‘He was a bit bewildered by finding himself in the midst of a noisy crowd and so much confusion after spending all that time alone. Not that he made a scene, he was perfectly dignified. We tried to create a bit of order, asked the police – who were jostling to get a glimpse of the Boss – to clear out and leave only essential personnel. We made sure he had what he needed. He asked for some medicine, a nurse was called, but I think he had it in a pocket.’
They introduced themselves, though she was aware no introductions were necessary – as the only female member of the team, it was obvious who she was. When Provenzano offered his hand, it was a great moment, something like a diplomatic encounter. ‘It was only a cease-fire’, Sabella says. ‘The next time we saw him he was uncommunicative. But that day I felt sorry for him. He just looked like a sick, old man. He looked beaten.
‘It was hard to register that what we had waited for so long was actually happening . . . that he was there in front of us.’
After Provenzano was escorted out for the short drive to the airfield Sabella and her colleagues drove up to the farm, to examine for themselves the conditions in which he had been living. After months of concentrated detective work it was a strange experience.
‘Going into the hideout, I had a moment of déjà vu. We had studied his habits and methods in such depth, I felt like I already knew everything that was there’, says Sabella. ‘I had the feeling of having been there many times: everything was strangely familiar. Through the pizzini and the pentiti’s reports we were aware of a lot of his habits and needs, and we recognized many things from descriptions. We found exactly what we expected to find.’
Sabella was, however, shocked by the Boss’s living conditions. ‘It was a rustic cottage kept in the most appalling state’, she said. ‘The standards of hygiene in the kitchen left a lot to be desired – the stove was filthy with baked-on food.’ However, a new bathroom had obviously been built on the side of the cottage, with a shower, lavatory and sink, and that was clean.
‘He was quite well organized: he had sent his dirty laundry to be washed just about every day, and the freezer was full of meat. There had been a problem with the television, and there were written instructions from his son on how to make it work.’
The police had been instructed to seal off Marino’s farmyard and make a thorough and detailed search or the contents of the Boss’s last hideout. After the fiasco of Riina’s hideout, which the carabinieri had not only failed to search but did not guard, leaving mafiosi free to go in and remove important evidence, it was vital that no such omissions were repeated. It was hoped that the contents of Provenzano’s hideout would give important clues as to how he had remained hidden for so long, and over the following days an exhaustive inventory was made, of everything from thirty rolls of Sellotape to incontinence pads for his prostate problem. Outside the cottage two handguns were found hidden under a large stone. There were bundles of cash, each one counted, tied and systematically labelled with the name of the person it was going to. It was an orderly, centralized financial system. There was a calculator with a bit of cardboard taped to the back giving the conversion rate of old lire to Euros.
In his typewriter there was a letter he was writing to his wife; on one side there were the pizzini he had to reply to, on the other, the ones he had already answered. ‘He apparently worked with an in-box and out-box, like any normal office worker’, remarked Gualtieri. ‘Obviously this is how he spent all his days; it was slow and arduous work. He had to answer the letters straight away, otherwise the Mafia machine would grind to a halt.’
Like his colleague, Michele Prestipino found the boss’s hideout gratifyingly familiar: ‘We had been told by several pentiti that Provenzano always carried with him a blue backpack, a sleeping bag and an electronic wand for detecting listening devices’, he said. ‘When we got to the hideout, there they were: the backpack, the sleeping bag, the wand.’
‘Everything was arranged for him to stay shut inside’, Sabella observed. ‘In a way, he was buried alive.
‘He is a peasant at heart. The other bosses, like Brusca, loved buying expensive stuff, they had Rolexes and Ferraris . . . if Provenzano had wanted a Rolex, he could have had one; his followers would have trampled each other to get him one. What he wanted was power.’
From all the stuff he had collected, it appeared Provenzano had been at the cottage for at least a year, and he may not have been planning to stay long. ‘I had the impression he was about to leave this place’, said Sabella. ‘He had a suitcase packed and ready, and he’d written an inventory of everything in it. And there was something in one of the letters from his son, which said: “If you’re still there. . .”.’
