Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  Investigators instructed the carabinieri to place a number of bugs in Guttadauro’s elegant sitting-room. Guttadauro had acquired some of Provenzano’s attention to security: he had bought an electronic wand for detecting bugs. He had not yet learned how to use it, but as it turned out, he did not need to. The officer chosen to the install the bugs was Giorgio Riolo, the expert technician with a weakness for publicizing his work.

  One of Guttadauro’s most frequent visitors was Mimmo Miceli, an ambitious young Palermo councillor who had good links with Cuffaro and was hoping to get a seat on the regional parliament. The two men discussed issues of burning importance to Cosa Nostra: candidates for regional elections and hospital directorships, development plans for new shopping centres. The most pressing issue for Guttadauro was to improve prison conditions for convicted mafiosi. He needed to find a political contact who would start the ball rolling on changing the anti-Mafia laws. He confided to Miceli: ‘I need to create a relationship with Cuffaro, via you . . . if he responds, and offers us some guarantees, it won’t go any further.’

  Miceli promised to pass the message on to Cuffaro, but word never came back. (Cuffaro was recently cleared of accusations that he had done any favours for the Mafia.)

  Just days before the election the agent on duty suddenly heard shouting, as a row broke out at the Guttadauro house. The bugs had been discovered.

  On the evening of 24 June, Cuffaro hosted a dinner at the Richard III restaurant on the hillside above Monreale in anticipation of the party’s victory. The guests ate swordfish carpaccio and fresh tuna, beef steaks and slabs of fresh tomatoes in the warm summer air, drinking golden Sicilian wine, looking down over Palermo’s Golden Basin. But not everyone was having a good time. After the meal Miceli motioned one of his associates to step outside with him for a moment and broke the news that Guttadauro’s place had been bugged.

  Agents back at the ROS were wondering how they had found out. At the DIA Ciuro continued his undercover work. He discovered that one investigation was looking into the connection between Aiello and Cuffaro. By the end of the year Guttadauro was back in prison, charged with Mafia association. Miceli was arrested the following summer. At the same time, a formal investigation was launched into Cuffaro’s role in the leaks of information.

  Riolo kept busy playing hide-and-seek, planting bugs in cars and houses, and informing the owners that they should take a look around. He learned about a bug in an Opel belonging to one of Provenzano’s top managers in Bagheria and let Aiello know it was there. The bugs, which had been recording highly incriminating conversations, were located and quickly removed.

  By the summer of 2003 Riolo was suffering from acute anxiety. He had so thoroughly abused his position of trust that it would be only a matter of time before he was found out. He was in such a state of fear that Borzacchelli allegedly put out feelers to see if his friends could not give Riolo a cheque big enough to calm his nerves and make the risk worth his while.

  When the region adjusted the tariffs that would fix the repayments for highly specialist radiotherapy treatment, Cuffaro and Aiello had long discussions about the tariff levels. Aiello’s clinics stood to earn millions from the state health pay-outs, but they had other urgent matters to discuss. At the end of October they made an appointment at a clothes shop in Bagheria. Cuffaro dismissed his armed escort and let Aiello know that he was under no circumstances to tell anyone where he was going or whom he was meeting. During their thirty-minute tryst in the shop, as they examined jackets and felt the thickness of collars and cuffs, Cuffaro told Aiello he had heard Ciuro and Riolo were under investigation. He had got the news ‘from Rome’ – that is, from government contacts. (This was the version of events Aiello gave magistrates under questioning. He later denied that they had talked about any investigations, saying his ill-health had muddled him.)

  Cuffaro later denied revealing any news about the investigation, claiming they had met merely to discuss the private health tariffs – a significant matter for a politician responsible for a black hole in the region’s health budget.

  On the evening of 4 November, Ciuro was alarmed to see that an urgent meeting had been called between magistrates and the director of the police organized crime unit and rang a friend at the DIA to find out what it was about. His colleague (as directed) gave him a reassuring answer. ‘OK then,’ Ciuro replied, ‘I can go and eat my dinner in peace, because they won’t be arresting me this evening.’

