Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  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 nicknamedu 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.

  2

  Palermo ambitions

  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.’7

  ‘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 jea
lously. 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.

  Provenzano had the phlegmatic character and diplomatic skill to manage a man of Ciancimino’s arrogant and abrasive manner. Ambitious and unscrupulous, with a sharp tongue and a ready put-down, Ciancimino intimidated people. He could also be utterly ruthless. When an old friend and company manager who had been paying Ciancimino millions of lire in kickbacks for contracts came to see him with a problem, the old weasel told him, ‘sono cazzi tuoi, stai molto attento’ (‘It’s not my fucking problem, just watch yourself’).

  Riina, perhaps recognizing Ciancimino’s aggressive manner as close to his own, couldn’t stand him, and the feeling was mutual. ‘Provenzano is all right’, Ciancimino told Giovanni Brusca, an ally of the Corleonesi. ‘I can’t be doing with Riina.’

  Provenzano had to nurture and manage the relationship not only between Riina and Ciancimino but also between the supposed political allies Ciancimino and Lima. The two politicians were a couple of prima donnas, always falling out, and it was Provenzano’s job to smooth things over and find a way to keep both of them happy. Riina became increasingly exasperated with their constant demands and competitive bickering, and eventually lost patience with Ciancimino altogether. Brusca recalled: ‘Riina said he couldn’t take any more, he would have to fight his paesano, this fellow Corleonese, he needed to teach him a good lesson. He had been put on the spot so many times when Ciancimino failed to deliver on his commitments, and he couldn’t stand the way Provenzano was always defending him.’

  But Provenzano’s patient approach paid off. During the 1970s Ciancimino was doing more for his Mafia friends than signing thousands of illegal building licences. It later emerged he was laundering money for the Corleonesi on a grand scale in Canada.

  When Ciancimino became mayor of Palermo in 1970, since his Mafia connections were well known, it caused such a scandal that he was obliged to resign after a few months. After that, Ciancimino remained a more discreet presence behind the scenes, building up his portfolio and maintaining a patronage system that meant people’s jobs in public office were held for them while they served time in prison. He also kept his position in Provenzano’s inner circle, advising him on political matters.

  During this period the increase of Cosa Nostra’s power, fuelled by drug money, was astonishing. One heroin trafficker was described by historian Pino Arlacchi as a ‘travelling milk salesman in the 1950s, a small-scale building contractor in the mid-’60s, and during the ’70s, until his arrest for drug trafficking in March 1980, one of the leading financiers and industrialists in Sicily’. The Corleonesi were determined to tap into this well of opportunity.

  Liggio was finally arrested in 1974, at the flat in Milan where he was living under an assumed name with his companion and their two-year-old son. After years of evading arrest and fixing trials, he would not leave prison alive again. He had already handed over executive power to his deputies, Riina and Provenzano, but continued to instruct them from prison. He made them joint leaders of the Corleone family, and they were to alternate as boss every two years. Riina, his ambition on fire, took the first turn as leader and never stepped down.

  This arrangement seems to have suited Provenzano. The differences between the joint leaders were emerging: Provenzano liked to move behind the scenes, quietly building his empire; Riina displayed Liggio’s uncontrollable violence, his leadership characterized by cunning, ferocity and ruthlessness. Riina’s joint rulers on the commission, Badalamenti and Bontate, were entirely unprepared for his tactics. In 1975 he kidnapped and murdered the father-in-law of one of Bontate’s most valuable and prestigious contacts, the tax collector Nino Salvo. It was a breathtaking act of disrespect, and Riina piled on the humiliation by refusing to give up the body, denying any knowledge of the crime.

  Provenzano stayed in the background, studying how to make his political contacts work for him, refining his skills as a mediator. His quiet, questioning approach failed to impress those mafiosi who preferred a more direct, even aggressive style. While Riina was making millions through the drug trade, Provenzano was focused on more prosaic sources of income: sewage and garbage. Rather than go for the highest margin, he saw public contracts as a less risky way of making money, useful for laundering profits and consolidating territorial control.

  Badalamenti, the wealthy boss of Cinisi and head of the commission, had got rich on drug trafficking and kickbacks from the construction of a new airport sited at Punta Raisi, an alarmingly narrow strip between the mountains and the sea. The Corleonesi pronounced that his hoarded drug millions were sufficient pretext to expel him from Cosa Nostra, removing one of their most formidable rivals at a stroke.

