by Gordon Kerr
‘Via!’ (Go!) he shouted, leaping from the van, gun in hand, and running towards the hut’s metal door which the man inside hurriedly tried to slam shut. But Cortese managed to catch it just before it closed, grazing his fingers. There was a brief struggle before Provenzano realised there was no escape. They held him, asking for his name. At first, he denied that he was the man they were looking for, but gradually began to understand that denial was futile.
Inside the building, they saw evidence of the pared-down, peasant existence that the fugitive had been living. The hut was sparsely and poorly furnished, chicory boiled in a saucepan on the cooker, and the fridge was stacked with meat and bread. The plastic bag that had finally led to his capture was located and found to contain clean underpants, vests and socks. Stashed in a cupboard was a pile of banknotes, a sum of 10,000 euros hidden amongst his underwear, and a pile of the sanitary towels he used due to incontinence resulting from an operation on his prostate some years earlier. On the desk in the shepherd’s hut lay five copies of the Bible. The pious Provenzano had underlined several passages in them, including the words: ‘Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and then you do not do as I say.’
They had finally captured the man who had been given the name ‘The Tractor’ because he mowed people down; the man of whom fellow Mafioso, Luciano Leggio once said: ‘he has the brains of a chicken but shoots like an angel’.
It was said that the authorities had known for years where he was – Sicily is not a huge island, after all, and he had even been seen on occasion strolling through the streets of Corleone. In their defence, however, the police claimed not even to know what he looked like. The last known photograph of him was a passport-sized image snapped in 1950. Computer-enhancement, ageing the face in the photograph, greying the hair and beard and adding lines to the face, had helped, of course, but not much.
The third of seven brothers, Bernardo Provenzano had been born into a peasant family in 1933 and, after finishing his education at a very early age, he had been sent out to work in the fields. However, the life of a Mafioso was immeasurably preferable to that of a farmhand, and in his late teens he joined the local Mafia Family of Michele Navarra, working as an enforcer for Luciano Leggio, often in partnership with Totò Riina who would himself later become one of the most vicious of all Mafia bosses.
Back in the mid-1950s, however, it was Leggio who was after the top job and Provenzano took his side against Navarra. They made their move in September 1958. Provenzano and Riina were members of the team that peppered Navarra’s car with 112 bullets, killing him and allowing Leggio to take over as head of the Family. With that, Provenzano rose through the ranks and was given the job of hunting down and liquidating as many of Navarra’s men as he could.
He showed his true mettle and began to create a reputation for cold-blooded ruthlessness when on 18 September 1963 he and some associates wounded three members of a rival gang in Corleone. As the men lay in agony, The Tractor walked up to each in turn, delivering the coup de grâce, a bullet between the eyes. Chillingly, he smiled as he did so, as if this was what he had been put on this earth to do. He added to this reputation on another occasion, when he is reported to have killed a rival gangster by beating him to death with a stone.
He successfully dispatched a great many more of Leggio’s rivals, but it was a failed hit in May 1963 that was to change his life. It was not the authorities who were creating problems for him, however. He found himself being pursued by other Mafiosi who had decided on a vendetta against him. A few months later, after the issue of an arrest warrant against him for the killing of one of Navarra’s soldiers, he found himself being hunted by both sides of the law. He did the only thing guarnteed to maintain his life and his freedom. He became a fugitive, moving from safe house to safe house, protected by friends and family.
However, the killing did not end. In December 1969 The Tractor participated in a killing that bolstered his reputation as a hitman, the murder of Michele Cavataio. Cavataio was a target because he had betrayed the Corleonesi in what has become known as the First Mafia War. When the attack on him was launched, however, he succeeded in shooting to death one of his assassins. The situation was getting out of control and Provenzano averted what could have been a disaster by spraying bullets from his Beretta submachine gun and giving little thought to his own safety. Nonetheless, an eyewitness later claimed that it was actually Provenzano who caused the problem by opening fire too soon.
