Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  The launderette that Angelo had tried to set up with his mother in Corleone had been closed by the authorities after a couple of years, on the basis that the family had failed to prove that it had not been bought and set up with illegally earned capital. When the police came to serve them notice to close the business, Saveria was visibly upset. In all their dealings with her, they had never seen her so emotional, and in their embarrassment they were brisk and businesslike. But this represented a major defeat for Saveria and the boys. Angelo, who saw it as a failure on his part, became withdrawn and depressed, and it was some months before he summoned the determination to challenge the closure in court. Grimly determined not to let his mother down, he got a job as a sales rep for a household goods company, selling electrical appliances. Among all the painfully unglamorous possibilities in the straight world for someone trying to steer away from a life of crime, selling vacuum cleaners door to door has to be high on the list.

  Provenzano was always affectionate towards his sons in his letters, and they were warm and respectful in return, but private conversations between the brothers revealed a deep unhappiness.

  In the spring of 2005 Paolo graduated with a first-class degree in languages from Palermo University (his dissertation was an ethnic study of the Goths). At his graduation a reporter snapped a picture of him in a mortarboard being congratulated by two female friends, and he ended up on the cover of a magazine.

  From Paolo’s point of view, he had satisfied his father’s wishes by finishing his studies, but his specialism in languages was going to help him get away from the family. While Angelo was stranded, packing bags and phoning for pick-ups, working at his dreary job, Paolo got away: out of 300 candidates he was one of the thirty-six picked to teach in Germany and promote Italian culture. During several trips he and his brother made to Germany, police recorded conversations in which he vented his rage.

  By this stage the search for their father had intensified, and their lives were utterly disrupted. There were cameras and microphones everywhere, picking up their every word. When the brothers got a plane to Germany, there was a policeman in the row behind, wearing what looked like an iPod, which was recording their conversation. Angelo’s fiancée, who worked in a clothes shop in Corleone, argued with him about his reticence on family matters. Her father worked for a transport agency in Palermo, and she simply was not used to accepting certain things without questioning.

  The boys had been brought up to respect their father, but they had developed a critical sense of his world. They had to live with that world but not within it; there was no getting away from it, but no entry either. When Paolo and Angelo packed the car to the roof with Paolo’s stuff and set off for Germany in September 2005, the police were with them every step of the way. They booked a cabin on the Palermo–Genoa ferry, and agents stuck microphones in every conceivable spot. Agents listened in to their heart-to-heart.

  ‘Some things have always bothered me’, said Paolo, ‘when he said we had to leave [to go and live in Corleone], we had to go, because of all our fucking problems, and who ever gave a damn about us? And when I got back on my first Saturday home from Germany, right? And we ended up going over there . . . I don’t know why he even wanted us there. I can’t see the point of going to see him: he’s never even talked to me properly. When I was graduating and I had to take my last exam, no one gave a fuck about whether I might be having any problems, no – I had to go and stand around over at his place. Because that’s all I ever do, stand around in his presence. Whether you like it or not, you’ve always been more involved – at least he talks to you, but I’ve always stood there saying nothing, since I was a kid.’

  ‘For what it’s worth . . . I don’t think he planned to come back’, Angelo said.

  ‘So what, I’m supposed be happy about it? I’m supposed to be happy that we’re rebuilding this weird sort of “family unit” and it wasn’t even planned? And then he calls it the will of God.’

  ‘We’re all to blame’, said Angelo gloomily: their mother was to blame as she had never stood up to him, and they were to blame for putting up with everything. ‘If there’s personal responsibility, I can take it. We can say it’s down to destiny, to God’s will . . . but the fact is we have put up with a whole lot of difficult situations and we carry on putting up with them. We can’t rebel against it, we can’t even shift this cross we bear, to make it easier to carry. I’ve never said this to anyone, but when you think about the situation we’re in, what we’ve had to go through, could it really be any worse if our father was dead?’

