Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  In a letter to one of the Palermo capos Provenzano explains that paying protection is not an imposition but an opportunity: ‘Let me know whatever they need, they must expect nothing but good from us.’

  ‘Provenzano’s skill was to keep everyone happy,’ says Pietro Grasso, ‘he managed to resolve everyone’s problems.’

  Keep God on your side

  ‘May the lord bless you and keep you . . . know that where I can be of use to you, with the will of God, I am completely at your disposal . . .’

  Provenzano’s letters, each one signed off in the same way, read like the parish priest’s homily. He would send tracts copied from the Bible to his followers. His show of religious fervour was an important part of the process of rehabilitating Cosa Nostra after the devastation of Riina’s regime.

  The Mafia has always laid claim to the religious high ground. ‘The mafioso has God behind him’, writes the editor of the Catholic magazine Segno. ‘His life is at one with the will and the law of God, in relation to which his role is as a kind of official priest and representative.’

  The Church has traditionally been reticent about the Mafia: one priest regularly heard the confessions of Pietro Aglieri; another performed the marriage ceremony between the fugitive Totò Riina and Ninetta Bagarella. But Riina’s war against the state finally stirred the Vatican out of its torpor, provoking a surprisingly strong attack from the Pope. In May 1993 John Paul II visited Sicily and made an emotional speech, waving a defiant fist and decrying the Mafia’s inhumanity, its culture of death. ‘Mafiosi, you must convert!’ he cried out.

  Re-establishing an ideology rooted in Catholic principles appeared to be an important part of Provenzano’s strategy, and he adopted a pastoral role that would appeal to many of his men: ‘With the will of God I would be a servant. Command me and, if possible, with calm and caution let’s see if we can make progress and work together.’

  His pastoral role clearly had the desired effect on some of his followers. His loyal friend Lipari wrote to him: ‘You are altruistic, wise, you take life as it comes, like a gift from God. Your faith is strong and sustains you. God has enlightened you . . .’

  In his letters Provenzano invokes the Lord’s good offices in matters of security: ‘It would give me great pleasure to see you in person, but at the moment this isn’t possible, but we will meet, if God wills it, and soon.’ He also invoked God in matters of violence, when necessary. When Provenzano’s aggressive war against the violent splinter groups in Gela was brought to an end, at a cost of 300 mostly young lives, he praised God: ‘I thank you from my heart, if this is true as you say, but for now no compliments, let us pray to our Heavenly Father, who guides us to do Good Works.’

  In one of the letters discussing a murder plot, Provenzano writes: ‘I’ve got nothing to say except let the will of God be done.’ With this, the Boss’s implied consent, the man died.25

  While Provenzano’s use of pious language was an effective public relations exercise, adding authority and gravitas to his letters, it has been given a more sinister interpretation. The only thing Provenzano has requested in prison is a Bible – not just any Bible, but his own – the one he had underlined, annotated and scribbled on during his years of composing and decoding pizzini. Investigators were convinced that a man so intent on restoring the Mafia’s good appearance would use a Bible to construct his secret code.

  But it seems increasingly likely that Provenzano’s Bible was, in fact, just a Bible. After making a thorough search of the volume, the Servizio Centrale Operativo (SCO), the police organized crime unit, reported that Provenzano seemed to have combed the Bible for texts to sustain a Mafia boss in his endeavours, and give him strength. ‘In general, one observes a certain attention to rules, to punishments, guilt, and vengeance, as though he were searching the book for some inspiration and authority to support him in his responsibilities and the decisions which were a necessary part of being the head of an organization.’

  Reinvention

  ‘I beg your forgiveness for the errors in my writing . . .’

  Every letter from the boss ends with the same sign-off: a saintly and affectionate benediction and an apology for grammatical errors. The bad spelling and schoolboy mistakes detracted nothing from the authority of its writer. For a man who moved easily in the worlds of business and politics it was apparently part of an elaborate disguise.

