Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  While the prosecutors argued, sinister forces were at work, threatening Falcone’s use of ‘penitent’ mafiosi. In May 1989 Salvatore Contorno, who had been in hiding in the USA after giving important testimony in the maxi-trial, suddenly turned up in Sicily. Police arrested him in a hideout stacked with guns of every size and calibre. He had apparently returned to wreak his revenge on the Corleonesi. As conspiracy theories abounded, Falcone was accused of letting Contorno come back to kill off the mafiosi he couldn’t catch.

  A rebellion began to foment against Riina’s leadership among capos and soldiers who felt his iron rule too harsh. Even his brother-in-law Leoluca Bagarella was angry enough to talk about a rebellion: he had been told he couldn’t marry his fiancée because her uncle (the strangler) had been murdered, which would have lowered his status.

  By 1991 the situation had got so bad that finally government ministers realized they could not turn a blind eye to organized crime any longer. After a government reshuffle Claudio Martelli, the justice minister, saw an opportunity to make his mark. Never mind that just a few years earlier, he had been campaigning against the magistrature. He invited Falcone to become director of penal affairs in the Ministry of Justice, and Falcone, exhausted by the jostling and backbiting, the poison and rumour-mongering in Palermo, accepted. Against all the odds it was the beginning of a serious fightback against Cosa Nostra.

  Falcone initiated a review of organized crime cases across the whole country, which resulted in the rearrest of bosses just released from prison, including Michele Greco. Magistrates suspected of leniency towards Mafia defendants were scratched off any lists for new positions. A super-prosecutor’s office was planned, to co-ordinate organized crime investigations across the country, while specialist local anti-Mafia pools were created. Finally the government accepted the importance of a co-ordinated anti-Mafia strategy.

  Corrupt councils were dissolved in towns, including Bagheria, across the south, wherever the Mafia had infiltrated local government and drained funds. As the maxi-trial sentences came up for review, the judge who had overturned several sentences against mafiosi, Corrado ‘sentence killer’ Carnevale, was transferred.13

  After years of complacency the anti-Mafia crusade finally became a vote-winner, and political parties came under pressure to root out Mafia candidates in Sicily and elsewhere. Riina’s violent regime had provoked a devastating response. The capos, weary and disoriented by so much violence, were disaffected.

  The difference in approach between Riina and his joint leader had become more marked than ever. The capos closest to the highest echelons of Cosa Nostra gravitated to one side or the other as they tended towards the policy of violence or of industry.

  ‘Ordinary people supported him [Provenzano]’, said one mafioso, not knowing the police were listening to his every word. ‘They didn’t support that other one [Riina], who was serving the interests of a handful of crazy maniacs. I gave these people my life. I am honest enough to admit it, Riina is a complete madman. The other one is more moderate, let’s face it. I’ve talked to the old man [Provenzano], I’ve eaten meals with him. He is a completely different proposition. Wise.’14

  Brusca, ‘the Executioner’, remained loyal to his godfather, Riina, who was a man after his own heart. He admired him, and he feared him. He liked the fact that he could joke around with Riina in a way he never could with his own father, but he retained a healthy respect for his anger. ‘If anyone needed money, Riina would be the first to put his hand in his pocket. But if any of us tried to trick or shortchange him, he went berserk. He’s generous in his own way. In general, if there was a problem that needed sorting out, he would give his answer, yes or no. You knew where you stood. But with Provenzano – never.’

  Some felt judged by Provenzano’s clean-living, pious style. Matteo Messina Denaro, an ambitious, womanizing young blood from the west coast, Playstation junkie and chain smoker, was no great fan of Uncle Binnu either; according to Brusca, ‘he was Riina’s man, and never got on with Provenzano.’

  Provenzano gathered around him a loyal band of moderates: the developer Pino Lipari, who had been convicted of Mafia association in the maxi-trial but continued to serve; his great friend Piddu Madonia, scion of a Mafia dynasty and loyal deputy; and the young, charismatic boss of Santa Maria di Gesù, Pietro Aglieri. Nino Giuffré, coolly detached, quietly building up his own empire around Caccamo, remained on the sidelines for now.

