Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  Provenzano had been keeping a low profile, staying away from big meetings, avoiding confrontation with Bagarella. To his satisfaction, his death had been reliably reported on several occasions. But he decided the time had come to take the reins of the organization. He must stop this destructive faction before they were all ruined. First he would let the Mafia capos know his intent.

  On an April morning in 1994 Provenzano’s ‘postman’ Simone Castello left his home in Bagheria and gunned his BMW along the motorway. He headed for Messina and took the ferry across to Reggio Calabria, on the mainland. There he stopped long enough to post a letter and knock back an espresso, looking out over the water towards Etna’s dark slopes.

  The letter arrived on the prosecutor’s desk in Palermo two days later. It was from the fugitive Bernardo Provenzano, who had been on the run so long and so rarely sighted that he was assumed dead. The letter, signed in his painstakingly neat hand, merely announced Provenzano’s appointment of his legal representatives. But in the massive publicity that inevitably followed, the real message reached its target. To the membership of Cosa Nostra, Provenzano’s letter was proof that, contrary to rumour, he was not dead. Only a few people had seen him, but the Phantom, as he was called, was very much alive.

  Provenzano’s authority was accruing. People were increasingly turning to him for recommendations and guarantees. Men who had suffered years of imprisonment as a direct result of Riina’s savage policies naturally gravitated to him on their release. In their eyes accusations that he had allowed or enabled Riina’s arrest were no obstacle. Rightly or wrongly, Provenzano was not so strongly associated with the bombings, and he began to attract a more moderate faction – Giuffré, Aglieri, Raffaele Ganci. Benedetto Spera, capo of the strategic rural outpost Belmonte Mezzagno, an old-school mafioso, was beginning to prove a useful ally.

  Aglieri had turned to Provenzano after a particularly bruising episode in the late 1980s: he had been sent to kill one of the surviving relatives of Salvatore Contorno, the supergrass who had done Cosa Nostra so much damage in the maxi-trial. Aglieri went armed with a gun to the intended victim’s place of work, a greengrocer’s. When he got there, the man was holding a little child, a four-year-old girl, in his arms. Aglieri, a man of strong religious convictions, walked away without firing a shot. When he told Riina what had happened, the boss screamed at him: ‘Do you know what that little girl’s surname is? Contorno!’ Hearing this, Aglieri realized it was time he got some new friends.

  Aglieri and Provenzano were natural allies; they shared traditional values and religious leanings, and after Provenzano sent his family away, they spent Christmases together. Aglieri’s piety was a matter of deep conviction: he had always been a devout child and had attended a seminary (religion runs deep in his family: after his arrest, his sister joined a closed religious order). Aglieri is, in the words of his lawyer, ‘orthodox’: a man of honour. Provenzano learned from him how religion can lend a man an appearance of wisdom, enhance his image of peace and mediation – which became an essential part of Provenzano’s make-up.

  Provenzano had an extremely difficult job to do: he was sitting on a volcano that threatened to erupt at any time. It would require all his skill to outmanoeuvre Bagarella and keep a lid on the discontents and ambitions boiling up within the organization.

  Although on the surface they managed to appear perfectly cordial, as was only proper in front of the other capos, a stand-off was developing between Provenzano and Bagarella.

  One of the key strategic areas for Cosa Nostra at that time was Villabate, where the Mafia’s infiltration of local government and industry meant a turnover of millions. The two dominant families at that time were in competition for their share of the profits, and the rivalry between them, bitterly fought inside the local council, was beginning to flare up into violence. The Di Peri clan was loyal to Provenzano. The Montaltos were on Totò Riina’s side: the father of the family had betrayed his own boss to Riina and become known as cane fedele, ‘Faithful Dog’.

  On a November night in 1994 a man was frogmarched into a historic uninhabited villa in Palermo, one of the crumbling palazzi left to drift into ruin. The Mafia had turned this one into a fortress, with bars across windows and doors blocked up. Armed guards stood by the only entrance. In an internal room of the villa the man was murdered. He was Francesco Montalto, Faithful Dog’s son.