  His optimism was misplaced. Ciuro was arrested the following morning, along with Riolo and Aiello. Aiello was charged with being a front man for Bernardo Provenzano; Riolo and the others with aiding and abetting a fugitive. Three months later Deputy Borzacchelli was also arrested. The trial of the mafia’s ‘moles’ was a massive operation, which resulted in convictions for Aiello (14 years for mafia association) and Riolo (7 years). Cuffaro was convicted of revealing official secrets, however the judge ruled that his actions benefited individual mafiosi, not the organization. After a fast-track trial Ciuro was convicted of aiding and abetting; at the time of writing Borzacchelli is awaiting the judges’ verdict.

  ‘I’m so ashamed of my disgraceful conduct’, Riolo confessed in court. ‘I feel utterly contemptible. I let myself be drawn into a world of power games, money and crime which has nothing to do with me. I stupidly believed I could do my job and still be able to use my contacts to build myself up and curry favour with important people.’

  He claimed that he had done it all for protagonismo, to make himself the centre of attention – but the car, and the money, spoke for themselves.

  ‘The trial of the spies in the institutions gave us an insight into how deep and pervasive Cosa Nostra’s contacts were, throughout the system’, the prosecutors wrote. ‘Unusually we have seen evidence of relationships between a defendant accused of Mafia association (Michele Aiello) and one convicted of the same crime (Giuseppe Guttadauro) with politicians of the highest level, with businessmen, professionals and journalists, with employees and directors of public administration, with people who work in the prosecutor’s office and with members at every level of seniority of the police force.’

  In the judges’ motivation for the sentence against the politician Mimmo Miceli, published in May 2007, they reiterated that Miceli, as Palermo’s local minister for health, was the go-between for the mafioso Giuseppe Guttadauro and the president of the region, Salvatore Cuffaro. Cuffaro remains under a separate investigation for aiding and abetting the mafia.

  After the round-up of Provenzano’s informers, investigators discovered there were other shadowy officials in Cosa Nostra’s pay, passing him news about plans for his capture, helping him keep one step ahead of arrest. While investigators were on high alert for leaks, at least one other attempt to arrest him would be scuppered by ‘the good Lord Jesus Christ’, the spy in the system.

  15

  Prostate trouble

  P

  ROVENZANO’S HEALTH PROBLEMS, which had been troubling him for some time, were becoming urgent. Ever attentive to his failing body, he needed to see a doctor with increasing regularity, and his letters were full of arrangements for clandestine medical appointments.

  Visits to private clinics had to be arranged, analyses of bodily fluids had to be organized; at some stage he had an operation. In April 2001 his loyal friend Pino Lipari wrote, in one of the more unlikely descriptions of the Boss of Bosses, ‘Our kitten has been unwell . . .’.

  Lipari had everything prepared; an ambulance was ready. His wife was going to go along, pretending to be the sick man’s companion. But there was a last-minute cancellation, as so often happened; the doctor couldn’t make a consulting room safe for a high-level fugitive to visit without arousing suspicion, and Provenzano was back in his old refuge, managing his symptoms with diet and drugs.

  After their galling near miss when they followed a doctor and arrested the ‘wrong’ patient, the police were taking no chances. They followed leads to urology departments all over Italy
and further afield. An agent from the Catturandi went to London after receiving intelligence that one of Provenzano’s relations was booked in for prostate treatment in a private London clinic. The Sicilian pensioner in his private room was extremely surprised to receive a visit from the police – but he was not the fugitive Boss.

  Following the arrest of so many of Provenzano’s closest associates, he was thrown back on his oldest allies. Ciccio Pastoia, an old-school mob boss who had moulded himself in Provenzano’s image, had become capo of Belmonte Mezzagno after Spera’s arrest, with Provenzano’s support. Now he took on the Boss’s day-to-day management. He got in touch with his godson Nicola Mandalà, the womanizing, coke-snorting, gambling king of Villabate. Two men more different in style one couldn’t imagine, but Uncle Binnu needed them, and together they took on the difficult task of managing Provenzano’s life in hiding.