  Onofrio Morreale was a trusted member of the upcoming generation, particularly favoured by Provenzano. If he was known at all to the Bagheria Mafia, it was as a common armed robber. But Provenzano chose him personally as his ‘pupil’, according to Giuffré: Provenzano presented him for initiation to Cosa Nostra in a ceremony kept secret from all but a handful of insiders. While the situation in Bagheria was somewhat volatile, Morreale’s privileged position was kept quiet. Later he was engaged to Nicolò Eucaliptus’s daughter and considered the natural heir to Provenzano in Bagheria.

  In the organization at large there was a motion to split from the Corleonesi, but you didn’t divorce a violent abusive boss like Riina with impunity. The only way out seemed to be to annihilate Cosa Nostra itself. A group of bosses held a meeting to discuss dissolving the organization, laying down their arms and splitting up the families. ‘We were talking about breaking up the whole thing, before 1990’, said Nino Giuffré. ‘In the ’60s Cosa Nostra had been dissolved and gone underground, so there was a line of thought, particularly amongst the older members, that we could close the whole thing down and start up again once things had calmed down. If we had, we would have avoided so much evil. But the Corleonesi wouldn’t do it.’

  Provenzano, for all that he disagreed with Riina’s methods, was one of those Corleonesi. Throughout this phase of mounting disaffection within Cosa Nostra he bided his time, plotting his own strategy. Plotting, perhaps, how to remove Riina and take his place.

  In the meantime Provenzano and Riina met regularly on Saturday afternoons, to discuss business and settle up payments. Provenzano would be dropped off by his regular driver, Ciccio Pastoia, at the Città Mercato, the biggest shopping centre on the outskirts of Palermo, and picked up by Riina’s driver. He’d be taken to the nearby house of a trusted intermediary, where Riina would be waiting. These meetings were almost always in private, just the two of them. They would never talk on the telephone, so these meetings were the forum for all their planning and accounting. If they were at times explosive, their hosts were too discreet to hear it.

  While the storm gathered about them, towards the end of summer 1991 many of the most powerful Corleonesi were living in hiding in and around Trapani, on the western tip of the island. They lived as though the apocalypse they had created was far away, in a dream. Trapani is an ancient port, with a picturesque historic centre within ancient stone walls. The cobbled streets twist and turn around the fixed point of the cathedral. The modern city spreads out from the city walls, its traffic-choked streets sprawling along the coast and up the hills behind.

  Along these streets the fugitive boss Bernardo Provenzano buzzed on his moped, hopping between Trapani and the Mafia fiefdom of Mazara del Vallo. Provenzano lived like a normal citizen during this turbulent period. And not just him but the other Corleonesi as well: Riina, Bagarella and Brusca. It was quite an undertaking for the boss of the local Mafia family responsible for their safety and hospitality. Each one had a villa for himself and his family to live in, a bodyguard and driver assigned to him, and a trusted messenger.

  The mafiosi had money, and they had style: Armani and Rolex watches. Provenzano favoured cashmere suits and silk shirts. One young mafioso was most impressed when he met ‘the Accountant’ (he would never dare to call him Uncle Binnu, and certainly never heard him called ‘the Tractor’). He described ‘a very distinguished gentleman, about sixty, very well kept. He was wearing a yellow polo shirt, buttoned up to the neck, and a checked jacket. What made the greatest impression on me were his shoes: they were beautif
ully made, in brown leather, with an oval painted on, and a flying duck.’15

  Provenzano would receive such extravagant items as gifts, but he wore them as curiosities: they meant very little to him. What gave him the most pleasure was a set of clothes that would help him blend into the background – wherever he found himself.

  Life among the fugitive bosses was congenial; they were like a big happy family, as Giovanni Brusca describes it, ‘before the poison set in, before the betrayals, the confessions’.

  Banquets had always been an important part of the Corleonesi’s style: after a major victory, a summit or a ceremony to initiate new members they would have a great feast. They were important bonding occasions, to consolidate a feeling that the men were all working and fighting together, on the same side. They were ostentatious occasions: everyone would bring something – everyone had to bring something, and the arrival at the banquet would look like the journey of the magi, as twenty or thirty gangsters arrived bearing gift-wrapped boxes.

