Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  According to Brusca’s analysis, the great symbolic return to the family home in Corleone was principally so that his sons could stay in school without having to make up stories and fake IDs. It had already become extremely complicated, keeping their identities a secret: girlfriends asked questions, teachers needed information. Brusca was clear: Provenzano’s philosophy was different from Riina’s. He wanted his sons to study and did not want them involved in any way in Cosa Nostra.

  It has not been easy for them. Their father made the decision that they should leave him, and the life they were used to, and go to Corleone, a place they had never lived – where not even their mother had lived. They knew no one, but everybody knew them. In a private conversation recorded by police years after their appearance in Corleone, they recalled their outrage at the way their mother had meekly submitted to their father’s order to leave. They felt she had been overlooked and ignored: ‘She went along with every decision, she never had the courage to say, “I want to do this, I don’t want to do that, let’s do it this way, let’s do it the other way.”’18 While everyone knew what was good for them, no one seemed to be paying any attention to their needs.

  Provenzano continually pointed out to his sons that his own childhood had been full of misery and deprivation, while his sons had lacked for nothing. Paolo bitterly resented his father for this view. He could tell them all he liked that they were privileged, but the boys’ lives in Corleone were not easy, and they’d never been given the opportunity to express that.

  ‘[He thinks he’s done] everything for us. He’s always saying, “Let me tell you about when your uncles and I were small . . .” He says his father beat him, and that at nine years old he went out selling stuff, whereas we’ve had everything on a plate. You know he’s always asking, “Have you ever lacked for anything?” He’s never given us the chance to say, “Actually, yes.” Why does he do it, why does he look for reassurance all the time? Well I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  Family life was never simple, and the trio was never allowed to forget that their movements were always under observation. Before the Christmas holidays in 1999, police bugs picked up whisperings about a secret family trip to Germany. They would be staying with Bernardo’s brother Simone, and no one was to say a word about the arrangements outside the immediate family. Bernardo’s sister made a vast quantity of buccellati, Christmas biscuits filled with dried fruit and almonds. And another brother bought hams and salamis, claiming they were a gift for his doctor. Such was the whispered urgency of these preparations that the police were convinced that the family was preparing a festive reunion with Bernardo.

  German law does not allow extensive surveillance except in cases of suspected terrorism, and it took several days for the Italian police to get permission to install cameras on every angle of Simone’s apartment building. On Christmas eve Saveria and the boys arrived, and the apartment door closed swiftly behind them. In the following days no one entered or left the apartment, not even to go to Mass on Christmas day. The police were getting jumpy. Finally, they made a last, desperate request to the German authorities for permission to search the flat.

  The small family party had spent days inside the apartment building, staying in a borrowed flat down the hall. They had made every attempt to arrange the trip in secret, but they were used to intense police surveillance, so it was no surprise when Simone opened the door to half a dozen Italian agents, who poured in and searched the flat thoroughly. Hours later, after dark, they had to concede that there was no sign of the Mafia boss. Whether Simone’s brother had just escaped through a secret passage or was not even intending to visit, the police never managed to figure out. For the family it was a depressing rerun of so many previous occasions and impossible to recreate the festive mood after they had gone.

  After her move to Corleone the couple were able to meet only seldom: she was too closely observed to be able to risk it. They knew this would be the case when they took the decision for her and the boys to come out of hiding. For such a close couple it must have been a painful separation, made worse by worries about each other’s security and health problems, with only intermittent letters for reassurance. She put up a brave front. But her house was watched by cameras and eavesdroppers twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the police agents monitoring their listening devices could hear her crying.

  There was another explanation for the family’s mysterious return to Corleone. Perhaps Provenzano was running out of options. In his home town he had family, people loyal to him and dependable, to whom he could entrust his wife and sons. He didn’t have the means to support himself and his family in exile: it would have been an expensive business, especially with Binnu’s medical and legal bills to pay. ‘His family never had the same disposable income that Riina had’, said Brusca.

  At that moment Provenzano could not count on enough manpower to protect his family outside Corleone. In Corleone he still had contacts – his brothers, his wife’s sisters and his nephew.

  Supergrass Tommaso Buscetta maintained Provenzano had another, more powerful reason for sending his family back to his home town at that time: the deterioration of relations with Totò Riina. Pressure was mounting in the leaders’ increasingly difficult relationship: Riina was becoming more unpredictable, more determined and easily enraged. Riina and Provenzano had done a deal, under which both their families would be safe in their home town. Provenzano had sent his family to Corleone to protect them from Riina.

  ‘With that gesture Provenzano makes his official break with the past’, said Buscetta. ‘From that day on he is playing his own game, he is no longer in partnership with Riina. He must increase his security to a new level, in which there is no room for his family. From now on, he works alone.’

  In the early months of 1992 the atmosphere within Cosa Nostra was tense. Falcone’s new measures had caused a crisis within the ranks of mafiosi in prison: they could no longer expect to be released from prison within months, nor could they be guaranteed to find their fortunes intact on their release. Riina had raised the stakes by waging allout war on the state, and his associates knew he would not back down, not now. He was locked into an escalation of violence that many men of honour no longer supported. As one pentito recalled: ‘The phrase you heard was ora ci rumpemu i corna a tutti: “Now we’re going to break all their heads.”’

