Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  Provenzano’s political ties enabled him to push through the next phase of his revolution. The election in 1994 was won by Forza Italia with a narrow margin. After that, Cosa Nostra’s strategists started thinking about how to cut out the middleman. One magistrate said, ‘the Mafia has decided it no longer needed intermediaries between itself and the political world. Mafiosi are now being elected directly to political office.’28

  While state subsidies and European funding were pouring into Sicily, the Mafia began to dispense with the system of supporting politicians and began to field them from its own ranks. Local councils in Mafia strongholds such as Bagheria and Villabate were infiltrated by mafiosi: Provenzano’s men were green-lighting developments, awarding contracts, channelling agricultural and development funding towards Cosa Nostra.

  The first Forza Italia association was founded in Villabate by Nino Mandalà, the local Mafia boss. Known as ‘the Lawyer’, Mandalà was respected and feared: he had a violent temper and a vindictive mind. If there was any hold-up in the council for one of the Mafia-backed projects, he would scream abuse at the councillors. He once threatened to punch a councillor, and boasted that he had made a Forza Italia senator cry.

  Giuffré claims that councils such as Bagheria became fortresses, closed shops operated from within the local administration. Anyone who lacked the right connections had no hope of getting a contract. ‘I challenge you’, Giuffré said under cross-examination, ‘to find a single company working on a public contract during the mid-’90s that had no links with the Bagheria family.’

  But while Provenzano’s people did good business, investigators were tapping their phones, recording their conversations and reading their bank statements. By November 1998 Ilardo and Brusca’s detailed accounts of the principal players in Provenzano’s court finally came to fruition. Early one chilly autumn morning, police raided forty-seven addresses across Bagheria and Villabate, kicking in doors and hauling out mafiosi in handcuffs.

  Simone Castello, Provenzano’s postman and factotum, whose links in politics and international business had served his master so well, was led away. He would have to endure the nauseating experience of reading hours of conversations that police had recorded in his car.

  Enzo Giammanco, head of the council’s technical office, which had rubber-stamped so many building contracts on behalf of Cosa Nostra, was another one rudely awakened. Just a few months earlier, the feisty Nino Mandalà had been picked up in Villabate. Provenzano’s political network, and his logistical support, had been savaged. Bagheria, for years his impregnable territory, was no longer safe. From now on he would have to look for logistical support where he could get it. The men at his disposal would not necessarily be the ones he would choose.

  Nino’s son Nicola Mandalà had followed his father’s footsteps into a career in organized crime and, once the old man was arrested, stepped into his shoes. Nicola was a keen gambler and big spender; he would take last-minute planes to watch important football games on the mainland and visit casinos. Weary agents conducting surveillance never knew where he’d be going or, once he’d started partying, whether he’d keep going all night.

  Mandalà was another one who couldn’t help telling his mistress everything. While they snorted cocaine, he recounted the story of his initiation: ‘You prick your finger, the blood comes out and you hold the picture of a saint . . . Then you set fire to the picture, and pass it from one hand to the other, repeating three times, “if I should betray Cosa Nostra, my flesh will burn like this.”’

  Mandalà confided to his girlfriend that he was the de facto boss of Villabate, with control over the administration: ‘They do whatever I tell them, see?’

  ‘He was like the prince of the 1001 Nights: hotels and women and cocaine and champagne.’ Mandalà’s friend Francesco Campanella shared his passion for gambling and occasionally flew with his flash friend to the casino in Val d’Aosta, but he was was shocked by Mandalà’s extravagant lifestyle. He berated his friend for the brazen way he flouted Cosa Nostra’s security rules, ran up massive credit card bills and cashed enormous cheques. Not to mention that he had a child with his mistress.

  Mandalà had an excellent contact in Campanella, whose meteoric political career in the Christian Democrats had taken him to the top of Villabate council. He was a good friend and former hustings partner of the ex-regional president, Salvatore Cuffaro, who had been a witness at his wedding.

