Boss of Bosses
Page 1
Boss of Bosses
Also by Clare Longrigg
Mafia Women
No Questions Asked
Boss of Bosses
A Journey into the Heart
of the Sicilian Mafia
CLARE LONGRIGG
Thomas Dunne Books
St. Martin’s Press
New York
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
BOSS OF BOSSES. Copyright © 2008 by Clare Longrigg. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Longrigg, Clare.
Boss of bosses / Clare Longrigg. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-53394-6
ISBN-10: 0-312-53394-2
1. Provenzano, Bernardo, 1933– 2. Mafiosi—Italy—
Biography. 3. Mafia—Italy—History. I. Title.
HV6453.I83M3543455 2009
364.1092—dc22
[B]
2008039095
First published in Great Britain by John Murray (Publishers),
an Hachette Livre UK company
First U.S. Edition: April 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Adrian
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1.
Corleone bandits
2.
Palermo ambitions
3.
Love and title deeds
4.
Bagheria’s feudal lord
5.
The split
6.
Family matters
7.
Goodbye Totò
8.
The regent
9.
A new strategy
10.
A management handbook for the aspiring Mafia boss
11.
Politics for Pragmatists
12.
Treacherous friends
13.
Letters home
14.
Spies and leaks
15.
Prostate trouble
16.
The net tightens
17.
The arrest
Epilogue
Sources and notes
Bibliography
Index
List of illustrations
1.
Bernardo Provenzano after his arrest, Palermo, 11 April 2006
2.
The sheep farm near Corleone where Provenzano was arrested
3.
Bernardo Provenzano’s first police mugshot, 1958
4.
Bernardo Provenzano’s second police mugshot, 2006
5.
Provenzano leaving for his military service, 1954
6.
The Corleone mafioso Totò Riina as a young man
7.
Totò Riina feeding pigeons on holiday in Venice, 1970s
8.
Saveria Benedetta Palazzolo, Provenzano’s companion of thirty-seven years
9.
Luciano Liggio, boss of the Corleonesi, in court, 1987
10.
Vito Ciancimino, during his brief tenure as mayor of Palermo, 1970
11.
Shoot-out in viale Lazio, Palermo, December 1969
12.
The murder of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and his wife, Emanuela Setti Carraro, 1982
13.
Leoluca Bagarella, Totò Riina’s brother-in-law
14.
The bomb that killed Giovanni Falcone, his wife and their escort, May 1992
15.
Giovanni Brusca, boss of San Giuseppe Iato, after his arrest, June 1996
16.
Nino Giuffré, boss of Caccamo and Provenzano’s right-hand man
17.
Identikit picture of Bernardo Provenzano, 2002
18.
Totò Riina’s son Giovanni riding his motor bike around Corleone, 1994
19.
Provenzano’s sons, Angelo and Francesco Paolo
20.
Part of a letter from Bernardo Provenzano to Nino Giuffré
21.
The secret code used by Provenzano in his letters
Illustration Credits: © Lannino & Naccari/Studio Camera Palermo, viale Lazio © Alessandro Fucarini
Acknowledgements
I have to thank my great friend Rino Cascio, a brilliant journalist with whom I have been privileged to work, who has been a tireless, resourceful and knowledgeable researcher on this project – and always great fun.
I’d like to thank Linda Pantano for her help with research and, of course, the peerless staff of the Istituto Gramsci in Palermo. Thanks to Rino, Linda and Alberto for their wonderful hospitality.
Thanks to Piera Fallucca and Antonella Maggio for their ideas and Mafia tours.
Pippo Cipriani was incredibly generous with his time and knowledge. Salvo Palazzolo, author of two brilliant books on Provenzano, was a fount of ideas and information, and generous with help on documentation.
Thanks to Saverio Lodato for giving me permission to quote from his excellent books based on interviews with Tommaso Buscetta and Giovanni Brusca.
I’d like to thank the experts – lawyers, prosecutors and investigators – who agreed to be interviewed for this book, especially Alfonso Sabella, Nino Di Matteo and Michele Prestipino, General Angiolo Pellegrini and Rosalba di Gregorio.
Thanks to my agent Derek Johns, to Linda Shaughnessy, to my editor Rowan Yapp, and particular thanks to Roland Philipps. Thanks also to Ian Katz at The Guardian, who commissioned the article that set the whole project in motion.
I’d like to thank Emma Cook and Laura Longrigg for their comments on the manuscript, and Dani Golfieri for emergency translation. Thanks to Christine Langan and Christian Spurrier, Camilla Nicholls, Amanda Sutton, Natasha Fairweather and Rick Beeston, and Denise and Charlie Meredith for their friendship and support. Thanks to Nigel Skeels for help with my website.
Heartfelt thanks to Helen and Bruce Buchanan. Thanks to my mother and sister Francesca for their constant support.