He never managed to move on to the next hiding place. There in the little farm cottage stinking of cheese, cupboards stuffed with someone else’s old clothes, bags full of rotting vegetables, the Boss of Bosses, the man who had saved Cosa Nostra from self-destructing, saw his Mafia career brought to a sudden, non-violent end.
Epilogue
S
INCE THE PRISON door swung shut behind the Boss of Bosses a series of trials has opened, reopened and gathered pace. At the time of writing, eight trials are currently ongoing.32 These days Provenzano, for so many years the absent star defendant, attends court proceedings via video link. Sitting in front of a camera in the prison’s specially equipped witness room, he endures the tortures of the damned listening to his former friend Nino Giuffré.
Giuffré is led into court, tall and imposing, his grey hair cropped short, his face expressionless. At times it seems as though his infernal punishment will never end: he must keep returning to courtrooms all over the country, answering the same questions again and again. He takes his position behind a hospital screen. From the public benches one can just see a foot punctuating his cadences, tapping rhythmically in a slip-on shoe.
Once the witness is in place, the screen lights up as the video link is activated. The Boss is at his post, sitting at a prison table with the camera trained on him. He answers to confirm his name, but nothing more. Occasionally he makes a phone call to his lawyer, to ask a question or locate a document. Much of the time he takes notes or reads the papers laid out meticulously in front of him. Years of keeping tabs on many complex deals have given him the habit of fastidious note-taking.
Who knew Giuffré could talk so much? Manuzza, with his crippled hand, so hard-faced, taciturn and closed – when did he get so chatty? In a low growl, full of deference to the prosecutors and the judges, reserving his withering scorn for Provenzano’s lawyers, Giuffré talks and talks. He asks permission to embark on digressions to explain the meaning of some incident or to express his judgement on a particular individual. Sometimes even the judge wishes he would shut up and begs the prosecutor to stop him. ‘Do please interrupt the collaborator when you can see he is setting off on a tangent that doesn’t concern us.’ At times he seems to enjoy retelling the more extreme episodes of his life in crime, beginning long parentheses with phrases like ‘One fine day . . .’. When he finishes his answers, he gives a courteous signal: ‘Prego’. Next question. Ask me anything. Provenzano, framed on the screen mounted over the judges’ table, takes notes, ponders and reads his legal papers. Occasionally, when the litany of betrayal gets too much, he gets up in disgust and walks out of shot. He would rather sit in his cell than listen to this.
Since his arrest Provenzano has admitted little more than his name. Much about his long period in hiding is still a mystery. The contents of his last refuge were exhaustively catalogued (‘One plastic fly swat with metal handle. One small white plastic plug for a handbasin, attached to a metal chain. One set of bathroom scales. One transparent container with lid labelled Nestlé containing foul-smelling vegetables . . .’). They revealed his lifestyle, his tastes, his health and sanitary problems, his religion, musical tastes, preferred brand of toothpaste, mania for writing things down. They did not reveal one detail about his business affairs, or about the political co
nnections that had kept him out of gaol for so long.
Conspiracy theorists claimed Provenzano had been expecting the police any day, and that he had made sure to dispose of any important document. The supergrass Tommaso Buscetta, who died in April 2000, had a theory that for Provenzano to survive the years of Riina’s bloody assault on the rest of the world he must have had a powerful protector. The anti-Mafia chief Pietro Grasso believes that the Boss was protected not by one individual politician but by an entire system, from the grassroots to the height of political influence, colluding with Cosa Nostra. The acquittal of the two carabinieri who had failed to search Riina’s hideout brought us no closer to the truth about who was protecting the Mafia’s secrets.
According to some, renewed negotiations between the Mafia and certain authorities may well have begun in 2001. Assistant prosecutor Alfonso Sabella was at the ministry of justice. ‘There were strange things going on among the prisoners. One of the more senior Mafia figures had volunteered for a cleaning job that gave him access to different floors. Now no mafioso of this man’s rank would have taken a cleaning job, out of principle. It would have been beneath him. So it was clear to me that something was going on. I realized there was a negotiation in progress, and I wrote a report to that effect.