He remained a fugitive, but his status did not impede his progress in the organisation. When Leggio went to jail in 1974 for the murder of Navarra, Provenzano’s associate, Totò Riina, took over as boss, Provenzano becoming his right-hand man. He was now second-in-command of the Corleonesi Family.
In 1981 Riina instigated the Second Mafia War in which almost 1,000 people died, but following which the Corleonesi were installed as the principal Mafia Family in Sicily. To what extent Provenzano joined in the killing is unsure. His work took place behind the scenes and he dealt increasingly with the financial side of the business, taking control of a large percentage through the years of the publicly bid building and civil construction projects in western Sicily. He also took personal control of the Family’s heroin trafficking. Meanwhile, he lived with his family in an opulent 18th-century villa in the Palermo suburb of Bagheria, often being driven to meetings in an ambulance to preserve his anonymity.
Riina, having himself been on the run for 20 years, was arrested in January 1993 and charged with dozens of killings, in many of which Provenzano had also been involved. Two of the most sensational were the murders of the prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, murders that sickened not just Italy but the whole world. Provenzano was convicted of both murders in absentia.
It is presumed that, on Riina’s incarceration, Provenzano became boss, but he had not been seen in public since 1963 and it was often suggested that he was actually dead. This suspicion seemed to be confirmed when his wife and two sons emerged from hiding in 1992. However, informants began to come forward, letting the police know that he was well and truly alive and that he had, indeed, become Godfather.
Police raids on a number of homes in Sicily in January 2005 resulted in the arrest of 46 people believed to have been helping Provenzano remain at large. But, still, they failed to unearth him and he was not among another 80 Mafiosi they picked up two months later.
As boss, Provenzano made a number of changes in the organisation, possibly sensing a change in society in general as a result of the high-profile killings of recent times. Following Riina’s arrest, the Corleonesi carried out a series of bombings in tourist destinations on the Italian mainland. Bombs went off in Florence, Milan and Rome, killing ten people and injuring many. Important buildings such as the Uffizi gallery in Rome were damaged. The public were outraged and demanded that the authorities come down heavily on the perpetrators.
Provenzano immediately brought this kind of action to a halt. He rendered the organisation less bloodthirsty than it had been under Riina, helping to get the police off their backs. And he ensured greater efficiency. He is said to have arbitrated between rival Mafia factions who were wasting time and resources chasing the same business. He persuaded his associates that coexistence with state institutions and the infiltration of public finance was in their best interests. He made efforts to stop the flood of pentiti, men who turned state witness, by not targeting their families and trying to make the use of violence the final option. Finally, he re-established the old Mafia rules that Riina had done away with years before
In carrying out this overhaul, however, he remained elusive, even to his associates. He never used the telephone and all communication was carried out through small, handwritten notes, usually signed off with a religious blessing. Undetected at the time, he travelled to Marseille in France in 2002 where he underwent an operation for a prostate tumour, an operation for which, remarkably, he was reimbursed by the Italian health care system.
Provenzano did n
ot say much when he was arrested and has said even less since. He went straight to jail, having been convicted already and given multiple life sentences for the murders of Falcone and Borsellino and many others. The man who was seen by very few people for years, of whose existence for so many years there was sparse photographic evidence, is now under constant video surveillance and is only allowed contact with his lawyer.
Benedetto ‘The Hunter’ Santapaola And Family
The harsh, industrial environment of the city of Catania on Sicily’s east coast breeds similarly harsh individuals, tough men and women who grab what they can from life, because, as they well know, nothing is given willingly.
Benedetto Santapaola, known as ‘The Hunter’ because of his love of hunting, was born in 1938 and grew up in poverty in the San Cristoforo area of Catania, with his three brothers, Salvatore, Antonino and Natale. The extended family took in numerous cousins, members of the Ferrera, Ercolano and Romeo families, names that would provide a roll-call of Cosa Nostra in years to come.
