Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  In their judgement in 1992 on the murder of senior police investigator Emanuele Basile, who was shot in the back while he carried his four-year-old daughter in his arms, magistrates had already identified Riina’s role as the executioner, the man of action, as distinct from Provenzano, the business brain.

  ‘Cosa Nostra has a financial empire run by extremely competent individuals’, said judge Antonino Caponetto. ‘It’s unthinkable that Riina could be running the whole thing. Riina is in charge of the armed wing of Cosa Nostra, while the organization, the powerful economic side, is run most successfully by others, with profits running into millions of billions of lire.’

  Provenzano was acquitted of Basile’s murder on the grounds that he would have been too busy running Cosa Nostra’s financial affairs to have been bothered with messy matters like this. ‘We only have to consider’, reads the sentence, ‘all the acquisitions made by various companies owned by the Corleonesi to understand how, in a convenient division of labour, it’s Provenzano who represents the reference point for all the clans’ investments.’

  Provenzano had an important part to play, the judges concluded, but Riina was the ‘true architect of the new bloody terror strategy’. While Provenzano looked after contacts with politicians and industrialists, Riina took care of territorial control.

  ‘There’s no reason he shouldn’t have done it without my knowing,’ Brusca later told investigators, ‘but as far as I’m concerned Riina never got involved in contract management. He never had companies involved in handing out contracts; he was principally interested in collecting protection money on his territory.’

  ‘When these great contract managers burst on to the scene, like Brusca, Siino . . . and undoubtedly Provenzano,’ explains Sabella, ‘Riina took a step back, partly because he didn’t consider contracts sufficiently lucrative.’

  Provenzano dealt with bankers, politicians and company directors, who found him easier to talk to; Riina dealt with hit men and enforcers.

  After the Mafia war Riina and Provenzano’s Corleonesi reigned supreme. However, the difference in their leadership styles and ideals was now becoming more polarized. Riina, who had never stepped aside to let Provenzano take his two-year turn as leader, as Liggio had instructed, became increasingly intolerant of dissent. When Provenzano disagreed with him, it took all his skill and cunning to say so without incurring Riina’s wrath.

  Giovanni Brusca described an episode that illustrated the difference between the two men. ‘Two characters had to be eliminated. They were called to a meeting to discuss the problem, and Riina wanted them killed there and then. But Provenzano said they should let them go, and then see about what should be done. Salvatore Riina said he was boss and they had to do as he said.’

  The two bosses had always appeared side by side at meetings through the 1970s, but after the war Riina usually attended commission meetings alone. The pentito Salvatore Cancemi explained: ‘Provenzano attended all the commission meetings in the ’80s, but Salvatore Riina didn’t agree with the way he conducted meetings; he didn’t agree with his terms, the arrangements he made, or even the subjects he raised for discussion. As a result, Riina and Provenzano made a deal. They would meet on equal terms and come to an agreement acceptable to both of them, then Riina would present their joint viewpoint to the commission.’

  Buscetta didn’t believe for a moment that Provenzano had been pushed aside: rather, he thought that he had a secret hold over Riina. Buscetta suspected he had access to a high-level contact on whom Cosa Nostra depended. ‘If Provenzano managed to survive the Mafia war in spite of being out of favour with Riina, he must have had a guardian angel.’

  Provenzano’s tendency to prevaricate had been useful once, but Riina was finding it increasingly infuriating. Giovanni Brusca, the Corleonesi’s executioner, would be waiting, shotgun at the ready, for his orders – while Binnu delayed. Brusca preferred his godfather’s more direct style: ‘If Riina said, “Falcone must be killed in Palermo”, Provenzano would come out with some objection, like, “I think it’s better to do it in Rome.” He would always play for time.’

  Provenzano knew better than to disagree openly with a murder sentence. Giuseppe di Cristina had tried that, when he and Riina were planning to kill the carabiniere Colonel Russo – and paid for it. ‘Provenzano claimed he wanted Stefano Bontate dead as much as anyone, but he never got round to giving Aglieri the order to do it’, Brusca complained. ‘Provenzano has always been the same: he waits for others to take the initiative.’

