Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  According to Brusca, there was some discussion between Provenzano and Riina about whether to kill Falcone in Rome or in Palermo. Matteo Messina Denaro, the ambitious and dedicated young capo from Trapani, was detailed to follow their target everywhere in Rome, note his movements, watch when he was alone, when he walked, when he took the car. But then there was a change of plan: Riina brought Messina Denaro back to Sicily and told him the assassination had to happen in Palermo.

  Pietro Grasso, chief anti-Mafia prosecutor, believes Riina had a motive for killing Falcone in Sicily: ‘Riina’s neither ingenuous nor mad, and nor are the other bosses who made that decision with him. We can only surmise that someone gave them a guarantee: kill him by all means, but do it in Palermo. Don’t worry about the state’s reaction. There won’t be any major consequences.’

  Provenzano had learned from his soundings in the corridors of power that some would not be unhappy if judge Falcone was removed. It seems improbable, to anyone who witnessed the outcry after Falcone’s death, but he was getting perilously close to a major corruption scandal, and several prominent figures were risking exposure and disgrace.

  ‘Falcone had turned his attention to the Mafia’s involvement in contracting’, Giuffré recalls. ‘That was too hot. But after he had completed his investigation and delivered the files, he was transferred. We breathed a sigh of relief: if he wasn’t there to see the investigation through, it was bound to stall. But we’d got it wrong: it wasn’t like other times, when people were promoted and you never heard of them again. It was much worse.’

  Falcone’s files contained 990 pages of closely researched figures, payments and bank transfers, details of every named company that had dealings with Cosa Nostra, including several run by Provenzano and his consiglieri Masino Cannella and Pino Lipari.

  ‘The situation got dangerous because we were afraid’, Giuffré recalled. ‘But not just us. The whole Italian machine, political and economic, was afraid. They started talking about Falcone becoming president of a new national anti-Mafia organization, and that was too much. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.’

  Falcone’s death sentence had been uttered years earlier, when he persuaded Tommaso Buscetta to talk: now it was time for action. Cosa Nostra’s cosy relationship with power was under threat of exposure. If members of Cosa Nostra were afraid, how much more terrifying for the politicians and industrialists who had been dishonestly lining their pockets for years. The symbiotic bond between certain Christian Democrats and Cosa Nostra had existed for decades but had changed in tenor. From agreeing to support candidates in exchange for fixing contracts, Cosa Nostra became dictatorial and threatening. Riina’s link to the party, the MEP Salvo Lima, was told to fix the maxi-trial verdicts. He was warned: ‘Stick to your promise or we’ll kill you and your whole family.’

  According to one pentito, in 1980 Prime Minister Andreotti had flown to Sicily to meet the boss Stefano Bontate, and to protest in person against the murder of the Christian Democrat president of Sicily, Piersanti Mattarella. The boss reportedly told the prime minister to back off: ‘We’re in charge here,’ he told the Italian premier, ‘and if you don’t want to destroy the [Christian Democrats], you do what we say, otherwise we’ll take away your votes.’

  The confirmation of the maxi-trial verdicts was clear evidence that their contacts in the Christian Democrats were no longer any use to Cosa Nostra. After the verdicts Riina had to show his political friends that this wasn’t good enough. Provenzano claimed that he tried, in his paternal way, to protect Lima: ‘I put my hands up to stop him banging his head’, he told Giuffré. But it wasn’t enough.

  Lima had a villa in the elegant beach resort of Mondello, Palermo’s marina, with excellent restaurants and palm-lined streets. On 12 March 1992 Lima was driving away from his house when he noticed two men on a motor bike in full-faced helmets heading towards him. He scrambled out of his car and started to run, but they shot him as they drove past, leaving him wounded on the pavement. They turned and came back for him, shot him several more times and roared off. It was Riina’s personal valediction to a long and fruitful relationship with the Christian Democrats.