Benedetto, or Nitto, as he was more familiarly known, was provided with an entrée into the largest Mafia Family in the area in the early 1960s by his cousin Francesco ‘Little Horse’ Ferrera, at a time when its head was Giuseppe Calderone, a hugely influential figure who was the founder of the Sicilian Mafia Commission. Santapaolo spent the next few years supervising various gambling and extortion rackets before being promoted to capodecina at the beginning of the 1970s when he took over the family’s heroin smuggling operation and became chief enforcer for the many businessmen associated with the Mafia. It was around this time that he made the useful acquaintance of Toto Riina, future head of the Sicilian Mafia, who was beginning his long period as a fugitive. The two would indulge their passion for hunting together in the forests and mountains around Catania. Riina liked Santapaola and lent him his support against Calderone whom Nitto was keen to replace.
Finally, in 1978, Calderone was murdered and Santapaola became head of what was now called the Santapaola Family, making Francesco Ferrera his underboss, another cousin, Franco Romeo consigliere and his brothers Salvatore and Antonino and cousin Aldo Ercolano capodecina. Riina promoted Nitto to the position of boss of the Catania province that same year and he was also given a position on the Regional Commission.
It was a busy time for The Hunter. He supported the Corleonesi in a war known as the Palermo War which lasted from 1981 until 1983, and at the same time he and his men were battling against another Family from Catania, the Cursoti, for control of the highly lucrative gambling and cigarette smuggling trade. Meanwhile, within his own Family, there was simmering discontent – fomented mainly by Alfi Ferlito – amongst some members over the murder of Calderone.
The discontent spilled over on 6 June 1981, when some of Ferlito’s men, armed with Kalashnikovs and bombs, attacked and seriously wounded Benedetto Santapaola. He did not go down without a fight, however, and, during the attack shot dead the leader, Salvatore Lanzafame.
Nitto sought revenge and the war took to the streets of Catania, resulting in dozens of murders. Finally, in April 1982, when six of Santapaola’s soldiers died in an explosion, he decided it was time to eradicate the cause of his problems. In June his men stopped the car transferring Alfi Ferlito from Enna to the prison in Trapani, following his arrest. Not only did they shoot Ferlito dead, they also murdered the four policemen accompanying him. The killers were from Palermo and members of the Corleonesi, allies of Santapaola.
He paid the Corleonesi back for their help shortly after. Carabinieri General Alberto Dalla Chiesa had been appointed prefect of Sicily at the beginning of the 1980s with the clear objective of bringing an end to the violence between rival Mafia Families. His last public interview made it clear that he was focusing particularly on the Catania Mafia. Santapaola sent a hit team to Palermo where they assassinated the General.
At the time, there was a great deal of suspicion about four entrepreneurs who were involved in property development in southern Italy – Carmelo Costanzo, Francesco Finocchiaro, Mario Rendo and Gaetano Graci. Rumours suggested that they operated with Mafia support and this was proved to be the case when Guiseppe Falcone, the magistrate investigating the Dalla Chiesa killing and himself a later victim of a bomb, discovered evidence linking one of the men, Carmelo Costanza, with payments that had been made to Nitto Santapaolo. In fact, Santapaola had even been a guest at the wedding of Costanza’s nephew and had been hiding in a hotel belonging to Costanza. With his passion for hunting, he had been delighted to be permitted to use the private game reserve of another of the four. Added to that was the fact that Mario Rendo bought all his cars from a dealership owned by Santapaola and recordings were made of his men meeting with Mafiosi.
At that time, journalists risked their lives every time they put pen to paper to write about the Santapaola Family. Guiseppe Fava was one such, editor of the newspaper I Siciliano. In February 1984 he penned an article entitled I quattro cavalieri dell’apocalisse mafiosa (the Four Horseman of the Mafia Apocalypse), in which he exposed the links between the four businessmen and the Mafia. Nitto considered it to be one too many articles about him and his Family and sent a team consisting of Enzo Santapaola, Aldo Ercolano, Marcella D’Agata, Maurizio Avola and Franco Giamusso to make sure he would not be writing about them again.
