Boss of Bosses (22 page)

Whenever someone new arrived, the host locked the office door. A local farmer with white curly hair arrived at about eleven in a Fiat Panda with the meat and proceeded to cook it, just how Provenzano liked it: very rare, without salt. He was Cola La Barbera, who owned
the farm on the other side of the Palermo–Agrigento road. La Barbera was Provenzano’s personal chef, providing for his particular needs and tastes.

They ate lunch sitting at the table, waited on by the shepherds, who brought dishes of fresh ricotta, pecorino and strong local bread, steamed vegetables and a vast platter of grilled steaks. There was local red wine, but Binnu drank only water.

After lunch Provenzano held one-to-one meetings to discuss his strategy for the organization, while the others waited discreetly in another room. Alone with Ilardo, he told him that whatever his grievances, and however much Brusca’s behaviour warranted it, he must make every attempt to avoid going to war: the delicate political situation demanded stability for now. Ilardo was disillusioned to find his old friend less proactive than before, pressing for peace and preferring to wait for the other side to slip up instead of going on the attack. He said they had to wait for the political situation to improve. If necessary, Provenzano claimed, it would take between five and seven years for the organization to recover sufficiently to be able to do business again and overcome the current precarious economic situation.

On a more personal note, Provenzano asked Ilardo if he had ever heard anyone refer to him as
il ragioniere
, ‘the Accountant’. His own accountant had started calling him that, and he had found it particularly irritating. Never, said Ilardo, politely. Provenzano, he knew, had been called ‘the Accountant’ for years.

At the end of the day, as it was getting dark, the driver came in and announced that now the men knew this place, when it came to the next meeting, they would be able to find it themselves. Ilardo nodded. He had taken in every detail of the place. But where was Riccio?

Riccio’s men, it turned out, had spent the morning photographing the cars parked at the rendezvous, watched them out of sight and then gone back to base. When Ilardo got home at about ten that evening and phoned angrily demanding an explanation, Riccio explained he had been waiting for the order from Rome but claimed that he had been instructed not to move in. A week later, after dark, Riccio’s men drove back along the Palermo–Agrigento road and tried to find the
dirt track but, after driving up and down the road three times, were unable to find the turning.

A further breakdown in communications meant that investigators in Palermo were not to learn of these events for an entire year. As a result, the meeting place in Mezzojuso, although known to the carabinieri, was used repeatedly by Provenzano, with no surveillance in place. It was to be another year before the authorities received a request to put a bug in the chef La Barbera’s car.

When it emerged that the carabinieri had had the opportunity to arrest the Boss of Bosses, the failure became a massive scandal. Riccio maintained he had orders from Rome not to raid the farmhouse.

‘Ilardo was to meet Provenzano in the Mezzojuso area. I communicated this information to the ROS, proposing to carry out surveillance myself and conduct the whole operation [to arrest Provenzano]. But my boss had a different view and told me it was not my job. The day of the appointment at the Mezzojuso junction I was there but the means at my disposal (men and vehicles) were insufficient, and the only thing we could do was take a few photos.’

The response from Rome was swift. Riccio’s superior officer, General Mario Mori, sued him for slander, saying there had never been any question of making arrests: ‘Riccio told us specifically that if they’d raided the farmhouse, he had no way of protecting the source.’

The complaints and counter-suits have since been shelved, but the controversy still churns on. ‘They didn’t want to get Provenzano’, Riccio, now white-haired, insists. ‘It may have been incompetence, or they may have had another reason. Perhaps Provenzano had some task to perform.’
²³

Meanwhile, Ilardo’s cover was still intact, and he continued to report to Riccio, providing a detailed picture of the daily administrative concerns of the organization and the changes being implemented as a result of Provenzano’s directive.

The Boss’s priority, in all correspondence, was to get problems sorted out quickly and peacefully, in order to let everyone get on with the real business at hand: making money. In one letter to Ilardo he wrote: ‘You must do this quickly, so we don’t lose the business . . . I
beg you, don’t make me look like an idiot, I am trying, with the will of God, to sort out everything I can, for you, for everyone.’