  One contemporary figure who has shed light on the dynamics of the Corleonesi’s race to power is Gioacchino Pennino, a doctor of good standing, a respected member of the upper middle class and a mafioso, who had been involved in politics in Palermo. Many years later Pennino, faced with criminal charges, revealed the relationship between Ciancimino and Provenzano.

  ‘From what I can gather,’ Pennino recalled, ‘the cultural level of my associates was very low, apart from Bernardo Provenzano, who clearly had a good level of knowledge and followed politics very closely. He spoke intelligently, and with enough depth to give me the impression that he ran the political life of the Palermo area.’

  He would soon discover the reality of Provenzano’s influence. When Pennino, who was a member of Ciancimino’s parliamentary group, had had enough of Ciancimino’s high-handedness, he decided to leave, but he couldn’t make a move without permission.

  ‘I went to see Michele Greco [another respectable middle-class mafioso who later became the boss], explained the situation to him, and said I didn’t feel I could go on like this, at the mercy of Ciancimino.’

  The following day Pennino received a visitor, who told him he had an appointment, but didn’t say with whom. The doctor was driven to the meeting in a small Fiat, belting along country lanes towards Bagheria. He was dropped off at a bar, where he was told to wait for his next escort.

  ‘I was taken to a farmhouse that was used as both a store for vegetables and an office. There I met a man I’d never seen before, who was introduced to me as Bernardo Provenzano, while the other man called him Binnu.’

  The meeting did not pan out as Pennino expected. He was barely allowed to speak. ‘I hadn’t even had time to explain what the problem was, when he turned on me. Clearly he knew everything about the situation, and he verbally attacked me. He told me to stay where I was, that things were just fine as they were.

  ‘At the end of the meeting, which I found utterly mortifying, Provenzano told me I needed to keep quiet and not stir up any rebellious feeling in the Ciancimino camp.’

  On a subsequent occasion Pennino was startled to meet Provenzano as he came out of Ciancimino’s villa in Mondello, a palm-lined marina near Palermo and the favourite seaside residence of Palermo’s rich. Pennino was leaving by the main gate when he saw Provenzano going in. ‘It was a few months after our stormy encounter. We nodded in greeting but didn’t stop to talk.’ Pennino related other occasions when he had caught sight of Provenzano strolling openly along the streets of central Palermo, in spite of being officially wanted by the police, clearly with no sense of danger.

  As Ciancimino’s fortunes declined, Pennino tried once again to be released from his group and went to see Provenzano at his favoured meeting place, another mafioso doctor’s surgery. Pennino was extremely apprehensive, but this time Provenzano didn’t get furious with him. He merely wanted to know how many people were planning to desert Ciancimino, and whether there was any way of repairing the damage. He was still apparently hoping to exert his influence and save Ciancimino’s political career.

  ‘Greco had
warned me to be careful, as Provenzano was considered extremely dangerous’, the doctor reported. He was naturally anxious after their last encounter, but to his surprise, he found Provenzano quite civil. The doctor said he had no intention of taking anyone else with him, and Provenzano, satisfied with his reply, said nothing more.

  Pennino made it clear that Provenzano exercised power behind the scenes. He also revealed for the first time Provenzano’s nickname, u ragioniere (‘the Accountant’). ‘He has infiltrated everywhere,’ he explained, ‘and quite honestly I’m worried about what he might be able to do.’

  Ciancimino was thrown out of the Christian Democrats in 1983, after a sustained campaign by his fellow politicians, and was finally indicted in 1984, following revelations about his links with Provenzano and Riina. He was eventually convicted of Mafia association, and the authorities seized assets worth $12 million, which they believed to be a small percentage of his illegal profits. Police found deposit boxes stuffed with notes – and this, the court was reminded, was a man who had never held a job.

  Twenty years on, he had still not paid the Palermo city council, which had been a complainant in his trial, a penny of the restitution ordered by the court.

  When a reporter from Rai TV news contacted him by phone to ask whether he was going to pay the moneys the council was demanding, he crowed: ‘I’ve got it all in loose change. They can send a railway car for it, and I’ll fill it up with coins, like a piggy bank!’ Though he disappeared from front-line politics, Ciancimino remained one of the most important members of Provenzano’s entourage.

  The mutually beneficial relationship between the minister of works and Provenzano did not go unnoticed. An investigative journalist, Mario Francese, had understood that the Corleonesi were controlling public contracts through politicians and businessmen, and published some explosive stories in the Giornale di Sicilia. He described a ‘third level’ of the Mafia: the bosses who sit behind their desks in public buildings, pursuing their interests through government office.