  Although some mafiosi have educated their children and allowed them to train for a legitimate profession, most end up getting drawn into the Mafia’s weir. Pino Lipari, who counselled his friend to educate his sons and keep them out of the organization, had a son who worked in the family contracting business and a daughter who trained as a lawyer. Whether it was what she originally intended, once she was qualified, and her father got caught up in legal difficulties, Cinzia Lipari specialized in criminal law and became her father’s legal representative. She saw it as filial duty, she later explained to investigators, an inescapable obligation to ease her father’s burden. It did not mean she shared his choices.

  After Lipari’s arrest in 1998, his son devoted himself to running messages and painstakingly reconstructing his letters, which were cut up and sewn into the hems of trousers. There was a lot of work and organization involved in rewriting and delivering the messages to the next ‘postman’.

  In 2002 the whole family was arrested for aiding and abetting a fugitive. In prison, separated from her two small daughters, Cinzia suffered from depression and went into a dramatic decline. Her father professed feeling desperately sorry for what he had done to his family. She later co-operated with the police, admitting she had worked for her father. She agreed that he had ruined her life but said she could not have denied him. The Mafia had ruined him; she just wanted to help.

  She blamed not her father, but Provenzano. ‘That man has destroyed our family’, she told magistrates.

  Although the ever-loyal Lipari was evangelical about his friend’s good intentions, his family did not share his view. His wife called Provenzano ‘Saint Brigit’, lacing a code-name with a sharp edge of sarcasm: ‘We need Saint Brigit here. If he was a man with enough balls he’d turn up and say, “Here I am” – he’s got nothing to lose any more, he’s practically dying – he should be locked up, and let fathers with families go home.’

  Alone in his farm cottage, the Boss’s thoughts were very far from on turning himself in. Night and day he kept working. Whatever happened, the pizzini must not ever stop: he had to keep the lines of communication open. If something happened to one of his postmen, he would have him replaced immediately. Any delay, or a pause, and the organization would grind to a halt. Day and night he typed his letters painstakingly, copying out carefully selected sections to send to different people. His careful and profitable management of the organization had become an obsession: he was a sick old man working tirelessly on his legacy.

  One of Provenzano’s major achievements was to restore the loyalty of the prison population. Men who had been caught in the great sweep following Riina’s arrest, most of them from Riina’s faction, would be coming out soon, and some of them could be dangerous. To prevent any revenge attacks Provenzano kept the prison population happy: paying into a fund for their legal expenses, seeking their views on major decisions, making sure their families were taken care of. It was an old-fashioned approach, one disapproved of by the young guns, who were overheard wondering why on earth Provenzano should bother himself about people in prison when there was money to be made. ‘We overheard some of the younger mafiosi complaining about Provenzano wasting his time on prisoners’, said Alfonso Sabella. ‘But he understood that keeping the prison population on your side was vital to prevent Cosa Nostra imploding. He was extremely successful at this – and we don’t know quite how he did it.’

  Those who had
behaved themselves, who had kept a low profile and remained silent, were promoted on their release. ‘When I was chief prosecutor in Palermo,’ recalls anti-Mafia chief Pietro Grasso, ‘I happened to meet two mafiosi whom I had convicted fifteen years before, in the maxi-trial. At that time they were soldiers, on the bottom rung of the organization; now they were regents. I said to them, well done, you’ve made a career of it. They had done their time, paid their debt to society and proved they were trustworthy. When they’d been released, they got their reward: promotion.’

  During the summer of 2005 Provenzano’s mediation skills were called on to deal with an increasingly inflammatory situation in Palermo. He had apparently been paving the way for two powerful Palermo bosses, father and son, to run the organization.

  Salvatore (Totuccio) Lo Piccolo, the most powerful boss in Palermo, had been in hiding for over twenty years. It was no secret that he expected to be the next Boss of Bosses. He was known as ‘the Watch Guy’ or simply ‘Cartier’ after he produced stainless-steel Cartier watches as gifts for Provenzano and Giuffré. An experienced capo who lived modestly and worked hard doing business behind the scenes, he was a dramatic contrast with his son Salvo – a flashy, violent upstart apparently loathed by both investigators and mafiosi.