  Months later, long after Bontate was shot dead, Riina joked with his godson: ‘I’m still waiting for my paesano to give Aglieri the order.’

  Another sign of division between the leaders, however outwardly united they might seem, was that both men kept their business and political contacts to themselves. Giuffré observed that Provenzano’s contacts with professionals included lawyers and politicians, ‘many of whom I don’t even know, because Provenzano has always been very guarded and kept his contacts to himself. He has a part of Cosa Nostra which is just cosa sua, “his thing”, his own private business.’

  ‘After the war Riina and Provenzano had the whole of Sicily in their hands’, Giuffré later said. ‘For a time they were in perfect synchrony. Then there were some nasty disagreements between them, made worse by the people around Provenzano, who did not see Riina in a good light. The more time passed, the worse the arguments between them became, and if they hadn’t arrested Riina, I think we would have seen some fireworks.’

  Within the constraints of the joint leadership, perhaps Provenzano was already mapping out the future of the organization.

  The two leaders also had different approaches when it came to politics, and it was this that eventually led to a definitive rift between them. By the time the maxi-trial was half-way through, Cosa Nostra’s cosy relationship with some members of the ruling Christian Democratic Party, which had provided mutual benefits for over a decade, was coming apart.

  Falcone’s sustained pressure on Cosa Nostra was making things difficult for the Corleonesi. He was attacking them where it hurt: seizing assets and property that had previously remained beyond reach, and making sure that sentences stuck instead of being overturned within months. Young mafiosi swept along with the excitement of getting rich by violence were suddenly looking at long gaol sentences. As the maxi-trial progressed, those Christian Democrats who had previously exerted their influence on behalf of the Mafia sent word that there was nothing they could do to rig the outcome.

  The risk represented by the young bloods stuck in gaol was clear: many of them would do anything to get their sentences reduced – even talk. Riina, a master of violent, stirring rhetoric, described collaborators, or penitents, as the worst evil ever to afflict Cosa Nostra and ordered his men to ‘hunt down’ members of the penitents’ families and kill them. He made it sound like a new sport.

  That spring the political crisis was the burning topic of commission meetings. Parliament had been dissolved, and a general election was scheduled for June. Riina was frustrated and enraged that he could no longer force ‘tame’ politicians such as Salvo Lima to do his bidding.

  The commission was summoned to a meeting. Each member was collected by a trusted driver with instructions from Riina and delivered to a group of buildings out in the country. The cars drove into a garage, where the heads of the Mafia families could get out without being seen and were shown through a door into the building. They entered a large, formal meeting room at the centre of which stood a long table, with chairs all the way down – at least ten comfortably each side, and one at the head. According to Giuffré’s account, they greeted each other as old friends, grasping each other by the shoulders and planting a kiss on both cheeks: Matteo Messina Denaro, the young, fast-living boss of Trapani, who took his customary place on Riina’s right; the violent, ambitious Graviano brothers from Brancaccio; the implacable hit man Pieruccio Lo Bianco, who would himself be murdered. But for now they were all friends.


  Some faces were new: a few of the commission members were unable to attend, owing to their unfortunate arrest, and were represented by a brother or a son. Once the bosses were all seated, smoking cigarettes or taking sips of water, Riina strode in and took his position at the head of the table.

  ‘Everyone knows each other?’ Riina asked peremptorily.

  One capo got to his feet. ‘Uncle Totuccio,’ he addressed Riina, ‘I don’t know this gentleman here’, pointing to Giuffré. Riina formally introduced Giuffré to Nino Madonia, the eldest son of the powerful Madonia clan, as they could not otherwise speak freely in each other’s presence, and the meeting got under way.

  Riina announced that he was planning to dump any politicians who had shown themselves to be untrustworthy. To punish their contacts within the Christian Democrats for failing Cosa Nostra, Riina announced that the organization would be backing the Socialist Party, the PSI, and their allies the Radical Party in the forthcoming elections. The switch was intended to send a clear message, a classic Mafia threat: ‘We made you, and we can destroy you.’