  One clue comes to us from a recorded conversation between Provenzano’s long-time associate Pino Lipari and his son, in which Lipari instructs his son to make deliberate grammatical mistakes when writing to Provenzano, as he himself does.

  ‘It’s all spelt badly, the grammar’s all wrong . . . I put the bad grammar in . . . it’s done on purpose, do you see? Get some verbs wrong, the odd word . . . do you see what I mean, Arturo?’

  This could mean that Lipari has understood by osmosis the political advantage of imitating your superiors, but it could be so that the police would think they were looking for an illiterate clod.

  One of the major reasons Bernardo Provenzano managed to live undetected for so long was that people still thought of him as a brainless killer, thanks to Luciano Liggio’s deathless phrase: ‘He shoots like a god, shame he has the brains of a chicken.’ Investigators spent decades trying to locate a dumb bully boy. When police wires picked up mafiosi talking about u ragioniere, ‘the Accountant’, whose advice and adjudication was sought on matters of business and finance, it never occurred to them it could be the same person. According to supergrass Tommaso Buscetta, if you asked most mafiosi they wouldn’t be able to say whether Binnu was an idiot or a genius.

  The man known as ‘the Tractor’ disappeared before his twenty-fifth birthday, when he was running a political campaign for Luciano Liggio’s favoured candidate. During his career in Cosa Nostra he transformed himself from a hired killer setting fire to hayricks and stealing cattle into a business investor, political mastermind and, ultimately, strategist and leader.

  When he was arrested, his expensive clothes and toiletries revealed he was used to a comfortable existence in the salons of Palermo, wearing silk and cashmere, and Armani aftershave. As the most powerful Mafia boss of the last generation, and the longest-surviving fugitive from the law, he was also a hardened survivor, living in a freezing mountain shepherd’s hut stinking of cheese, eating maggoty greens.

  ‘When I got out of prison in 1993,’ Giuffré recalled, ‘I found a changed Provenzano from the warrior he was; now he was showing signs of saintliness. After the bombings, he was urgently looking for a remedy. He became a different person, above all in the way he expressed himself.’

  ‘We have an image of him bashing a man’s brains out with the heel of a gun’, says police chief Giuseppe Gualtieri. ‘Now he’s become a political strategist.’

  With Provenzano’s new directives, not only did the headline-grabbing violence cease, but Provenzano managed to dissociate himself from the violence that had gone before. Among all the collaborators who were giving their version of events to investigators, there was not one who could recall a meeting at which Provenzano gave an explicit order to kill.

  The new boss had an acute sense of public relations and the importance of creating an image. Giuffré was impressed: ‘Lipari and Cannella [Provenzano’s strategists] helped him get his virginity back; like everyone else, he had emerged from the bombings with his reputation in tatters. They had to restore his image. So this little group was identified as having been against the bombings – which was not true at all; Provenzano, in matters of politics, and therefore of political assassinations, had always been number one.’

  Provenzano’s transformative genius enabled him to live for forty-three years as a fugitive from justice. He became known as The Phantom of Corleone, since many believed that he had never strayed far from his home town, and yet no one could find him.

  ‘It’s not that he changed, he just understood what was required at the time, and responded to that’, wrote the Mafia expert, sociolo
gist and anti-Mafia campaigner Umberto Santino. ‘He’s been a man for all seasons: killer for Luciano Liggio in his youth, bomber with Riina in the ’80s and early ’90s; when Cosa Nostra was beaten and had to put a brave face on defeat, he became a moderator . . . he showed yet again how the Mafia can keep transforming itself and stay the same.’

  Modesty

  ‘They want me to tell them what to do, but who am I to tell them how to behave?’ Provenzano wrote to Giuffré.

  Many of the letters have the solemn and affectionate tone of a father writing to his children. Provenzano never wanted to be a tyrant; he wanted to be a ‘kindly dictator’. In deliberately avoiding the hectoring tones of Riina, Provenzano adopts an earnest modesty.

