Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  Provenzano’s business activities signalled a new departure for Cosa Nostra: ‘It was something completely new to us,’ says Pellegrini, ‘that a clan could be waging war on one front, while at the same time it was dedicated to developing the health supplies business. This is what became known, famously, as la mafia imprenditrice, “Mafia enterprise”, whose methods are largely non-violent and whose front men have no previous convictions.

  ‘There were some who underestimated what we were dealing with at that time. But not us. We never thought of these people as viddani or ignorant peasants, I’ve always liked the Sicilian saying “big boots, smart brain”. Peasants’ boots they may wear, but they’ve got good minds. I have always regarded them as extremely dangerous and extremely shrewd. I always thought of Provenzano as “the Accountant”, because he made calculations. The work he was doing required a good brain.’

  Pellegrini’s 1984 report explained Cosa Nostra’s qualitative leap: ‘The mafioso, once his authority is secure, no longer needs to resort to violence or threats to impose his will; his presence and his word are enough for him to be involved in any business on his own terms and conditions.

  ‘Businessmen have grasped this reality, recognizing the Mafia’s authority: considering that, if they do not submit to the Mafia, they could not pursue their business activity, they have preferred and prefer to deal preventively with organized crime, thus avoiding the high cost of damage and personal harm.’

  Since no local businesses could risk reporting Mafia extortion to the police, Pellegrini continued his assiduous tracking of suspects. The most difficult task faced by investigators was conducting surveillance on foot. ‘If we sent anyone to follow a target, they would find themselves being followed. We’d be spotted in minutes. If they saw a vehicle they didn’t know, they’d send out men in cars to block us in. We did manage to take photographs from inside a van or a truck, while we were pretending to set up road works.’

  It came to the team’s attention that the Bagheria Mafia was investing in a new diagnostic health centre, a project of particular interest to Provenzano. Riina used to tease Provenzano about his predilection for investments in health, but he was not the only one to spot a personal interest. Pellegrini has strong suspicions that the health business provided cover for Provenzano while he was on the run. He and his family needed health care over the years, and he also needed access to money, offices, bank accounts and so forth. The various health supply companies provided him with this infrastructure. Pellegrini suspects they also became channels for something else.

  ‘We had our suspicions that there was drug trafficking going on. We picked up a conversation between two men – it may have been Lipari or Carmelo Gariffo – and one of them said, “Come and meet me, I’ve got something for you.”

  ‘It was a very intense moment for us, as we were convinced that one of these men would lead us to Provenzano.’

  Carabinieri followed Carmelo Gariffo’s car down corso Calatafimi, a long, tree-lined avenue on the outskirts of Palermo where exclusive villas are concealed by high walls, and watched him turn into a courtyard. They waited for him to come out but soon realized, when there was no sign of anyone coming or going, that there must be another exit. Sure enough, two hours later, Gariffo arrived from the other direction in a different car. After his driver searched the street for any suspicious vehicles, Gariffo, carrying a suitcase, got into his own car. The carabinieri gave chase but quickly realized they were being followed by the other driver and turned off.

  ‘We don’t know whether that suitcase contained drugs or money,’ says Pellegrini ruefully, ‘because we decided not to intervene, as it would have alerted the organization that we were watching them.’

  Some years later he learned that Provenzano was staying just 50 metres from that courtyard, in an elegant villa with its own lush garden, surrounded by palm trees and purple bougainvillaea.

  Pino Lipari was arrested in November 1983 and charged, along with seventeen others (some of them, including Provenzano and his companion Saveria Palazzolo, in absentia), with money-laundering. When Lipari left prison five years later, he was summoned by Uncle Binnu, who valued his business acumen and networking skills enough to risk re-employing a man with a criminal record.