  Serious gastronomy is a manly concern in Sicily; every Sunday men drive many miles to get the best beef cuts or the freshest cheese. The guests would outdo each other to bring something particularly good. They would bring pasta al forno, with ragù and tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese that melted into long strings; some would bring packages of meat that the barbecue king, the bearded murderer Calogero Ganci, would sear expertly on his home-built grill. They’d bring fish, or seafood, to be grilled and spruzzed with lemon and olive oil. On one occasion Giovanni Brusca brought prawns and scoffed the lot while the other guests were distracted by the beefsteaks and involtini of minced veal and melting caciocavallo cheese. The rest would bring puddings: cannoli from Piana degli Albanesi, the little mountain town isolated from the world, where the sheep’s-milk ricotta makes the perfect sweet creamy filling. There would be the best local wines to drink, and cases of champagne.

  These men-only banquets were exuberant occasions where this happy band of murderers could let off steam, releasing some of the tension that had built up between them and the continual stress under which they lived from day to day. Totò Riina, who was naturally sociable, would be ready with witty put-downs; even the normally grim-faced Leoluca Bagarella would lighten up. The banquets would last six or seven hours and would usually end with a food fight or a dousing with buckets of water. Once, Brusca recalled, the Trapani boss was trapped on a table, screaming for mercy, surrounded by murderers trying to tickle him.

  The festive scene was very different from another Christmas banquet, some years before, when the Corleonesi were rising to power. In 1982 Riina had invited Rosario Riccobono, boss of Partanna Mondello, to the west of Palermo, and his men, to a friendly barbecue. Riccobono had tried to prove his loyalty to the ambitious Riina by betraying members of his own family, but he underestimated Riina’s notion of loyalty. After a congenial barbecue, sated on grilled spicy salsiccia and beefsteak, Riccobono dropped off in his chair. He was woken by his host’s executioners, tightening a rope around his neck. None of his men survived that festive celebration.

  The Christmas banquet in 1991 was celebrated in Mazara del Vallo in style: the Corleonesi wanted to show they were riding high. The major capos were all there, and Riina presided, becoming his jovial self as such occasions demanded, teasing and wisecracking with his men. The Christmas feast was a welcome occasion to laugh and joke with each other and, for the time being, forget what loomed on the horizon. But there was one boss who wasn’t present on that Christmas Day.

  Provenzano spent the day riding around Mazara del Vallo on his moped. He explained that it was for security reasons, so that he and Riina could not be taken together – in the past both police and Cosa Nostra had used the quiet days of Christmas to strike. The ostentatious banqueting culture was not to his taste, it smacked of decadence. This was to be the last of the great formal Mafia feasts: under Provenzano’s rule only a trusted few were ever invited to sit down with the boss, and no one went to restaurants any more. Such extravagance, such risky effusion, was no longer the order of the day.

  By staying away, Provenzano also put a further distance between himself and Riina’s bloody dictatorship. He had seen what was coming, and he didn’t like it.

  6

  Family matters

  O

  N A BRIGHT sunday morning in Corleone on 5 April 1992 the carabiniere barracks were abuzz. It was election day, and the armed forces were on the alert throughout Italy, but this local anticipation had less to do with politics than with a highly unusual visitor.

  The imposing yellow barracks dominated the wide central square of Corleone, set back behind a high wall. Its courtyard, bristling with palm trees, echoed with the sound of striding boots. Cars parked under the trees outside the gate were showered with blossom. Across the square a few tables were arranged on the pavement outside the bar, but the locals drank their coffee inside, talking earnestly about the impostors from the north who claimed to represent their interests. A huge hoarding advertised ‘Don Corleone’s aperitif’. In front of the barracks, behind a cast-iron fence, a garden stood closed and locked, its fountains dry, its plants withering among the rubbish left by night-time trespassers.