  One of Campanella’s great coups, pre-empting a move to disband the council for Mafia infiltration, was to launch a cultural anti-Mafia initiative. It was exactly the sort of PR gambit that met with Provenzano’s approval. In a cynical move the council invited a top actor to receive an anti-Mafia award for his portrayal of Capitano Ultimo in a film. The actor had no idea he was being exploited in this way, but the sham was exposed, and the council was disbanded shortly afterwards.

  Campanella subsequently confessed that Cosa Nostra’s policy of submersion ‘was intended principally to pave the way for the organization’s direct running of business’. Nino Di Matteo recalls: ‘The aim was to blur the line between legimitate income and income from business that was apparently legal. The Mafia need no longer limit itself to traditional activities like extorting protection money from businesses, but should be part of those businesses themselves.’

  Ambitions in Villabate were running high, and Provenzano was eager to move on from its recent ugly past. In a conversation intercepted by investigators Mandalà passed the Boss’s message on to Campanella: ‘The old man says, we must run businesses, we must infiltrate every important commercial enterprise. Our priority is to do business.’

  The projected shopping centre in Villabate is emblematic of how the system worked. The massive development, worth £200 million, with a multiplex cinema, shopping centre, offices, businesses, car parks and so on, was proposed in the mid-1990s by a company based in Rome, Asset Development, and welcomed by the council.

  It was a complicated project, involving the acquisition of a large number of properties – a matter almost impossible for an outside firm to sort out but simple enough for the local Mafia, who quickly dispensed with any objections on the ground. Under Campanella’s direction a legal contract was signed (amazing though it may seem) between the developer and Mario Cusimano, representing the Villabate Mafia.

  ‘We found the evidence on a computer used by one of the intermediaries’, recalls Di Matteo. ‘There was actually a written deal: “You, the northern developer, will make this investment; we, the Mafia, guarantee to make all the arrangements for your acquisition of this plot of land. Then if there is any problem with the bureaucracy in the council administration, I will sort it out, because I know which strings to pull. I will permit you to do business, but you must employ my people, and buy cement where I tell you . . .”

  ‘The Mafia infiltrates the business and exploits it from the inside. The private contractors had to do what Signor Mandalà told them to do: they had to employ at least 20 per cent of workers named by the Mafia. They had to rent out 30 per cent of the office space to firms chosen by the Mafia. The Mafia was taking control of a major development from the inside. Such an operation could only be possible with political contacts.’

  The commercial development was a monster, in a small suburban residential area, and would cause pollution, not to mention traffic chaos, and starve out any small businesses in the immediate area. But planning permission would not be a problem: for a consideration of £50,000 the Mafia’s contacts in the planning department would take care of the application. The kickback had to be paid via untraceable companies, which received an invoice for an initial €25,000 for telecommunications consultancy from a fruit and vegetable merchant.

  One major sticking point was transport: the centre would need a number of access roads linking to the motorway, which had been ruled technically impossible. And yet, using the letterhead of ANAS, the national road construction company, Campanella granted all the necessary permissions.


  The shopping centre’s inexorable progress was halted by the dissolution of the Villabate council and the arrest of Francesco Campanella and Mario Cusimano, both representing the Mafia’s interests in the deal. Pierfrancesco Marussig, a director of Asset, was also accused of corruption but denies the charges. After ten years being forced past every legal challenge, the development was finally stopped.

  Provenzano had been alerted to the fact that Guttadauro was planning a development on a similar scale in Brancaccio, and that these two massive projects could potentially be in competition. The Boss ruled that they should both go ahead, in case one failed to get the green light. Guttadauro’s arrest put paid to his hopes of the greatest employment opportunity seen in years.

  One of the men accused of enabling Provenzano to make major investments was Michele Aiello, known as ‘the Engineer’, a resident of Bagheria who had begun his career building single-lane country roads. In the early 1990s he made a massive investment in a private health clinic – a payment investigators considered far too great to have been made from laying asphalt on sheep tracks.

