Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

Giuffré related that after the regular meetings between himself, Provenzano and Spera, the Boss of Bosses would give orders: ‘You wash, I’ll dry, you sweep.’ Three of the most powerful criminals in Sicily would roll up their sleeves and set the cottage to rights, polishing the last glass and sweeping under the table. Provenzano always wanted to make sure he’d be invited back. His needs were not excessive, even when he was in poor health; he lived like a monk, showing his people by example that power was not about exhibition.

  The Ciminna bosses were not the only ones to be enraged by Spera’s lack of respect. Spera had been embroiled in a long-drawn-out campaign against the Lo Bianco family, his rivals for control of the Misilmeri district. In 1995 Provenzano had allowed Spera to get rid of his long-time rival Pieruccio Lo Bianco because Lo Bianco was one of Riina’s old guard, close to Giovanni Brusca. Provenzano needed to send a message to Brusca that his – Riina’s – faction was finished, and Spera was a willing accomplice.

  But the disappearance of Lo Bianco was not the end of it. After Provenzano’s peace directive had gone out, forbidding any kind of violent action likely to attract attention, Spera pursued his bid for control of the area. There were deaths on both sides. ‘Benedetto had gone over the top with his military offensive,’ said Giuffré, ‘and the way he went striding all over everything in hobnail boots was causing trouble. I could tell the effect it was having on Provenzano when he said in a meeting, “Benedetto, please remember, I rule with my head.”’

  Those mild-sounding words betrayed a darker intent. This was a direct warning, Giuffré explained, not to let personal ambition get in the way of progress. ‘The situation in Belmonte Mezzagno had become – dare I say it – untenable within the context of Cosa Nostra, because it was in direct conflict with the politics of submersion, of making no noise, not attracting attention from magistrates and law enforcement. That is, to create a calm environment, with the express purpose of getting to work quietly behind the scenes. Riina had crowned Spera capo mandamento. But Provenzano, if he wanted, could depose him.

  ‘At one meeting we talked about contracts, and we also talked about the situation in Belmonte Mezzagno, which had become a bit – a bit! – extremely complicated, because it had begun to create problems outside. Problems in the sense that it was attracting attention from law enforcement – particularly after they started killing businessmen. Then the situation got really heavy.’

  Someone was slowly picking off wealthy businessmen who had close ties to Spera. It was not a massacre – the deaths were spread out over many months – but it was enough to do him serious economic damage. And he was convinced he knew who was behind it.

  The man emerging as Spera’s main rival as boss of Belmonte Mezzagno was Ciccio Pastoia, Provenzano’s former driver and a man very much in his mould. They were of the same generation and understood each other instinctively; he has been called Provenzano’s ‘alter ego’. ‘Provenzano trusted Pastoia blindly’, Giuffré said, implying that his faith was perhaps misplaced. (Events would prove him right.) Pastoia arranged Provenzano’s meetings, which were held in his office in Palermo. Capos could make an appointment, through Pastoia, to see the boss or they could leave their letters with him. No one got to Provenzano except through Pastoia. He stayed in the background, never throwing his weight around, but the low-profile, dependable Ciccio became the reference point for contracts and protection payments across the whole mandamento.

  Spera and Pastoia’s rivalry became intense. Meetings between Provenzano, Giuffré, Spera and Pastoia’s representative got extremely heated. Spera couldn’t abide Pastoia’s man, and there was a lot of shouting and arguing as Provenzano tried to bring the two sides to an agreement while surreptitiously finding a way to put his own man in power. Police discovered a massive arsenal in the countryside near Misilmeri: buried inside a greenhouse, they found shotguns, sub-machine guns, ammunition, rocket launchers and bazookas. Investigators believed it was Spera’s arsenal.

  The peace plan did not go well. Spera confided to Giuffré that he intended to murder Pastoia without telling Provenzano (Giuffré, who valued Spera’s trust, decided not to bother the Boss with this detail). Police agents monitoring the Belmonte clan heard the two rivals swear vengeance.

  ‘I’ll kill him, that bastard’, Pastoia confided to his son as they drove through heavy traffic.

