Boss of Bosses (5 page)

Cavataio, described as ‘a cunning killer with a face like a gorilla and a turbulent past’, was suspected of inciting the Mafia war, setting families against each other and creating suspicion and trouble. Finding himself pushed aside by the new generation, he had built a powerful, if unofficial, group of older capos around him and orchestrated a series of murders.

After the war was over, tensions were still running high in Palermo, and Cavataio represented a common enemy. He attempted to blackmail his way out of trouble by boasting that he had drawn a map of the Palermo Mafia families, including the names of all the members. The police had no knowledge of the Mafia groupings or the identity of the various families – even making such a map was dangerous. While the boss of Catania went through the motions of negotiating with him, Salvatore Greco, whose villa had been partly destroyed by the bomb at Ciaculli, put together a group of hit men, with Bernardo Provenzano at the head.
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At 7.30 on that December evening two police cars stopped outside Moncada’s office. While Totò Riina stayed in one of the cars to direct operations, six men in police uniform ran towards the building. Bernardo Provenzano and his friend Calogero Bagarella were in the lead, followed by Damiano Caruso, from the Riesi family. They burst into Moncada’s office, pointing machine guns and shouting ‘Freeze!’ Before anyone could think about moving, Caruso opened fire – destroying the advantage of surprise. One man was shot in the chest and fell. The accountant managed to fire a shot but was hit in the stomach. Moncada’s sons were hit several times. Cavataio ducked behind a table and returned fire, shooting Bagarella full in the chest. He caught Provenzano in the hand, then dived under the desk, playing dead.

The order was to set fire to the office. The men looked around at the corpses and at the wounded groaning on the floor. Provenzano wanted that map. He’d heard that Cavataio kept it hidden in his sock, so he grabbed his ankles and started pulling. As he heaved, he felt some resistance and realized that Cavataio was still alive. As they struggled, Cavataio, who had his gun in his hand, tried to shoot Provenzano in the face, but he had run out of bullets. Provenzano was trying to shoot him with his machine gun, but it jammed, so he clubbed him unconscious with the butt. When he got a hand free, he drew his own handgun and shot him point-blank.

The shoot-out had lasted just a few minutes and left five men dead. Provenzano, covered in blood, carried his friend’s body out to the waiting cars and heaved him into the boot. They buried him secretly on top of another body in the Corleone cemetery.

The viale Lazio massacre became one of the most notorious events in the history of Cosa Nostra, and nearly forty years later the trial of its alleged protagonists, now old men, is still ongoing. Although there were initially protests against the high-handed way the assassination of Cavataio had been decided and executed by the Palermo families, the other clans no longer had the stomach for a fight, and the Grecos, with their ambitious allies the Corleonesi, consolidated their power.

There were lessons for Provenzano from viale Lazio too, as the historian Salvatore Lupo explains: ‘A frontal attack such as that is a highly
unusual event in Mafia history. Usually the adversaries circle each other, one of them falls into a trap and is disappeared, or there’s a set-up and someone tries to shoot him.

‘The Mafia is not made up of gangs who shoot at each other. The horror of that attack brought down the full weight of law enforcement. The Mafia manages to operate undisturbed when it doesn’t hurt anyone. Any mafioso who understands that, tries to do business and settle disputes without creating a massive disturbance.’

A disturbance had most definitely been made, and yet the shoot-out prepared the ground for Provenzano’s promotion. His reputation for tenacity was affirmed, as was his nickname,
u’ tratturi
(‘the Tractor’), because, as one collaborator expressed it, ‘where he passed, the grass no longer grew’. He was unstoppable, dogged and fiercely determined. The country boys from Corleone were discovering that, wherever you are from, violence is power.

After his acquittal in Bari, Liggio spent most of his time being treated in clinics in northern Italy. In December 1970 the court of appeal sentenced him to life for the double murder of Dr Navarra and his colleague. But by this time he was nowhere to be found.

