Boss of Bosses

by Clare Longrigg

  When Provenzano’s need for surgery became a matter of urgency, he was convinced he would be at risk of discovery in Bagheria: by this time it was well known that the Palermo suburb was his base of operations. His aides located a private clinic in Marseille that, on presentation of a doctor’s referral letter, did not require any other ID.

  The man recruited to help Provenzano get to this discreet establishment on the French Riviera was Salvatore Troia, a wealthy associate of the Villabate Mafia and a resident of Marseille, where he and his wife owned a bar.

  In July 2003 the Mafia boss, in constant pain, with aching legs and unable to sleep, set off for France in a convoy of two cars, with Mandalà, Fontana and his ‘son’ Salvatore Troia. For security reasons Saveria did not go with him. Provenzano, whose favourite reading was the Bible and who spent most of his time completely alone, sat, suffering, in the back, while Mandalà – the high rolling, fast-living, night-clubber – drove. There could not be two more different characters in the ranks of the organization, and here they were, shut in a car together for whole days: Provenzano, who liked to turn matters over in his head, in silence and solitude; Mandalà, who always wanted a mate to go to the casino with him, and a mistress, and a woman in his hotel room. It must have been a very quiet journey.

  In Marseille the team hooked up with Troia’s glamorous French wife, Madeleine Orlando, who was needed to interpret for the patient. Mme Orlando claims not to have known the true identity of the mysterious sick man, but must have been aware that the old fellow was not, as his ID card announced, Gaspare Troia, her father-in-law. Provenzano was examined at La Licorne clinic in a small town just outside Marseille, by doctors who, considering how serious his illness, were surprised at how strong his constitution was. They found problems with his arteries and diagnosed hepatitis B and C; he also suffered from rheumatic pain (exacerbated by living in basic accommodation in the mountains in winter). Doctors informed him that he urgently needed surgery to remove his prostate.

  The patient insisted he could not be treated straight away; he had urgent business at home to attend to. The Boss instructed his helpers that he had to get back to Sicily immediately. He could not be away from Sicily for long: he was needed to oversee business, make decisions and give advice. Surgery would have to wait; Cosa Nostra could not.

  In October he was back, again driving through Italy and along the coast of France, to another clinic, La Casamance, east of Marseille. There he spent nineteen days as a tourist, staying in a borrowed apartment in the centre of the city before undergoing surgery. When he came round after the first operation, to remove a lesion on his arm, he asked nurses to take the phone out of his room. He never used the phone for fear of being intercepted by the police. While he was recovering, Troia, Fontana and Mandalà spent their nights at the casino.

  The Boss returned to Sicily in a much more comfortable state and spent some days convalescing at Mario Cusimano’s villa outside Bagheria: an elegant place (in a style much imitated in the subsequent illegal building boom all around it) amid the lemon groves that slope down towards the sea at Ficarazzi, with a swimming-pool. Before the operation he had followed a strict diet of fish and steamed vegetables; afterwards he continued to eat healthily, even in difficult circumstances. In his rural hideouts there was usually fresh fruit and ricotta cheese available. In spring he sent a request to his temporary landlord to pick wild chicory and dry the seeds for him, so he could grow his own – he found it refreshing and had read that it has a cleansing effect on the urinary tract. ‘Not the stuff you buy in plastic bags,’ he wrote, ‘but the plant in its natural state. I need the seeds.’

  He sent out for a particular kind of honey with health-giving properties. One of his men managed to source forty-six jars of the precious stuff and had it taken to his hideout.

  The middle-aged man who took Provenzano his meals was impressed by how tough he was. In a conversation recorded by police Stefano Lo Verso, forty-four, called the Boss ‘Rambo’ because of his strength under duress and his ability to survive the harshest living conditions. Unlike the younger, fast-living generation of capos, Provenzano did not need comfort, let alone luxury hotels and fancy restaurants. Lo Verso recounted an occasion when he was in one of Provenzano’s hideouts, cleaning the larder, and the Boss told him off for throwing away the outer leaves of vegetables and greenery with bugs in it. ‘Don’t waste it, I’ve eaten worse’, he said.