  Falcone, meanwhile, was embroiled in a row with the magistrates’ ruling body over the nomination for the new ‘super-prosecutor’ position. While he struggled to continue with his work, Cosa Nostra was preparing its revenge. In May, when Falcone flew home to Palermo for the weekend, as he did every Friday, a series of security breaches were scarcely noticed – the police failed to check the route he was to drive into the city. A group of men in overalls had been laying a pipe under the motorway, but no one had noticed anything unusual about them. Up in the hills above, a trio sat and watched, smoking cigarettes and waiting for a signal. As judge Falcone’s motorcade swept into view, Giovanni Brusca, peering through binoculars, pressed a button on his remote control. Far below them the road, and three bulletproof limousines, erupted in a massive explosion that tore up the ground for 100 metres around. The three bodyguards in the front car were killed instantly. Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, barely regained consciousness and died later in hospital.

  As news of the massacre spread, cheering erupted in Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. An old enemy of Cosa Nostra had finally got his reward. The team behind the bombing met at a house belonging to Salvatore Cancemi, a mafioso who had been involved in planning the massacre. As they drank champagne and toasted their enemy’s violent end, Cancemi knew they had created a disaster. ‘This bastard will destroy us all’, he muttered to another member of the team.

  Cancemi had sensed the reaction to Falcone’s murder: it was, as he surmised, an outrage that would come close to destroying Cosa Nostra. Ordinary people turned out in their thousands to pay their respects to the dead and scream abuse at the politicians who had let them down.

  With a heavy heart Falcone’s friend and close colleague in the anti-Mafia pool Paolo Borsellino took his place at the prosecutor’s office in Palermo. Borsellino was marked by the Mafia as a dangerous man – he was known for his moral rectitude and seemed to inspire trust: he had persuaded several key Mafia figures to collaborate and was accumulating vast files of incriminating evidence. He was also trespassing on Cosa Nostra’s prized public contracts.

  ‘The acceleration of events that led to Borsellino’s death’, said the pentito Angelo Siino, once the Mafia’s minister of public works, ‘was due to the fact that he was about to broach the issue of the major contracts, the management of £60 billion spent by Sicilian politicians with the Mafia’s agreement.’

  As Borsellino worked night and day on his huge and rapidly increasing caseload, Cosa Nostra plotted to prevent him exposing their precious contracts. On a Sunday afternoon, outside his mother’s flat, on 19 July, he and five bodyguards were killed by a massive car bomb.

  This time the city came out en masse to express its rage and disgust at the Mafia’s violence and the state’s failure to protect its own. Women went on hunger strike in the central square of Palermo to demand government action. A small group of ordinary citizens organized a mass protest in which people hung sheets over their balconies, bearing anti-Mafia slogans. The Mafia had been thrown out of the beds where it had lain, cosy and undisturbed, for so long. The Corleonesi had finally gone too far.

  The government’s response, at last, was swift: in an operation named Sicilian Vespers thousands of soldiers were transferred from the north to do guard duty, protecting magistrates and other public figures and institutions, and freeing up local police and carabinieri to hunt for the killers. Young servicemen in Alpine uniform, complete with pheasant tail feather in their hats, stood guard nervously behind bulletproof glass cabins. It felt like a city at war. ‘Invite a soldier for coffee!’ said leaflets posted along the walls and on lamp posts. ‘Show them we’re not all mafiosi.’

  Several collaborators have hinted that there were forces beyond Cosa Nostra at work in the massacres at Capaci and via d’Amelio. Elements of the state, alleged
ly, wanted Borsellino dead. On this part of the story the case has not yet closed.

  Giancarlo Caselli, a distinguished, white-haired judge from Turin, had volunteered to step into the post of Palermo’s chief prosecutor, a cause for celebration among anti-Mafia campaigners – whose numbers had swelled in recent months to include most of the city. Within weeks of his arrival dozens of mafiosi were behind bars. For once there was back-up from the government: eight years after Buscetta risked his life by agreeing to talk to Giovanni Falcone a law was passed to give collaborators proper protection and to help them assume new identities.

  Another sign that all was not well within Cosa Nostra was the number of prisoners turning state’s evidence. Mafiosi who opposed Riina’s strategy and had witnessed the massacre of the ‘losing side’ in the war of the early ’80s turned themselves in rather than face his wrath. Many who had enjoyed the high life under his leadership, accumulating wealth and relishing their power, could not see the point of ‘this life’ from the inside of a prison cell. After the bombings the number of pentiti, already higher than ever before, rose to over 400.

