Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  When the villa had been stripped of everything that looked important, La Barbera took a few men with him, chucked out everything they found and made a bonfire in the garden. The flames consumed several of la signora’s fur coats, some personal letters and photos, and her trousseau. She was furious, but La Barbera protested that those were his orders.

  As soon as Riina was arrested, Caselli had ordered an immediate search of the villa in via Bernini, but the carabinieri had requested permission to keep the villa under surveillance, to see who came to call. It seemed like an excellent idea – except that no agents were sent to watch the villa, and no search was ever made. By the time the prosecutor’s office realized that the order had not been followed up, eighteen days had passed since Riina’s arrest. When officers finally entered the villa, it was not only empty but had been remodelled: walls had been demolished and rebuilt, everything had been hoovered and repainted. It was no longer the same place where Riina and his family had lived. The hole where the safe had been was blocked up and plastered over. Caselli was incandescent and ordered an immediate inquiry. Two senior carabinieri were investigated for aiding and abetting the Mafia: both Sergio De Caprio (known as Capitano Ultimo) and Mario Mori had exemplary records of arresting mafiosi, and their failure to search the villa was baffling.

  Their trial was a media sensation: the two men responsible for arresting Riina found themselves in the dock for protecting him. Capitano Ultimo, who had been a national hero when he stopped Riina at a traffic light in Palermo, now had to defend himself. Prosecutors claimed that there must be some mysterious explanation for this oversight, but in the end both officers were found not guilty of any intention to pervert the course of justice. They even received an apology from the court. Although the judge commented that not to search the fugitive’s home was a professional misjudgement, it was found that no crime had been committed.

  With the carabinieri exonerated, conspiracy theories focused on interference by the state. Years later, Giusy Vitale, sister of Riina’s faithful killer dogs Leonardo and Vito, claimed that inside Riina’s villa there had been ‘documents that, if they’d been discovered, would have put a bomb under the state. If the police had got hold of them, it would have been a total disaster.’

  The Caltanissetta judges who examined the events of this whole extraordinary period in their sentence for the via d’Amelio bomb noted Brusca’s belief that ‘Ciancimino was playing a double game. In fact, he helped investigators capture Riina, probably with Provenzano’s consent. This way the state could be seen to make a strong response to the assassinations, while allowing part of Cosa Nostra – the part less compromised in the investigations – to survive.’

  Although Provenzano initially supported the strategy of violence, he may have already begun to conceive his new strategy. And while Riina was threatening more terrible violence, Provenzano may have been talking a different language, to other ears, behind his back.

  There were rumours among men of honour that Provenzano was talking to the authorities, possibly doing some kind of deal. Some were calling him sbirro, ‘grass’. In a private moment Provenzano asked Giuffré whether he believed what people were saying. Giuffré, the inscrutable capo, assured the boss that no, he didn’t believe it.

  Brusca would not want to give Provenzano credit for such a bold move. But he had no doubt that Riina’s arrest suited him. ‘Provenzano wanted to take Riina’s place.’

  Was it possible that Provenzano would sell his troublesome friend when the going got tough? Riina, the peasant mafioso who took on the state, had finally been defeated – brought down by men on his own side, who could no longer go along with his violent strategy. Investigators set about recouping some of his ill-gotten fortune. Over the following months property and agricultural land worth £200 million were seized.

  Not everyone gave credence to the rumour that Provenzano had ‘sold’ Riina, but it never quite went away. When Provenzano was arrested, his arrival at Terni prison was reportedly greeted by Riina’s son shouting ‘sbirro!’ Giovanni Riina apparently wanted to remind the inmates that the new prisoner had betrayed his father to the police.

  It eventually emerged that the insult was an invention, a damaging rumour of the kind Provenzano himself specializes in. And, as damaging rumours often do, particularly in Cosa Nostra, the slur stuck. Some still believe the Boss of Bosses obtained his position by selling out his more powerful friends.