  Provenzano’s plan was to distance himself from the terrible events ahead. He had deep misgivings about Riina’s strategy and intended to disappear from view during what he knew would be a disastrous period for Cosa Nostra. He had kept such a low profile that on most of the lists of defendants for many of the crimes committed by Cosa Nostra during this period his name did not even appear. By the time his family appeared in Corleone, without him, the general conviction among magistrates in Palermo was that he must be dead.

  7

  Goodbye Totò

  I

  NSIDE THE COMMISSION there was a heavy atmosphere, a chill that turned icy’, recalled Giuffré. ‘We were getting close to the day of reckoning. A lot of people, most of them politicians, had made themselves scarce after the Mafia war, but when you’re dealing with Cosa Nostra, once you’ve begun something, you can’t back out. A number of politicians had eaten from the same plate as Cosa Nostra, and then they spat on us. Salvo Lima was one of the ones who had done a runner. But running away didn’t help him because his time had come.’

  Lima, the Christian Democrat politician and MEP, one of Giulio Andreotti’s closest allies, had been a powerful friend to Cosa Nostra. When he was no longer prepared to use his influence in Cosa Nostra’s favour, his time, as Giuffré put it, ran out.

  On 31 January 1992 Italy’s Supreme Court upheld the sentences handed out at the maxi-trial. It was a historic defeat for the Mafia. And yet, for Falcone’s team at the ministry of justice, triumph was tempered by their knowledge of the enemy: while the victors in this round celebrated with champagne, they knew they would pay for it before too long.19

&
nbsp; Riina, who had been fully expecting his influence to prevail, was incandescent. ‘He had become unrecognizable from his former self’, said Giuffré. ‘There was a ferocity in his eyes that was frightening. Before, he had kept everything on a tight rein, now he started losing control.

  ‘Once the decision had been taken to kill politicians, Riina, who knew many of us had contacts and friends in that world, told us not to ask him any favours.’

  The verdict was a devastating indictment of Riina’s leadership: he had failed to exert his influence in Rome. He needed to make a swift and decisive response to this outrage, and he had plans.

  He had been holding a series of extraordinary meetings to plot the organization’s reaction to its political troubles. In late December the regional commission had gathered, as they did every year, to exchange Christmas greetings and gifts, and drink a toast to their success in the New Year. They met at a secluded farmhouse in the forest near Valguarnera, in the mountainous province of Enna. On the surrounding slopes lay the remains of abandoned sulphur mines; in the town the visible scars of poverty remained: old men hauling at mules, women in headscarves and black widows’ dresses wheezing home with their little bit of shopping.

  Up at the farmhouse the ‘new rich’ were gathering – sons of peasants in cashmere sweaters, members of the Mafia commission, settling themselves around a long table. ‘Shorty’ Riina at the head, with hard black eyes and jowly face, smiled and joked with the men one minute and threw an icy glare around the room when he wanted silence. Provenzano, ‘the Accountant’, sat near by, his half-moons on a string round his neck. He hardly ever attended these meetings and seemed uneasy.

  Riina announced to the assembled company that they were going to war with the state. He explained that the representatives of the state with whom they had always enjoyed fruitful relationships were no longer to be trusted. ‘If we want peace,’ he announced, ‘first we must have war.’

  The meeting lasted several hours, with much discussion, in a mixture of Italian and dialect, about launching a separatist movement – a theme to which Cosa Nostra returned, whenever its ‘tame’ politicians started ignoring orders. A frontal assault on the state, Riina insisted, was inevitable. Provenzano, with his customary attention to detail, raised numerous questions about how this was to be achieved, and whether it would not be better to see how the next phase turned out, with the election in the coming months. Riina snapped at his old adversary’s objections with weary irritation, mocking Provenzano’s clerical style. The discussion churned on, over platters piled with bloody grilled steaks and bottles of red wine; they agreed that nothing would be achieved without a higher body count. When the men finally rose from the table, they were resolved. They raised their glasses in a toast to war.

  In the following weeks Provenzano, more circumspect than his associates, took soundings among his contacts in politics and industry to gauge likely reactions to another high-level assassination. Giuffré attended a midwinter meeting of Provenzano’s faithful, where each of his capos was given a sector from which to report back: the contracts man Pino Lipari was asked to talk to industrialists; Provenzano’s childhood neighbour Vito Ciancimino, the former mayor and minister of works, was asked to take soundings among his political contacts; others were to talk to masons and businessmen. Between them they were to listen to opinion formers in every sector.

  ‘At that time Provenzano had a series of faithful friends and advisers who were not necessarily men of honour, but politicians, businessmen, doctors’, says assistant prosecutor Nino Di Matteo. ‘He primed these contacts of his, who were sufficiently well connected that they could test the mood in the corridors of power, to understand, if they were to kill Falcone and Borsellino, what sort of reaction there would be. Would the judiciary hit back hard, or would most of them (sadly) be secretly pleased? Through his high-level contacts Provenzano was able to take the pulse of power in the country at that time – this was undoubtedly his major strength.’