  At the same time Provenzano was dealing with the ambitions of another Palermo boss, Nino Rotolo, a hot-headed capo presently under house arrest, trying to balance the two men’s power and influence and avoid a war of succession. It was a lesson he had learned from his mentor Luciano Liggio, who had put him and Riina in harness together, drawing on their different strengths – knowing that there was so much rivalry between them that they would never unite to oust him.

  Lo Piccolo had been manoeuvring to build up his power base within Cosa Nostra by linking up with the Inzerillo family – survivors of the Mafia war in the early 1980s and Sicily’s foremost drug traffickers, who had been routed by Riina’s men and fled to the USA. Lo Piccolo had been working with the Inzerillos, building up a significant income stream with the USA, and now, twenty years after they were banished by decree of the commission, they were beginning to come back. Lo Piccolo was paving the way for their safe return to Palermo and had petitioned Provenzano – who, as ever, heard the economic arguments and tried to find a way to make everyone happy.

  In the summer of 2003 police acting on a tip-off staked out a traditional family restaurant, Il Vecchio Mulino, near Palermo, which was hosting a private banquet on a day it was closed to the public. Agents had been told it was a sit-down between Mafia families to settle a row over cattle-rustling. As agents hiding in cars and up trees took photos of the arriving guests, they recognized several old faces: mafiosi from Palermo who had fled for their lives in 1981. This meeting was to do with far more than cattle-rustling.

  Rotolo was one of the most senior bosses in Cosa Nostra, with a high degree of autonomy. He was an assiduous disciple of Provenzano, imitating his style in his letters and preaching the Boss’s message to his men. ‘You have to be loved – it’s very different from being feared. Respect, my friends, is one thing. Fear is a different matter: as soon as you turn round . . . and someone gets the chance, they’ll put a fist in your face. But if you, as they say, do good, no one’s going to touch you.’

  Rotolo knew he would be in the front line if the Inzerillos returned seeking revenge, and he was determined to uphold the commission’s order of banishment. The men who made that ruling are no longer with us, he argued, so we have no authority to change it. Rotolo lived in fear of the Inzerillos’ reprisals, knowing that if anyone came looking for vengeance, they would come to him first. But the scappati, the ‘escapees’, were already slipping back into Sicily, and Provenzano was offering Rotolo no support to hold them back.

  Rotolo was serving a life sentence when he was diagnosed with a dangerous heart condition; he was allowed to serve his sentence under house arrest. But police keeping watch at his villa in a residential estate in western Palermo watched as the supposedly ailing capo leaped over his garden fence and held meetings in a corrugated steel builder’s hut in an alley behind his villa. Agents who were keeping Rotolo under surveillance knew he had anti-bugging detectors. Shortly before the parties arrived, they would deactivate the devices so that the machine would not pick up their presence. Once the room had been ‘swept’ for bugs, the devices would be switched back on.

  As the agents listened, Rotolo would read Provenzano’s letters aloud to his men and comment bitterly on them. Provenzano, realizing he had an explosive situation on his hands, had prevaricated and refused to give Rotolo a free hand. He played for time, telling both sides what they wanted to hear. ‘The agreement was made, they have to stay over there’, he wrote to Lo Piccolo’s man. ‘I was wondering if you know anything about this. I don’t want to comment as yet’, he wrote to Rotolo.

  In his little cottage above Corleone, Provenzano was drawing on all his experience and skills as a mediator to diffuse this potential disaster. His letters were masterpieces of neutrality and ambiguity. ‘I’ve talked to everyone from that family, and we’re in agreement.’

  Rotolo was spitting. ‘Everyone from that family? Which family? The Inzerillos, I suppose!’