  Riina’s arrest, although it undoubtedly suited Provenzano, was by no means the end of his troubles. Aware that his former brother in arms had, if not caused his arrest, then failed to prevent it, Riina placed his military force in the hands of his brother-in-law Leoluca Bagarella. A crude, hot-headed, violent man of inferior intelligence to Provenzano, Bagarella now wielded more power. And although he nominally occupied the top spot in Cosa Nostra, Provenzano was, for now, a general without an army. It would take all his dark arts of mediation and manipulation to prevent further disaster.

  8

  The regent

  ‘E

  VERYTHING THAT Uncle Totò started, goes ahead; we’re not stopping.’

  Provenzano was addressing a meeting shortly after Riina’s arrest in the early spring of 1993. He and several other capos were gathered in a warehouse in the Palermo suburb of Villabate. Provenzano’s old friend Ciccio Pastoia owned a warehouse on an industrial estate, alongside workshops and small manufacturing plants. Amid the roar of engines and hammering Provenzano sat in a small office with his trusted allies Carlo Greco and Pietro Aglieri, a thoughtful, old-school mafioso, and with men still loyal to Riina – the attack dog Leoluca Bagarella and the portly Giovanni Brusca, perched uncomfortably on a desk.

  Since Riina had invested Bagarella with his military force, Provenzano needed to find a way to work with him. He had to get Riina’s loyal followers onside. What he lacked in firepower, he would have to make up by cunning, using all his dark arts of tragedie, play-acting and manipulation. He would start by reassuring the capos that there would be no U-turn. Who would suspect that he had guaranteed his own immunity in return for an end to Riina’s bombing campaign?

  In fact, everyone suspected that, and more. It was a tense period, a moment of fearful transition. The arrest of such a powerful, dictatorial leader left a vacuum. If Riina was feared, at least people knew what he wanted. Provenzano’s line was not so clear-cut; he always prevaricated, weighing up the pros and cons, and those not in his inner circle did not know what to expect. Riina had controlled everything from the centre, and his men mistrusted Provenzano’s more federal, laissez-faire approach. Brusca, without his godfather to protect him, felt fatherless. He needed a strong leader. Provenzano was ill and very thin; his receding grey hair and glasses made him look frail.

  Brusca was not the only one who felt bereft without their powerful leader. Giuffré recalls that Riina’s arrest created considerable anxiety and restlessness; members wanted clear direction and needed to know who was giving the orders. While Provenzano’s faction was held at bay by the Bagarella–Brusca camp, with a violent tendency matched by their superior firepower, Provenzano had to play it exceedingly carefully.

  Cosa Nostra’s senior capos split into factions, who would meet in secret, trying to figure out the others’ next move. Giuffré had a meeting in Bagheria with Pietro Aglieri and Carlo Greco, who persuaded him to throw his support behind Provenzano. Giuffré, for all his diffident manner, had contacts in every part of the island, which was a great asset. ‘Soon after that, we realized there was someone rowing against us . . . Bagarella was making moves to get control of the situation, with the help of Giovanni Brusca and other people close to them – and I’d have to say that to a certain extent, they succeeded.’

  Giuffré got the impression that Provenzano was standing aside and letting Bagarella get on with it. This may have been partly due to his worsening prostrate trouble. It may have been a deliberate ploy to avoid being associated with this dark phase of Cosa Nostra’s history, as he effec
tively removed himself from the front line. Indeed, the president of the anti-Mafia commission, Luciano Violante, announced, days after Riina’s arrest: ‘Provenzano is probably already dead or out of the game.’

  ‘Whatever people say,’ remembers Alfonso Sabella, who was part of the energetic new team of anti-Mafia prosecutors, ‘when Caselli arrived in Palermo, Provenzano was not a big priority for us. Our priorities were Brusca, the Graviano brothers, Bagarella, any of the mass murderers who planted bombs . . . we had to stop the bombing.’

