Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  The judges did not go for the story about the humble seamstress and the elderly aunt. Neither were they at all convinced by the apparently coincidental meeting between Saveria Palazzolo and the cavaliere Provenzano (no relation to her husband), who was suspected of being a front for another of Bernardo Provenzano’s investments. They wanted to demonstrate that, if the Mafia was going to use women to conceal their illegal business dealings, then the women were no longer off-limits.

  In 1990 Saveria was given two years and six months for receiving stolen goods, later commuted to aiding and abetting. She was given a reduced sentence under house arrest, which, since she was already living ‘at home’, whereabouts unknown, was conveniently unenforceable. It did mean that she was no longer free to live as a legitimate citizen, should she decide to do so, and that she and the boys, now aged seven and fourteen, were condemned to life on the run. Binnu had relied on the justice system’s blind belief in the goodness of women and had exposed his wife to prosecution. Now they were tied together in an inexorable bond, united against the law.

  4

  Bagheria’s feudal lord

  T

  HE ROAD INTO Bagheria, once thick with lemon groves, is a jumble of small streets built up with no kind of planning or regulation: most of the houses are plastered but not painted; many are unfinished, clad in scaffolding. This is urban sprawl at its most chaotic and unattractive. A lovely eighteenth-century villa, the towering Villa Cattolica, resting place of the celebrated Sicilian painter Renato Guttuso, appears at the bend of a road on the edge of town. Right next to it, standing in what should be parkland, loom the ugly industrial silos of a concrete plant.

  A short distance off the main road stands a warehouse, a rough concrete building with imposing steel doors fastened by an iron pole. There are houses around it now, but once it was isolated, out in the lemon groves. You go up a couple of steps and walk across what was once a small office, where the manager would sit with his paper and his phone. The hangar, now empty, was an ironworks which traded under the name ICRE, making nails and wire fencing, owned by Leonardo Greco. Greco was the main contact for the heroin trade: morphine arrived from Turkey and was turned into heroin in a secret lab in Bagheria, before being exported to New York.

  Greco’s warehouse was the reference point and meeting place for mafiosi in the area; it was also known as the ‘death chamber’. Condemned men would be brought to the nail factory to be interrogated and beaten, then strangled, and their bodies dissolved in acid. The acid bath, beneath a grating in the floor, would have been ready for them when they were brought in, its acrid stink filling the airless space. The place is empty now, but the damp greenish concrete, the pitiless, windowless walls, every stain and metal staple preserve its horrible memories. In one corner is another grating over a cistern, where the victim of a Mafia feud was buried beneath the stones. Two years later, when the feud had been resolved, his remains were given back to the family.

  It was here that Bernardo Provenzano first met Nino Giuffré, or Manuzza (‘Little Hand’), so called because one of his arms is deformed. Giuffré, tall and reserved, was a striking figure. At this point he was Caccamo boss Ciccio Intile’s driver, a teacher at the technical institute in Caccamo and newly initiated into Cosa Nostra. He would become Provenzano’s most important ally, and ultimately the author of his downfall.

  ‘Every time we went to Bagheria of a morning, Provenzano was there’, recalled Giuffré years later. ‘This ironworks was one of the most important places in which Provenzano used to make appointments, apart from being where the Corleonesi murdered their enemies. People were given appointments here, people who were perhaps no longer considered trustworthy, and once inside the door, they’d never leave. Provenzano used this place for two purposes: as a death chamber and for meetings with his closest allies.’ The two, as Giuffré of course knew, are not mutually exclusive.

  A short way from the warehouse, at the turning off the main road to Messina, on a sharp bend, is a bar, the Diva, painted bright pink, where Giuffré and Intile stopped for coffee when they were in the area. It didn’t matter that there was a police road-block just yards away and they were both wanted men; no one made any attempt to stop them.

  On one occasion, after knocking back their sugary espressos from scalding white cups, the two men headed over to the ironworks. A car parked outside aroused their suspicion, but while they watched and waited, a ‘friend’ came over. ‘We’ve got a couple of tuna fish in the boot’, he explained. ‘We’re just waiting to unload them. There’s been some problem on the road, and we’re waiting for the all-clear.’ The ‘tuna fish’ in the boot were two corpses, victims of the Mafia war, destined to disappear into an acid bath.

