Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  In early June prosecutors Pietro Grasso and Michele Prestipino were on their way to Marseille to seize medical notes and question the doctors about their notorious patient. Doctors were a little surprised, somewhat alarmed. They see 2,500 old men every year with similar prostate problems, they said. They did remember one unusual detail: that the fugitive wore three silver crosses on a chain round his neck.

  Magistrates Grasso and Prestipino returned from Marseille with a mass of information about Provenzano’s state of health, but in reality no nearer to the man himself. They now knew everything about the Boss, including his DNA, his medical history and current condition, diet, scars, blood group. They knew he did not smoke, did not drink, never took sleeping pills, wore a dental plate, was intolerant of wine and allergic to anti-inflammatories. He suffered from stomach-ache but couldn’t take antacids. The astonished public had viewed his scratchy signature (‘A person with this sort of handwriting is not to be trusted’, commented the TV calligraphy experts, instantly earning their appearance fee). They knew him inside out. The only thing they did not know was where to find him.

  In the midst of this medical detective hunt came the sudden, mysterious death of a top Sicilian urologist. Dr Attilio Manca, from a small town near Messina, was found dead in his apartment in Viterbo, Lazio, in early 2004. He was discovered with an injection mark in his left arm, and the autopsy said he had died from poisoning.

  The cause of death was registered as suicide, but Manca’s mother revealed that her son had made a frantic phone call just days before his death, telling her he would shortly be coming home to Sicily. It also emerged that Dr Manca had made an unscheduled visit to France in October 2003, at the same time that Provenzano was having his prostate operation.

  His mother is convinced he had been coerced into treating Provenzano and then silenced. Her suspicions had been raised because he had his surgical instruments with him at the apartment when he died, though he did not usually take them out of the clinic. Also the injection of lethal substances had been given in his left arm – but the doctor was left-handed. The inquiry into his death was reopened in October 2006 but has so far reached no conclusion.

  Meanwhile Provenzano’s options were shrinking fast. He had lost his helpers and supporters, his cover, his health, even his prostate – but somehow he carried on. It showed he had, as one journalist observed, a constitution of steel.

  A few months after his death Ciccio Pastoia’s grave was ransacked and set on fire. The old man had taken his own life, depriving those he had betrayed of the satisfaction of exacting their revenge. Investigators deduced that the perpetrator was doing Provenzano a courtesy. It was apparently Provenzano’s style: to harm Pastoia’s widow or his sons would have caused a major row and made the news. This way the signal would be understood by those who needed to know it.

  In the calm after the storm ‘Alessio’, Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the few survivors of the blitz, wrote to the boss: ‘Carissimo mio . . . I’m so sorry to hear about everything that’s happened and hope that you are safe and in good hands . . . I don’t know how to contact you but I’m hoping you’ll get in touch with 121. I’ll just have to wait.’

  16

  The net tightens

  A

  FTER THE BIG arrests in January 2005 we had to start again from scratch.’

  Bloodhound and the rest of the Catturandi group were suddenly victims of their own success. ‘We had created scorched earth around Provenzano and burned all our leads, every investigative channel had been blown wide open. We had arrested everyone who had any contact with the Boss. Now we had to find out who had replaced them.’

  Grasso announced that his team had ‘broken up Provenzano’s ministry of post and telecommunications’, but this left them with the big question: who were they to follow now? They knew Provenzano would have already built up a new inner circle to function as his personal management and support system. To make life more difficult for the investigators, these would be people with no previous convictions.

  ‘Looking after Provenzano had become a bad business,’ said Pietro Grasso, ‘a major inconvenience. In the past it was an opportunity, it gave you prestige in the organization – but not any more. With all the police activity it had become a liability. Whoever was looking after him was instantly open to charges of aiding and abetting.’