  ‘The old fool, he’s going to disappear’, Spera told Giuffré as they talked in a remote shepherd’s cottage.

  The boss demanded a sit-down to prevent any further escalation of the war, but Spera refused. Provenzano wrote to Giuffré: ‘What can I do about Ciccio? They want to know from me how to resolve this issue. But who am I to tell them what to do? I have already told BN [Benedetto] how he should behave, and as you are my witness, he has not listened to me. I hoped he would understand and follow my direction, but sadly this has not happened. He wants me to meet Ciccio alone, which I will not do. I told him, “If you are present I will meet him, but if you’re not there I will not meet him, and my word on that is final.”’

  Pastoia, recently released from prison, was under special surveillance, so his movements were restricted. Spera and Provenzano, both fugitives, continued to meet in conditions of heightened security. Their drivers would drop them off before dawn at one of the shepherds’ cottages in the middle of the countryside and leave them to discuss business and politics during the hours of daylight. Spera’s plot to kill Pastoia was coming together: he had the gunman and the place. As the situation became increasingly volatile, there was an added complication. Spera, who had been on the run for seven years, needed medical attention.

  Investigators had been led by the supergrass Giovanni Brusca to the area around Mezzojuso; Brusca had revealed that the farm buildings dotted across the mountainous countryside provided discreet meeting places for the boss. It was ideal terrain: the main Palermo–Agrigento road ran through it, if they needed to get away fast; isolated farm houses high on the slopes commanded a good view of anyone approaching. It was at the turn-off to Mezzojuso that the carabinieri had watched the mafiosi gathering for a meeting with the boss in October 1995. It was here that the informer Ilardo had sat through eight hours of meetings with the boss, poker-faced, waiting for the carabinieri to burst through the door.

  Provenzano’s cook, the sheep farmer Cola La Barbera, used to host meetings in a remote farm building in the area, believing it was safe from investigators’ bugs as there was no electricity. However, the crack troops selected from the Palermo flying squad and dedicated to catching fugitives, known as the Catturandi, successfully planted a bug inside the building and on a December morning recorded a meeting between La Barbera and an unknown doctor. Shortly afterwards the two were joined by another man. The agents heard references to prostate trouble, for which the doctor gave him various prescriptions. Could it be Provenzano?

  The Catturandi had been watching a doctor, Vincenzo Di Noto, who seemed to have some interesting patients and was suspected of diagnosing mafiosi with conditions that meant they could serve their prison sentences under house arrest.

  One of the Catturandi’s most experienced agents, code-named Bloodhound, recalls: ‘We knew that Provenzano had already had an operation on his prostate, and we had information that this particular doctor was treating an old man with prostate problems. We intercepted a conversation in which they made an appointment with Dr Di Noto, for a particular day in January, at a farm cottage belonging to Nicola La Barbera, near Mezzojuso.’

  La Barbera (known as ‘Cola Truppicuni’, after his family nickname ‘the Bunglers’) had been under surveillance since the mid-1990s, when Gino Ilardo told the carabinieri about his support role. They knew from Ilardo’s revelations that La Barbera was Provenzano’s meat man, responsible for providing, and often cooking, his steaks, just as the boss’s delicate health required it: bloody, no salt, no fat.

  ‘On the morning of 30 January’, Bloodhound recalls, ‘we followed him to the meeting place, and let him go in.’

/>   The Catturandi, dressed in black, wearing balaclavas, crept up the hillside and surrounded the little farm building. When they heard voices inside, they burst in through the windows and the door, shouting: ‘Freeze! Police!’

  They found three men and pinned them to the walls, hands behind their backs. To the Catturandi’s disappointment the old man with his trousers down wasn’t Provenzano. The one they led away in handcuffs was another on their most wanted list, Benedetto Spera, the notorious boss of Belmonte Mezzagno. His host, Cola La Barbera, was in the next room. When agents searched La Barbera, they found his pockets and unlikely corners of his clothes were stuffed with pizzini, sealed tightly with Sellotape.

