Boss of Bosses (31 page)

‘The role of Mafia women has always been as keepers of the culture, knowledge and values. It’s women’s job to pass on Mafia culture, above all in the education of their children’, wrote magistrate Teresa
Principato. As the principal educators, mothers are also uniquely qualified to vouch for their sons.

In her letter to the papers Ninetta Bagarella portrayed her older son as a paragon of local youth, unjustly persecuted by the state: ‘Justice demands that people should know that my son Giovanni is a normal, open, happy, easy-going boy. He works hard in the fields, and when he comes home he meets up with his friends.’

If you asked anyone other than his mother, since the moment he arrived in Corleone, Giovanni had sought to establish his credentials as the boss in waiting. He was taught to handle firearms and command respect. By the age of nineteen Giovanni had been initiated into Cosa Nostra, surrounded by mentors and friends of his father’s and invited to formal feasts with other men of honour. He ‘made his bones’ two years after his father’s arrest, under the guidance of his uncle Leoluca Bagarella, by strangling with his bare hands a man accused of talking to the police. Giovanni was overweight and unfit, and struggled to dispatch the victim. But when he had stopped the man’s breath, he was, as Brusca later described him, ‘excited as a child’.

He attended summits with senior Corleone bosses. He did wheelies on motor cycles in the main square. If the police stopped him for questioning or caution, he was insolent and sarcastic: ‘Yes, sir, is there anything at all I can do for you today sir?’ When the plaque in the centre of Corleone commemorating the sacrifice of judges Falcone and Borsellino was ripped up, Giovanni Riina was the prime suspect.

While the Riina boys roared around town on their motor bikes and picked fights in the bar, Provenzano’s sons studied hard and kept themselves to themselves. Angelo Provenzano was raised to do things differently. When his car was stolen, he reported the theft to the police – an action that would have branded a mafioso as a
sbirro
, a spy.

At a club night held near Corleone a confrontation between the brothers highlighted their essential differences. Angelo wore his usual preppy uniform of polo shirt and jeans and chatted to friends about his passion – Milan football team; Paolo wore his jeans trendily low slung, with lashings of gel in his hair. They were standing near the bar when they were aware of a row going on at the door. The Riina brothers were refusing to pay the entrance fee, insisting that their status
as the boss’s sons be recognized. When Angelo heard what was going on, he picked his way through the throng and took Salvo aside. ‘Don’t be an arsehole. If you behave like this, it reflects really badly on all of us. We paid to get in, and you’re paying.’

However much the Riina boys threw their weight around in town, they acknowleged the Provenzano boys’ authority – rather than start a fight, they paid for their tickets.

Once Provenzano’s law of ‘submersion’ had come into operation, the Riina boys’ thuggish behaviour was no longer indulged. Word reached Provenzano that Giovanni and Salvo were destroying the carefully constructed
pax mafiosa
that had been maintained in Corleone for decades. He wrote to Brusca: ‘I am dismayed by what you tell me about our dear friend’s son, who seems to be behaving very badly, and from what you say, has been even worse lately. I need you to give him a message from me, ask them to stop causing problems. In the meantime, I need details: what have they done, exactly? How have they been making so much trouble? Make absolutely sure that what people are saying is true, but at the same time, tell the boys they’ve got to limit the damage they are causing. It’s got to stop. That is my fervent prayer.’

By the age of thirty, Giovanni was serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison, for murder. Totò Riina, so bitter about the old, privileged Palermo families, had transformed his dirt-poor peasant heritage in one generation into something terrible and self-destructive. Giovanni’s younger brother Salvo seemed to see the world exactly as his father taught him, despising Mafia collaborators as
malantri e spiuni
,‘evil-doers and spies’. Police who planted a bug in his car heard him boast about the Corleonese clan’s triumph in the bloodbath of the second Mafia war, as though it were a football match. ‘Excuse me, in Sicily . . . In the whole of Italy, who have always been the winners? The Corleonesi!! So, who did you think was going to win?’

On one occasion Salvo and a friend, ‘C’, were driving along the A29 towards Palermo while agents strained to hear their conversation. As the two men drove past Capaci, Salvo noticed bunches of flowers placed at the site of the bomb blast that killed Falcone, his wife and his
police escort. He had evidently been fighting off the growing belief within Cosa Nostra that the bombs had been a disastrous mistake.