  Although Provenzano would later decry the bombings as a disaster for Cosa Nostra, at the time his information indicated there would be a positive response from certain quarters. His contacts in the north were deeply alarmed about the corruption scandal threatening to engulf them. He, like everyone else, went along with Riina’s grand plan.

  ‘I don’t believe Provenzano would have stood by and let Riina have his way if he didn’t agree with the policy’, says Di Matteo. ‘If he wanted to stop the bombings, he could have done it. He was in full agreement with the politics of a violent attack on the state by Cosa Nostra. There was a well-founded fear within the organization that new investigations were in progress that would go a lot further than any previous initiatives. Provenzano, whose business dealings, in particular his lucrative contracts, would be vulnerable to any serious investigation, had as much stake in the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino as anyone else.’

  The organization would become increasingly embattled as its access to power was denied. In the middle of February a Socialist politician was accused of taking bribes, and the scandal quickly spread to the prime minister, Bettino Craxi, threatening to expose the whole intricate system of bribery and corruption at the highest levels of all the political parties.

  While Cosa Nostra’s response to these outrages was under discussion, a power struggle was developing behind the scenes. A meeting took place near Palermo in February 1992, unusual in that both Riina and Provenzano were present but particularly memorable because Provenzano turned up wearing a bishop’s robes, complete with mitre and sash. The whole scene was witnessed by a nineteen-year-old woman, who later became a collaborator. Giusy Vitale gave her mafioso brother a lift to the meeting and remembered being astonished to see a senior cleric alighting from a chauffeured car to attend a meeting of Cosa Nostra – until her brother explained it was Provenzano in disguise. Riina was reported to find the whole scene very distasteful and told Binnu not to pull any similar stunts again.

  At this meeting, held in a farmhouse in the countryside near Palermo, there was a bid to push aside some of the older figures in the commission, in favour of young bloods, a movement spurred on by the ambitious Vitale brothers, Leonardo and Vito, and supported by the young Trapani boss, Matteo Messina Denaro. These young guns were all for the use of violence and self-styled followers of Totò Riina. At this meeting he rewarded the Vitale brothers by giving them control of Partinico. It was a clear message to anyone thinking of opposing him in future.

  Towards the end of February another summit took place. The commission met again at the farmhouse in Enna, and here Cosa Nostra’s top representatives – Riina and Provenzano, Nitto ‘the Hunter’ Santapaola, boss of Catania, and Piddu Madonia, capo of Caltanissetta – agreed the strategy for a series of top-level assassinations. The Corleonesi already had the blood of many on their hands: about a thousand people had died during their bid for total control in the early 1980s. Eminent representatives of the state had been shot down in broad daylight, in busy streets. Now they were planning the most devastating bomb attack ever attempted – on a moving target in an armoured car. Giovanni Falcone was not going to be allowed to destroy years of empire-building.

  The supergrass Nino Calderone saw this decision as an act of desperation. ‘A spectacular public bombing is never in the interest of the Mafia . . . it is a sign of weakness.’ It was a response to a series of defeats, which the Mafia no longer knew how to tackle. ‘The Corleonesi and the other dominant Mafia families lost their heads.’

  It’s tempting to imagine Provenzano trying to dissuade his paesano from such a risky strategy, particularly in the light of his later peaceful regime. Tempting, but wrong.

  ‘The leaders of Cosa Nostra were in full agreement over the decision to murder Falcone and Borsellino’, says Di Matteo. ‘So much so, that Provenzano put forward his own men in Palermo for the via d’Amelio bombing [which killed Borsellino]. Those two attacks involved men of honour from both factions: those close to Provenzano, like Aglieri, an
d those close to Riina, like Brusca.

  ‘Provenzano may not have attended every commission meeting, because of the rule that he and Riina alternated, but according to the pentiti who were in a position to know, he took a full and active part. It was not until he understood the reaction to the bombings that he changed his strategy.’

  Riina’s godson Giovanni Brusca, who had killed many times for the organization, was outraged that Provenzano later distanced himself from the decision to wage open war on the state. He was deeply mistrustful of the Accountant’s background manoeuvres.

  ‘I noticed that throughout the whole preparatory phase Bernardo Provenzano and Pietro Aglieri were never to be seen. They were just like a bucket and mop: wherever one went, the other followed. They had a perfect understanding. It’s no secret that I could never stand them, because they’re the kind who let everyone else do the dirty work and think they can keep their hands clean.

  ‘Provenzano never came out with his opinion,’ Brusca said, ‘but before you jump to any conclusions, this doesn’t mean he was against the bombings. He just wanted someone else to do the job. I never once heard him say he was opposed to a murder.’

  In private Brusca vented his frustration to his godfather that Provenzano had held back during the planning phase. Riina merely laughed, and said, ‘I tied up the dogs. They can’t say they didn’t agree to it.’