  It was time for a new dynamic, a shake-up of the crack team of investigators who had been working together for eight years. A compact, hand-picked group would work autonomously and exclusively on capturing Provenzano. Renato Cortese, under whose leadership the Catturandi had caught Brusca, Vitale, Aglieri and others, was brought back from the Servizio Centrale Operativo (SCO) in Rome to repeat his success.

  Cortese, vastly experienced and softly spoken, with a grizzled beard and dark eyes behind glasses, commanded immense loyalty among his team. Working with Gilberto Caldarozzi, head of the SCO, whose trophies from capturing fugitive mafiosi include the Catania boss Nitto ‘the Hunter’ Santapaola, Cortese selected seventeen men and one woman from the Catturandi and a further eight men from the SCO in Rome. There were technicians expert in electronic surveillance, dogged, old-fashioned detectives, some with a talent for trailing suspects, and local specialists familiar with the difference in accents from one village to the next.

  ‘We wanted to streamline the investigative group, bringing together police investigating Mafia crime and those searching for fugitives’, said Giuseppe Gualtieri, head of the Palermo Flying Squad. ‘It’s better for the morale of those involved: if you spend ten years looking for a fugitive and you don’t find him, it’s hard; but if you’ve successfully rounded up his entire support network, you feel like you’ve achieved something.’

  When picking his team, Cortese favoured single people over those married with children (half the squad, including ‘The Cat’, the only woman, were single), as they would be on call round the clock, and their work would be a total secret, for the protection of their families. ‘You can’t live in Palermo if people know who you are’, one anonymous member of the group told a TV reporter. ‘These people have long memories. They don’t forget a face, and they know where your relations are.’31

  The headquarters of Gruppo Duomo, as it came to be called, were not far from police headquarters, near the cathedral. This separate location meant they could be more autonomous but also helped to build team spirit. They would be working intensive, eighteen-hour days at a dangerous job that no one else knew about, and they needed to trust each other, to create a powerful bond. On their occasional days off they never let the radio out of hearing in case of an urgent recall.

  Their headquarters were stripped to the bare essentials. One soundproofed surveillance room was lined with electronic equipment. It was always dark, and agents spent hours staring at screens, viewing and reviewing images from the closed-circuit cameras, following the GPS signals emitted by cars their colleagues had tagged, or glued to the headphones, listening to conversations, playing and replaying sections to catch any hidden meaning. Local knowledge was essential: exchanges were often in dialect and usually in code. This relentless surveillance activity proved essential to the investigation, and at least three men were involved in it continually.

  Since people with Mafia connections never say anything of significance on the phone, Cortese’s men put bugs in their houses, to pick up private conversations. It was highly dangerous work, but it was the best option open to them.

  Meanwhile, of the mafiosi close to Provenzano who had been arrested at the end of January, some were beginning to talk. In April a collaborator claimed that a tunnel underneath a clinic in Bagheria, owned by Provenzano’s private health tsar, Michele Aiello, had been used as an escape route by Provenzano. On a rainy night carabinieri closed off the surrounding roads and searched in the dark, using special imaging equipment, for signs of human passage. Eventually, they gave up.

  As Easter approached, the prosecutor’s office received the usual mysterious tip-off
s about where the Boss would be eating his celebratory paschal lamb. Because of its connection to family, Church and community, the Mafia boss’s celebration of this ritual had taken hold in the public imagination, and, as ever, investigators trekked off to follow up these tenuous leads.

  Since Provenzano’s Mafia support network had been taken off the streets, the Gruppo Duomo focused on his family. The agents realized that his family were managing to get letters to him; they just needed to figure out how.

  Apart from family members, there was another section of the community that Provenzano trusted with his life, and his letters. ‘The only people Provenzano ever really trusted were shepherds’, said Gualtieri. ‘When we got his voice on tape, he was at the sheep farmer Nicola La Barbera’s farmhouse. The only place anyone got to meet Provenzano, the few occasions he emerged from hiding, were in rural farmhouses miles from anywhere. He hardly ever went to see family members, he held very few meetings. We came to the conclusion long ago that he wrote these pizzini because he didn’t want to have meetings. But he was forced to have some face-to-face conversations, and those were always held in shepherd’s cottages or farm buildings.’