  Salvatore Cancemi, who had been involved in the bombing at Capaci, walked into a carabiniere station and announced that he wanted to talk. He encouraged other mafiosi to take the same step ‘because Riina is a dog, a demon, a devil who has destroyed Cosa Nostra’.

  Mafiosi who had worked for Riina, murdered for him and then found themselves despised and outcast, were savage in their criticism. The supergrass Nino Calderone said, ‘He’s got cunning eyes and a peasant’s face. The man’s crazy about money – he would do anything to get his hands on a kickback or get rid of a rival. To him, we were just dead meat.’

  After the bombings, satisfied that he had got the government’s attention, Riina tried to force them to come to terms. He wrote a list of demands, and his intention was that if they were not met, the bombing would continue. His sense of his own power had become exalted.

  ‘I met up with Totò Riina some time after the assassination of Falcone and Borsellino’, his godson Brusca ‘the Pig’ later recalled. ‘I asked him how it was going, and he said, “They’ve given in.” Out of respect and good manners, I didn’t ask what he meant. I was used to seeing Riina as someone who acted in the interests of the organization. He added: “I’ve made my request. I have given them my list of demands. I’ve given them a list this long.” And he held up his hands to show how huge it was.’

  Riina’s demands were typically uncompromising: overturn the maxi-trial verdicts, abolish harsh prison conditions for convicted mafiosi, reverse the confiscation of assets and repeal the law protecting pentiti.

  ‘It was understood’, Brusca said, ‘that if Riina’s demands had been met, we would have stopped the bombs.’

  To concentrate minds, Riina decided to give the state one more shake, a colpetto, to be sure he had made his point. His target this time was Pietro Grasso, one of the judges from the maxi-trial, who had been working with Falcone in Rome. Grasso had been coming home every weekend to visit his sick mother-in-law on Saturday afternoons. She lived in Mondello, the lovely Norman cathedral town above Palermo, and Grasso’s habitual visits had been noted.

  ‘There was a manhole in the street outside her house,’ Grasso recalls, ‘and they were going to park a van over the top of it and fill it with explosives. A van had been procured for this purpose, and the floor cut out. They’d got the key to open the manhole cover. But then they noticed there was a bank near by, whose burglar alarm could have interfered with the signal from a remote-control detonator.’ They had already sourced a different sort of remote in Catania that wouldn’t have caused interference, when the would-be assassins were arrested in a round-up of mafiosi. In the meantime the poor lady died.

  Grasso had the uncomfortable experience of interviewing his would-be killer, the collaborator Gioacchino La Barbera, about the plans for his execution. ‘He was ashamed, and afraid to find himself face to face with his intended victim,’ Grasso recalls, ‘but I had the disturbing sensation of having narrowly escaped death, and I needed to know every detail.’

  Riina’s list of demands has never been found. It seems improbable now that the state would have engaged in talks with Cosa Nostra, in the aftermath of a savage attack on its eminent representatives. But those who were in Palermo at the time do not find it surprising. Police and magistrates alike were so traumatized by the events of 1992 that they were willing to try anything to stop the bloodshed.

  A senior carabiniere, Colonel Mario Mori, has revealed that a deal was in progress during the turbulent late summer of 1992, but it was not about whether to accept Riina’s high-handed list of demands. In fact, it was a deal to try to bring about Riina’s capture.

  Colonel Mori revealed that a meeting took place in July 1992 between Ciancimino’s son Massimo and another senior carabiniere, Colonel DeDonno. ‘We wanted to get Riina and put an end to the bombings’, Mori later explained to magistrates. ‘We were looking for contacts within the organization . . . and DeDonno told me he had a good relationship with Massimo Ciancimino. We thought we could try to sort out a meeting with a member of Cosa Nostra through him.

  ‘A further meeting was arranged in Rome, at Ciancimino’s house near the Spanish Steps. Present were myself, Colonel DeDonno and Vito Ciancimino. I asked Ciancimino if he had any contact with Cosa Nostra that would enable us to try to come to an agreement to stop the bombing. He said he might be able to set something up through an intermediary.

  ‘He proposed a meeting abroad. I said, “I want Riina’s head.” He jumped out of his seat and shouted, “You want to get me killed!”