  Bagarella was in some ways the natural heir to Riina: he shared his brother-in-law’s single-minded enthusiasm for violence. Their family ties gave Riina access to information on the outside: he could send messages to Bagarella via his wife, Ninetta, who was close to her brother (she had pleaded for leniency on her brother’s behalf in the past, when he had made mistakes in anger). There was also a close tie between Bagarella and Riina’s son Giovanni, who worshipped his uncle. Bagarella had tutored the boy before his initiation to Cosa Nostra and taught him how to kill a man with his bare hands – he even took him to commit his first murder and was proud of how the boy got fired up. Since Giovanni was still allowed to visit his father in prison, Riina had another line of communication to Bagarella.

  But Provenzano was still officially head of the commission and could not be swept aside. Brusca came to see him with a message from Bagarella, asking for a sit-down – to take the heat out of the situation, he said, and clarify a few things. But Provenzano knew Bagarella of old: they had grown up together in Corleone; Bernardo and Leoluca’s brother had been best friends. He knew that Bagarella, unpredictable at the best of times, was dangerously out of control, and he would have to gain his respect. ‘And if Bagarella doesn’t agree with Cosa Nostra,’ he sneered, ‘what should I do? I’ll be the teacher and give him a beating.’

  His message was clear: I am Cosa Nostra. If Bagarella thought he had the measure of Uncle Binnu, he was wrong. Provenzano announced that he would be appointing a new boss of the Palermo area.

  ‘I said I thought . . . I thought perhaps . . . he should discuss it with his paesano’, stammered Brusca.

  The two capos had a meeting to straighten out their position. The remaining Corleonesi from the original gang of four faced each other across a table, politely gauging each others’ strengths while Brusca listened. Bagarella raised the subject of Riina’s alleged discussions with the authorities, and his list of demands. He wanted to know what stage the negotiations were at.

  ‘Provenzano claimed never to have heard anything about any list of demands.’ As usual, Brusca commented bitterly, he feigned total ignorance. He, of course, revealed nothing about his own negotiations.

  ‘I mentioned that there was no need to appoint a new capo for Palermo. But Provenzano didn’t agree, and from that moment he became cold with us and closed, very closed. He shut us out.’

  Tensions were mounting within the highest echelons of Cosa Nostra. As mafiosi behind bars continued to reveal its secrets, the organization needed a response. On 1 April 1993, two and a half months after Riina’s arrest, a meeting of high-level capos was held to discuss strategy. Neither Provenzano (who seldom attended commission meetings) nor Brusca (who had fallen out with Bagarella) was present.

  Since Riina’s demands – overturning of the maxi-trial sentences and softening of the anti-Mafia laws – had not been accepted by the state, Bagarella insisted that Cosa Nostra continue with the strategy of violence. There were some chilling suggestions: they would leave syringes containing blood infected with HIV strewn on Sicilian beaches. They would poison children’s breakfast brioches. Bagarella relished the idea of attacking people enjoying innocent pleasures. His suggestion was to blow up one of Sicily’s most treasured tourist attractions, a heritage site of inestimable value: the Greek temple at Selinunte. The authors of the next phase in the war on the state would be Riina’s men and leaders of the pro-violence faction: Bagarella, the young Matteo Messina Denaro and the capomafia of Brancaccio, Filippo Graviano.

  When the upshot of this meeting was reported back to Provenzano, he was appalled. And though he was in no position to give Bagarella orders, he tried to limit the fall-out of the campaign by insisting, most politely, that any more bombings would have to take place outside Sicily. Cosa Nostra had been in the limelight too long; another spate of killings would further damage its interests and expose its members. Besides, Provenzano didn’t really believe Bagarella would take on a bombing campaign on the mainland. In this, he was very much mistaken.

  Bagarella’s faction had a sense of omnipotence, a sense that, after the devastating results of the bombs that killed Falcone and Borsellino, Cosa Nostra could force the authorities to accede to their demands: ‘We believed we could not lose.’

  On 27 May 1993 a bomb exploded in the heart of Florence, killing five and wounding forty residents. The Uffizi Gallery was badly damaged; doors were ripped off their hinges, statues hurled to the ground. The nation was shocked: people dreaded a return to the nightmare of the terrorist attacks of the 1970s.