‘As soon as I delivered my memo, the very next day, my office at the ministry was closed, and I lost my job.’
Provenzano still has some power: he is master of his secrets. Every request he granted, every recommendation for an employee or a political candidate, every guarantee he made, is logged somewhere. Up to now his lawyers have played down his role in the last two decades of Mafia history, but like his first master, Luciano Liggio, he may end up dragging others down with him.
Prosecutors suspect that, like Liggio, Provenzano has successfully hidden his fortune behind a complex trail of foreign investments and property deals, private health companies and shares in construction companies. After Riina’s arrest, land and assets worth £200 million were confiscated in the first couple of years. Nothing like that amount has been traced to Provenzano. Eighteen months after the arrest the authorities seized properties in the tourist resort of San Vito Lo Capo to the value of €1 million.
However, the state is exacting its meticulous revenge. When magistrates asked Provenzano if he was married, he replied, ‘In my heart’. He would like to be married on paper too – but the terms of his incarceration are harsh: he may receive visitors only behind a Perspex screen, and if he wanted to get married, that screen would stand between him and Saveria. They would not be able to touch or kiss. It is inhuman, they insist, but so far the authorities have not relented: the law denies any expression of human tenderness to convicted mafiosi. The authorities may decide that Bernardo Provenzano and his long-time companion have already enjoyed enough privileges.
Saveria clearly longs to be married to her man. When a friend recently told her she was marrying the father of her children, Saveria said she was very happy for her. The friend said she wasn’t that hung up on the idea of marriage, after all these years. Saveria took her friend’s hand in hers, and gave her an earnest look. ‘If you can do it,’ she said solemnly, ‘you should.’
Provenzano’s health is not improving; he’s receiving hormone treatment, but according to his lawyer, his thyroid is swelling and he’s increasingly uncomfortable. His state of health is not improved by his fastidious temperament and having hours of the day to worry about his physical symptoms, as is his wont, with nothing to distract him. He recently wrote to his lawyer complaining that he felt the doctors had ‘abandoned him’. He is not allowed a typewriter and takes a long time to write by hand, so his deeply ingrained epistolary habits of the last decade have been effectively denied him.
Saveria’s letters take a month to arrive, and each one is opened, read and censored. Lawyers and clients who want to have face-to-face meetings must submit to invasive body searches before and after the meetings. Even with his incontinence problems, Provenzano is not allowed to keep more than one spare pair of trousers in his cell. Although prison conditions are grim, he does not complain. According to his legal team, he suffers in silence, but they can tell. Some weeks he has two or more court appearances, in trials for crimes that date as far back as 1969. It is scarcely surprising he sometimes gets confused.
His sons, Angelo and Paolo, can breathe a bit easier now their father’s in prison; they don’t have to worry about his health or answer his incessant demands. Once a month they accompany their mother on the ferry to Genoa, then the long drive to the prison for the visiting hour. Saveria has spent so long confined to a small area that she can’t cope with these gruelling trips alone. Then, as soon as they had got the routine of the trip to Umbria down pat, their father was moved to Novara.
Paolo, who seemed to have made his escape from Corleone, has come back from Germany, having lost his college job. Pressure from the media was extremely embarrassing for a young man hired to improve the image of Italians abroad. The college authorities were understanding, but Paolo did not want to put them under that sort of strain and packed his bags. He is currently looking at courses to get some other qualification.
The two brothers gave their first interview, to the BBC, in 2007, in which they were filmed in their lawyer’s office in Palermo. Speaking on camera for the first time, they seemed very tense, staring, presumably as instructed, fixedly at their lawyer, the exuberant Rosalba de Gregorio. Angelo was fiddling nervously, entwining his delicate fingers around each other and smoking. Physically he is much lighter than his brother, with chestnut hair, like his father, and the same green eyes and glasses. His expression changes from laughter to deadly seriousness in a moment, and, like his brother, his emotions seem very close to the surface. Paolo is taller, a little heavier and dark, with brown eyes and thick, curly black hair. They talked in bursts, as though they have so much to say that they will never let out.