  ‘I know nothing more about this matter than you have both told me’, Provenzano continued, with measured formality. ‘I hear you both, but I cannot give my opinion, however much my heart desires it, for several reasons beyond my control. My motto is: may God give us the certainty . . . that we have erred . . . and the strength to come to an agreement, and forgive.’

  ‘Why won’t he take responsibility?’ Rotolo fumed.

  ‘In Cosa Nostra the tendency is to eliminate the potential danger immediately’, says Grasso, ‘and not to take any risks. Provenzano took time to prevaricate . . . he said it wasn’t his decision, only the people who had given the order could revoke it, and they were all in prison. He didn’t resolve the situation, but he bided his time.’

  He was avoiding, with admirable skill, conclusive action by one party or the other and successfully keeping both sides convinced that they had his special attention.

  Provenzano typed: ‘There are only three people left with the power to decide this matter: you, me and Lo Piccolo.’ Rotolo was not satisfied. With the hut wired for sound, police heard how the situation in Palermo was hurtling towards war.

  ‘One shot, here, that’s all it’ll take’, Rotolo instructed his men. The agent listening at the end of the wire realized he was planning to murder Lo Piccolo and his son.

  But while Provenzano had played for time, the Inzerillos were coming home, and the question of the scappati became academic. Rotolo did not have anyone shot, but he did have the satisfaction of kicking one of Lo Piccolo’s men out of the organization. The Boss’s tactics had angered him, but they had, for the moment, held him at bay.

  Provenzano’s talents as a mediator were required in family life as well, where a quarrel over money had blown up into a feud between the three brothers.

  On 8 June, Falco, ‘Hawk’, was on duty in the Palermo HQ, listening to a conversation between Provenzano’s two brothers, Simone and Salvatore, via a device planted in Salvatore’s home in Corleone. The three-storey corner house was wedged into the end of a cul-de-sac, opposite his mother’s family home. It was almost impossible for anyone to drop into the narrow street unobserved, but one of the agents had managed to break into the house and install a bug.

  The brothers were moaning about Binnu, the famous outlaw. A long-standing row about an inheritance was rumbling on, despite the Boss’s immense wealth and the good offices of his nephew Carmelo Gariffo, who was trying to smooth things over. They complained that Bernardo’s sons were getting unfair advantages.

  ‘What the hell did he contact me for’, grumbled Salvatore. ‘Did he really send for me after eight years to have an argument?’

  In the police operations room Hawk strained to hear every word. The brothers’ bitterness was palpable. Binnu’s status as Italy’s most w
anted man was apparently becoming an intolerable burden.

  ‘So he’s still here then.’

  After hours of listening to rambling, irritable conversations Hawk was not sure he had heard right. But when he cleaned up the tape and played it back without the background noise and interference, there it was. ‘Iddu’, they called him: ‘Himself’. There was no doubt who they were talking about. Hawk got straight on the phone to the chief, and told him to come in right away: ‘You’ve got to hear this.’

  These few ill-tempered words by Provenzano’s brother had let the Catturandi know their prey had come home to roost and was living in Corleone.

  17

  The arrest

  T

  HE FAMILY: IT was the last refuge, a natural network when all else failed. Provenzano had gone home to Corleone, where he could be cared for and protected by people he trusted. He had quarrelled with his brothers, it was true, but now he was in difficulties and needed their help.

  The investigation initially focused on the Boss’s favourite nephew, Carmelo Gariffo, who had recently come out of prison and was living just around the corner from Saveria in Corleone. He had evidently lost no time getting back in contact with his uncle, but the police couldn’t follow him without being spotted. Conducting surveillance on foot within Corleone was almost impossible. An agent wandering about the narrow streets would be noticed within minutes, and asking for the neighbours’ co-operation was out of the question. A tiny camera was planted on a street light outside Saveria Palazzolo’s house to record every visitor, every movement to and from the house. Cameras were fixed on Gariffo’s door, just around the corner. Listening devices inside the houses relayed their every word, but no one ever mentioned Provenzano.