  A few days earlier the carabinieri had received a visit from Bernardo Provenzano’s lawyer announcing that his long-time companion, Saveria Benedetta Palazzolo, would be coming to live in Corleone, bringing her sons with her.

  The former seamstress had disappeared from view more than fifteen years earlier, after a brief courtship with the outlaw from Corleone, and was presumed to have been living with him as a fugitive all these years. The lawyer had insisted on total secrecy, to avoid a press scrum.

  Saveria arrived promptly at the station with her lawyer and her sons in tow. She hurried in through the tall gates, her heels clicking over the flagstones. She wore a dark suit and pearl ear-rings – an ageing look for her forty-seven years. Her greying hair was swept back from her face, which had an intelligent, if guarded, look. Her eyes were pale blue and penetrating, with sharp, expressive eyebrows and high cheekbones. If she was nervous about voluntarily entering a carabiniere station after years of avoiding the police, she certainly didn’t let it show.

  ‘Signora Palazzolo here has come to see the captain’, her lawyer announced to a young officer on the desk.

  ‘Well, he’s extremely busy, you know there’s an election . . .’

  ‘I don’t think you understand. Signora Palazzolo Provenzano is here to see the captain’, the lawyer explained.

  The young officer blanched and leaped into action, fairly running off to inform his senior officer that the distinguished visitor had arrived.

  Signora Palazzolo was ushered into the captain’s office, anxious to get the formalities over with, and drew on all her reserves of dignity to confirm her personal details: ‘Born in Cinisi, in Palermo district, on 13 July 1945, permanent address via Generale Artale 48, Cinisi.’ She announced, for the official record, her boys’ names and ages, and their paternity. The two boys, aged nine and sixteen, acutely uncomfortable and sensing themselves observed, listened in silent humiliation. Years later they described that fateful day in an interview with the BBC.

  ‘At the police station that day they asked us a lot of questions’, said Angelo. ‘It was a very strange thing for me, I’d never been in that situation before. I felt like a fish out of water. I was sixteen, and he [Paolo] was only nine, he didn’t even understand what was going on, they just stood him in the corner.’

  ‘I was just watching what was going on and not really understanding, as usual’, added Paolo, laughing.

  ‘They asked all the usual questions that have been asked of us endlessly – where had we been, who had been protecting us . . . but these are questions I will never answer.’

  What had life been like for them on the run, before they and their mother came out of hiding to live in Corleone?

  ‘I’ll give you a short answer, but I’m not going to explain it’, Angelo replied. ‘It was li
ke being under house arrest.’

  The captain was longing for answers to his questions, but he could not insist: he remained congenial and respectful, hoping, perhaps, to build a good rapport with the Boss’s wife. The wife of one of Italy’s most wanted was sitting in front of him, and there was nothing the captain could do to make her tell him where he was. He ventured: ‘I hope your husband will follow your excellent example . . .’ Every time he mentioned her husband, she raised her eyes heavenwards, with exasperation, or possibly hinting that he was no longer on this earth.

  The warrant for Palazzolo’s arrest had been revoked some months previously, after her three-year sentence for money-laundering had been commuted to aiding and abetting, which for family members was not a crime (Italian law has always favoured the principle of keeping the family sacred, a principle that the Mafia has always successfully exploited). There had been frenzied preparation for this apparently spontaneous appearance: her lawyer had been working for months to make sure that there was no risk of her being arrested. Tommaso Cannella, one of her husband’s closest allies and his strategist, had smoothed the way for her return by obtaining guarantees from local politicians that there would be no trouble.

  ‘I have no outstanding debt to the law’, announced the Boss’s wife. ‘I wish to reside in Corleone undisturbed, I intend to bring up my boys here, and I will be living with my brother-in-law Salvatore.’

  With that announcement she had clearly said all she intended to, and her manner left no opening for further questions. The carabinieri had, for the first time in over two decades, a living link to one of their most wanted criminals, within their grasp – but they could find no pretext to detain her. Instead, they politely gave her a lift up the hill to her brother-in-law’s house, a large but unpretentious ochre town house on the corner of via Colletti, a narrow cul-de-sac in the old part of town.