  It was not a move that could go unpunished, and Bagarella decided to go after the suspected killers. He sent a message, via Brusca, his own faithful dog, to Provenzano, saying, ‘I’m going to make a move in Villabate. Is there anyone you want me to spare?’

  Provenzano spied a trap. If he had given Bagarella any names of his people in Villabate, they would be the first to fall victim of the vendetta. He sent back a typically measured response: ‘Everyone and no one.’

  So Bagarella started to wreak his terrible revenge, executing anyone he believed to be loyal to Provenzano.

  Investigators were alerted to a series of gruesome murders in Villabate, but for a while they were at a loss to understand the cause of the bloody feud, or who had ordered it. The explanation came from an unexpected source. Carabinieri investigating Salvatore Barbagallo, an accountant and rising star of the Villabate mob, had planted a bug in his mistress’s bedroom. Like other men of honour, when Barbagallo was in bed with his mistress, he got carried away: forgetting the rules of Cosa Nostra, he told her all his most thrilling criminal secrets.

  When the murders in Villabate began to pile up, assistant prosecutor Alfonso Sabella hauled in Barbagallo and let him read the transcripts of his pillow talk. ‘I gave him fifteen minutes to decide whether to collaborate’, Sabella recalls. ‘I said, you can call your lawyer, whatever you like, but when this comes out in the papers tomorrow, as it inevitably will, the rest of Cosa Nostra will know that while you were screwing your girlfriend, you were spilling the organization’s secrets. The choice is yours. A quarter of an hour later, he started talking. He told us all about the vendetta in Villabate, and who was behind it.’

  A few days later Sabella issued arrest warrants for the key figures in the Villabate feud. The day after the police blitz, his driver Tony Calvaruso recalls, Bagarella was reading a copy of the newspaper with pictures of the wanted and arrested members of the Di Peri clan. He handed the paper to Calvaruso with an order for one of his capos: ‘Ammazzali tutti. Kill them all.’

  Bagarella’s reputation for violence preceded him. Two brothers from Villabate, recently released from prison on a technicality, knowing they were on his hit list, turned themselves in at the prison gate, begging to be readmitted.

  Bagarella was finally arrested on 24 June 1995, near his apartment in the centre of Palermo – just across the piazza from a senior magistrate. The apartment looked scarcely lived in: elaborate Art Nouveau tables and chairs in pink, green and gold were decorated with glass vases and ornaments in the same style. A cabinet held their wedding china: a never used set of gold-rimmed dishes, delicate teacups and crystal. It was not exactly how one imagined the home of a man who wanted to blow up the ancient Greek temple at Selinunte. Carabinieri found a bunch of flowers in front of his wife’s portrait on the mantelpiece.

  Now Bagarella was behind bars, Provenzano’s hands were untied. Almost immediately, and aided unintentionally by the authorities, who were arresting scores of men loyal to Bagarella, Provenzano moved to take over Palermo. The last of Riina’s bully boys was Pieruccio Lo Bianco, capo of Misilmeri, who had been engaged in a long battle with Benedetto Spera for control of an area of strategic interest to Provenzano. Lo Bianco disappeared.

  Giovanni Brusca was now dangerously isolated, his sense of alienation and mistrust intensified with the death of his friend and ally Lo Bianco. When Brusca protested, Provenzano claimed he had told Spera not to harm Lo Bianco, but ‘he just wouldn’t listen’. It was typical of Provenzano, fumed Brusca, that he would feign powerlessness at a moment like this.

  ‘Pieruccio was a good guy, who f
ollowed the rules and killed a lot of our enemies for us’, Brusca protested. ‘Couldn’t Provenzano have said a word on his behalf?’ He believed the murder had been orchestrated to cut the ground from under his feet. He was afraid. Provenzano showed no gratitude, no bond of debt, towards a man who had done Cosa Nostra’s dirty work for years – a lot like Brusca, il boia (‘the Executioner’).

  ‘Like my father always said, Provenzano has a lot of sides to him – like a caciocavallo cheese’, Brusca said. ‘Several times I asked for an appointment to talk about Pieruccio Lo Bianco’s case and to clear up the situation. At this point Provenzano sends me messages that he can’t see anyone – and then I hear that he’s been having meetings with Matteo Messina Denaro. When I met up with Matteo, we agreed to keep a close eye on Provenzano, and see what he was up to.’

