Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  Before he could dig any deeper, Francese was shot near his home on a chilly January morning in 1979, and his death was recorded as a ‘crime of passion’. Decades would pass before the crime was laid at the Corleonesi’s door.

  The Mafia’s code of honour is a shadowy sort of constitution, generally invoked to provide a pretext for murder. If there was ever a rule about not murdering public figures, the Corleonesi defied it. Ugo Triolo, a magistrate in Prizzi, just south of Corleone, would have no truck with the overbearing attitude of mafiosi and, instead of listening to their demands, threw them out of his waiting-room. Riina and Provenzano, schooled by Liggio in the art of terror and intimidation, wouldn’t stand for it. It was the first time they had killed a servant of the state: they gunned him down brazenly in the middle of Corleone, and dumped his body in the street outside his house.

  Riina and Provenzano’s strategy unfolded over a number of months. Towards the end of the 1970s they installed as head of the commission Michele Greco, who, according to the supergrass Tommaso Buscetta, was too ineffectual to be anything but a cover for the Corleonesi’s rise to power. They moved insidiously, committing murders that could be blamed on others, exposing the prominent Palermo bosses to police investigation while they remained in the shadows, wreaking havoc.

  At a meeting of mafiosi in Palermo, Provenzano and Riina announced their plan to murder the retired police colonel Giuseppe Russo, a tireless investigator who had made life difficult for them. The plan was immediately opposed by the more moderate faction, led by Giuseppe di Cristina, boss of Riesi, in central Sicily. He believed in Cosa Nostra’s policy of not harming representatives of the state. Stung by their humiliating defeat, Riina and Provenzano reported Di Cristina’s opposition back to Liggio, who promptly sentenced him to death.

  During the years of Riina and Provenzano’s rise to power, investigators were warned about the two men’s savage reputation. In 1978 Di Cristina contacted the carabinieri and told them he wanted to talk. He had already survived one attempt to kill him, and he knew the Corleonesi were planning to try again. There was no protection system for informants in place at that time, but he wanted the authorities to know what they were dealing with.

  ‘Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, nicknamed le belve, [‘the Beasts’] because of their ferocity, are the most dangerous men Luciano Liggio has at his disposal. They have both committed about forty murders each.’ Di Cristina told the police about the Corleonesi’s tactics of taking over the commission by intimidation and violence, kidnapping and murdering their way to power. He described a situation in which the ‘old-style’ Mafia, the traditional heads of families who lived openly as figures of great respect in their neighbourhoods, were being swept away by the new breed of outlaw, who lived on the run and set their enemies against each other. ‘The Corleonesi are invisible targets because they are almost all fugitives and run few serious risks with regard to their rivals or from the police.’

  He tried to steer the police towards capturing Provenzano, who had been seen, Di Cristina said, in Bagheria, a leafy suburb of Palermo, on a Sunday, being driven in a white Mercedes by the young Giovanni Brusca. Bernardo Brusca, the driver’s father, was boss of San Giuseppe Iato and one of Riina’s staunchest allies, an ‘untouchable’, according to Di Cristina. It was a significant tip-off, but Provenzano had several bolt-holes at that time, and the carabinieri didn’t find him.

  Di Cristina told police he would shortly be taking delivery of an expensive bulletproof car, as he knew the Corleonesi were trying to kill him. He never received the car. Within a few days of his secret meeting with the police Di Cristina was shot dead in a busy Palermo street. There were no arrest warrants for Riina or Provenzano. Instead, police charged Di Cristina’s friend Totuccio Inzerillo, because he had been murdered on Inzerillo’s territory. Exactly as the Corleonesi had planned it.

  Any investigator who got close to the Corleonesi’s drug operations was cut down: the brilliant police captain Boris Giuliano, who was following drug money between Italy and the USA, was shot dead at a bar close to his home one July morning in 1979. The agent who took over his investigation, Emanuele Basile, was shot in the back while carrying his four-year-old daughter in his arms. Senior members of the Mafia commission were enraged: they had not been consulted or informed about these assassinations. The Corleonesi were doing as they pleased, and it seemed there was nothing anyone could do to stop them.