  The Corleonesi’s attack on the Palermo families had begun in earnest, with a bewildering ferocity that left mafiosi and investigators wondering who could be behind it. After the violent deaths of the supreme Palermo boss Stefano Bontate and his ally Totuccio Inzerillo, Greco called a meeting at the ironworks. Giuffré recalls: ‘Leonardo Greco stood up and announced that the Corleonesi’s rise to power had begun, and that he and his family had pretty much made their choice of leader. So it was his advice to the assembled company that the various mandamenti should align themselves with Bernardo Provenzano. And that’s what happened.’

  But while Riina was fighting his war in Palermo, Provenzano was attending to business. ‘The Mafia’s money had to be kept moving, it had to be invested, and Provenzano was in charge of that side of things’, says Angiolo Pellegrini. ‘While Riina was being the great warrior, Provenzano was managing his companies through front men. Riina was making Cosa Nostra’s military decisions, while Provenzano was running the economy.’

  In the early 1980s the carabinieri’s chief investigative tool was the phone tap. With about fifteen men drawn from the companies at Partinico and Corleone, Colonel Pellegrini worked out of the cramped operations room at the Palermo prosecutor’s office, listening to calls and tracing Provenzano’s ever-expanding network. Fortunately for the agents listening in, the mafiosi had not yet learned to exercise discretion while using the phone.

  ‘Our targets were not as sophisticated as they are now’, recalls Pellegrini. ‘They had basic codes, but weren’t generally as cautious as they subsequently became.’

  One day an agent heard the following exchange, picked up on a phone tap:

  ‘Nardo!’

  ‘Carmelino!’

  ‘How’s everything? . . . Could you tell the accountant to get the invoices ready, I’ve got the cheques here for him to sign.’

  ‘Nardo’ – Leonardo Greco – and Carmelo Colletti, Mafia boss of Agrigento, chatted about business before arranging a meeting at Greco’s HQ, to exchange sums of money. At that point the police listening in to the phone calls did not know the identity of ‘the Accountant’.

  Pellegrini discovered companies registered to various blameless individuals, which turned out to share the same electricity account or were connected to the same answerphone. If you phoned the construction company to order cement, you might get through to a supplier of radiography machines. Pellegrini started mapping these curious connections. On one big sprawling graphic of the health suppliers, all the meandering pen lines led to Provenzano’s favourite nephew, Carmelo Gariffo; another showed all the companies connected to Leonardo Greco. And connected, somehow, to all of them, was the mysterious ‘Accountant’.

  A few years later the developer Angelo Siino revealed that ‘the Accountant’ was the fugitive Provenzano. Siino also revealed that the investigators’ failure to figure out ‘the Accountant’s identity was a source of great amusement: ‘It was unbelievable, we were all on those tapes, we were talking about “the Hunter” . . . that was Nitto Santapaola [boss of Catania], he was identified; and people were talking about me, using my nickname, “the Builder” . . . We were always talking about this man “the Accountant”, but he was never identified, neither was I . . . and we had such a laugh about the fact that every
one was looking for an accountant . . .’

  The carabinieri had also, unknowingly, recorded Provenzano’s phone conversations. After Siino’s revelations, fifteen years after the event, someone was dispatched to look in the archives. But the tapes were no longer there. Provenzano had apparently covered his tracks.

  Provenzano made Bagheria his base. He and other capos occupied splendid villas in the town’s lush parkland, beyond the gaze of inquiring eyes. According to one insider, Provenzano lived ‘on the edge of Bagheria in a large villa, full of stucco and frescos, surrounded by high walls which enclose a wonderful garden, full of shrubs and flower beds’.12

  Whenever there was trouble, Provenzano would be spirited away to another of his safe houses in the area – Palermo, Monreale, Ciminna. During this period he used his contacts in the health sector to provide him with the perfect transportation to meetings: an ambulance. He was also sighted in a white Mercedes chauffered by the young Giovanni Brusca. He held meetings in private homes, in his friends’ villas, in offices and businesses. He met his capos in furniture shops, perched on plastic-coated sofas, to settle disputes and nominate debt enforcers.