  By this stage relations between Provenzano’s faction and those loyal to Riina had soured to the point of combustion. Brusca was so paranoid that Provenzano would have him killed that he was afraid to go to a meeting with the boss. Instead, he invited Provenzano to a meeting on his territory – planning to end the boss’s career then and there. Two or three meetings were discussed, and a date arranged, but Provenzano always cancelled.

  When Brusca received a summons to a meeting with the boss, he agreed, with some trepidation, to go. Knowing that an invitation to a friendly sit-down was one of Cosa Nostra’s favoured set-ups for murder, he went armed. The meeting was in a village near Corleone, in an abandoned house on the site of a concrete plant – so there wouldn’t have been any difficulty disposing of a body.

  ‘I did have my suspicions. On Matteo Messina Denaro’s advice . . . he and others told me I should be extremely careful. I didn’t want . . . I just wanted to have this meeting without having to worry about . . . so I got my driver to take me over there, and we arranged that if anything happened I would throw my mobile phone out of the window and that would be the signal: they would come in shooting, and do whatever they could . . . I was armed, and so were they. But as it turned out there was no need, I could see there was no danger, so I came out again straight away and told him, “It’s OK, you can go, it’s fine”.’

  Thereafter Brusca, though often troublesome, was on Provenzano’s side. Matteo Messina Denaro, a volatile capo whose obsession with childish things set him apart from the older bosses, was persuaded to make a deal and give up his opposition. Once he decided where his future lay, Messina Denaro became fiercely loyal to the Boss.

  Provenzano’s way was clear: anyone who stood between him and the leadership of Cosa Nostra had been eliminated, imprisoned or won over. But the organization was in chaos: the authorities were continuing to make arrests right across the Mafia’s territory, and the mafiosi in prison were angry. It would take every bit of Provenzano’s skill and experience to turn it around.

  9

  A new strategy

  ‘I

  TOLD HIM, listen Binnu, we’ve only been doing this for two years . . . we don’t have to agree with everything that’s been done. Because good things have been done, but we have to admit, mistakes have been made. We’ve got to be patient. A lot of bad things have been done.’

  Pino Lipari, Provenzano’s consigliere, was describing a meeting of his inner circle. Relaxing with a friend at his villa in the holiday resort he owned in San Vito Lo Capo, on the north-west tip of Sicily, he was eager to show off how well he knew the boss, and how well he advised him. In his smug display of loyalty he unwittingly gave away a good deal of information to the police, who were listening to his every word.

  ‘There are people who are feeling pretty let down . . . that’s the truth! In fact, we’re reorganizing ourselves a bit better, so we can say, “Now signori, let’s not look at the mistakes of the past in isolation . . .” We need to say, yes, OK, mistakes were made . . . but the important thing is to keep moving forward . . . and we’re working on it, but we need time.’

  During the autumn and winter of 1995–6 the authorities were inflicting significant damage on Cosa Nostra. At one stage Alfonso Sabella’s office was issuing twenty warrants every fortnight. ‘We were cutting a swathe through Cosa Nostra like a hot knife through butter’, he recalls.

  Against a background of disarray and defections action was needed. Lipari was wrong: there was no time to lose. By waging war against the state, Cosa Nostra had destroyed its own defences, made new enemies and seriously damaged its business prospects. Provenzano, finally in sole command, began to formulate a new strategy. A period of calm was essential, in which the organization could be restored to strength, rebuild its people’s shattered morale and (most important) start doing business.

  ‘The moment Provenzano saw that Riina’s strategy did not give the results he wanted,’ Giuffré recalled, ‘he took a step back and insisted that it was a mistake, and that we would have to pursue a different line . . . from this moment on he changed his position and pursued a new policy, not with bombs but with a strategy that would make Cosa Nostra invisible.’

  The first step would be to limit the damage already done: he would impose a cease-fire. ‘Provenzano’s new strategy, which we called “submersion”, had a clearly defined tactical approach’, said assistant prosecutor Nino Di Matteo. ‘Do not commit murder, particularly political assassinations; take steps to avoid going to war with the opposing wing of Cosa Nostra, and particular measures to avoid bloodshed within the organization.’