  As Provenzano’s spokesman, Pastoia contacted capos all over western Sicily, organizing his postal system and letting his will be known. ‘Pastoia became Provenzano’s alter ego’, says prosecutor Michele Prestipino. ‘He was the closest in character to Provenzano. The others had delusions of grandeur, they were power-crazed. Provenzano, and Pastoia, to a degree, were the opposite: they had this ostentatious modesty. Pastoia was capable of great self-sacrifice; he could operate behind the scenes, let someone else be the boss, but he was by no means powerless.’

  Pastoia waxed lyrical on his relationship with the Boss: ‘We’re the same, we are the same deep in our souls, he and I . . . for that reason whatever happens in life, nothing and no one can come between us . . . no one can put . . . they’ve tried . . . that bastard from my town even tried . . . but he couldn’t do it . . . because he’ll tell you, “I don’t believe Ciccio would ever betray me . . . me or anyone else”.’

  Pastoia was now involved in trying to organize Provenzano’s cure. Agents listened in as he and Mandalà discussed how to get him a doctor. They feared he would need further treatment, perhaps even surgery.

  Mafiosi are particularly vulnerable to health problems, and not just because they’re liable to get shot: life in the Mafia takes its toll both physically and mentally. In the USA many mafiosi have sought help for stress-related conditions, including diabetes and depression.

  The supergrass Tommaso Buscetta has spoken about the punishing reality of life on the run: ‘When you know they’re after you, you can’t sleep, you never have a moment’s peace. Every night, before you go to bed, you think about what could happen to you during the night. I travelled all over the world as a fugitive for forty years, in a state of constant anxiety. Life on the run is very tough. You can do it for a month or two, no problem. But to keep it up for a lifetime is incredibly stressful. You get used to it – but basically you get used to the stress.’

  In every letter Provenzano and his ageing supporters and friends inquired tenderly after each other’s health before getting on to the question of murder. His helpers were sent off with shopping lists in search of medicines, syringes, pills and incontinence pads. The sickening Boss, living apart from his wife, was becoming increasingly dependent. He continually recruited new supporters and ‘postmen’ to deliver his letters along their complicated routes, creating a vast and complex structure whose main aim was his own protection.

  By his late sixties he had become obsessive, full of anxieties, afraid that he would start forgetting things or leave out something important in one of his messages. As his fear of forgetting became a fixation, his letters set out the points by number. Of course, being Provenzano, it was probably an act, to create a fictional image of a bumbling old man to get maximum support and indulgence from his friends and lull his foes into a false sense of security.

  ‘I hope I haven’t forgotten anything, my memory does play tricks on me’, he wrote. ‘Please do make sure that anything I’ve forgotten, if you remember, remind me next time.’

  By 2003 Provenzano was a sick man, in urgent need of medical intervention. There were logistical problems: he had been a fugitive for forty years, leaving no official record of his existence anywhere. How does a man get medical help if he has no records?

  Nicola Mandalà, who loved to party and flash money around, was one of Provenzano’s key protectors and managers. One morning in June 2003 Mandalà called on his good friend Francesco Campanella, former leader of the local council, in his office at Credito Siciliano’s modern, orange-clad concrete block in Villabate. The two men were in business together, running an operation that included concessions on phone shops, bingo halls and betting shops. But since Mandalà had come in on the business, he had taken out large sums for his and his entourage’s expenses and massively expanded the gambling side of things, and it began to make a loss. To shore up the plummeting bottom line, Campanella went behind his bosses’ backs to siphon off money from savings accounts deposited by legitimate clients. Campanella always intended to pay them back, but the company’s finances went from bad to worse.

  As Mandalà swung into Campanella’s office, the bank clerk dreaded what was coming. Before he said a word, Mandalà threw his jacket over the CCTV camera that perched, beady-eyed, in the corner and shut the door.

