccolo had been working with the Inzerillos, building up a significant income stream with the USA, and now, twenty years after they were banished by decree of the commission, they were beginning to come back. Lo Piccolo was paving the way for their safe return to Palermo and had petitioned Provenzano – who, as ever, heard the economic arguments and tried to find a way to make everyone happy.

In the summer of 2003 police acting on a tip-off staked out a traditional family restaurant, Il Vecchio Mulino, near Palermo, which was hosting a private banquet on a day it was closed to the public. Agents had been told it was a sit-down between Mafia families to settle a row over cattle-rustling. As agents hiding in cars and up trees took photos of the arriving guests, they recognized several old faces: mafiosi from Palermo who had fled for their lives in 1981. This meeting was to do with far more than cattle-rustling.