  The capos were somewhat alarmed by this news: many of them had contacts in the Christian Democrats who had served them well over the years. The discussion was long and heated. Provenzano wasn’t there, by arrangement with Riina. The joint leaders had made this decision on security grounds – in case Riina should be arrested or (God forbid!) murdered at the meeting, Provenzano would remain at large – but it suited Riina to control the information that reached Provenzano. The two leaders held regular face-to-face meetings where they discussed policy. But Provenzano had other friends on the commission who would quietly report back to him: Carlo Greco from Bagheria and Pietro Aglieri, boss of Santa Maria di Gesù. They, among others, wanted to know what the PSI would do in return for votes. ‘It’s all in hand’, Riina assured them. ‘I have been given guarantees.’

  The Socialists, under Bettino Craxi, in whom Riina had invested great hopes for a fruitful collaboration, were campaigning for a limit to the magistrates’ power. This was intended to protect their own activities from investigation, but it also clearly served the Mafia’s purposes. But Riina had another reason to back the Socialists. He had not just ‘woken up one morning and decided to vote PSI’, he explained: he had been in negotiations with a prominent industrialist. One of his companies had been awarded a series of development contracts; in return, he had promised to talk to his political contacts about fixing trials.

  At the end of the meeting the decision was toasted with strong local wine, and the bosses were served an enormous lunch: local dried sausage with fennel seed and veal on the bone with bread and black olives; a mountain of fragrant pasta with tuna and capers; thick slices of tomato in a pool of olive oil and scattered with salt. After exchanging jokes and catching up with news of other mandamenti, the bosses dispersed, as they had come, through the hidden garage door, each with his driver, back to their secret hideaways.

  Provenzano’s representatives reported the decision back to him. He heard the news with many misgivings. Provenzano has been described as a Christian Democrat loyalist, true to the old guard, but his concerns were more pragmatic: Cosa Nostra’s most useful and long-standing contacts were members of the Christian Democrats, and he saw no good reason for alienating them. At the same time, he didn’t believe the Socialists would deliver.

  He arranged to meet Riina to discuss the ruling. They talked cordially enough but quickly ran into difficulties. Riina was infuriated by Binnu’s dogged reasoning and his endless objections. He stormed about the room and slammed his fist on the table, his voice piercing and relentless. Provenzano, as always, sat quite still, smiling and looking down, giving no ground. Eventually, Riina persuaded Provenzano there was nothing he could say to change his mind. ‘I accepted the decision to vote for the Socialists,’ Provenzano later told Giuffré, ‘but that doesn’t mean I agreed with it.’

  Once the decision had been taken to support the PSI, the capos received their orders. Fax machines beeped into life, spewing out pages with the names of the new candidates they were to support. Giuffré rushed round to the local representatives, who were putting the finishing touches to their own campaign to support their old friends and allies from the Christian Democrats. Many of the campaigns had been funded out of their own pockets: leaflets had been printed, jamborees and outdoor banquets planned. Speeches were prepared, with posters and coloured lights. When Giuffré turned up and told them, in his lugubrious manner, that they had a new candidate, they were not best pleased.

  ‘It was a real problem, particularly in areas where they’d supported the same party for years, and some of them were hostile to the new policy. The capos told me they were finding it extremely difficult to persuade their people, as we were changing a long tradition. But those were the orders, and we had to obey.’

  The Mafia’s support for the PSI was scarcely a secret. An election poster appeared in the window of a bar in Brancaccio belonging to a local mafioso. The bar had been closed down because of the owner’s criminal association, and the door was sealed by the authorities, but the owner’s defiant message was clear.

  At the June elections the Socialists made significant gains. Furious claims that they were backed by the Mafia were dismissed as sour grapes. A few months later the Socialists pushed through a referendum to limit magistrates’ powers.