‘Physically he’s not doing too badly’, Angelo says in response to the lawyer’s question.
‘He is a bit better,’ Paolo goes on, ‘but he’s still disoriented. He’s going to need a bit of time to get used to being in solitary. The only people he talks to are the guards, so you can imagine . . .
‘He got the bag of laundry OK this time, but there’s still a problem with sending him books.’
Asked about his relationship with his father, Angelo said he had given him sound advice such as ‘Get up early in the morning,’ and ‘Do unto others as you would like them to do unto you.’
‘They may be small phrases, but they are the things that stay with you for your whole life.’
Paolo spoke up. ‘I can’t say that my memories of my father correspond in any way with what the papers or the police say about him.’
On the subject of their father’s guilt the two men seem to have no way of grasping what he may have done. They make it clear they could never accept the evidence, as that would mean they would have to judge him, and this they would never do. ‘I don’t believe, I don’t want to believe any of it, in the sense that he is my father, and he is a man’, says Angelo. ‘He may have made mistakes. He may have made choices that I know nothing about. But that is basically his business, those are his choices. As far as I’m concerned, he will always be my father.’
‘Everyone who says he is the godfather of Cosa Nostra has to accept that there are many godfathers’, Paolo says, doing his best to minimize his father’s reputation. ‘If you take one out, another one pops up. There’s always another one coming along.’
The brothers may have decided it is time they did a little positive PR. After years of being left out of any Mafia inquiry, in 2007 Angelo’s name came up in an investigation into protection rackets. Police taping conversations between a Palermo capo and one of his men heard them discussing how a victim of extortion said he was going to appeal to Angelo for help. Palermo’s chief prosecutor was quick to announce that Angelo would not be subject to a criminal investigation, but clearly he needs to do m
ore than simply lead a law-abiding life. Giovanni Impastato, whose brother was murdered for campaigning against the Mafia (of which their father was a member), believes the Provenzano boys should publicly renounce Cosa Nostra.
Will Angelo ever make a clean break from his father? Historian Salvatore Lupo says, ‘Any boss who has accumulated enough capital can get away and make a new start somewhere far away. In another country his sons can become part of the middle classes like anyone else. But if he doesn’t move away, the Mafia is always ready to pull him back in.’
Provenzano’s careful stalling and sustained negotiation had avoided a war between the Palermo clans led by Salvatore Lo Piccolo and Nino Rotolo, but after his arrest there was a very real danger that the conflict could be re-ignited in a contest for the leadership of Cosa Nostra. But in June 2006, in an operation code-named Gotha (Ruling Class), Rotolo and several of his closest supporters were arrested.
Once Rotolo was behind bars, the American scappati - members of the Inzerillo family driven into exile in the 1980s - met no further opposition to their return. At the point Salvatore Lo Piccolo was considered to be the boss, and still faithful to Bernardo Provenzano. Investigators believed he and his son were rebuilding the transatlantic partnership that created a massive international heroin trade. There are those who believe the Inzerillos are planning to take revenge on the Corleonesi.
‘There was a battle for power in which one side was cut out, almost eliminated, and now the heirs of those people are coming back’, says Lupo. ‘It’s possible that the power struggle will start again.
‘This conflict was not resolved in the usual way. In most circumstances, if there is a conflict, it explodes in violence, then the two sides come to terms. But this was different: it involved the annihilation of one side. We haven’t figured out why, and we have yet to see how the whole story turns out. There’s a group of mafiosi today who are very worried about the return of the Inzerillos, that they might take their revenge – which is unusual, because the Mafia in general is nothing if not pragmatic, and long violent feuds are disadvantageous in every way. There has to be a reason why this violent conflict is impossible to resolve.’
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