Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

Provenzano never let even those closest to him know where he was staying. He was good at letting the people think that he was staying in the place where they met. His driver would be from that village, and his associates would naturally assume he was staying there. That was what he wanted them to think.

  Although they were close associates, there was a deep-seated, quite mutual, sense of caution. ‘If he had ever needed somewhere to stay as a matter of urgency,’ said Giuffré, ‘I of course told him he could stay with me. But he didn’t know where I lived because I didn’t tell anyone that . . . not even Provenzano. He did ask me once but I didn’t tell him, because he didn’t need to know. There are some things you don’t ask.’

  Taking the best of old and new

  ‘How can you ask for a discount, when our people are inside? You are like a rock in the middle of the sea, with the wind battering against you from all sides. Please, stop getting in the way of what I’m trying to do and sort this out for me.’

  Provenzano had set up a fund for imprisoned members of Cosa Nostra, paid for from the profits of racketeering. When Palermo capo Nino Rotolo asked permission to give one of the businesses in his territory a discount, Provenzano chided him for neglecting his brothers in prison.

  The new boss had no military power, and a diminishing number of capos. He had to deal with a decimated, demoralized, even traumatized, army, and his first priority was to stop any more mafiosi turning state’s evidence. By giving prisoners their due, Provenzano showed he was prepared to pay attention to the old way of doing things. It was important to reinstate the old rules and the old way of managing Cosa Nostra – such as the mutual fund for all the families in Palermo.

  Provenzano proved a master at combining old and new: modern business methods with old-fashioned typewritten notes; new business strategies with old-fashioned patronage. In the process of rebuilding an army, he combined the knowledge of the old guard with the energy of the new.

  ‘The apparent equilibrium within Cosa Nostra rests entirely on the recognition of Bernardo Provenzano’s authority’, a secret service report notes. ‘He continues to be the connecting link between the traditional Mafia and the more aggressive factions.’

  After Bagarella’s arrest Provenzano called a summit. Present were senior men of honour Provenzano knew he could rely on. ‘All the men on this new-style cupola were so old,’ wrote the examining magistrates in their report, ‘it should have been called a Senate.’

  Provenzano restored a sense of hierarchy. He recruited the old guard who had been out of the country, or out of favour, for a decade, and who were appalled by the turn Cosa Nostra had taken under Riina.

  ‘Provenzano’s strength’, explains Nino Di Matteo, ‘has been his ability to surround himself with apparently respectable people perfectly capable of interacting with the institutions of power, to discover what he needed to know.’ Di Matteo observes that Provenzano rebuilt the commission on new guidelines, avoiding old clan enmities and feuds: ‘Provenzano gathered together a close group of men, often not even formally affiliated with Cosa Nostra, a group that comprised members of several families, across different mandamenti.’

  In so doing, he revived a culture of working together for a common aim. It was not always easy to do. In Palermo there were some, such as Rotolo, who found it impossible to forget the past and unite. ‘We must do it for everyone’s good’, Provenzano wrote to him.

  Political and business contacts appreciated the change of regime and understood that these were people they could do business with, without jeopardizing their careers.

  The magistrates investigating Provenzano’s supporters described his successful process of recovery and rehabilitation: ‘A Cosa Nostra, directed by Provenzano, fully operational, run on a hierarchical model, whose ruling group, once they have processed the fall-out from the “mistakes made” in the recent past, acknowledge the need to stitch up old wounds, in order to mend their “broken toy” and get on with achieving their goals: wealth and Mafia power.’

  11

  Politics for Pragmatists

  C

  OSA NOSTRA’S DESERTION of its traditional political allies the Christian Democrats did not assist the Mafia cause. New anti-Mafia laws passed by Giulio Andreotti made life very uncomfortable for the prisoners and their families, who were now separated by Perspex screens on their monthly visits and body-searched on their way in and out. The authorities seized their businesses and – more painful still for those, like Riina, of peasant stock – their land.

  ‘What do they think, that the prime minister’s forgotten they voted for the Socialists? They were a thorn in his side, and he’s got rid of them’, Salvo Lima scoffed to Angelo Siino.