In Liggio’s absence Totò Riina represented him on the ruling commission of Cosa Nostra, making up the triumvirate with Gaetano Badalamenti, the boss of Cinisi, and Stefano Bontate, the ‘prince of Villagrazia’. Riina was ambitious and steely, sarcastic and intolerant of mistakes. It would not be long before the Corleone cuckoo shoved his fellow commission members out of the nest.

One Palermo mafioso voiced the alarm of many Palermitani, who knew the Corleonesi had their sights on the city: ‘What’s Riina going to do in Palermo, if we’re all united? We’ll give him a kick up the arse and send him back to Corleone to grow corn.’
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Going back to the rural Mafia was the last thing on Riina and Provenzano’s agenda, and everybody knew it.

The new bosses of Corleone were an unknown entity. They had started out as rustic bandits, thugs and killers, and made careers for themselves in Cosa Nostra – not the usual trajectory for a Mafia boss, points out Salvatore Lupo. ‘Liggio was defined as a gangster and a killer, which does not correspond to the usual model of capomafia.’
Until that point Mafia bosses had come from dynasties raised on organized crime. These Corleonesi had no such pedigree.

Riina was bitter about men of honour like Bontate, who came from middle-class, old-money families. ‘He was crazed with jealousy and envy’, said Francesco Di Carlo. ‘He was drunk with power.

‘I said to him once, “You’ve got it in for these people because they come from a big dynasty that goes back hundreds of years, great-great-grandfathers who got rich in Cosa Nostra, and you had no one before you, not even your father. . . .” His family were poor, some of them had been in prison, they were dirt poor. I remember doing a whip-round and giving him money for the Corleone family’s legal expenses.’

Riina never lost that instinctive need to overcome the poverty of his roots: when he made millions later in his career, he bought land – the peasant’s dream – land of his own. Provenzano would return to the countryside when he had to, holding meetings in farm buildings and sleeping in sheep sheds, but he didn’t have the same need to possess land. But for now the two friends’ ambitions centred on the city.

Circumstances were in their favour. In 1972 Badalamenti and Bontate were arrested, and while the older bosses were in prison, Riina continued his relentless rise. Even though kidnapping had been outlawed, the Corleonesi snatched prisoners on other families’ territory, causing huge embarrassment and making large amounts of ransom money.

Nino Calderone, whose brother was the boss of Catania, like others on both sides of the law, regarded the Corleonesi as a new breed, unlike any mafiosi they had dealt with before. ‘The heads of the Corleonesi were incredibly ignorant, but they were cunning, like devils, and at the same time they were smart and ferocious, which is a rare combination in Cosa Nostra.

‘Toto Riina had intuition and intelligence and was difficult to fathom and very hard to predict. At the same time he was savage. His philosophy was that if someone’s finger hurt, it was better to cut off his whole arm just to make sure.

‘Binnu Provenzano was nicknamed
u viddanu,
“the lout”, because of his fine manners. My brother called him
u tratturi,
“the Tractor”, after
his skill as a murderer, and after the effect he had on any problems, or people, he had to deal with.’

Riina and Provenzano had built on their different strengths and respected their differences; as their reputations grew, few others felt comfortable around them, and they never needed to justify their actions to each other. They knew where they came from and what they wanted to achieve. Riina, backed by Provenzano, had taken Liggio’s place. As the situation required, Provenzano would transform himself from a ruthless killer into a political operator.

In 1970 the court of appeal in Bari found Bernardo Provenzano and Salvatore Riina guilty of conspiracy and banned them for life from holding public office. Fortunately for them, they didn’t need to occupy any public office in person. They had someone to do it for them. Their key political contact was Vito Ciancimino, the son of a Corleone barber and one of the most corrupt and malign influences on the Palermo political scene.

Ambitious, greedy and self-obsessed, Ciancimino would take the Corleonesi a long way.

A
T THE END
of the 1950s the landscape of Palermo began to change rapidly. The price of property soared as land became available for development and people left the countryside and moved into the city for work. Beautiful Liberty villas, with elaborate brick-work and elegant balconies, were pulled down. One famously lovely villa on via Libertà was bulldozed in the middle of the night, just before a protection order came into force. The nineteenth-century villas surrounded by lovely gardens were swept away, replaced by multi-storey apartment blocks, ugly cement and glass constructions jammed close to each other.