  After the success of his inroads into the health system, Provenzano was determined to achieve the same thing with other public contracts. Riina had a head start in this field through his man Angelo Siino, known as the Mafia’s minister of public works, who controlled the awarding of contracts. Siino was a wealthy man, an exuberant type with a handlebar moustache and a passion for expensive watches, with a house in central Palermo, just off the fashionable via Libertà. He was exceptionally well connected, since he was the reference point for every major contract awarded throughout Sicily. But Provenzano took a dislike to him (he was Riina’s man, and competition between the two was already heating up) and unceremoniously replaced him at the Mafia’s ‘ministry of works’ with his own faithful business manager, Pino Lipari.

  Siino, for all his powerful connections, had made a tactical error (probably on instructions from Riina) by blocking one of Provenzano’s favoured Communist-backed construction companies from a lucrative contract to build aqueducts. He may have underestimated Riina’s mild-mannered friend, but in any case he was swiftly punished for it – locked out of any future contracts in Bagheria. Giuffré recounted: ‘It was war’. ‘Not with guns, perhaps, but it was definitely war – on the political front, with Siino trying by any means, fair or foul, to crack open this protectionist fortress.’

  Siino got his revenge: after his arrest he became the first state witness who had had close contact with Bernardo Provenzano and revealed how the Accountant managed his empire.

  Lipari, as the new ‘minister of works’, operated a cartel to divide up contracts between a small, hand-picked group of companies known as the Tavolino or Round Table. These companies agreed among themselves whose turn it was to get the contract, so there was no need for them to discount their prices to underbid the others. Quite the reverse: when a company was ‘awarded’ a contract, it paid ‘tax’ to the Mafia, which was reflected in its fee – and the fee, of course, came out of the public purse. People in Palermo were paying more for their water, waste disposal and street lighting than the inhabitants of any other city in Italy.

  Lipari directed the Round Table from behind the scenes, closely monitored by Nino Giuffré and others, who were called in to ‘keep order’ if any of the companies failed to come up with the kickback. If any companies who were not members of the cartel made the mistake of thinking they could bid for a contract, Giuffré made sure they were ‘strongly discouraged’. A bottle of petrol and a suggestive box of matches would usually do the trick, but sometimes he had to smash up a digger or set fire to a car.

  ‘This cartel operated in the name of Provenzano’, Giuffré explained. As a result, most of the time things went very smoothly.

  This quantum leap in the Mafia’s economic power had been foreseen, and might have been prevented. Sadly, the carabinieri’s 1984 report on Provenzano’s stranglehold on public administration was shelved. ‘There was so much going on at the time’, says Pellegrini, ‘it sort of got lost.’

  Pellegrini feels some satisfaction that his investigation was eventually proved right in almost every regard but inevitably also disappointment that the report, based on many months of assiduous police work, was overlooked. Actually it was swept aside by the events of what became known as l’estate caldo, the ‘hot summer’ of 1985.

  On a Sunday afternoon in July, Beppe Montana, the young officer in charge of the squad hunting down fugitives, was shot dead as he got out of his little boat. The resourceful Montana had tried to make a virtue of his lack of official protection: running around on a scooter and snooping along the coast in his boat on his days off, looking for Mafia hideouts. Just over a week later his friend and colleague Ninni Cassarà, an idealistic, hard-working officer, was gunned down outside his ho
me. Cassarà’s murder was set up by several members of the Mafia commission, who had a personal investment in seeing his brilliant career brought to a premature end. Afterwards, according to insiders, there was a celebration.

  Anti-Mafia prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino, who had spent the summer of 1985 incarcerated for their own safety on the prison island of Asinara (an irony not lost on them, considering the lovely seaside villas where the mafiosi would be spending the holidays), finally delivered their massive compilation of evidence for the biggest Mafia trial in history, known simply as the ‘maxi’. An underground bunker had been built, lined with cages where over 400 defendants stood and watched proceedings, intimidating witnesses, sometimes heckling, even throwing food. The accusations were based on Buscetta’s description of Cosa Nostra as a unified organization, with a hierarchical structure, and a central part of the prosecution focused on the rise of the Corleonesi to dominate this hierarchy. The trial opened in February 1986, although a third of the defendants were still at large. The most important of these were Bernardo Provenzano and Totò Riina.