  If the Catturandi were disappointed by their catch, there was further mortification to come. A few days after his arrest, Spera was visited by family members in prison. The table where they sat was equipped with a hidden microphone, which picked up their conversation. At one point Spera lowered his voice, and said: ‘And to think, he was just 200 metres away.’

  ‘He’ could only mean Provenzano. The Boss had been hiding just a few hundred yards away in another anonymous, dilapidated farmhouse, waiting in the dark for the doctor to finish with Spera before he joined them for a meeting. When he saw the police arrive, he stayed where he was, and hours later was rescued by his driver when the last police car had disappeared slowly down the farm track.

  In the aftermath of Spera’s arrest a major row erupted between police and carabinieri, with the Catturandi squad criticized for doing their own thing and jeopardizing other investigations. Half of the flying squad had not even been informed about what the other half were doing. And as it turned out, the carabinieri were working on their own line of investigation, conducting close surveillance on La Barbera. The Catturandi were accused of destroying years of detective work and bungling an operation that would have ended in the capture of the Boss of Bosses.

  In the midst of this storm investigators opened the pizzini confiscated from La Barbera and found positive confirmation that Bernardo Provenzano was alive, if not quite well, and living in the area. One indicated that he had recently met up with his son Angelo. There were several letters from Angelo and his younger brother, and from his wife, all expressing concern about his health and discussing everyday family matters. The discovery of these pizzini re-ignited the row between law enforcement groups: La Barbera was one of Provenzano’s ‘postmen’ – if the Catturandi had not been so impetuous, he might have led them to the Boss.

  Provenzano must be in the area. But in this rural part of the island, intelligence was hard to come by. The hillsides were scattered with hundreds of shepherds’ cottages, huts and sheep sheds in varying states of repair: some were in use, others were little more than crumbling shells. Any of them could have provided shelter for clandestine meetings. With no inside information there was no way to search them all. The Catturandi and the carabinieri were doing their utmost, planting listening devices like seeds across the landscape, but there had to be another way.

  The man who had tracked Provenzano’s infiltration of the health sector in 1983 was invited back. Angiolo Pellegrini returned to Palermo in 2000, to search out property secretly owned by Provenzano. He set about tracing the ownership of plots of land between Mezzojuso and Corleone.

  ‘He has lived much of the time in the remote countryside,’ said Pellegrini, ‘in those rural areas, where he has an endless number of villas, houses and cottages at his disposal, on land he owned through intermediaries. There’s a strip of land that goes from San Giuseppe Iato to Caltanissetta, and I did a check on all the land ownership there. I was convinced that he was just moving on his own property. He definitely had support. And since he didn’t have great needs . . .

  ‘From what my sources have told me, he was capable of staying indoors, with the windows shut, surviving on whatever he had to eat, with the radio on . . . he always listened to the radio. He was capable of living alone for long periods, in the dark.’

  Somewhere out in the rugged landscape Provenzano was living with the radio on and the lights turned off. But where? Even if he wanted to tell, Cola La Barbera, his faithful retainer and cook, did not know. He had only ever seen him at prearranged meeting places during the day.

  After the arrest of Spera and La Barbera there was a period of hush as replacement postmen and suppliers were urgently sought and Provenzano’s men laid low to avoid police activity in the area. In Belmonte Mezzagno, which had already seen dangerous conflict, there was a scrummage for power. To avoid further bloodshed and settle the leadership contest for this strategic district the boss had work to do. In his remote lodging out in the hills his typewriter click-clacked into the small hours.

  Provenzano’s long-term plan was to install his old friend and ‘alter ego’, Ciccio Pastoia, as head of Belmonte Mezzagno. But Giuffré had other ideas. He favoured another man, who, although not a man of honour, was au fait with Spera’s business dealings and had the particular virtue of being almost unknown to the authorities. In the weeks that followed, both men tried to promote their own candidates – without letting on. It became another game of tragedie and bluff. Provenzano, while sticking to his plan with steely resolve, put on a show of humility. He wrote to Giuffré: ‘They ask me how they should conduct themselves. But who am I to tell them what to do?’ ‘This’, Giuffré comments, ‘is the role Provenzano plays. He deliberately wants to take a back seat, in order to disguise his intention of taking the situation in hand.’