  Riina had put too much pressure on his political contacts, who had ultimately snapped. ‘He had pulled the rope too tight,’ said Giuffré, ‘particularly in connection with control of public works contracts. The politicians got irritated; they felt bullied and threatened.’

  Although Provenzano had never set much store by any of the parties, he needed a new political alliance to consolidate his position and realize the next phase of his plan. While he consulted his contacts in search of new political partners, in early 1990 Leoluca Bagarella, always inclined towards the dramatic, started taking an interest in the idea of a coup d’état. He asked Tullio Cannella, a contractor, to seek out any separatist tendencies and find out if they were serious. Cannella duly spent some months and a lot of money founding a new separatist party. He later confessed: ‘I worked on the plan to build an independence movement that would hand Sicily over to Cosa Nostra.’

  Among those he canvassed for selection was a prince who had expressed an interest in starting a Southern League. At supper with the prince, who liked to be addressed as Your Royal Highness, Cannella told him bluntly that if they were going to get him elected, they would have to do a deal with the Mafia bosses, to ‘kiss some hands’, as he put it, however disagreeable this might be. At this point His Highness paled and politely declined, and said, ‘We never had this meeting.’

  The attraction of a separatist movement was, to Provenzano, the ideal of controlling a political party from the inside. Cosa Nostra had a new ambition, ‘in which men of honour would be able, directly or nearly, to make their voices heard and impose their will’. But such a movement could take years to get going, and the man at the helm of Cosa Nostra was in a hurry. Just when he was running out of money, Cannella was contacted by Bagarella, who said that they had a solution, more concrete and immediate than the project he’d been working on, and he should not waste any more time on it. ‘Bagarella told me they were supporting a new party, Forza Italia. Apparently there were members of Cosa Nostra who had links to some of the candidates, who had made some kind of electoral pact, had undertaken a commitment, so they were going to vote for them.’

  Provenzano’s top priority was to get the anti-Mafia laws changed, to lessen the power of the pentiti and to soften the harsh conditions for mafiosi in prison. In January 1993 Provenzano summoned Giuffré and told him he had found a new political reference, one that within a decade would have made all the concessions they demanded. As the judges later put it: ‘The new political line was good news for anyone who needed to move vast amounts of capital, and would raise the threshold of impunity.’

  ‘The leaders of Cosa Nostra had made contact with a very senior figure in Berlusconi’s entourage, someone beyond suspicion’, the informer Gino Ilardo told his carabiniere handler, Maresciallo Riccio. ‘In exchange for their support in the elections, I was told they had received certain guarantees.’

  So, Riccio asked, who was Berlusconi’s man at the meeting? Was it Marcello dell’Utri?

  ‘Ah, Maresciallo, nothing gets past you!’ Ilardo replied.

  Dell’Utri had been a banker and was now director of Berlusconi’s advertising agency, Publitalia. In a clever stroke for a football-mad nation he came up with the idea for a political party called Forza Italia! (Go Italy!). Prosecutors dated dell’Utri’s lin
ks with the Mafia back to his days as a football coach in Palermo in the 1960s, and he had hired a man of honour, Vittorio Mangano, to work at Berlusconi’s country estate in the ’70s.

  It was later claimed that dell’Utri hired Mangano in the 1970s not for his skill with animals (he could not even ride a horse, and as one mafioso put it, ‘Cosa Nostra doesn’t clean stables for anyone’26), but as a representative of Cosa Nostra, to protect Berlusconi and his family from kidnapping. Berlusconi has insisted that he had no idea about Mangano’s links with Cosa Nostra and recalled that, as estate manager, he was exemplary.

  For the rich, kidnapping was a real threat at that time: after the commission outlawed his favourite way of making money on Sicilian soil, Luciano Liggio had moved his operations to the north. ‘First we threatened them, then we offered them a guarantee of safety; it worked every time’, said collaborator Francesco Di Carlo, capo of Altofonte, who was later arrested in London for drug trafficking.