  He subsequently built a state-of-the-art radiography centre, with equipment the public hospitals couldn’t afford in their wildest dreams. They sent their patients to him, and he fixed the prices for the state repayments. Aiello’s contacts on the Bagheria council would accept the overblown figures without a murmur. He also allegedly recommended that his clinics bought their equipment from Provenzano’s favourite nephew, Carmelo Gariffo.

  Provenzano wanted his own ‘minister of health’, a representative on local authorities who would appoint hospital directors and medical fund managers. It did not take long to find one.

  The Ospedale Civico in Palermo is a sorry place. People sit for hours in the dirty corridors in plastic chairs, waiting for tests or treatment. Waiting lists for operations are hundreds of names long, and new requests are greeted with grim resignation. Equipment is out of date, in need of repair. It is desperately in need of investment.

  To deal with the shortcomings in staffing, beds and equipment in public hospitals, the regional government pays for patients to receive private treatment. The Mafia’s investment in state-subsidized private clinics and diagnostic laboratories has forced up prices and immo-bilized waiting lists, draining the lifeblood from the public health service.

  After a number of deaths apparently caused by lack of resources, the head of the anti-Mafia commission denounced the Mafia’s control of private health schemes. ‘Sicily has about 1,800 private health centres, compared with 150 in the rich northern region of Lombardy. Instead of reducing the workload for public hospitals, they have diverted funds away from those hospitals, which are falling into a state of disrepair’, he said. ‘Sicily is the first region in Italy for the financing of private health centres and the first for patient deaths.’

  As far as Giuffré is concerned, if anyone embodies the Mafia’s new way of operating from within the institutions, it is Dr Mercadante, fifty-nine, director of the Ospedale Civico, radiologist and Forza Italia politician elected to the Palermo council in 1997. Long suspected of involvement with the Mafia, Mercadante became head of the anti-corruption commission set up to ensure transparency and financial propriety in the administration. His name appeared in a letter to Bernardo Provenzano from his son Angelo – the first confirmation of the doctor’s rumoured links with Cosa Nostra.

  His uncle was Tommaso Cannella, Mafia boss of Prizzi and Provenzano’s strategist. Mercadante would brush off questions about his criminal connections with the old adage ‘You can’t choose your relations’. But his relations were pleased to have him, and his potential value to Cosa Nostra increased exponentially when he was elected to the regional parliament for Forza Italia in 2001.

  When police bugs planted in the secret meeting place of Palermo boss Nino Rotolo picked up numerous references to the ‘doctor’s orders’, investigators believed they had enough solid evidence against Mercadante to arrest him for Mafia association. While awaiting trial, Mercadante has resigned from his position as regional deputy. In a statement he said that he wanted to focus his energies on clearing his name.

  Giuffré reported that Provenzano constantly complained about the new raft of politicians. ‘A subject he brought up time and again was that certain politicians couldn’t be trusted, and he complained particularly about their inexperience.

  ‘It’s important,’ said Giuffré, ‘to know how to get things done behind the scenes, to steer particular debates that might have an impact on public works, health, agriculture and everything that we have an interest in. There has to be a certain ability on both sides, a savoir-faire. And I have to say that frequently, in the case of some politicians, Provenzano was pretty unimpressed.’

  The disbanded Christian Democrats reformed under the banners of several centre-right parties. Giuffré described how, in the run-up to the elections for president of the region in 2001, Cosa Nostra made the decision to vote for Salvatore Cuffaro.

  ‘There was an agreement within Cosa Nostra to support the election of l’onorevole Cuffaro – as usual, from behind the scenes. As far as Provenzano was concerned, it was the right decision, and he told us that, wherever we could press Cuffaro’s advantage, we should do so. We were to do whatever we could to ensure that the candidate opposing Cuffaro – Leoluca Orlando, if I remember rightly – would lose.’