  ‘I can tell you what I tell you, that is, in your position I would do this, not that you must do it . . . I can’t give orders to anyone, indeed I look for someone who can give orders to me.’

  This manner sets a tone of modesty and forbearance that is a tremendous asset in tackling disputes. ‘With the will of God I want to be a servant’, he writes to Ilardo ‘command me, and if possible, with calm and reserve we will make progress. My typewriter stops here, but my heart carries on.’

  ‘The greatest quality in a Mafia leader is to know how to co-ordinate the activities of different groups, without imposing his will’, says Professor Lupo.

  ‘He was the uncontested boss of Cosa Nostra,’ says Prestipino, ‘but he wanted to give the impression that his decisions were reached after long consultation. He had learned how to be the antithesis of Riina. His ostentatious modesty becomes part of his character in his personal relationships. Others, like Riina and Brusca, have an obsession with being great, looking powerful. He deliberately comes across as being down at heel.’

  Living simply, in a humble rustic setting, could be seen as a deliberate choice, setting an example of true leadership, particularly in a Christian context – surrounded by weeping Madonnas and Jesus pictures. It sent a message both to mafiosi enduring hard times in gaol and to those who loved to live extravagantly, quaffing champagne at casinos.

  Provenzano’s letters speak of a humility apparently incompatible with a boss of his status, but make him sound all the greater for that: ‘I ask nothing, I was born to serve.’

  One young mafioso turned pentito, Salvatore Barbagallo, attested to the Boss’s reputation for fairness and conciliation: ‘I’ve got to say that within Cosa Nostra I always heard good things about Provenzano; people said he used the expression “Eat and let others eat”’ which underlined his willingness to share the money he made from crime.’

  Provenzano’s simple lifestyle gave the signal that he was frugal and hardy; people who came into contact with him were impressed by his toughness. As his last hideout testified, his power was to be measured out not in fancy possessions but in the loyalty he commanded.

  Don’t let political beliefs get in your way

  ‘We didn’t create Forza Italia’, Nino Giuffré told the court in one of his first appearances. ‘We merely put our resources behind the party most likely to succeed.’

  Provenzano never held a strong preference for one political party. His predecessors had tended to favour the Christian Democrats, the party of tradition, with a strong Catholic heritage, but he had no such party loyalties. He looked for the individual politicians who would best serve the Mafia’s interests.

  Cosa Nostra’s way of doing business required politicians of the right disposition to smooth the way. Giuffré was the principal exponent and apostle of Provenzano’s thought, and of finding trustworthy people to pursue it. ‘It’s important to have the right political experience,’ 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 aptitude on both sides.’

  During the years when some within the Christian Democrats were doing Cosa Nostra’s bidding, and the reforming Communists were considered a threat to the Mafia’s stranglehold on industry, Provenzano had his moles in the Communist ranks. In Bagheria and Villabate Communist-controlled councils were infiltrated by Cosa Nostra’s friends and business partners.

  Siino recalled of Provenzano: ‘A sophisticated mind like that of Signor Provenzano decided to cover his back by bringing in the Communist co-operatives, while Riina, the clod, had thrown them out.’

  Provenzano had learned early in his career to change parties when it suited him: Liggio had decided to support a Liberal candidate against the Christian Democrats in the 1985 elections because he was promoting a potentially lucrative construction project. From this episode Provenzano learned a lesson in politics that he would never forget: that the only ideology is Cosa Nostra’s, and that any political belief is as good as the next, as long as it makes money.

  When Riina decided to back the Socialist Party in 1987, Provenzano was against it because most of the Mafia’s powerful contacts were still Christian Democrats, and he could not see any benefit in dropping them.

  When he took over the organization, the prison population was deeply unhappy with the way they had been neglected. The only way Provenzano was going to be able to appease mafiosi serving long sentences was to bring about some changes in the harsh anti-Mafia laws. He needed new political contacts, who would be open to negotiating. For a short time he toyed with the idea of joining forces with a growing far-right separatist movement.