  Di Carlo claimed sensationally that Berlusconi’s fears about a member of his family being kidnapped led to an extraordinary meeting in 1974 between Berlusconi and the rather eccentric and self-important Palermo Mafia boss Stefano Bontate. The meeting, as described by Di Carlo, was held in a Milan office and convened by the Mafia capo Dr Gaetano Cinà, at dell’Utri’s request. Di Carlo, a detached and amusing narrator whose account of events has been hotly contested by dell’Utri, said he was only invited along to make Bontate look good.

  ‘I shook dell’Utri’s hand, but I didn’t kiss him . . . I’ve never really gone in for all that kissing. Besides he wasn’t Cosa Nostra . . . if he had been, I suppose I’d have been obliged to kiss him.’

  Bontate, who believed Berlusconi had a low view of southerners, was very conscious of his status. He expected to be addressed with the formal ‘lei’ throughout the meeting, while he used the familiar ‘tu’: ‘Bontate had these affectations of grandeur’, said Di Carlo.

  According to Di Carlo’s account, which reads like a film script, Berlusconi explained his concerns about kidnapping, and they discussed protection measures. In a relaxed moment at this improbable-sounding gathering Bontate and Berlusconi sparred.

  ‘Why don’t you come down and build an industrial plant in Sicily?’ asked the Palermo boss.

  ‘What do I need to come down there for? I’ve got enough trouble with Sicilians already’, answered the industrialist with a wry smile.

  ‘Ah, but if you came to Sicily, you’d be the boss!’ protested Bontate mildly. ‘We’d be at your disposal . . .’

  ‘In the end, Berlusconi said he too was at our disposal for anything: we just had to let Marcello know what we needed. And I don’t know whether the Milanesi mean something different by “at our disposal” than Sicilians do, because for us, when someone says they are at our disposal, in Cosa Nostra that means for anything and everything.’

  Dell’Utri’s lawyers, who are appealing against his conviction for Mafia association at the time of going to print, claim to have documentary evidence showing that Bontate could not have been in Milan for this meeting since he was under special surveillance in Palermo and attending a Mafia trial. Whether or not the fabled meeting of Titans took place, Mangano was hired as estate manager at Arcore, where his duties included driving his boss’s daughter to school every day. After dinner, every bit the faithful retainer in immaculate tweeds, Mangano would set off round the gardens accompanied by his Neapolitan mastiffs. But soon enough there was trouble.

  On a December night in 1974 Berlusconi gave a grand dinner at Arcore, which Mangano attended. Late at night, as he was leaving, one of the guests was kidnapped. Outside the gates his car was blocked in by two others, he was forced into another car and driven off. But snow was thick on the ground, and the driver lost control, slid off the road and crashed into a bank. The kidnappers made off on foot, and the victim, shocked and a little battered, was rescued. In the ensuing police operation it was discovered that Mangano had a criminal record, and shortly afterwards he left.

  Mangano kept in touch with his old friend dell’Utri, however, and in the summer of 1993 the connection probably saved his life. Mangano had just finished an eleven-year sentence for drug trafficking and had returned to Palermo. His ambition was on fire after being out of the game for so long, and he had become very close to the boss of Porta Nuova, Salvatore Cancemi. But Cancemi had aroused the wrath of Leoluca Bagarella – not a difficult thing to do at the best of times – and he was invited to a meeting to clear up a misunderstanding. Cancemi, remembering the Corleonese family’s peculiarly violent methods of clearing up misunderstandings, knew he was unlikely to survive the meeting and turned himself in to the carabinieri. (His subsequent collaboration would give the authorities their first concrete evidence that Provenzano was not only alive but actually running the organization.)

  At this point it would have been Mangano’s turn to die – except that now Bernardo Provenzano had a political project, and Mangano’s powerful contact was needed.

  According to a note on a telephone pad produced by the prosecution, Mangano and dell’Utri met twice in 1993. One collaborator claimed these meetings were to discuss a political contract, under which dell’Utri promised legislative change, including ‘softening of the law on confiscation of assets; and release of all those convicted of Mafia association . . . At the same time, dell’Utri told Mangano that it would be good if everyone could stay calm, that is, avoid any acts of violence, which would not contribute to the success of political projects favourable to the Mafia organization.’27

  Dell’Utri said later that he and Mangano may have met a couple of times during the period, but only to discuss Mangano’s personal problems. Dell’Utri’s legal team now say that the telephone notes are totally unreliable as evidence of meetings.