  In Mafia terms the boss’s territory is all-important: he can never go far from his power base and must show his strength in his feudal home. If he has his territory under control, he will always have people to protect him. Riina seldom moved house in twenty-three years ‘on the run’, and enjoyed an existence untroubled by the knock at the door. For several years Provenzano lived comfortably in Bagheria, master of all he surveyed.

  ‘The Bagheria Mafia was Bernardo Provenzano’s Mafia’, Giuffré explained.

  Bagheria was once the playground of the rich, a place where the wealthy of Palermo built themselves grand summer residences. The Villa dei Mostri, in the centre of town, features eccentric gargoyles at the gates, mocking the passers-by on their Sunday passeggiata. Recent development has been so haphazard and careless that imposing stone gateposts are left stranded between new apartment buildings. Parts of ancient walls have been incorporated into traffic islands. The town hall in Bagheria is an ugly modern building on the wide main street, flanked by upmarket shops. Its smoked-glass windows conceal a dreary past of graft and greed. For years planning and development in the town were blighted by Mafia interference. Showrooms, villas and blocks of flats sprang up on protected ground, cement foundations paving over the last green spaces. Provenzano’s associates built themselves villas in the centre of Bagheria, even within the parkland of the historic Villa Valguarnera.

  ‘Everything in Bagheria was run by the Mafia’, said the pentito Angelo Siino years later. ‘Nothing moved without the Mafia’s say-so, because the nerve centre of life in Bagheria was in the Mafia’s control.’

  To consolidate his power base Provenzano made an unusual alliance. At a time when Cosa Nostra enjoyed close links with some Christian Democrats he nurtured contacts within the Communist Party, which enjoyed a majority on the council. It has since been claimed by collaborators that some councillors signing off development contracts colluded actively with the Mafia, and that whole departments were completely under the control of Cosa Nostra. A number of building contracts were awarded to the same group of companies, none of them local concerns: behind them were international connections linked to drug trafficking. Party members who raised the alarm were silenced, intimidated or expelled.

  On the witness stand Giuffré painted a graphic picture of what he claimed was Cosa Nostra’s grip on a whole town.

  ‘All roads lead to Provenzano’, he said.

  ‘What does that mean, exactly?’ asked the prosecutor.

  ‘It means’, the witness replied, ‘that in Bagheria you are dealing with the not inconsiderable power of Provenzano. It wasn’t just the planning office that was in the Mafia’s hands. The political side was just the same. If a candidate for mayor didn’t get the go-ahead from Provenzano and his people, you can rest assured he would never get elected.

  ‘If he wanted to canvass votes in Bagheria, if he didn’t have the go-ahead from the family and from Provenzano himself, a candidate could drive past on the A13, but he’d better not stop.

  ‘I’ll give you an example of how it worked. One local businessman had a brother. I think I met him: I can’t remember his name, but I do remember he had a beard. He was a radical member of the Communist Party, had been for years. As soon as this businessman started dealing with us, his brother was forced out of the Communist Party and made to join the Christian Democrats. There was no room for someone like him on the Bagheria council. If you wanted to get anything done, it had to be with the full knowledge and consent of Cosa Nostra, otherwise forget it.’

  Political corruption was not confined to Bagheria by any means. In the neighbouring satellite town of Villabate, the most prominent of Provenzano’s contacts was Nino Fontana, known as ‘Mister Millionaire’. Fontana was the deputy mayor and a front man for Simone Castello, one of Provenzano’s most resourceful allies. Fontana and Castello were old friends and business partners. Fontana was leader of the socialist co-operatives behind the building contracts, but he also ran a scam to get EEC compensation, in which the fruit and vegetable growers’ associations were ordering their members to destroy large quantities of their citrus crops to qualify for EEC grants.

  In this environment of corruption and greed, Pio La Torre, recently appointed regional secretary of the Communist Party, made a preliminary effort to clean up the party and expose links with Cosa Nostra, but his demands for an investigation met with ferocious resistance.

