Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  Saveria found herself irresistibly attracted to the outlaw, who was always well dressed but never showy, and seemed much older than her. He came from outside Cinisi and had seen something of the world. She had cousins who had been forced to give up their fidanzati because they came from the next village. She wanted more than Cinisi had to offer. According to his reputation, this bold young man was not afraid of anything, and yet he seemed the quiet type. He was drawn to her direct, unaffected manner, her intelligence and resourcefulness. She seemed to understand that he didn’t want to talk all the time, that he liked solitude and needed time to think. She didn’t ask him questions or demand that he visit her constantly. At last he had found a woman who seemed implicitly to understand his life. He courted her in secret, but before long their relationship attracted attention.

  Giovanni Impastato, who has carried on his brother’s anti-Mafia campaign, remembers the Palazzolo family, not wealthy nor explicitly connected to the Mafia, but moving in the right circles: ‘Saveria would have understood what kind of man he was’, he says. ‘You can see what those men are like. Women like my poor mother still believed the Mafia was a force for good. Saveria’s family will not have done badly through that connection.

  ‘They lived in that semi-legal environment; the father didn’t have an active role in the Mafia, but they were very close to [Gaetano] Badalamenti’s family. Anyone with ambition had aspirations to be part of that world – it was the dominant culture. If you could worm your way into Mafia circles, you would never lack for anything.’

  If his courtship of Saveria was initially approved, Provenzano’s precarious situation made it difficult for them to marry. It would be hard to find a priest willing to risk prosecution for aiding and abetting a fugitive. And Saveria’s family did not want her to leave Cinisi. So the couple, no longer in the first flush of youth, were fidanzati for a few years, during which time he would disappear for weeks on end, and she never knew whether she would see him alive again. But she always had the sense not to ask him what he had been doing.

  She wasn’t seen much around town; since everyone knew each other’s business, she took care to avoid the hairdressers and the shops where women exchanged news. He wasn’t the jealous type, but the last thing she wanted was for Binnu to hear anything about her from gossips.

  At last he asked Saveria to run away with him. This was customary practice in those parts when a formal marriage was impossible because the families disapproved, or the couple were too young, or because there wasn’t money for a big church wedding. Often a family member would secretly lend them a room to help out. Once they had spent a night together, the family might bewail their dishonour, but the couple were officially engaged. Saveria and Bernardo stayed with one of her cousins. By now everyone knew they were living together as an unmarried couple.

  ‘It was a scandal’, the local priest recalled in an interview with Sicilian journalist Salvo Palazzolo. ‘A girl from such a good family . . . how did she end up involved with that sort, everyone wondered. How was it possible? Her mother always came to Mass.’

  The local police were embarrassed. When they questioned Saveria about her boyfriend’s whereabouts, she claimed not to know. Then she appeared in town, visibly pregnant and proud. ‘When the police saw I was expecting, they sent for me’, she reportedly told the local priest. ‘They asked me, “How can you tell us you don’t know where Provenzano is hiding, given your condition?” And I said, “Wait a minute, can’t a woman have a baby with anyone other than her husband?”’

  Not when her husband is a mafioso, as she knew, and the police knew perfectly well. Cosa Nostra takes a strong line on women’s moral conduct. Saveria was apparently enjoying the mystique of her relationship with an outlaw, and unafraid of moral condemnation. She no longer belonged in this small town, and it seemed she didn’t care what anyone thought.

  When the rumour reached Badalamenti that Saveria was expecting a baby, he was furious. A young mafioso in his charge, seducing a local girl! It was very bad for Cosa Nostra’s image. As the local boss, he was the people’s moral guardian, and men were to treat women with respect at all times and protect the ideal of the family. (If a wife discovered her husband was having an affair, she’d take the children and go back to her mother’s. The boss would take it upon himself to pay her a visit and persuade her to come back.) Badalamenti couldn’t allow any sort of public immoral behaviour: ‘He told Bernardo Provenzano he had to formalize his relationship with her’, recalls Giovanni Impastato. ‘Even if they couldn’t get married in church, he wanted the situation sorted out.’

  Provenzano did as Badalamenti instructed and started looking for a suitable plot of land to build his new family a home. On the outskirts of Cinisi in the stony, sloping countryside Provenzano chose a plot of land to build a home for himself and his beloved. According to investigations by the carabinieri, the deeds were signed and registered by Saveria’s brother Salvatore, and Bernardo had plans drawn up showing a spacious villa for a young family to grow into.

  However, once work was under way, the builders received an unexpected visit from the carabinieri, wanting to know who owned the place. Before any further investigations could ensue, the plot was sold, with its unfinished structure, stalled and rusting, still in place. Bernardo and Saveria, who now had a healthy baby boy, named Angelo after Bernardo’s father, would have to find somewhere else to build their first home.