  Provenzano’s choice of Forza Italia was a decisive moment in his leadership. He could at last separate himself definitively from Riina’s politics; he also believed he had found a solution to the organization’s immediate crisis: a high-ranking official in a political party who was willing to support changes to the law in their favour.

  ‘At last Provenzano announced we were in good hands,’ Giuffré recalled, ‘and we could trust them. For the first time, Provenzano committed himself, assuming personal responsibility for the guarantees he had received. And from that moment, we’re on the move, promoting the Forza Italia line within Cosa Nostra, in order to take it to the rest of Sicily.’

  The organization got behind Provenzano’s decision. Even Bagarella agreed to support the new party, providing they kept their promises – on pain of death. Provenzano’s pursuit of a non-violent strategy had a political sponsor. The bombers had lost.

  ‘Provenzano called a halt to the Mafia’s strategy of attacking the institutions of state’, says assistant prosecutor Nino Di Matteo. ‘This paved the way for him to reach an agreement with political representatives. Under the terms of the deal the Mafia had to disappear from the public arena and must support Forza Italia in the ’94 elections. In exchange, according to our information, within a decade Cosa Nostra would receive certain benefits.’

  Although dell’Utri’s links with Cosa Nostra have been proven (he was sentenced to nine years in 2005 but is appealing), there is no evidence that Berlusconi ever courted the Mafia’s support for Forza Italia. Giuffré described Cosa Nostra’s relationship with Forza Italia as a case of jumping on the bandwagon: ‘We have always been smart enough to be on the winner’s side, that’s how clever we are. When we went with the Socialists, you could see it wouldn’t work. It’s not that we control Sicilian politics, but when we back the winners, we’re in. We didn’t create Forza Italia’s success. People were fed up with the Christian Democrats, people were sick of politicians – unni putieva cchiù, they couldn’t take any more. So they saw in Forza Italia an anchor to grab hold of, and everyone was talking about it, and it was all new, a new hope. And we, smart as we are, caught the ball on the rebound.’

  It has been sugge
sted that with his inflammatory claims about Berlusconi sitting round a table with men of honour, Giuffré was merely making trouble for Cosa Nostra’s political friends, who had failed to deliver any benefits for the organization. Contrary to guarantees Provenzano had allegedly received, there was no let-up in the most draconian anti-Mafia laws. Provenzano had committed early on to improving conditions for prisoners, but when Falcone’s law on maximum security terms for convicted mafiosi was upheld at review, the captive members of Cosa Nostra began to feel sorely neglected. Although the law did not change fast enough to placate the prison population, Provenzano had more success in other areas. ‘At last the conditions were right to press ahead in Provenzano’s specialist sector, that is, contracts’, Di Matteo explains. ‘Once he’d got the right people in place, he could subvert this system of power that allowed him to be the master.’

  To exploit their links with the ruling party, Cosa Nostra needed people who knew how to operate in the political environment. One of these was the eminent doctor and mafioso, the boss of Brancaccio, Giuseppe Guttadauro. In spite of his homely looks – he was short and rotund, with a double chin – his pedigree was excellent: his brother-in-law was Trapani boss Matteo Messina Denaro.

  Giuffré recalls: ‘Provenzano’s policy was to reverse Riina’s strategy of violence, and he found in Dr Guttadauro a perfect pupil, who would pursue his pacifist politics in the best possible way. To initiate the process of remodelling the image of Cosa Nostra, Guttadauro made contacts in business and started a debate on how best to apply peacefully the process of silent reconstruction of Cosa Nostra.’

  Guttadauro had plans for a huge development in Brancaccio: a shopping centre and multiplex cinema. He planned to sell developers his own land, and then become the guarantor for protection of the site, while making sure that a significant number of Mafia people were employed. It was the perfect business plan for Provenzano’s philosophy.