Meanwhile, investigating magistrate Falcone brought in the Italian Finance and Customs Police who uncovered countless instances of political and business corruption involving the four businessmen, the local Mafia and political figures. There were even photographs of the Catania mayor and members of the council with Benedetto Santapaola. In one, Nitto was shown in a friendly embrace with Salvatore Lo Turco, all smiles and grins. This was even more astonishing given that Lo Turco was a member of the Sicilian parliament’s Anti-Mafia Commission.
The Mafia were so embedded in local politics that they always had prior warning of arrest warrants being issued. They were even allowed to vet the warrants and have names added or taken away, if they wanted. The police also showed great leniency to men such as Santapaola. On one occasion they picked him up in his bullet-proof car at the scene of a violent gunfight in which there had been a number of fatalities. After a brief visit to the police station and the most perfunctory of questions, he was released without charge. Even more bizarre was the fact that they allowed this man with a long criminal record involving violence a licence to carry a gun.
By 18 May 1993, Benedetto Santapaola had been on the run for 11 years, but he was finally arrested in the farmhouse where he had been hiding out. Things were beginning to unravel.
In 1994 his nephew Maurizio Avola became a pentito, a witness for the state. Altogether, he confessed to 70 murders, amongst them the killing of the journalist Guiseppe Fava, in which he implicated his uncle, Nitto Santapaola.
Then, a year later, Santapaola’s wife, Carmela Minniti, was shot dead by a gang of men pretending to be policemen. They pushed past Santapaola’s daughter at the door, ran into the house and opened fire. It was said that she ran her husband’s affairs for him and was far from innocent.
One of the killers was Giuseppe Ferone, whose father and son Santapaola had ordered to be killed. In court, Santapaola read out a letter forgiving Ferone for the killing of his wife.
In 1998 justice finally caught up with The Hunter. He and his cousin, Aldo Ercolani, were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of Guiseppe Fava, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Meanwhile, the wars continued and the Santapaola Family, headed by acting boss Umberto Di Fazio, underboss Vincenzo Santapaola and consigliere, Antonino Santapaola, fought a vicious war throughout the 1990s with the Cappello and Mazzeo Families. Hundreds died.
On 5 December 2007, Sicilian police arrested 38 Mafia suspects and hunted for nine others, another step towards terminating the grip that the gangsters have had on the island for hundreds of years. Amongst those arrested was Enzo Santapaola, Nitto’s son. The suspects
are being charged with an extensive menu of crimes, including extortion and drug-trafficking. This was just the latest in a series of sweeps.
Part Four: Wild West Killers
Jesse James
Hero or villain? Robin Hood or cold-blooded killer? Which was Jesse Woodson James? Certainly only on a couple of occasions did he rob passengers on the trains he was holding up, and even then he only did it because the safes he and his gang were robbing, were almost empty. Added to that, before he robbed those passengers, he checked their hands to see if they were working men. If so, he left their wallets intact.
This handsome, dashing but utterly ruthless bank robber behaved more like a present-day rock star. Sometimes crowds would turn out to watch his robberies and newspapers treated him like a folk hero, taking revenge on an increasingly industrial society that was sweeping away the old ideas and ways of life. Or perhaps he did it because he was upholding the last vestiges of the old South, hanging on to the lost cause of secession from the Union. Whatever his motive, he and his various gangs carried out dozens of daring robberies during a 16-year period and he killed half a dozen or so men in the course of these actions before himself succumbing to the cowardly gun of Robert Ford at the age of 34.
Jesse had a good start in life. He was born in Clay County, Missouri, in 1847 but his father Robert, a farmer and Baptist minister, died when he was only three. His mother Zerelda remarried twice, the second time to Doctor Reuben Samuel in 1855.
The American Civil War that broke out in 1861 brought turbulent times to Missouri. Pro- and anti-slavery factions committed atrocities and fear stalked the territory. The James/Samuel family was caught up in it. Jesse’s 18-year-old brother Frank joined the Confederate army, riding with Quantrill’s raiders, while young Jesse, just 14 at the outbreak of hostilities, remained at home, itching to be old enough to join him.