  This was Saveria’s first taste of the rootlessness of her life ahead: she could no longer run back to her parents in Cinisi, but she and her new family had no place to call home. She could, however, draw on the intelligence and resourcefulness that Binnu had so admired in her; she had some understanding of the Mafia’s rules and its raison d’être. Over the years she spent with Binnu, Saveria, coming from a legitimate family, would need all her personal resources to withstand the pressures of life in the Mafia. She had to renounce any personal ambition and throw in her lot with a man who lived in constant danger. She was fortunate in that Binnu’s nature made him more disposed to spending time with her and their son than with his Mafia associates, but he was often forced to move around, for security reasons or for meetings, and she would never know where he was going or for how long. She had to accept anything from him, on faith.

  ‘A woman who comes from a Mafia background doesn’t ask for explanations for the things she sees’, said the pentito Leonardo Messina. ‘The true wealth of a man of honour is a wife who understands his role.’

  Ninetta Bagarella, who married Totò Riina, grew up immersed in the Corleone Mafia: her two brothers, Calogero and Leoluca, were Provenzano and Riina’s running mates. (Calogero was killed at the viale Lazio massacre in 1969.) At twenty-one, when her fidanzato was already on the run from the police, Ninetta earned the dubious honour of being the first woman to be arraigned for aiding and abetting the Mafia, by taking messages between her fiancé and his associates. Young as she was, she had shown an acute understanding of how Cosa Nostra operates within Sicilian society. The attractive young woman wore a light floral dress, and her dark hair long, to make a dramatic appearance in a Palermo court.

  ‘You say I am guilty, but I am only guilty of falling in love’, she cried. ‘You cannot judge me for loving a man, it’s my natural right. You ask how I could have chosen a man like Riina, about whom people say such terrible things. Is it against the law to love a man like Salvatore Riina? I love him and I know he is innocent.’

  She was, inevitably, released without charge and three years later married her man in a church wedding. (The priest who conducted the service was later questioned by police, who accepted his defence that he could not condone two souls living in sin.)

  Both Ninetta and Saveria, once they had committed themselves to these two outlaws, glamorous as they may have been, were destined to live their married lives as fugitives. Saveria and Binnu’s passion grew as they stood together against the ‘unjust persecution’ of the state, and the drama of their lives unfolded within its
constrictions. There was money – though not always – and there were gifts. (Ninetta acquired enough fur coats to need a whole refrigerated room to store them, and serious jewels. Saveria was not interested in a fancy wardrobe or furs, but she and Binnu were undoubtedly comfortable.) Ninetta couldn’t take the children and run home to mamma if her husband strayed, but then the Mafia has its particular code of honour in these matters: ‘You can do what you want,’ Riina reportedly said to a young mafioso who had been caught with his mistress, ‘but you must never disrespect your wife publicly.’ Binnu just wasn’t the type to indulge. While his Mafia friends enjoyed celebratory feasts and wild parties, he preferred to be alone, at home.

  By going on the run, Provenzano had (albeit temporarily) cut off his route back to Corleone and his family, and he needed an alternative support structure. Saveria, with her family in Cinisi and her unquestioning acceptance of his chosen career, provided him with the security he needed. He recruited her relations to be his business associates and representatives. Her brother Paolo was a front man for many of Binnu’s enterprises, including the lease of a substantial tract of land. A police report described him as ‘particularly closed. A man of few words, extremely withdrawn and retiring, who never talked on the phone, and never met anyone.’ An extremely difficult subject for surveillance, in other words, and a most welcome addition to Bernardo Provenzano’s family circle.

  Provenzano continued to register shares in his wife’s name. The young mafioso Giovanni Brusca later recalled that he and his associates had been told to favour a construction company with which Provenzano’s wife was associated. ‘We wondered, is he crazy, to put his wife in as a partner? We knew that sooner or later he was bound to have problems if his wife was mixed up in it.’

  Saveria and Bernardo made their base in Bagheria, aided by his contacts in law enforcement and local government and by a culture that protected the Mafia. During this period they lived a quiet life, with no fear of arrest. When their son was seven, Saveria became pregnant again, and they had another baby, another boy, whom they named Francesco Paolo. In a culture where the customary greeting for newly-weds is auguri e figli maschi (‘congratulations, may you have sons’) Provenzano was doubly blessed.

  ‘I know Bernardo Provenzano has an immense property in Bagheria, in the grounds of a grand villa’, one pentito later testified. ‘I’ve never known exactly where it was, but from what people told me it was a beautiful place, in classical style . . . Provenzano lived here undisturbed with his family.’11

  In the mid-1980s a series of high-profile Mafia crimes turned up the heat on Riina and Provenzano and led to a series of arrests. Binnu and his family decamped to Trapani, where the boys attended school under an assumed name.

  When Provenzano began to receive substantial kickbacks from waste management and other public contracts, he needed to start investing his profits. He bought businesses and properties, which he registered to members of his fidanzata’s family. A tenacious investigator managed to uncover the extent of Provenzano’s property investments.

  Colonel Angiolo Pellegrini arrived in Palermo in early 1981, just as the Mafia war was breaking out. It was a frenzied time: while the Corleonesi were murdering their rivals on their own territory, Cosa Nostra’s influence was spreading.