  Their boss, Luciano Liggio, had lost none of his attitude after a decade behind bars. He was an undoubted star of the proceedings, strutting and posturing from his cell overlooking the court, wielding a Cuban cigar as a gangsterish prop, demanding that his rights be respected. He insisted at one point that the defendants couldn’t concentrate on the proceedings with the police guards watching them. In between court appearances Liggio painted: landscapes, seascapes, bunches of flowers – the career criminal’s artistic soul burst out of him in splashes of colour. His lawyer encouraged the press to see this outpouring as the sign of a profound and sensitive humanity.

  After his arrest in 1974 Liggio had directed Cosa Nostra from prison, but as the months passed, power devolved on to his joint lieutenants, Riina and Provenzano. They continued to shelter behind the figure of a nominal head of the commission: Michele Greco.

  Greco was arrested ten days into the proceedings, tracked down to a deserted farm building in the mountains, and took his place alongside the caged mafiosi. In a statement delivered to his lawyer he emphasized his religious credentials: ‘They call me The Pope, but I can’t compare myself to any pope, not even the current one, except that my clear conscience and my profound faith make me, if not their superior, certainly their equal . . . I have always worked the land, which I inherited from my parents. I read a great deal, mostly the Bible.’

  Once Greco was behind bars, there was no one to stand in Riina and Provenzano’s way.

  When the supergrass Tommaso Buscetta took the stand, the audience in the bunker was electrified – none more so than his former friends and allies in their cages. Never before had such a frank exposé of Cosa Nostra been heard in open court. Liggio was allowed to question him directly, but faced with Liggio’s arrogant, strutting figure, Buscetta denied even knowing him. Liggio’s vanity got the better of him, and he puffed up his own role, insisting he was on intimate terms with the most prominent Mafia bosses of the century.

  While this drama played out in the concrete bunker, Riina and Provenzano were never far away.

  5

  The split

  L

  IKE ALL THE best partnerships, Riina and Provenzano polarized people.

  ‘Signor Provenzano’s sophisticated mind’ was appreciated by Cosa Nostra’s minister of public works, the developer Angelo Siino. Riina was ‘a clod, a goatherd’, despised for his failure to think strategically.

  Riina’s godson Giovanni Brusca preferred Riina’s directness. ‘When there was a problem, Riina would confront it, deal with it. He would give his response – good or bad – but at least he gave it. Not Provenzano. He is a slippery one. I call him the Philosopher, because he never takes a stand about anything.’

  When Liggio appointed his two trusty lieutenants joint leaders in his absence, he knew they had different qualities. By the time their mentor was arrested, the two men had a long history together. They shared a home town, Corleone. ‘The fact of having a common origin strengthens their bond, it makes them a tighter group’, says historian Salvatore Lupo. They called each other paesano even when they weren’t on the best of terms: it was how they knew each other.

  Both men played to their strengths: Riina was not particularly interested in contracts; Provenzano considered drug trafficking too risky. Riina had a caustic sense of humour – as Provenzano began to suffer with prostate trouble, Riina liked to tease him about his health problems – but he could also throw a good celebratory banquet (particularly if there was an execution to be toasted with champagne). Provenzano was more private, a family man, affectionate to those who sought him out.

  Few could see it from the outside, but they worked as a team. When a difficult step had to be taken, they bought time by deferring to each other.

  ‘My friend and I don’t always agree on everything,’ Riina confided to Giuffré, ‘but we never get up from the table until we’ve come to an agreement.’

  To Giuffré this was a significant statement: it showed Riina, the hot-headed dictator, in a different light, forced to negotiate with his counterpart. Provenzano was always conscious that the leadership should appear to be harmonious. ‘If there were disagreements, they sorted them out,’ says the anti-Mafia prosecutor Pietro Grasso, ‘so whatever happened was their joint responsibility. Even if they disagreed, they made a public show of being united.’