  But when Forza Italia was founded in 1993, Provenzano saw a new political party on the landscape and recognized that a number of its local politicians were willing to do business. ‘From then on’, recalls Giuffré, ‘our people had to forget about their old friends in the Christian Democrats – it was all Forza Italia.’

  Security

  ‘Tell the others they mustn’t talk inside their cars or anywhere near them, and at home they must be careful as well, they mustn’t talk loudly near any houses, construction sites or abandoned buildings.’

  This letter from Provenzano to one of his managers followed a tip-off that police had bugged their meeting place – a farm office out in the country.

  Provenzano was obsessive about security. Wherever he went, he carried a little backpack, a sleeping bag and a wand for detecting bugging devices, and he was constantly on the look-out for new and more secure meeting places.

  Giuffré described a meeting with Provenzano and Pino Lipari in which the main topics were security issues. As Giuffré recalls, he reminded them repeatedly ‘to be careful never to talk about certain things, to try and find some protection against being bugged, for example with one of those instruments that locates bugs, and at the same time to try and find new people, with no record, who could move freely without being spotted by the forces of law and order, to protect both fugitives and people who shouldn’t be seen in contact with them’.

  With so many penitent mafiosi revealing the organization’s darkest secrets, Provenzano had to find a secure means of communication, to stay ahead of police investigators.

  ‘New technology is a minefield for anyone with security worries’, points out General Angiolo Pellegrini, who was tracking Provenzano in the early 1980s. ‘Mobile phones can be pinpointed, landlines are no longer secure; we put bugs in their cars, and we can follow them with GPS, e-mails can be intercepted, computers can be taken apart. Anything they do we can intercept. By the time it’s legal to plant listening devices in houses, well, at this point, the less we talk, the better. So I write a note on a piece of paper, and I send it to you.’

  Provenzano’s simple method of communication, no more sophisticated than the one used by schoolchildren in class before mobile phones, revolutionized the running of Cosa Nostra.

  Provenzano kept the pizzini circulating, come what may – as symbols of his authority and reminders of his continual presence – advising, answering, cajoling and, occasionally, making demands. He used code numbers and initials to conceal the identity of the addressees. ‘Zio’ (�
��Uncle’) signed on and off in similar, generic vein, avoiding any personal detail that could have identified the recipient.

  He advocated extreme caution in business dealings, as an essential part of his no-risk, no-noise policy. He wrote to Brusca, who had invited him to join a drug deal: ‘This is the second time you’ve invited me to invest in this deal with you, and I thank you for it, but if you would listen to my advice, at this moment in time, if we can’t hand-pick the people we are doing business with, we should do nothing. The people who you are in contact with are fine, I know who they are. But what about the people they are in contact with? We don’t know them, so I don’t want any part in this.’

  Brusca recalled this rebuttal years later: ‘He insisted that before we made any kind of investment, he wanted to know who we were doing business with, where we were going, what it was all about . . . he wanted to know the whole story from A to Z.’

  If any of his men proposed to make political contacts without the necessary caution, they could expect the same grilling. Provenzano sent his man in San Giuseppe Iato, Salvatore Genovese, a chilling rebuke.

  ‘You tell me you have a high-level political contact who would put you in a position to manage major projects, and before going ahead you ask me what I think. But without knowing this person, what do you want me to tell you?

  ‘I would need to know their name, and who their contacts are. These days we can’t trust anyone. They could be a trickster, a cop, an infiltrator. They could be wasting our time or plotting our downfall. More than that, I can’t honestly say.’

  Provenzano had been highly disciplined and autonomous, even in earlier days on the run. Brusca remembers: ‘I would say that man is prudence personified. We would go out and about, taking the usual precautions, usually in the early morning, but he was capable of going to ground for months at a time. He walled himself in. When we saw him again, his skin was as white as paper.’