Restoring the crumbling palazzi in the heart of the city was considered too expensive, so the carved stone balconies were left to collapse, windows buckled and cracked, and parts of the roofs fell in. The old gardens, untended, were parched and rubbish-strewn. Residents of the old palazzi would have their water and electricity cut off in a bid to force them out of the old quarters and into the new flats on the edge of town. The families who moved in, often penniless immigrants, lived in conditions worse than anything they had left behind.

The commissioner for public works at this time was Vito Ciancimino, the son of a barber from Corleone, whose relentless ambition was visible in his sharp expression and aggressive manner. His curly hair was greased back, and he wore a Hitler moustache and affected a cigarette holder. Like Riina and Provenzano, he was in a hurry to make his fortune in the city.

The Christian Democrat mayor of Palermo, Salvo Lima, was a slick operator who built political connections across the country and was a member of the inner circle of the Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti,
rising to finance minister and MEP. He was persistently accused of having Mafia connections, to which he responded that in Sicily you simply couldn’t avoid them. He had close ties with the La Barbera brothers, powerful bosses in Palermo, and the multimillionaire Salvo cousins, who collected taxes for the whole of Sicily, thanks to their links with the Mafia. The alliance of Ciancimino and Lima brought corruption and degradation to the city for decades.

Under Cianimino corruption exploded in the city: over half of the four thousand building licences issued over the course of four years (1959 to 1963) went to the same three people, none of whom had any development or building experience (one was a janitor, one was retired) – all of them front men for developers who were paying substantial kickbacks to the Mafia. While these massive developments swallowed up the green spaces and citrus groves to the west of the city, Cosa Nostra laundered millions in drug money through the builders’ books.

Ciancimino was raking in kickbacks from overpriced contracts for public services and giving the Mafia a large cut. In a city that frequently endured temperatures in excess of 30° C in summer, 40 per cent of water leaked from rusty old pipes. In the poorer quarters, where bomb damage from the Allied attack during the Second World War had not been repaired, old tenement buildings had been opened like dolls’ houses and left exposed to the elements. Many areas had no running water: residents had to queue at standpipes with jerry cans.

The old system of patronage in Sicilian politics was as strong as ever. Ciancimino was described as a ‘puppeteer’ manoeuvring the city council, but he in his turn was controlled by the Corleone Mafia. During the boom years in Palermo, Ciancimino was ‘in the hands of the Corleonesi, Riina and Provenzano’, according to the Palermo boss turned supergrass Tommaso Buscetta. One collaborator, a politician and mafioso, revealed: ‘Ciancimino was very close to Bernardo Provenzano, who steered his political evolution.’
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‘There’s nothing in Corleone’, explains the historian Salvatore Lupo. ‘It’s only once they arrive in Palermo that the Corleonesi make a career for themselves. The fact that this close-knit group comes from
the same home town reinforces their ties. Ciancimino is one of them. Clearly, the fact that he’s their
paesano
strengthens the unit.’

‘Riina and Provenzano are fugitives, and they don’t have the where-withal to range across the horizons of politics and business’, Giuffré later told magistrates. ‘They have a limited education and, living in hiding, it’s difficult for them to keep up direct contact with people in these fields. Provenzano surrounds himself with advisers, people who see how things are going to go, who help Provenzano reinvent himself. . . . There’s Vito Ciancimino, one of the former mayors of Palermo, who helped his fellow Corleonesi climb the ladder of power.’

His close ties with Ciancimino reinforced Provenzano’s position within the organization, and he guarded the contact jealously. Ciancimino would remain an indispensable contact behind the political scenes throughout Provenzano’s rise to power. Even when he had been thrown out of the Christian Democrats for Mafia connections, Ciancimino continued to wield extraordinary influence, since he could still deliver the Mafia vote.