  ‘A few weeks later we met again. He asked for a map of the district where Riina was eventually found. I personally believe he knew where Riina was hiding.’

  The deal Mori wanted to offer Cosa Nostra’s leadership was this: you give yourselves up, and we will respect your families. A man of honour must be able to protect his family, it’s one of the basic tenets of his position. But this simple formula was more complicated than it seemed: these families would need somewhere to live. So not only the mafiosi’s families but also their homes would have to be respected – those luxurious villas and cars, their income, perhaps, and even their bank accounts. This was the objection some Palermo magistrates raised. In the climate of anger after the bombings at Capaci and via d’Amelio any such deal, they pointed out, would have quickly unravelled.

  One mafioso who sought protection from the law was Balduccio Di Maggio, who had become embroiled in a power struggle in the Mafia fiefdom of San Giuseppe Iato and was in fear of his life. Brusca, the boss of San Giuseppe Iato, was hunting Di Maggio at this time and had several men on the case in different parts of Italy. Di Maggio’s time was running out. But he had key information, which might save him. The police believed they had identified where Riina was living and showed Di Maggio hours of surveillance video, from which he was able to point out Riina and his family members coming and going from their grand Palermo villa. For the carabinieri, who had only one ancient photo of Riina from 1958, with Brylcreemed curls and a pencil moustache, the identification was a major breakthrough.

  At 8.15 on 15 January 1993 an unremarkable beige Citroën was stopped in a traffic jam in a Palermo street. The little man who was bundled out into the street looked stricken, then relaxed when he realized his assailants were officers of the state, not Mafia assassins. He was taken into custody and photographed in handcuffs. The full-length police shot was circulated to the news media worldwide: Salvatore Riina, godfather of Corleone, ‘la Belva’, the savage killer driven mad by power, and wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, had been caught. His physical reality was a shock to all those who had followed his murderous career: he was extremely short, square-headed, with a jowly peasant look and an expensive suit. He spoke softly, addressed investigators respectfully and stood up when magistrates entered the room. (This mild demeanour did not last: during his court appearances he could no longer contain his rage an
d scorn. He accused Caselli of being a communist agitator and insulted the witnesses, accusing them of moral turpitide and lying.)

  Conspiracy theories crowded in. ‘There was supposed to be a meeting on 15 January to discuss the progress of the negotiations’, Brusca recalled. ‘I don’t believe it’s any coincidence that Riina was arrested that day.’

  Riina had been betrayed by Balduccio Di Maggio. At least, that was the story. But evidence began to emerge that someone else was moving behind the scenes, and that someone may have been his long-term partner in crime, his rival for Luciano Liggio’s favour and competitor for power, Bernardo Provenzano. Provenzano was always close to Ciancimino: perhaps he was the person Ciancimino had contacted to negotiate with the carabinieri behind the scenes. After all, it was in his interest to get rid of Riina. The deal on the table was simple, according to one theory: if Provenzano could stop the bombing, his freedom, and that of his closest associates, would be guaranteed. Colonel Mori has always denied that anyone offered Provenzano protection, at any price.

  The first suspicions that Riina’s arrest had been part of a deal were raised when the Mafia managed to clear out his luxurious villa in via Bernini, Palermo, after the arrest.

  After their leader was carted off, Brusca and Riina’s brother-in-law Leoluca Bagarella took charge, starting with the immediate evacuation of Riina’s wife and four children to safety and privacy in Corleone. Riina’s men watched the villa, waiting for the carabinieri to seal it off. But to Brusca’s amazement nothing happened. Eventually he sent his man Angelo La Barbera into the villa to remove the most inflammatory documents, hidden in a safe built into the wall; documents relating to contracting, as well as money, letters, accounts and legal files. La Barbera removed the whole safe with a pickaxe.

  Again they waited for the police to arrive. When no one came, Brusca sent in a trusted contact who went through the place clearing out carpets, silver, jewellery, pictures – anything of value. Riina’s villa attested to his extremely expensive tastes. He had collected gold ingots and designer watches, ceramics and art. Brusca’s man took what he could and stored it all until he was himself arrested some time later (Riina’s son Giovanni reportedly confronted him in prison, saying that when the stuff had been cleared out of his warehouse, there were some pictures missing).