  Provenzano’s multi-million Euro deals did nothing to change his attitude to money: he always behaved as though he was earning no more than one of his faithful shepherds. On his return from his operation in Marseille, under the borrowed identity of Gaspare Troia, he applied for reimbursement under the regional health scheme. Given the way Cosa Nostra has stripped the public health system of funds, nothing could have been more natural.

  Salvatore Troia, tanned and wealthy, was rewarded for helping Provenzano get to Marseille with membership of the Villabate Mafia. He returned to Sicily and invested some of his wealth in a gleaming ultra-modern bakery and French patisserie called La Baguette. On a prominent corner of the market square the bakery was brightly painted in orange and black, with a broad curved frontage.

  By now the police were watching everything that went on in Villabate. Provenzano’s postmen had led them to Pastoia, whom they knew as an old Mafia hand. The investigation was homing in on his contacts. There were bugs in their cars, bugs in their homes, on their phones. As they made every effort to avoid detection, the police became more and more ingenious. Pastoia used a ruined house out in the country for his meetings. The Catturandi put listening devices between the stones and patches of plaster. Keeping watch on their prey with long-range binoculars, they noticed that Pastoia would often walk outside the ruin with his men to have a private chat. This would be where the most highly charged information was exchanged. As Bloodhound recalls, they were determined to capture these intimate talks.

  ‘We followed Ciccio Pastoia and Nicola Mandalà to a place out in the country. We’d already figured out where they were going, but it was really hard to follow them, along these remote tracks where most cars couldn’t even go. It was a terrible road, an awful place to reach – we called it “the devils’ arse” – they were crazy to choose it, and we were even crazier to follow them there.

  ‘After we saw where they were going, indicated by the GPS we had planted on their car (although GPS is very unreliable – you have to rely on your intuition), a few of the men had to go back after dark and looked around for a likely place to put a listening device. They found a tree with loads of cigarette butts on the ground around the trunk, and decided that must be where they held their meetings. It was a really difficult job, in the dark, and it’s a nightmare if you drop the thing, you have to put it somewhere they won’t find it . . .

  ‘Four or five days later we got a break, which told us our intuition had been right. We picked up a conversation between two men, one of whom was evidently in charge. We radioed this fact to the men on the ground, who took down number plates of the cars in the area. We had them.’

  While the hidden microphones picked up every word, Ciccio Pastoia held court under his favourite tree. The men smoked, talked and plotted. Pastoia directed them where to take Provenzano’s letters. He waxed lyrical about his friendship with the Boss, his affinity for Cosa Nostra. He talked about his loathing for Benedetto Spera and his whole family, about how he wanted to kill Spera’s son, if he could do it without Provenzano knowing.

  The bugs revealed Pastoia’s true similarity to Provenzano: he was capable of plotting behind his back for what he reasoned was the greater good.

  On 17 September 2004 police intercepted Pastoia and Mandalà discussing a murder plot, although from the men’s conversation they could not figure out who was the target. It later emerged – when he was found lying dead in the street near his home – that the object of their attention was the developer Salvatore Geraci, who had been trying to muscle in on Mafia contracts.

 
; ‘We’ll see about it on Sunday, when we see Uncle’, said Mandalà. The agent listening in snatched up a pen and started taking furious notes. He checked his watch: it was already Friday.

  ‘OK, so we’ll talk to Uncle on Sunday . . . but we needn’t tell him we’re going to do it . . . we’ll tell him afterwards, because then if we do go ahead . . . when it’s done and he knows about it. . . . I’ll tellhim . . . and he knows why it’s got to be done . . . also because he’s [Geraci’s] not a friend of ours . . .

  ‘We can go ahead and make an appointment because I’ve already told him . . . we just need to get a reply from No. 25 . . . so between now and Sunday . . . I’ll make the appointment.’