Finally, thanks to my husband, Adrian Buchanan, and my children, Patrick and Alice, who had to put up with my year-long absence.
Boss of Bosses
Introduction
‘There’s someone inside.’
The voice of Il Segugio (‘Bloodhound’), one of the agents posted on the mountain, crackled over the radio. He had been watching the shepherd’s hut day and night for over a week, looking for a sign of life. This was the signal his commander had been waiting for.
‘We had been watching the sheep farm for days,’ said police chief Giuseppe Gualtieri, ‘and the door to the hut was always closed. Some days the shepherd arrived at seven in the morning and opened the door, but he never went in. He stood in the doorway, and sometimes it looked as though he was talking to the wall . . . it looked wrong somehow. We wanted to go up close at night and see what was in there, but then we thought, careful: if there was someone hiding in the cottage, we didn’t want to risk frightening him off and destroying all our hard work. We would wait.
‘One day we saw the shepherd standing in front of the cottage, fiddling with an aerial. We wondered, what’s that for? Why would you need an aerial on an uninhabited house? It was a couple of days before the elections, so we were thinking, which fugitive takes a keen interest in politics?
&nb
sp; ‘Shortly after that, a package was delivered to the cottage that looked like it could be a television set. We said, Oh my God! One of them comes up with an aerial, the other one turns up with a television, there’s got to be someone living inside, and it could be Bernardo Provenzano.’
Early on the morning of 11 April 2006 the shepherd opened the door as usual, and just for a fleeting moment the observers up on the mountain saw an arm reach out from inside. It was all the proof they needed. The police unit got into position: the leader, Renato Cortese, moved up to a point 4 km away with eighteen men; the chiefs waited in the cover of the nearby forest.
‘Go!’ Bloodhound’s voice came over the radio, loud and clear. Everyone knew what to do; they’d been rehearsing this moment in their sleep.
When Cortese burst into the little farm building, the old man tried to slam the door in his face, but he threw himself against it, smashing the glass with his fist. For a moment the old man looked like a trapped animal, then he composed himself to face his captor.
‘You don’t know what you are doing’, he said in a low voice. He spoke quietly, with a strong Sicilian accent. Cortese thought he might be trying to say they’d got the wrong man. He checked for the scar on the old man’s neck: there it was. He had been told of another identifying sign: the Boss would be wearing three silver crosses on a chain. Sure enough, they were hidden under his shirt. There was no doubt, it was Provenzano. After forty-three years on the run the Boss of Bosses had finally been caught.
‘I looked into his eyes, and I knew it was him’, Cortese said.
One of the agents, nicknamed ‘the Director’, had recorded the build-up to the arrest on a hand-held camera. Seeing the lens turned on him, Provenzano hid his face. When he finally lowered his hands, he was composed, fixing his visitors with a scornful expression, an inscrutable half-smile, offering his hand and his congratulations.
Outside the cottage the agents hugged each other and wept, whooped with euphoria and phoned their loved ones. In the midst of this scene of wild celebration Gualtieri followed Cortese into the hut. ‘He wore a knowing smile, as though to say, “You think you’ve won, but you haven’t. Capturing me doesn’t change anything. Cosa Nostra isn’t beaten.”’
The place they found Provenzano, in the mountains above Corleone, was known as the ‘triangle of death’: a couple of miles away were the ravines and forests where Provenzano’s earliest victims had met their violent ends. He had come home.
The massive international media coverage and frenzied analysis that followed Provenzano’s arrest was largely due to the fact that, until that moment, very little was known about the boss of Cosa Nostra. He was one of the most powerful criminal leaders in Europe, and hadn’t been seen in public for over forty years. The mystique that had built up around him made his arrest an object of fascination world-wide – yet even then there were no easy answers. People watching the news all over the world were shocked at the humble circumstances in which Provenzano was living: the tiny shepherd’s hut reeked of rotting vegetables and urine, his diet of bread and onions . . . how had the Boss of Bosses, at the age of seventy-three, been reduced to this?
‘He’s living in this dump’, said the Sicilian crime writer Andrea Camilleri. ‘He’s got candles, because maybe the electricity goes off . . . but he knows he’s got power. He’s a multi-billionaire. Provenzano is the living embodiment of the Sicilian saying meglio commandare che fottere: it’s better to rule people than to screw them.’1
The old man living in a cramped shepherd’s hut was, in spite of appearances, the centre of Cosa Nostra’s operations. People sent for his advice, his blessing, his introductions, his judgement. ‘People weren’t looking for him to arrest him’, wrote journalist Salvo Palazzolo. ‘They were seeking him out to ask his considered opinion.’
Not one bulldozer moved without his say-so. Multi-million-dollar deals were made on his word. And all these instructions were contained in little Sellotaped notes, banged out on a manual typewriter and carried from hand to hand. After his arrest the hideout was searched inch by inch, every carrier bag inspected and noted down. But the more they found, the more mysterious, if anything, his personality became.