  But any advantage the Mafia gained in the elections was lost when the maxi-trial verdicts were announced in December 1987. After a record-breaking five weeks’ seclusion, eating and sleeping in their Spartan quarters in the concrete bunker, the jury finally returned its verdicts.

  On a December evening the prisoners listened in silence to the verdicts being read in the judge’s high, tremulous voice, for well over an hour. They inflicted heavy blows on Cosa Nostra, with guilty verdicts for 344 defendants and a total of 2,665 years in prison. Liggio was acquitted of running the organization from prison, but life sentences were pronounced for nineteen mafiosi, including Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano. It was an unprecedented defeat for the Mafia – previous trials had almost all resulted in acquittals for lack of evidence. Riina had failed to fix the verdict.

  Provenzano maintained that Riina’s decision to support the PSI was a disaster. Giuffré remembers that election as the beginning of a major dispute between the two leaders. ‘I’d have to say that at this precise moment the rift between Riina and Provenzano got wider, a rift that most people had not really noticed before this point. But Provenzano didn’t agree with this experiment in supporting the Socialists and the Radical Party, and I think I’d have to say that events have proved him right.

  ‘Unfortunately the strategy misfired and the rift opened up between the Mafia and politics, because there was an inevitable reaction from both the Christian Democrats and the Socialist party, so that by the ’90s we had both [justice Minister Claudio] Martelli and [Giulio] Andreotti against us.’ Instead of heeding their ‘warning’ and making concessions to the Mafia, the Christian Democrats supported a raft of anti-Mafia measures.

  The division between the two men became more marked; although they maintained the peace in public, the façade was becoming increasingly thin. The two men who had hatched so many clever plots against their enemies were getting close to hatching similar plots against each other.

  The next few years were some of the most turbulent in Cosa Nostra’s history. Sensitive to any threat to his charismatic leadership, Riina turned on the star players in his own ranks. Even better: he would get the man’s closest allies to do it – convinced, by Riina’s skilful manipulation, that their lives depended on it. The hit man Pino ‘the Shoe’ Greco had been the Corleonesi’s most reliable killer and Riina’s host at his elegant villa until his brilliant career went to his head, and Riina had him murdered by his own men. Another reliable hit man for the Corleonesi, Agostino Marino Mannoia, who had been part of so many of Riina’s execution squads, suddenly vanished. Filippo Marchese, the enthusiastic strangler of P
alermo’s notorious chamber of death, disappeared in a vat of acid, just as he had dispatched so many of Riina’s enemies. While Riina was reinventing the savagery of organized crime, his killers buried the bodies on a rubbish dump.

  During this time Riina allegedly hatched a plot to murder Provenzano. With the full knowledge that his words would be taken as a threat, he inquired: ‘Does Binnu go out in the morning or the evening?’ Anyone hearing that innocent-sounding question would know that he would be doing Uncle Totò a favour by dispatching his irksome joint leader. Provenzano began to see less of his friends and made plans to tighten his security.

  Falcone and Borsellino gained the confidence of men of honour who were appalled by the way the organization was going and wanted to take their revenge against the Corleonesi by revealing the secrets of Cosa Nostra. Nino Calderone, whose brother Pippo, capo of Catania, had been murdered, agreed to collaborate with Falcone in the spring of 1987. He revealed a great deal about the Mafia’s political patronage and its protection rackets. He also trespassed on the holy ground of Provenzano’s contracts, giving investigators a detailed picture of the relationship between Cosa Nostra, captains of industry and politicians. When Francesco Marino Mannoia revealed the Corleonesi’s modus operandi, Riina killed his mother, his aunt and his sister. And there were more.

  Falcone’s tremendous progress in his investigations irked many of his colleagues, who were jealous of his success and hostile to his methods. Cosa Nostra took advantage of confusion and infighting in the Palermo prosecutors’ office (known as the Poison Palace) and unleashed a new round of violence and intimidation. Two senior judges, who were due to hear the appeals against the maxi-trial verdicts, were murdered.