  When Ciccio Pastoia left his house, driven by his son, at ten past eight that Sunday morning, the unmarked police car was in place up the road. As usual, they would drive ahead of the vehicle they were tracking, rather than follow it. Father and son drove to Baby Luna, a bar beside the main Palermo ring road, all faded silver and glass brick. Its position on the main road and convenient car park once made the Baby Luna a favoured meeting place for mafiosi. Palermo boss Stefano Bontate used to meet Christian Democrat politician Salvo Lima here (before they were both assassinated by the Corleonesi). Mandalà arrived in his Hyundai, and Pastoia got in. As the two men took a circuitous route towards the village of Ficarazzi, near the sea outside Bagheria, the agents in pursuit could barely contain themselves. It really looked as though they were going to catch Bernardo Provenzano after all these years.

  ‘We all kept in touch all that day, waiting by the phone, for the moment . . . it was pretty tense. We realized this trail could take us to Provenzano’, said DNA chief Pietro Grasso.

  The Hyundai stopped in via Marconi, just outside the village. After a short wait they set off again and drove around the narrow streets before finally stopping at a housing estate, where they left the Hyundai and got into a green Toyota. All morning they carried on driving around Ficarazzi, along narrow residential streets, past the trucking company, along the coast road, revisiting via Marconi several times, and eventually the agents lost track of them.

  Back at the operations room an agent picked up a phone call on Mandalà’s mobile. It was his wife, and after ticking her off for ringing his mobile, he told her he would be home shortly. Agents drove by Pastoia’s house and saw that he was home too. The investigators realized that Provenzano had skipped the appointment, and they had missed their first opportunity in years.

  ‘I got pretty angry with the police who’d been tailing them, saying they must have made a mistake and someone had spotted them’, says Grasso. ‘But they were adamant this wasn’t what had happened, as they would have noticed something was amiss. So we decided to keep an eye on the old farmhouse where we’d had our microphones, but none of the mafiosi ever went back there. So we knew, someone had told them that’s where we were getting our information.’

  Pastoia and Mandalà had not known they had a tail; their evasive driving was habitual. Provenzano, however, through his own sources, had known that the police would be going to the meeting. He just had not told the others.

  The anti-Mafia unit had just missed what seemed to be a golden chance, but they knew they were close. They knew the identities of most of Provenzano’s supporters and ‘postmen’, the routes of his letters and the chain of command. They had kept the whole network under surveillance for months and had built a solid base of evidence against them. No matter how much Provenzano urged his men to be cautious, they continually gave themselves away. Aware of the continual presence of law enforcement agents, they began to feel the pressure. Ciccio Pastoia went to stay with his brother in Emilia, north of Florence. Mandalà invited his friend Campanella to a casino, and when the wives went to the Ladies, confided that he was convinced he was about to get arrested. As the police closed in, he was spending more and more time at casinos, as he considered it a useful alibi.

  ‘I’ll be OK’, Mandalà said. ‘I’ve booked a flight to South America.’ The Boss would find someone else to look after him.

  At dawn on 25 January 2005 doors were kicked in all over Palermo, handcuffs snapped on over pyjamas and hundreds of apartments and offices turned over. Over a thousand police and carabinieri were deployed in a massive operation code-named Grande Mandamento, the culmination of three years of investigations by a combined special force, involving hundreds of hours of surveillance. The effect of the raid was to create scorched earth around the Boss of Bosses, picking off his entire support network in Villabate and Bagheria. Pastoia was arrested at his son’s house in Emilia, Mandalà in Villabate, with the plane tickets to Venezuela in his wallet.

  TV news cameras rolled as, one after another, they were led to police cars, jackets over their heads: Mario Cusimano, who helped set up the trip to Marseille, Nicolò Eucaliptus and Onofrio Morreale, Provenzano’s trusted lieutenants in Bagheria.

  The news agencies rushed out the first accounts of a major strike against the Boss of Bosses: ‘Provenzano ever more alone’, ‘Back against the Wall’, ‘Heavy Blow Struck against Provenzano Clan’. Somewhere Provenzano was listening to the headlines on the radio.