  One early morning in September 1979 three killers shot down judge Terranova and his bodyguard right outside his home in a quiet Palermo back street. Terranova had returned to Palermo after his attempts to prosecute Mafia crimes in the 1960s had met defeat, and he was about to take over as chief investigating magistrate. The murder appears to have been a settling of old scores on several fronts: he had recognized the scale of the Corleonesi’s operations and had dared to prosecute Liggio.

  More experienced mafiosi tried to warn the Corleonesi that attacking the representatives of the state was too risky. Years later, investigators would record the rueful musings of an old-school mafioso: ‘You don’t touch the state . . . you can say what you like, but no one touches the state. The state, if it wants to, can crush you.’8 Many believed that if you waged war on the state you risked alienating public support, and also exposing Cosa Nostra to retaliation. But the Corleonesi, in their rush for power, simply didn’t believe the state would react against them.

  Piersanti Mattarella, president of the region of Sicily and a Christian Democrat known for his refusal to adopt the Mafia’s agenda, had tried to put a stop to the corrupt distribution of government contracts. This sort of interference would not be tolerated by Cosa Nostra, and Mattarella was murdered in January 1980 on the orders of Riina and Michele Greco, backed by their allies on the commission, including Provenzano, Bernardo Brusca and Ciccio Madonia.

  As they demonstrated their impunity, and their defiance of the commission, with this frontal attack on the state, Riina and Provenzano’s main intention was to strike fear into their rival Mafia families in Palermo. They were just warming up.

  The rise of the Corleonesi began as an insidious, creeping terror and culminated in their takeover of Palermo and domination of the international drug trade. Their leader and mentor, Liggio, had infiltrated other Mafia families with his own men, insinuating his killers into the heart of Mafia clans all over the country. The principal tactic, which Provenzano later deployed to his own ends, was to turn old friends and families against each other. In the confusion that followed, the Corleonesi killed with a ruthless abandon that became known as the mattanza, after the annual slaughter of captive tuna fish that turns the sea red with blood.

  One mafioso later recalled the apparent warmth and camaraderie among mafiosi at Christmas 1980, just before the slaughter started: ‘We all kissed each other, we celebrated together and wished each other Happy Christmas. You’d never have known there was so much hate burning under the surface.’9

  The first Mafia boss to fall was Stefano Bontate, the most powerful man of honour in Palermo, gunned down at the wheel of his car. Two weeks later Totuccio Inzerillo, the drug baron, was shot dead getting into his bulletproof Alfa-Romeo after a tryst with his mistress. It wasn’t enough to kill the heads of the Palermo families: Riina went after every last man loyal to them. The Corleonesi’s anonymous killers emerged out of nowhere to strike. In the panic that ensued, terrified men tried to pledge their loyalty to their new masters by killing their own family members. But Riina trusted no one: over 200 men he suspected of having had links to the losing factions were ‘disappeared’, strangled or shot.

  So many men were murdered in Palermo over the terrible months of 1981 that police could do little but pick up corpses. On one day twelve men were found shot dead in different parts of the city. ‘It was not a battle between rival families,’ said Tommaso Buscetta a few years later, ‘it was a manhunt.’

  The entire Inzerillo family was murdered or driven into exile: many fled to the USA, where the
y took refuge with their relations the Gambino family. The Corleonesi’s vengeance pursued them: Inzerillo’s brother was found dead in the USA, a bundle of dollars in his mouth and another stuffed in his underpants.

  The Corleonesi’s aim was to eradicate their enemies, and they nearly succeeded – but not entirely. Riina eventually issued an edict that those who left Sicily would be allowed to live but could never return. However, members of the Inzerillo family who had fled their assassins would begin to drift back to Palermo twenty years later. The return of Palermo’s banished mafiosi was to cause acute difficulties for Provenzano and threatened to cause another war.

  Such bloodshed on a massive scale required a robust response from the state. For years the courts had run into trouble when they tried to prosecute individual crimes: the law needed a more precise instrument to tackle the mafia. Pio La Torre, head of the Communist Party in Sicily and a member of the parliamentary anti-Mafia commission, insisted it should become a crime to belong to the organization. He also believed the state should seize the Mafia’s assets if it could be proven that they were acquired with profits from criminal activity. This represented a major threat to the Mafia, whose accumulation of secret wealth was its chief raison d’être and had never been seriously challenged before.