‘You could think he was a peasant living in the country’, observed assistant prosecutor Michele Prestipino, who had been on Provenzano’s trail for eight years. ‘He had all the props – the cheese, bread and onion, the simple pious lifestyle – he had constructed a whole rustic image, but then we discovered he had a wardrobe full of silk jackets, cashmere sweaters, clothes from the most upmarket stores in Palermo. He led us to think he’s a rough countryman, when all the time – and this is my theory – he’d been staying in a massive apartment in the middle of Palermo, living the life of a bourgeois pensioner.
‘He had seventeen cases containing his stuff: winter pyjamas, summer pyjamas, four vanity cases with manicure sets and very nice products. It was clear that living in this shepherd’s cottage was not his normal life. His possessions, the products he uses, would not have seemed out of place in any professional’s house. This was no peasant living rough.’ Provenzano even had a battery-operated device for trimming nose and ear hairs: he was clearly not a man who lived his whole life among peasants.
‘Provenzano is a chameleon’, says Giuseppe Gualtieri. ‘You’d see him in an immaculate suit in the finest drawing-rooms in Palermo, and he’d look as if he belonged there. You’d see him in the country, in an old pair of trousers and an anorak, looking like a shepherd. There are one or two collaborators who say they’ve seen him dressed as a priest – and apparently he looked the part. Provenzano’s great skill is this ability to adapt . . . it is also his greatest weapon.’
From one viewpoint the cheesemaker’s hut in Corleone was a perfectly calculated last staging post for the Boss of Bosses. The message implied by this improbably humble setting was: if this malodorous hovel is where the godfather has been holed up, the Mafia can’t be as powerful as we thought.
Provenzano was acutely aware of the importance of messages and symbols in the Mafia’s secret communication system, and of the uses of propaganda. Whatever message his circumstances sent out was intended.
Provenzano had rescued Cosa Nostra from disaster. He had taken over the organization when the Mafia’s political connections were losing traction and its leaders were trying to impose their will on the state by means of extreme violence.
Under the leadership of Luciano Liggio, Provenzano and his brothers in arms had transformed the Corleone Mafia from a machine that guaranteed the status quo into an expansionist force determined to dominate Cosa Nostra. They broke every rule of the old Mafia and blew apart the families that had run Palermo for generations, with an audacity and savagery that had never been seen before. The partnership between Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, who took over as joint leaders after Liggio’s conviction, was greatly feared: Riina had muscle and determination; Provenzano had a political mind and contacts. And at the same time both were fugitives, scarcely known outside their own circles: under cover they wreaked devastation by setting families against each other.
But the differences between them became increasingly marked, and Riina, maddened with power, ceased to listen to his old friend. Provenzano remained in the shadows as Cosa Nostra waged war on the state, and as the tide turned against them, he began to keep his distance from Riina, building his contacts, counselling prudence, taking a long view. And when the strategy of violence backfired, threatening to destroy Cosa Nostra, Provenzano finally emerged to take control.
After years of political assassinations, internecine fighting and hundreds of arrests, the Mafia capos were disoriented. The soldiers were suffering from trauma, and many had ‘repented’ and confessed their role in the organization. These so-called pentiti were the greatest threat to Cosa Nostra. Terrible things had been done in the name of the organization, and it badly needed a new way forward.
‘Provenzano became head of Cosa Nostra not because he was the last godfathe
r left standing’, wrote Michele Prestipino and Salvo Palazzolo, ‘but because he was the only one capable of forging the new Cosa Nostra, adapting it to the demands of the time.’
Most mafiosi had never seen him. Investigators had long believed him seriously ill. More than once over the years since his disappearance in 1969, Provenzano had been pronounced dead. The most recent announcement had come just two weeks before his arrest, when his lawyer had made an extraordinary announcement. ‘Bernardo Provenzano has been dead for years. The Mafia has created a phantom.’2
The conspiracy theorists and Mafia watchers puzzled over the significance of this. It seems his lawyer was announcing the death of the bandit who sowed terror in Corleone, the wild beast who killed at least forty people with his own hands, the unstoppable criminal known as ‘the Tractor’. These were shadows, ghosts, the lawyer seemed to declare. The old Provenzano no longer existed.
The new model of the Mafia boss was a far more sophisticated version. ‘The new founding father of Cosa Nostra, the great reformer’, one recent book calls him.3
‘Provenzano’s role?’ mused the Boss’s former right-hand man, Nino Giuffré, on the witness stand. ‘I could tell you exactly what it was: he gave the orders. But it was more complex than that. He came up with a new strategy for Cosa Nostra. He wanted to preserve the rules of Cosa Nostra, which had been corroded. And he had an impressive number of contacts in every area of Italian life.’