  A total of forty-six men were arrested on the first sweep. Investigators had Provenzano’s inner circle, the men who had seen the Boss just days, even hours, earlier – but they still did not know where the Boss was hiding. They left one of his closest assistants, Stefano Lo Verso, free but followed him closely: they knew he took food to Provenzano regularly and were hoping he would lead them to him. They could not let the old man starve, after all. But after a couple of days of close surveillance, police gave up hope that Lo Verso would take them to his leader and arrested him.

  Two days after the arrest Mario Cusimano, claiming he was frightened for his life, asked for protection and started talking. It was something of a record.

  Police put Ciccio Pastoia in a cell and left him alone to read a copy of the dossier containing the evidence against him. Pastoia had been warned that his house had been bugged, but he had no idea of the extent to which his words had been immortalized. After all his assiduous attention to detail, his safe house up in the hills, his summits under a tree, he had been careless; he had betrayed everyone. He turned page after page, reading transcripts of his conversations, boasting about breaking the rules of Cosa Nostra, bragging about how he would kill Geraci first and tell the boss later. How he had killed a man in San Giuseppe Iato without asking the Boss’s permission: crowing about his own treachery, criticizing the Boss to Mandalà for changing the rules, for failing to follow his own directives.

  ‘Do you have any idea how many times Uncle put me in a difficult situation . . . that’s what he’s like! He criticizes others for doing something, then he goes ahead and does it himself . . . I’ve taken care of him for thirty years . . . I know him’, he had boasted. ‘I know him like the back of my hand . . .’

  And there he was, threatening to kill Benedetto Spera’s son, the son of a capo mandamento, a made man. ‘That bastard . . .’

  In other cells in the same prison men of honour were reading the same papers. They would know. And they would go after his own sons: his sons would become the target of vengeance. He had two choices: collaborate and get his family under protection as fast as possible, or kill himself and expiate the vendetta right there, by his own hands.

  The old man ripped a sheet off the prison bed, hung it over the bars of the window and tied one end around his neck. When the guards opened the cell door the next morning, they found him dead, the legal dossier open on the bed.

  The bank clerk and ex-council leader Francesco Campanella was thrown into panic by the police raid. He told police he wanted to collaborate but then lost his nerve and tried to give them bits of information with no real significance. When news of his arrest on Mafia charges got out, the bank’s clients had stormed the building to demand whether they still had their savings. Months later his wife told him she had seen a suspicious-looking person hanging around outside the house. A
fraid that his former clients were going to take their revenge against him, Campanella told investigators he had decided to collaborate, this time for real. To prove it, he told them about the forged ID, bearing the name of Gaspare Troia, on which the Boss of Bosses had left the country.

  With the latest information detectives composed a new identikit image of the Boss, updating the ancient 1958 black-and-white mugshot that was all they had to go on. Giuffré confirmed the new image was a good likeness, as did others who had seen him recently. Investigators picked up a conversation between two mafiosi sitting in their car, looking at the identikit image in the paper, and discussing the likeness. ‘He’s not as bald as this picture shows . . .’

  The picture was broadcast on Chi l’ha visto?, the Italian version of Crimewatch, on 7 March 2005 and drew a record audience of 3.6 million. Of the numerous callers to the programme, the producers said a few were convinced they must have seen Provenzano himself.

  One sighting had been the previous January at a motorway service station outside Rome, another at a bar outside Florence. Investigators spent the following weeks following up leads all over Italy, and harmless old boys were interviewed in police stations across the country. One man was followed by detectives after he made a number of unexplained journeys from Corleone to Palermo and was seen making nodding contact with an older man at the Palermo railway station. The old man fitted Provenzano’s identikit image, and police picked him up half-way down via Maqueda, the long, narrow street lined with stone palazzi that cuts through the heart of Palermo. It turned out the officers had gatecrashed a homosexual assignation.

  Cusimano’s account of the emergency prostate operation launched a new phase of the hunt for Provenzano. Police visited the old man Gaspare Troia, a retired baker, in Villabate, and inquired about his health. No problems, he told them, no recent operations, nothing wrong with his prostate, and he had never been to France.