  In the world of Cosa Nostra, particularly where several of the most senior members are in hiding, information is power. Between the Boss and his various capi mandamenti there was a constant manoeuvring to get information by any possible means. Provenzano wrote to Giuffré: ‘Listen, I’ve received word from a friend who had made some recommendations to BN [Spera] and he wants me to take care of it but I don’t know anything about it. Could you do me the courtesy, if you had some business with BN, to let me know what it was, and if possible tell me the name of the firms and what agreements you’ve made? Let me know your response as soon as you can.’

  Giuffré, re-reading the letter years later, laughed. There was no ‘friend’. It was a fishing exercise, he recalled, a subtle trap to get Giuffré to tell him about Spera’s business and pass the information on to him. In the end Giuffré was outmanoeuvred, and his candidate was, as he put it, ‘cut off at the legs’.

  Provenzano had rolled out a successful strategy for the organization, while Giuffré was busy setting up his own power base. He may not have been preparing a challenge; it may have been mere contingency planning, should anything (God forbid) happen to the Boss of Bosses. But the exchange of letters between Provenzano and Giuffré reveals just how much continual intricate plotting went on between the various factions, even within each group of supposed allies.

  Uncle Binnu ruled with an open hand, giving as much leeway as he could and encouraging families to settle their own disputes where possible. He tried to make sure that profits were shared, that prisoners were taken care of. He cultivated the image of a strong but benevolent leader who inspired trust. So when he suspected treachery in his ranks, he was devastated.

  When the key position of Cosa Nostra’s regional representative in Agrigento became vacant, the scene was set for some frenzied plotting. Agrigento was one of the most important areas for Provenzano’s faction to conquer. The Valley of the Temples, with its magnificent ancient Greek ruins bestriding the hills, has been in Mafia control for years. The evidence is plain to see: what should be a protected site has been built up, with sprawling developments crowding over the landscape.

  Provenzano’s candidate in Agrigento was Giuseppe Falsone. Giuffré, for his part, had been cultivating Maurizio DiGati, sending him information about Palermo companies doing business in Agrigento from which he could demand protection money. While Giuffré was quietly building up his man for the regional job, another Agrigento family, the Capizi, made a serious challenge for the leadership. At this point
there were three different factions, all squaring up for the fight.

  DiGati was determined to face down the challenge. He wrote to Giuffré threatening that, if the Capizi family did not back him, he would execute every last one of them. In the frantic negotiation that followed, capos from different areas tried to settle the matter in their candidate’s favour and avoid another war, without involving Provenzano.

  Two of Giuffré’s allies from Palermo, who supported DiGati, came up with an audacious plot. They called a meeting with the Capizi family, claiming to be emissaries from Provenzano, and announced that the Boss had a message: he was supporting DiGati. Knowing that they would be going head to head with the Boss, the upstarts stepped down.

  ‘When Provenzano found out,’ said Giuffré, ‘all hell broke loose.’

  The next letter Giuffré received from the Boss was entirely unlike his usual cordial formality. He was furious:

  ‘There is a topic I have to raise, which is painful and suspect, but I can’t say I’m surprised.’ He quoted an intermediary who gave him the whole sorry tale of the two Palermo capos passing themselves off as his ambassadors and concluded: ‘There is much to reflect on and analyse here. But I pray to God to let me know how much more slander and lies these troublemakers want to spread about me.’ Provenzano, as the king of tragediatori, was practised in the art of deception. Finding his own techniques used against him was devastating.

  Giuffré was unrepentant. ‘The Agrigento question was settled, because there were three or four of us who decided what was going to happen in Agrigento, and that was the end of the matter. There was nothing Provenzano could do about it. He had to fall in step with us, and everything had to go through me.’

  Eventually, and inevitably, Provenzano discovered the extent of the betrayal: that his own right-hand man had been among those plotting against his candidate. Years later the two men confronted each other (via video conference) in court. While Giuffré was talking, Provenzano seemed to be having trouble following the notes in front of him. His lawyer, seeing he was in difficulty, phoned him from the courtroom.