  Provenzano sent for Brusca to demand an explanation. The fat, bearded killer shuffled in and answered in his halting, nasal voice the boss’s furious questions. What did his paesano think he was doing? Did he want to ruin everything? How much pressure could Cosa Nostra be expected to take? When he was finally dismissed, Brusca reported back to Bagarella that Provenzano was furious.

  Bagarella’s response was defiant, revealing the depths of his scorn for the old man. ‘Tell Provenzano he should walk the streets with a sign around his neck, saying, “The bombs have got nothing to do with me”.’20

  The killings continued relentlessly. In July another bomb went off in central Milan, killing five. And in Rome, in late July, the church itself received a warning: two bombs exploded below the walls of San Giovanni in Laterano, wounding three people and damaging the cathedral. In September Padre Puglisi, a tireless and courageous priest who had campaigned against the Mafia among the poor and disenfranchised, was shot dead at the door of his house in Brancaccio, a suburb of Palermo.

  The bombings, striking at the heart of Italy’s tourist centres, killing and maiming, quite deliberately, innocent members of the public, provoked outrage. The murder of a priest who did extraordinary work with boys in a blighted suburban area caused revulsion – even within Cosa Nostra. For many insiders this was not what the organization was about: by attacking the people, and the Church, they were striking at the Mafia’s historic support system. Many of Riina’s former followers were men who loved flash cars and ostentatious violence, and had little in the way of Mafia culture and tradition to fall back on in prison. The number of men of honour who ‘repented’ and gave information to the police continued to rise. With the harsher prison terms, by the mid-1990s more than 400 had ‘repented’ and agreed to talk.

  Riina was not afraid of much, but he had a mortal fear and loathing of pentiti. He once declared: ‘We’ve got to kill them and their relatives to the twentieth remove, starting with children of six years and over.’21 One collaborator was dealt particularly savage punishment. In the autumn of 1993 a young boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, was kidnapped on the orders of Leoluca Bagarella while grooming his horse at a riding stable in Villabate. His father, Santino, a former man of honour from Altofonte, a Mafia fortress in the mountains outside Palermo, had become a collaborator just a few months earlier and had revealed for the first time who had sat with him on the hillside above Capaci and activated the remote-control device that killed judge Falcone. After the child was snatched, his grandfather received a series of threatening notes, saying that if he wanted to spare the boy, Santino would have to recant.

  The months went by, and Di Matteo showed no signs of retracting his evidence. He knew how these things went. In a heart-breaking appeal the boy’s grandfather offered his own life in exchange for the child. Giovanni Brusca and his brother Enzo were keeping the boy, but Brusca never showed his face because the boy knew him: he had spen
t months in hiding at his father’s house in Altofonte. Brusca had even given the boy a horse in gratitude for his family’s hospitality; now he had him chained to a radiator in a darkened basement. Nino Giuffré and others, sensing the public horror at the kidnapping, or perhaps thinking of their own sons, felt that no good would come of this and sent a formal request to Provenzano to make Brusca release the child.

  Brusca refused. Bagarella was insisting that the treacherous Santino be forced to give way. After two years chained up, Giuseppe, once a wiry outdoor type who loved his riding, was reduced to a frightened, flabby, whining creature. In early 1996 Brusca learned that he had been given a life sentence for the murder of the millionaire industrialist and mafioso Ignazio Salvo. Enraged at yet another strike against him, he gave orders for the boy to be executed. While one man held him down, another strangled him with a length of rope, and they dissolved his body in acid. It was as shocking and depraved a crime as had ever been committed in the name of Cosa Nostra and forced many within the organization to question their allegiance. The killing of a defenceless child threw Cosa Nostra into a new dark age. Few even tried to defend it.

  In Bagarella’s private life the kidnapping had a terrible effect: his wife, Vincenzina, who was desperate to have a child and had suffered the latest in a series of miscarriages, killed herself. According to one of Bagarella’s closest associates, she felt that her inability to conceive was divine retribution for her husband’s crime against a child.22