  The shepherds’ world is very closed, explained one Corleone resident. ‘They feel very much on Cosa Nostra’s side. Anyone who is on the other side, who doesn’t do what they’re told, is a sbirro, a spy. You would never find a shepherd in these parts who would willingly tell investigators anything.’

  The Boss worked at keeping the rural community onside: a couple of years earlier he had arranged for a fruit juice factory to offload a truck full of lemon peel for a cattle farmer in Ciminna (at a certain time of year, if cows are fed on lemon rind, it gives the milk a particular aroma essential in cheesemaking). Several fugitives had been lodged in the area, and Provenzano wanted to do this particular farmer a favour and have the rind delivered free – to build good will among the local community.

  Provenzano had political contacts at the highest level – industrialists, contractors and businessmen – but he never forgot where he came from. Shepherds had a particular place in his heart. They had a respect for the old ways, the traditional farming and husbandry, the time-honoured ways of making ricotta and pecorino: a stake in the status quo. At some level Provenzano represented the history and traditions of this community. He may have had contacts at high levels, but now he was in difficulty, Corleone’s shepherds came to his aid.

  Arrangements were made for Provenzano to stay at a little farm cottage belonging to the cheesemaker Giovanni Marino. This old boy had no previous convictions and was locally famed for his excellent ricotta, which he made on his little property above Corleone in Montagna dei Cavalli. He was a traditionalist, respectful of the older generation, and happy to help.

  To prepare for the Boss’s arrival, he built a small extension on his farm cottage, with a toilet, sink and shower. He kept some of his wife’s stuff in storage there and a few bits of farm equipment, but he made it as presentable as he knew how, with a double bed, a table and chair. The kitchen had a small stove and some basic cooking equipment. There was also a meat freezer he had used on the farm. He had been given instructions: black out the windows and make sure the door can be securely locked from the inside.

  Marino’s farm cottage was serviceable and reasonably secure, but we can be fairly certain it was not what the Boss was used to.

  Provenzano arrived by night with his sleeping bag and arranged his clothes in an old wardrobe, attire for better times: silk jackets and cashmere jerseys, plaid flannel pyjamas and silk shirts. He was used to pampering himself: his collection of hair and skin products, Armani aftershave and manicure sets, filled four vanity cases, each one packed and ready should he have to make a sudden departure. His corduroys and tartan shirts from the classiest menswear stores in Palermo were arranged in the rickety cupboard. The glossy store bags with ribbon handles that they came in were folded neatly away, ready for the next move.

  Provenzano slept in his sleeping bag on top of the bed, dressed and ready for flight. The nights are not very restful if you are always waiting for someone to crash through the door.

  The centre of his daily operations was the little table on which he placed his trusty Brother typewriter. On one side, a box for pizzini he received – questions, complaints, requests for advice, judgement, adjudication – on the other, letters he had painstakingly typed, folded into half-inch squares and sealed with tape, each addressed with a number, ready for delivery. When he was particularly busy, there were more than a dozen rolls of Sellotape on his desk.

  He also had his Bible, in which he slowly and deliberately underlined passages of particular resonance. He copied out whole tracts of text he wanted to memorize or re-read. He had painstakingly typed out Luke 6: 43–46 (‘A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit./For every tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not pick figs from thorn bushes, nor do they gather grapes from brambles./A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.’)

  He hung his religious pictures – the Last Supper, the Weeping Madonna of Siracuse, Padre Pio. It was not exactly a chapel like his old friend Pietro Aglieri’s, but a little shrine, a place of meditation. It was certainly quiet. He was shut in the small, ripe-smelling cottage for most of the day and all night, listening to the sounds of the valley.

  His circumstances were sadly reduced, compared with what he was used to, but he was determined to suffer in good cheer. ‘Dearest love’, he typed, ‘I am glad to hear you are well, as I can assure you the same is true of me . . .’