  It was a long-term plan, which would require great faith from the men of Cosa Nostra. But Provenzano was determined that making great changes was the only way the organization would survive and regain its former strength.

  ‘All the guys involved in implementing the changes called him tabula rasa, “clean slate”,’ said the pentito Salvatore Barbagallo (whose indiscretions in the arms of his mistress had caused so much trouble). Barbagallo added reverentially that he never heard Provenzano called anything so informal as ‘Uncle Binnu’.

  Investigators first learned of the new strategy through a police informer, Gino Ilardo. On his early release from prison on grounds of ill health in 1994, Ilardo had agreed to be an informant for Michele Riccio, a maverick colonel in the organized crime section of the carabinieri, known as the ROS (Ragruppamento Operativo Speciale). Ilardo, aged forty-three, from Catania, was a pedigree mafioso: his cousins the Madonia family were one of the strongest Mafia dynasties; Piddu Madonia, until his recent arrest, had been regent of Caltanissetta. Ilardo would not consider joining the witness protection programme – he was afraid his wife and children would never accept his defection. He could not face a scene like those terrible wailing women who disowned and denounced their husbands for treachery – he would wait until his wife was onside. But Ilardo was profoundly disillusioned with Cosa Nostra, as he said in a statement:

  I decided to collaborate formally with Justice after realizing what I have lost over these years apart from my family and my children, in the hope that my example will be of some help to young boys who feel that nothing can equal the honour of joining an organization such as this, just as I did . . . I hope that my collaboration will bear witness to how hollow and false it is, how the only reality is the wickedness that a depraved minority perpetrates, destroying everything that was good about this organization. Cosa Nostra has become an instrument of death, of lies and machinations. The evil deeds of the few at the head of the organization cast their guilt and shame over all the other members, for sadly, Cosa Nostra now consists of nothing but murderers and criminals . . . I decided to collaborate willingly with the Law, because I want to make a break with my past and hope to spend what remains of my life in peace, with my children.

  This idyllic image of a family life beyond the reach of Cosa Nostra’s fearsome revenge was the last thing that a Mafia informer could reasonably expect, and Ilardo was no exception. But as long as he remained beyond suspicion, as second-in-command of the Caltanissetta Mafia, he was an extremely well-placed informer. Diligent, pushy and proactive, he would ring his handler c
onstantly from pay-phones or secure lines and meet him in bars, in waiting-rooms, in busy streets, to report the latest development, plot or rumour. Over the months he would try to draw Provenzano out of hiding to attend a sit-down, where the carabinieri could grab him. Riccio, whose high-risk strategies had occasionally won him rewards, could not put Ilardo on an official footing but allowed him to risk his life to bring about the result they both desired.

  Ilardo revealed for the first time Provenzano’s chief means of communication. The boss never used mobile phones, which he believed were too easily intercepted and could lead the police straight to him. He certainly did not like computers, and never used e-mail. He had perfected a secure means of communication: short letters closely typed on exercise book paper, folded as small as they would go, and sealed with Sellotape. The addressee would be marked as a number or a letter, and the pizzino, not much bigger than a cigarette butt, would be passed via a handshake along a sequence of trusted ‘postmen’ until it reached its destination. Ilardo gave Provenzano’s postman, Simone Castello, his messages folded but not sealed, to make them easier to destroy (rip up, flush down the lavatory or swallow) if he’d been caught. Once Castello had safely met up with the next link in the chain, he sealed the letter with tape.

  When the security forces were particularly active, the postmen would have to lie low, and a letter could take days to reach its destination, but because Provenzano had a close circle of trusted handlers it was still the most secure means of communication he could devise. (The recipients were always supposed to burn the letters when they had read and absorbed the contents, but some kept them safe. Giuffré stored a couple of dozen in a box in the farmhouse he called his ‘office’. He claimed he needed to keep a record of agreed payments; in case of an eventual dispute, the parties could review the ‘contract’. The letters were also an investment for the future: they might come in useful for blackmail, or revenge.)