No problem was too small: ‘Thank you for sorting out that firm I spoke to you about, but unfortunately, while I was looking into it, they had a jackhammer stolen, and two soldering irons, which you need to track down, and get them back. Once you’ve done that, let me know, everything should go through me.’

Provenzano was concerned that the firms they were squeezing for protection money should not feel aggrieved. Ilardo reported that one firm had refused to pay what he felt was a reasonable sum,
£
20,000. The Boss replied: ‘We must be sure to ask the right amount, otherwise we get into a situation where we’re putting ourselves in the wrong, pursuing them for an exaggerated figure, so ask for the right amount and we’ll make sure they pay.’

While trying to impress on his cousin in prison that he was to be trusted to take over Caltanissetta, Ilardo fanned the flames of conflict with Brusca and the Agrigento clan, at considerable risk to himself, to try to force Provenzano to call another meeting and bring his collaboration to a speedy conclusion.

While Ilardo was still scheming how to force Provenzano out of hiding, word began to slip out that he was working for the police. At first it was just a rumour, odd snatches of hearsay, but in Cosa Nostra gossip can be lethal. Ilardo, now a marked man, blindly pursued his plan.

Brusca wrote to Provenzano saying he had had a request from the Catania clan to get rid of Ilardo, but he wanted the Boss’s permission. Provenzano’s response was typically measured: ‘We must be extremely careful to avoid any unfortunate occurrence.’

Brusca’s irritation turned to slow-burning anger. ‘I wrote to Bernardo Provenzano for guidance, to see if he could shed some light on why the request had come from Catania, and not from him. I took a pen and paper and I wrote to Bernardo Provenzano that there was this problem we needed to resolve. His response to my question, was that he didn’t understand what was going on. He said: “Let’s see about this, as soon as we can.” So he played for time.’

But Provenzano did not always prevaricate for the sake of it. While Brusca fumed, he was arranging for Ilardo to be swiftly dispatched.
Such profound treachery was deeply wounding, and damaging for the organization. He had revealed his plan to Gino Ilardo. The authorities would have his letters, would know more about him than they ever had in thirty years. He instructed Giuffré to find a secure, remote location. Giuffré, suspecting the purpose, found the perfect spot, out of sight of prying eyes, and told Provenzano it was ready.

In early May, Ilardo decided to put his collaboration on a formal footing. He asked to meet magistrates from Palermo and Caltanissetta to talk about his situation, and spent some hours with them at the ROS barracks in Rome, going over the details of his conviction, his protection and the information he could offer. He left that afternoon, with an agreement to reconvene in ten days’ time, to finalize the arrangements for his, and his family’s, protection. He took a plane straight back to Catania, hoping to get home before his absence had been noted. But the news was already out. The next day two gunmen accosted him outside his house in Catania and shot him several times from close range before making their escape.

Word of Ilardo’s death spread rapidly through Mafia circles. Police recorded a conversation picked up by a bug in a mafioso’s car:

‘I saw Lucio yesterday evening . . . and he said to me: have you heard the latest about Gino? No, I haven’t, I said. . . He said it seems he was an informer.’

‘Who? Gino?’

‘Apparently he was in direct contact with someone from the police. Looks like he was the one who got Mimì arrested . . . and Aiello . . . If they hadn’t killed him he’d have let them have me, you and all our sons to the seventh generation . . . We don’t know what they know. I feel like a complete idiot – my whole world’s collapsed.’

Piddu Madonia was going wild with rage in his prison cell, betrayed by his own cousin, in whom he had placed his trust. The man described as the ‘worm within our midst’ had caused untold damage.

While Provenzano was digesting this disaster, Brusca, having made a show of pledging his loyalty, seemed to be acting on his own again. He refused to accept that he could not get any business in Bagheria – although he had never, by his own admission, been a part of that family, and he knew it was a closed shop.