  When General Dalla Chiesa was invited to return to Palermo in 1982 as prefect, La Torre represented a prospective ally in an extremely difficult situation, a beacon of energy and clarity in the war against the Mafia. But as Dalla Chiesa took up office, in April 1982, Cosa Nostra prepared his welcome: Pio La Torre was murdered as he drove to work.

  It was a devastating blow for Dalla Chiesa, who was already in a difficult position: he had been promised extra powers to take on the Mafia but was beginning to realize that these were never going to materialize. Although his earlier reports had given the anti-Mafia commission essential intelligence on the Corleone clan’s business activities, he was treated on his return to Palermo as a semi-retired soldier who knew nothing of the ‘modern’ Mafia.

  He had been lauded for successfully taking on Italy’s left-wing terrorist groups, but many claimed that his tactics against terrorism would not work against the Mafia. Over a few tense and difficult months, while Dalla Chiesa investigated links between the Palermo Mafia and captains of industry in Catania on the other side of the island, he was increasingly isolated and vulnerable. In September, just a few months after arriving in Sicily, General Dalla Chiesa and his wife were gunned down in their car, blasted with shots from Kalashnikov rifles.

  The murder of Dalla Chiesa was ‘an act of arrogance by the Corleonesi’, commented Badalamenti, watching news of the assassination on television; ‘they planned this in response to the general’s challenge to the Mafia.’

  The assassination of a national hero, who had been deserted and isolated by the state, provoked an outcry from the people and a response, finally, from the government. The measures that Pio La Torre had tried so hard to push through parliament, making it a crime to belong to the Mafia and allowing the state to confiscate property acquired with the proceeds of organized crime, became law.

  For once the outrageous killing of a public official had not cowed the authorities but had provoked the first major set-back for Cosa Nostra in years. It was the first serious challenge to the Corleonesi’s policy of frontal attack on the state, and sowed controversy within the organization that rumbled on for years.

  The magistrate who had taken over from Terranova, Rocco Chinnici, was determined to continue his predecessor’s hard line against the Mafia. He was ambitious and energetic and began a thorough investigation into the Mafia’s financial dealings. Unflinchingly, Chinnici signed arrest warrants against Palermo boss Michele Greco, Riina and Provenzano for the murder of Dalla Chiesa.

  As soon as the warrants were issued, the Greco family, backed by their allies the Corleonesi, planned their retaliation and Chinnici was assassinated. One insider later confided that the strategy of war held them to an inexorable course of violence. ‘They told me it had been a mistake to kill Dalla Chiesa because it stirred up a lot of trouble, but having started, it was necessary to continue with these actions against anyone who stuck their nose in the Mafia’s business.’10

  This reference to a ‘mistake’ was repeated some years later by Dalla Chiesa’s killer, Pino Greco, in a conversation recorded by police. Pino scarpuzzedda (‘Little Shoe’) Greco was one of the Corleonesi’s most ruthless and prolific killers, but he was troubled by the general’s assassination. ‘This Dalla Chiesa murder – we really didn’t need it’, Greco told a trusted associate. ‘It’ll take at least ten years to steady the ship.’

  He indicated clearly that Provenzano was behind the assassination. ‘This business has been a joke at my expense, and it was the Accountant who played that joke on me. This is the work of the Accountant – you know who I mean, the one who gives the orders.’

  Greco had been given guarantees for his part in a murder that brought the Corleonesi a sharp increase in prestige – but, he complained, whatever he had been promised had failed to materialize. Besides which, with the advent of the La Torre law, the killing had caused Cosa Nostra more problems than it solved.

  The echoes of this brutal phase reverberated for years. In 1984 scarpuzzedda Greco disappeared at the hands of his own men. Many within Cosa Nostra considered the murder of Dalla Chiesa a pointless crime – they didn’t believe the general had the power to do them any real harm, since he had been isolated and abandoned by the state – but Greco may have been the only one to say it.