  Pellegrini was working with Giovanni Falcone, who had begun his painstaking paper trail, following drug money through international banks. Rotund, moustachioed and every inch the no-nonsense army investigator, Pellegrini liked to work the same way: investigations based on diligent, detailed detective work.

  ‘We asked for a computer, to log the data we were collecting, and were told it was not essential’, he says jovially. Now retired from the army, it’s unlikely he has let a day go by without buttoning himself into his suit and trimming his tidy goatee. ‘Now it’s easily done with a database, but we wrote everything by hand in old ledgers and created a massive index. It was essential for us to be able to make the links.’

  A particular case had come to Pellegrini’s notice, in which a modest family from Cinisi had made some spectacular property acquisitions. The family name was Palazzolo. They had no criminal record, although it emerged during the course of the investigation that the daughter, Saveria Benedetta, had left home and was living with the fugitive Bernardo Provenzano. It was the first time investigators had heard that the outlaw from Corleone had a woman living with him. They were also surprised to discover that he had two children. Pellegrini entered the Palazzolo family in his ledger and proceeded to track them through title deeds and company registers.

  Saveria Palazzolo’s name began to show up again and again. In a very short space of time she had acquired substantial shares in a building company, Italcostruzione, 12 hectares of land near Castellammare and an apartment in Palermo. The carabinieri found her name on two further properties and two plots of land in the suburbs, as well as a vacant lot in Palermo’s fast-developing viale Strasburgo.

  By the time the carabinieri went looking for Saveria, she had already left Cinisi. ‘She had disappeared’, recalls Pellegrini. ‘We set up investigations into the family and in the area, to see if we could find any leads that would take us to her, and to Provenzano. We didn’t find her.’

  His report read: ‘La Palazzolo, officially spinster and housewife, possessing no assets prior to 1972, in the course of five months, from December ’72 to April ’73, acquired property for the considerable sum of 26 million lire [£13,000]. Her investments were managed by the well-known mafia accountant Giuseppe Mandalari.’

  Four months after the carabinieri demanded to see the deeds of the plot where they were building, the report went on, ‘La Palazzolo hurriedly sold all her properties to the company Simaiz s.p.a., a company set up for the purpose and administered by Mandalari. This sale is without doubt directly related to the discovery of building works which were intended to construct a safe house (far from prying eyes) for Bernardo Provenzano.’

  Saveria Palazzolo was charged with money-laundering in November 1983. Provenzano was charged with Mafia association, and a business associate was arrested for money-laundering. The latter went to prison, leaving a wife and two children to fend for themselves, while the lovers were nowhere to be found.

  The case against Saveria Palazzolo came to court in 1990, and she was required to explain where she had got the money to acquire properties and shares. Her reply, sent by post and delivered to the court in her absence, revealed her own profound double standards. The letter appealed to the court’s belief in the virtue of women – she mentions a maiden aunt and her own role in caring for her. She also portrays herself as a dutiful daughter, and a woman who understands little of the difficult world of business, merely signing complicated documents as required. Her acquisition of a small fortune was not only legitimate, she maintained, but the result of considerable personal sacrifice.

  Most illustrious Signor Presidente

  The assets that are alleged to be the profits of illegal activity are in fact monies earned by the undersigned in her own right. In point of fact, the undersigned has always earned her own money from legal employment first as an embroiderer working from home, subsequently as a seamstress.

  In between times, the undersigned assisted her paternal aunt Benedetta Palazzolo in her activity as a dressmaker, without receiving any financial recompense, because of the special relationship between herself and this particular aunt. And in fact, the undersigned also took on the duty of caring for her and assisting her in all matters until the end of her life.

  According to family tradition, since the young woman had taken particular responsibility for looking after her aunt, the aunt took care of her niece’s future. She and another relative bought the young woman a piece of land worth 13 million lire.

  One day the undersigned met the Cavaliere Sebastiano Provenzano, and recalling that her father had spoken well of him, decided to ask him for advice about her investments.

  The Cavaliere replied that if a good opportunity tu
rned up, he would let her know. Years went by, and when she was least expecting it, the Cavaliere contacted her with a proposal that she buy two plots in Latomie district, in Castelvetrano.

  The undersigned admitted she lacked sufficient funds to make the acquisition, but the Cavaliere told her not to worry, since the deal would require a small initial investment, while the rest could be covered by a complex network of loans and bank cheques guaranteed personally by himself, to be repaid with the profits of agricultural production (olives and vines).

  The down payment was arranged by the Cavaliere via mutual funds and complex bank processes which the undersigned is not technically capable of accurately describing.

  Conveyancing and all other matters concerning the transaction, as well as investment of the remaining funds, were handled by the Cavaliere, leaving the undersigned merely to add her signature as required.

  From the above information it is clear that the funds are all from legitimate sources.

  Signed

  Saveria Benedetta Palazzolo

  The letter aimed for the right note of virtuous industry: here was an enterprising young woman doing her family duty, with ambitions to run her own business. She had a clear idea of what she wanted but needed legal advisers to sort out the complicated financial stuff. If they had done anything underhand, she implied, it was nothing to do with her.