  When the two leaders attended meetings together, Provenzano tended to say little or nothing during the discussions. On occasion he let it be known that he would give his view at the following meeting. This fuelled suspicions (which he carefully nurtured) that he had to consult an important contact. ‘You have to remember that, according to the rules,’ said Tommaso Buscetta, ‘only one representative from the Corleonesi should have been allowed to attend commission meetings. Provenzano and Riina came as a couple. And the thing that made everyone furious was that Provenzano would never agree to anything. Even Riina was uncomfortable with the way he acted. All this proves to me that, at least in this particular phase, Provenzano was the boss, while Riina was champing at the bit.’

  ‘When the commission held a meeting, Riina would go one time, the next time he’d send Bernardo Provenzano, or else they’d both cancel at the last minute and rearrange the whole thing’, Brusca recalled.

  Both were masters of the art of tragedie – a concept peculiar to Mafia culture, meaning pretending to be something you’re not or manipulating others to believe what you want them to believe. In terms of a secret society like the Mafia, the ability to manipulate information (or disseminate rumours beneficial to you or detrimental to your adversaries) is essential. They would set brothers against each other, send rumours flying that old friends were plotting against each other. In the confusion their target would end up dead, killed by his own side. Riina could make a person believe he was in danger from a certain quarter, when in fact the danger came from Riina himself. Provenzano would feign ignorance about a murder when he had already given his consent. They played their parts: Provenzano may have seemed more avuncular, and Riino more dynamic, and men would gravitate towards one or the other; when they met in private, each would learn who had confided in the other.

  The differences between the two men were not always so stark and clear. Provenzano was not just the man of peace: he put down a rebellion by a splinter group of gangsters in Gela, on Sicily’s industrial south coast. The armed gangs, or stiddari, caused havoc in the town, stealing and shooting in the streets. Provenzano crushed the rebels in a violent war in which over 300 died.

  Riina may not always have been the man of war. Lupo points out that we only have the pentiti’s accounts of Riina’s leadership qualities – and they were all, by definition, his enemies. We don’t have Riina’s words of advice, his encouragement. ‘Maybe Riina was a good mediator too.’

  Maybe. On the other hand, Riina liked people to know that he didn’t care how many he had to kill as long as he got his w
ay. When he met the woman he loved, a teacher from Corleone, he told a friend, ‘If they won’t let me marry her, I’m going to have to kill some people.’

  The man they called u curtu (‘Shorty’) spread fear. He had no problem condemning his allies to death. On the least suspicion of betrayal, or a notion that someone else had more charisma and might outshine him, he would order an execution. Riina had inherited from Liggio a small private army of killers, who were not all based in Corleone, or even Palermo, but planted in the different families in other parts of Italy. The secretive manner of his infiltration made him greatly feared.

  We assume that Riina had taken the commanding role. ‘Put simply’, says assistant prosecutor Alfonso Sabella, ‘in Cosa Nostra, whoever has military force has the power. Provenzano had political contacts, but that never held sway in the Mafia.’

  But the balance of power between them was very complex. There is some disagreement about whether the two men’s mentor and boss, Luciano Liggio, favoured Riina or Provenzano. He reportedly stood up in court and said, pointing to Riina, ‘He is close to my heart.’ When asked about Provenzano, he said: ‘I know he’s from my home town, but I don’t know him.’

  Buscetta suggested that this was deliberately misleading: that Provenzano was keeping out of the limelight, operating as Liggio’s deputy while allowing Riina to attract all the attention. He portrayed Provenzano as an inscrutable loner who increased his power and charisma by being elusive. ‘Provenzano would give people the run-around’, he recalled. ‘He was quite capable of giving someone an appointment at the top of a mountain. After walking for a whole day, the man would get to the appointed place – and find no one there. While he was walking back down, the fellow would meet one of Provenzano’s men coming the other way, who informed him that the appointment would be postponed for a few weeks. And he’d tell him where to meet – somewhere completely different, maybe even a different province. The man would get there at last – and again no Provenzano. This would happen three or four times. Months would pass in which no one would see Provenzano, then suddenly he’d pop up when people were least expecting it. He has always liked to keep people guessing.’