  Once he had dispatched his rivals and demonstrated what Cosa Nostra would do to any obstruction from the state, Riina completed his bloody revolution. He made Provenzano capo mandamento of Corleone and built himself a majority on the commission. He changed the boundaries of the remaining families (Cosa Nostra’s territory is divided into sectors, or mandamenti, each comprising three families; each mandamento has a representative on the commission) so that his most loyal allies gained control of their area. In some places he changed the borders; in others he elevated families to control mandamenti – to put his men in positions of power.

  ‘Riina was – what do you call it, the little beastie that burrows away underneath you and you don’t even know it’s there? Woodworm.’ The boss of Altofonte, Francesco Di Carlo, had a healthy mistrust of Riina; he accused him of making Cosa Nostra fragmented and secretive. ‘He wanted a piece of every other mandamento – and most of the time he got his way.’

  ‘Riina didn’t have a very great trust of the Greco family,’ explained Alfonso Sabella, who was assistant prosecutor in Palermo during the 1990s, ‘so he moved their mandamento, Ciaculli, to Brancaccio, to the east of Palermo, and put his faithful soldiers, the Graviano family, in charge. Where a family was particularly loyal to him, the family was promoted to mandamento.’

  The Corleonesi’s rise to power shocked many mafiosi by its sheer arrogance and its violence. Later Provenzano would be among those who played down their role in the bloodshed, portraying Riina as the sole author of the slaughter. This may not be entirely accurate. Riina did not take kindly to being countermanded. If Provenzano had opposed him, it seems unlikely he would have survived this terrible phase of Cosa Nostra’s history. He not only survived, but he remained Riina’s joint leader. Giovanni Brusca claims Provenzano was constantly offering arguments against acts of violence, but that his objections were simply brushed aside. Others remain convinced he backed the policy.

  ‘There’s no doubt that Provenzano took a full part in the Mafia war against Bontate and Inzerillo’, cautions chief prosecutor Pietro Grasso. ‘He was involved in the planning stage because he was with Riina: they were jointly lieutenants and regents of Luciano Liggio. Provenzano has a case to answer.’

  The Corleonesi’s excessive use of force had already brought new anti-Mafia laws into play, but their sustained war against the state would sow the seeds of their destruction.

  3

  Love and title d
eeds

  S

  AVERIA BENEDETTA PALAZZOLO lived in a narrow street in Cinisi, west of Palermo, with her parents, two brothers, Paolo and Salvatore, and three sisters. At twenty-seven she was an unaffected young woman working as a seamstress in a local shirt factory. She had no trace of vanity, made all her own clothes and did her own hair – she pinned her thick curls back and never wore make-up. She divided her time between working and keeping house for an elderly aunt, who had a little money and a more comfortable lifestyle than Saveria’s own parents. She would talk to her aunt about her ambition to have her own dressmaking business. She could not see herself like the other women she knew, who got married and spent the rest of their lives keeping house. She was clever and industrious, and she was bored.

  Cinisi was a small town on a promontory, a prosperous and peaceful place, under the ever-watchful eye of the local Mafia. Nothing escaped the notice of their gossips and spies. The Mafia boss was the self-appointed moral guardian, who could give permission for a marriage or stop the couple from seeing each other, offer advice and guidance on all matters and resolve disputes.

  Provenzano was thirty-seven, on the run from enemies within the Mafia and from the police. He had been living in different towns all over western Sicily, travelling with his friends from Corleone, protected by mafiosi who knew him as Liggio’s man. In Cinisi he was the guest of the boss, don Tano Badalamenti, who had taken in many fugitives over the years, including Liggio. Giovanni Impastato grew up in Cinisi in an embattled family: his father was a mafioso, and his brother was thrown out of the house, and subsequently murdered, as a result of his outspoken campaign against the Mafia. As a boy, Giovanni would go with his father to take food and run errands for Liggio. He recalls Provenzano’s arrival created quite a stir. ‘People were fascinated by him’, he says. ‘Here was this young Corleonese who they believed was unjustly persecuted by the law; he was seen as a courageous outlaw on the run. It wouldn’t be hard to be drawn to a mafioso like him; he had charisma, a certain fascination.’