  Bagheria was still the playground of the rich – not the old aristocracy but the new moneyed criminal class. At the opposite end of town from the death chamber, along the shoreline at Mongerbino ad Aspra, mafiosi built themselves luxurious villas where their friends and families came to spend the summer holidays. On the winding coast road, high above the waves, is the walled entrance to Pino ‘the Shoe’ Greco’s villa – tiered apartments descending to sea-level, among the pine trees. The villa boasts thirty-six rooms in different apartments, where high-ranking fugitives would bring their families to stay, occupying separate floors, each with its own living quarters. From their white-tiled balconies they looked out from the rocky promontory at Mongerbino and drank champagne with their host, the hit man.

  To tour the little winding roads along the shore is to trace a map of Mafia country: in Aspra, Brancaccio boss Giuseppe Guttadauro had an elegant house by the shore, with a glassed-in terrace overlooking the water. Along the coast is a pretty fishing village with blue- and red-striped boats pulled up on the sand; a couple of streets back is the seaside hideout used by Trapani capo Matteo Messina Denaro. Police identified it by following Messina Denaro’s girlfriend. Inside they found unmistakable clues to his presence: cigarette butts of his favourite brand and his greatest passion, a Playstation.

  At the end of a narrow sandy path, right on the beach, is the villa belonging to Ciccio Pastoia – long-time friend, driver and ‘alter ego’ of Bernardo Provenzano. The villa is a masterpiece of 1970s’ modernism: a two-tiered curving glass and cement structure covered, on the outside, with blue glass swimming-pool tiles.

  While the Riina family drank cocktails with the Grecos overlooking the sea at sunset, and Ciccio Pastoia clinked glasses with his friends on the sheltered balcony of his villa, not far away men in industrial gloves were dissolving their erstwhile friends in acid baths.

  As the capos relaxed and celebrated their latest victories, a young police captain, Beppe Montana, took his little boat out and nosed about the coves and bays along this stretch of coastline. He suspected that several mafiosi living in hiding had properties along the shore, and he spent his Sundays posing as a holidaymaker, peering into walled gardens and discreet terraces.

  Back at the prosecutor’s office, following their paper trail, investigators were pursing links between the various companies connected to Provenzano. Tracing connections between board members or investors, they arrived at a number of c
ompanies all located in the same Palermo street. Many of the trails led to Pino Lipari, a former surveyor and consultant for ANAS, the national road transport corporation. He had no criminal record and no apparent connection to Cosa Nostra, but Lipari emerged as one of Provenzano’s most faithful associates and senior manager of his business interests.

  Lipari was a busy, clever little man in his mid-forties. He had worked for the Cinisi boss Gaetano Badalamenti and had excellent contacts in local administration. Provenzano had met Lipari while he was in hiding as Badalamenti’s guest. His faith was rewarded when Lipari came up with a system for milking the health system of billions. Together they would cream off a fortune from state funds, putting the Mafia on a new financial footing.

  The Sicilian public health system was overstretched and crumbling after years of chronic underinvestment. Lipari had contacts in the local administration who would ask no questions about the inflated prices demanded by Provenzano’s health companies. If hospital suppliers leased them expensive, cutting-edge machines that staff didn’t know how to work, no one objected. Apparently legitimate companies appeared, with proper-sounding names and board members who were almost all relations or girlfriends of Bernardo Provenzano or his consultant Pino Lipari.

  These companies were repeatedly awarded contracts for supplying the major hospitals in the region. The success of Lipari’s system showed how much money there was to be made from health supplies if you had the right contacts in the administration – and there was no reason the system couldn’t be rolled out across other areas, even on the mainland.

  ‘When we tapped their phone lines, we discovered that there were meetings held in advance to agree who would win the contracts’, says Pellegrini.

  ‘We discovered a monopoly of health supplies,’ Pellegrini wrote in his report, ‘a cartel of companies which was grabbing bigger and bigger slices of a highly profitable market, given the high cost of scientific equipment used in hospitals.’