  He handed Campanella a document: it was an ID card belonging to an old man by the name of Gaspare Troia. ‘I need you to fix this ID card, and I’ll need a couple of mobile phones’, said Mandalà, giving his friend a passport photo of a grey-haired pensioner. ‘To be honest,’ Campanella later confessed, ‘I didn’t know who it was in the photo.’

  Mandalà spoke in a whisper in Campanella’s ear: ‘And watch it, because if you get caught with this photo you’ll get thirty years.’ Campanella understood this must be a high-level fugitive, and as he looked at the photo again, he realized it was the Boss himself.

  Campanella had witnessed just how terrifying the Boss could be if you messed up. ‘Mandalà had been to a top-level meeting,’ he told magistrates, ‘and I assumed it was with Provenzano. He met us for dinner at the Mata Hari restaurant in Bagheria, and he was holding a note, a pizzino, sealed. At dinner he talked about other stuff, he didn’t mention Provenzano or anything about him. Then we drove back to Villabate, and we’d just got to the motorway when he realized he had lost the note. He frantically checked his pockets and searched behind the car seats, shouting: “I’m dead, he’s going to kill me, this pizzino is incredibly important, if I don’t find it, I swear he’ll kill me.” He started looking along the road, we went back the way we came, all the way back to the restaurant. At last he found it under the car mat.’

  After Mandalà had unhooked his jacket from the surveillance camera and left, Campanella put the documents carefully in an inside pocket and hunted through his desk drawers for an official stamp. He did not have anything that would make the right impression. He knew the office where the registration stamps were kept, and what sort of stamp they used – but he had not been able to get access to them. The guy in charge of the official stamps at the bank was an old political adversary, so there was no way he could ask a favour.

  He took an early lunch break and went across the road to his old office in the city council. Taking out the documents, he glued the new picture in place and rummaged around in boxes to find an official stamp. It was the wrong sort, but it said ‘Comune di Villabate’, so it would have to do. He needed another which would leave a raised impression. For that, he tried pressing down on the paper over a €2 coin. The result was a mess. It didn’t look right at all. He went back into town, feeling extremely apprehensive, to meet Mandalà and apologize for the botched job. With Mandalà were his closest associates in the Villabate mafia, Mario Cusimano and Ezio Fontana, both of them on the Provenzano protection detail. Fontana was known as Provenzano’s ‘minister of post and telecommunications’.

  ‘Look, I haven’t got the proper stamps,’ Campanella babbled, ‘the official ones, I can’t get hold of them, I’m not allowed to use them, there’s no way I can do a good job on this.’

  Mandalà took the ID card and
gave it a cursory glance. ‘Looks all right.’

  Campanella, relieved, felt bold enough to ask who it was for, and Mandalà, without using the name, made it clear it was for the Boss. ‘He’s got to have an operation urgently, so we’re taking him abroad.’

  ‘How the hell are you going to get there?’ Campanella imagined Italy’s most notorious fugitive might have a problem leaving the country unnoticed.

  ‘Same way as I’ve done for the past few years’, replied Mandalà. ‘I’ll drive him in my car, easy. Don’t worry about it.’

  Mandalà’s confidence was well placed. Over the years Provenzano had moved freely around Palermo in no apparent danger of being arrested. He had been stopped at road-blocks, treated in clinics, even gone to the cinema, and had never been recognized. He did have a mortal fear of having his picture taken, which is why this fake ID was such a dangerous document. He had managed to stay at liberty for over forty years because the only photo of him dated from the 1950s. Mandalà told Campanella that the ID card would do fine if they were stopped on the journey.

  The Boss’s deteriorating health was well known. Investigators were aware that he had problems with his kidneys and his prostate. They were also aware that he had contacts in the health sector.

  The pentito Angelo Siino revealed that, approaching old age with failing health, Provenzano considered it a sensible idea to buy a private clinic. The suspicion was that by investing in Aiello’s Santa Teresa clinic in Bagheria, that was more or less what he had done.