  He took care of himself: he brushed his teeth and sterilized his dentures, read up on his symptoms and looked up what foods would suit his condition. He had ordered the complete set of a partwork on health from La Repubblica and consulted it regularly, copying out difficult terms. He even wrote out a definition of prostate, to help him remember what was happening to his body. He was particularly concerned that prostate cancer would make him impotent, and copied out a number of different treatments, from psychotherapy to pills to be taken before sex.

  His health had become something of an obsession. Cut off from the world and unable to call his doctor when he had any new sensation, he spent hours listening to his body and pondering his symptoms. He copied out the results of his blood tests and took notes on the medicines he had been given.

  Shielded from prying eyes by black hospital bin bags taped over the windows, he withdrew more than ever. Sometimes Marino, his host, would drop in for a word, as he delivered fresh ricotta and a bag of clean clothes from Saveria brought up from Corleone, less than a mile away. Other mornings he would not venture in. Whole days would pass when Provenzano would see no one at all. He liked it that way: it gave him more time to focus on his writing. It was his habit to reply to every point in every letter sent to him, and he continually worried that he would forget things. Was his mind going soft in this protective prison? More likely it was a pretext for omitting to respond to difficult points when he wanted to play for time. In some ways, living as a fugitive suited Provenzano’s leadership style; the system of pizzini gave him time to think about his answer. He often deferred requests for face-to-face meetings, which became increasingly rare – for security reasons, but also because he preferred it that way.

  His note-taking had become a compulsion, perhaps a reaction to spending hours alone locked in one room. Occasionally he would listen to music – some hymns, or gentle background crooning: Julio Iglesias. He had the soundtrack to The Godfather, an old favourite he had seen in Palermo with his friend Pino Lipari. He set a chair so that he could sit, after his hospitable gaoler opened the door in the mornings, and look out of the crack above the door to enjoy the sunlight without being seen.

  Down in Corleone, reactions were mixed at having the Boss back on their doorstep. Tensions were heightened by a subtle increase in police
presence.

  Those who were recruited to provide material support, security and postal services to the Boss were constantly on call. He did not go out or hold meetings but wrote letters constantly, several a day, and wanted them collected immediately. His presence, though invisible, was keenly felt.

  Provenzano’s return to Corleone was not an easy time for his family. Saveria and the boys were under more surveillance than ever. Every time they left the house there was a camera monitoring their movements.

  Life definitely got more complicated. Saveria was happy to have her man within range so she could attend to his needs on a daily basis, but those needs were becoming more unmanageable. She seldom went out in case someone needed to drop something off or pick something up. The letters between her and her husband during this period were mostly about family business and banal practicalities. He would asked for food, fresh cheese, more coffee; and ‘please don’t send any more pasta al forno’. She complained of a bad leg keeping her at home; he commiserated with her on having a cold. They also exchanged notes about Angelo’s impending wedding. With his continuing prostate problems there was a continual flow of reeking garments to wash.

  For the boys, looking after their father was a heavy burden, and he was testing them with his demands, asking to see them all the time. They had never been involved in Cosa Nostra – their father was most insistent on that – but now that there were fewer old friends to rely on, the immediate family were drawn into his support system.

  More than that, after they had moved to Corleone, they had got quite used to living without him, through school and university. They and their mother were a unit. And then, all of a sudden, he was back among them. Francesco Paolo had begun to make a life elsewhere but had to return.

  Both young men were fed up. Angelo could not stand the life he was leading. It was not easy being Provenzano’s son, organizing meetings and everything he needed. When he summoned them, they arranged to meet him, under considerable stress. ‘The whole family was circling around him and his needs’, said one investigator. ‘He was obsessed with the details and arrangements of his life in hiding and his protection, and he wasn’t really paying attention to anyone else’s needs. And the boys were tired, tired and fed up with this life.’