  Cuffaro has always denied any knowledge of whether the Mafia supported his candidacy or not. When he was asked whether Cuffaro was aware of Cosa Nostra’s support, Giuffré replied: ‘I don’t know if he was aware of it, but every politician knows that if you take a position of power at that level, you have to have Cosa Nostra’s protection, otherwise you upset the balance.’

  For the next few years the balance would go very much in Cosa Nostra’s favour.

  12

  Treacherous friends

  S

  HELTERING A FUGITIVE is not an easy job. Angelo Tolentino and Nino Episcopo, joint bosses of Ciminna, managed the seventy-year-old capo Benedetto Spera’s life in hiding for seven years. Although they initially enjoyed the status this role conferred on them, their charge was excessively demanding, and the life of service began to get them down. They were on call day and night, organizing his meetings and bringing supplies.

  Ciminna is a remote mountain town across the valley from Mezzojuso, reached by small, winding roads through the sheep pastures. Tolentino and Episcopo were required to drive Spera to meetings, speeding along the treacherous and often unpaved country roads in the darkness before dawn, with the added anxiety of avoiding detection on the roads. Every time they saw an electrician working on the telegraph poles, they were afraid it might be a police detective installing a camera. If the weather was bad, the potholed tracks became impassable, and they’d be pushing the car out of the mud while the boss sat furiously inside.

  When they got to the meeting place, they’d have to wait an entire day outside in the car or in a nearby farmhouse or livestock pen, as it might be, for hours on end. There was fresh food to be bought and prepared, and every other kind of special need – batteries, typewriter ribbons, toothpaste. If Spera wanted to see his wife, they had to arrange everything, fetch her and deliver her to one of the farmhouses before first light.

  The carabinieri had planted listening devices in Tolentino’s home in Ciminna and in a farm building they used for meetings, and were monitoring their every conversation. They heard a lot of complaints about the men’s troublesome charge.

  ‘We’ve looked after him for five and a half years’, Tolentino moaned. ‘And as you know, five and a half years, day and night, I’ve barely been home. He gets me out at one or two in the morning. I’m always with him. I’m the real fugitive here!’

  ‘All these years we’ve been his slaves’, Episcopo agreed.

  The two men had no choice in the matter: Spera was the capo mandamento. ‘Like it or not,’ recalled Giuffré, ‘Tolentino and Episcopo had to obey him – and Spera could be despotic.�
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  Spera had been lodging with Episcopo’s family, running the women ragged with his incessant demands. The strain was taking its toll on Episcopo’s health, and his long mountain drives became more infrequent.

  The Belmonte capo had secured a string of lucrative contracts across the Palermo hinterland, and his base, a small mountain town, boasted an unusually large number of millionaire businessmen. While he was enjoying the hospitality of the Ciminna capos, Spera demanded a kickback from public contracts issued to firms on their territory. It was a presumption that outraged his hosts. ‘It’s the nastiest thing he could have done’, lamented Tolentino. ‘While we looked after him in our homes, he mugged us.’

  Not only did Spera claim money from his hosts, but he then found another mafioso from the same area to arrange his meetings and employed him as his driver. The jealousies and rivalry this created in Ciminna were a dangerous distraction. The two men talked about the difference between Spera and their other boss, the old man Bernardo Provenzano, who had also passed through their care. ‘How could he have anything in common with that animal? Binnu is much more affectionate in his letters.’

  ‘No comparison’, the men agreed. To Uncle Binnu they were loyal servants. Agents listened in as they slowly and deliberately dictated their letters to the boss or whooped with excitement as they sorted through his post and found pizzini addressed to them.

  Provenzano always took particular care to treat his hosts with respect: because he was forced to move house so frequently, he needed people who would be prepared to support him, turn over their houses to him, bring him food and deliver his letters, at considerable risk to themselves.

  ‘My brother’s been a fugitive for many years’, his brother Simone told a reporter. ‘The man had to eat. If he was as bad as people say he is, who would have taken the trouble to bring him food?’