The only way to prevent Brusca causing further damage, Giuffré concluded in his coldly calculating manner, would be to get rid of him. Obviously murdering Riina’s godson was likely to be an unpopular proposition, and Riina, though in prison, must still be respected. But Giuffré remembered something Riina had said that made him think he might not stand in his way. Brusca had been demanding the right to collect extortion money on another mafioso’s territory. Giuffré and Riina were discussing the protection rackets at a meeting in Palermo when Riina made a sardonic remark. ‘The colt is beginning to paw the ground.’

Giuffré took this as explicit permission to get rid of the ‘colt’, adding that Riina never did like to show favouritism (on the contrary, he had never shown any compunction about killing friends and allies). But Provenzano did not buy Giuffré’s rationalization and would not give permission for Brusca’s murder, however much he would have liked to. He had other ideas for revenge.

‘I wouldn’t wish to cause trouble,’ Giuffré said years later in his gravelly drawl, ‘but if I was determined to think the worst of some people, I would say Provenzano was convinced that, as soon as Brusca was arrested, he would collaborate, and his thinking was, Brusca knows next to nothing about me.’

Brusca was in love with the power, the sudden wealth and the football star lifestyle that Cosa Nostra could offer. A gruff, greedy individual, he had a surprising weakness for comfort and expensive clothes. Provenzano figured that, as soon as the prison door clanged behind him, he would be a prime candidate for collaboration.

Brusca as an informer on the opposition: the prospect made him worth more to Provenzano alive than dead. It was, as Giuffré describes it, a case of particularly sharp far-sightedness. Brusca was duly arrested in May 1996 while watching a TV film about the assassination of Giovanni Falcone. And within a few months he did indeed collaborate.

There was a kind of morbid fascination, a compulsive repulsion, about the fat, bearded monster who had killed judge Falcone. In the early days of his collaboration Brusca told untruths and half-truths, and demonstrated a high-minded amorality. He said he was disgusted
with the organization; no one followed the rules any more. ‘I felt betrayed as a mafioso. Not guilty for what I had done.’

Magistrates who questioned him in the early weeks found an understandable reticence on some particularly hot topics, and anything concerning his father, but in general his memory of events was clear and well ordered. They also revealed that the man known as ‘the Pig’ scoffed biscuits between sessions.

Brusca’s motive for betraying Cosa Nostra, his godfather and his own father, was his betrayal at Riina’s hand. Brusca had read, in the confessions of another mafioso, that Riina had been angry with him for going behind his back on a drug deal, and had threatened to kill him.

Riina had known him since he was a child; his father had taken in Riina’s whole family in times of trouble. ‘This revelation made me so angry and upset, he might as well have killed me. I had lived in the cult of Riina, but from one day to the next he turned to dust before my eyes.’

Brusca, like so many others, would get his revenge. But in the meantime Provenzano faced another challenge. Vito Vitale, a young blood from Partinico, considered himself the natural successor of Riina and had no time for the old-style capos. He and his brother used to make a mockery of Provenzano’s pious phraseology. He was a violent, hot-tempered man nearly thirty years Provenzano’s junior, whose murderous talent was attracting a group of like-minded youths. He did not wait for permission to kill. He shot Nené Geraci, the patriarch of Partinico, whose position he had already usurped, on Riina’s orders. He also got hold of a rocket launcher with which he intended to blow up the prosecutor Alfonso Sabella.

Provenzano heard rumours that Vitale was planning to take over the Mafia fiefdom of San Giuseppe Iato by executing any men loyal to Brusca and Balduccio Di Maggio. He wrote to a local mafioso in his steeliest tone: ‘They tell me a certain Vitale from Partinico has been hanging around town. What is Vitale doing in San Giuseppe Iato?’

Provenzano also happened to know that Di Maggio had returned in secret to his home town and assembled a small and heavily armed force to settle some old scores. Provenzano, assuming that the
pentito
might also settle a new score, didn’t try to stop him.

But before any of his enemies could get to him, Vitale was arrested. Provenzano, without using a gun, had seen off his last challenger. His circle of trusted allies was getting smaller, but they were men who understood what he was trying to do, who would work with him to accomplish his mission.