Riina: God . . . they’re still leaving wreaths for this thing.

C: What do you think about it? . . . Things have got worse since then, haven’t they?

R: It’s not that they’ve got worse . . .

C: Prison conditions, stuff . . .

R: No, but prison conditions wouldn’t have got worse if there hadn’t been such a heavy reaction that made them back off . . . In May there was this bomb, in July there was the other one, then they arrested my father in January, understand? That was a blow . . . I don’t know how it would have ended up, if we hadn’t forced the state to back off.

C: You’re right.

R: We had to tell them, ‘we’re in charge here’.

C: So outsiders were saying, fuck, they got it wrong . . .

R: Right! And it’s not true, because we told them, ‘We’re in charge here, you might be in charge up north, but down here, we’re in charge’.

C: Yeah, ’cause the guy who took over didn’t have . . .

R: Didn’t have the guts to carry on . . .

C: So the state and everyone in it could say, ‘Fuck, they got it wrong’.

R: A colonel’s got to make the decision and take responsibility. And the decision was: ‘Shoot them!’ And they shot them down!’

Salvo is clear that Provenzano, ‘the guy that took over’, let the organization down by failing to carry through the violent strategy started by his father. Totò Riina’s children have shown how a family raised within Mafia culture behaves: they proclaim themselves unjustly persecuted and assert their own, separate, brand of justice. They are united against the world, and they are secure in their identity. Angelo and Paolo don’t have that luxury. Provenzano’s sons are unhappy, resentful and muddled about their place in the world.

Both Provenzano and Giuffré’s sons struggled to lead legitimate lives with some semblance of normality. As the operation to catch their fathers intensified, they were constantly watched, and the strain sometimes showed in strange ways. One night a police surveillance unit watched Giuffré’s son get into his car in Caccamo in the early hours of
the morning. They followed him at high speed across the island, becoming ever more convinced that he would lead them to his father. When he arrived in Messina, four hours later, the young man walked into a bar and ordered a coffee, then turned and gave his pursuers a wave, before getting back in his car and driving all the way home.

Police surveillance was making Angelo and Saveria’s lives extremely stressful. Bernardo’s prostate trouble was getting worse, which was deeply worrying. They knew he paid attention to his symptoms and consulted his medical dictionary all the time. As the months went by, his health would become a matter of urgency, continually increasing his risk of exposure.

I
F YOU CAN
get the others to do as you say . . . get them to see if, around the office, someone could have put a camera, or more than one, close up or a bit further away, get them to have a really good look. . . . Tell them what to do, and don’t thank me, thank Our Lord Jesus Christ.’

Provenzano’s letter to Carmelo Umina, owner of the office, was not a general warning but a very specific instruction. The rural farm office where Umina was to host a meeting of senior capos had been under surveillance for some time by the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale (ROS), the anti-organized crime section of the carabinieri. One day, quite suddenly, the agents’ screens went blank. Someone had searched the place and found micro-cameras hidden in the furniture. The tip-off had probably come to Provenzano from his sources inside the carabinieri, and he had passed it on. It was just one of several secret cameras and listening devices that Provenzano’s men had discovered and immediately dismantled.

Someone was watching over the Boss. Provenzano’s frequent religious invocations revealed a close connection to the Lord, who was very attentive to his needs: ‘I don’t need that house, Jesus Christ has found one for me’, he wrote. Closer attention indicated that Jesus Christ was probably a code-name for one of Provenzano’s informers, who often came to the rescue in moments of crisis.

Provenzano’s preoccupation with security, already high, intensified after the discovery that law enforcement were planting bugs like wildflowers around his favourite meeting places. He lost no opportunity to remind his men not to lower their guard.

Provenzano didn’t always meet his lieutenants in sheep sheds in the middle of the country: one of their favoured places was a driving school right in the centre of Palermo, between handbag shops and upmarket groceries in via Daita, behind the glorious Politeama theatre, with its prancing bronze horses. Around the corner was via Libertà, Palermo’s most fashionable avenue, lined with plane trees and smart clothes stores, Max Mara and Tod’s. The driving school was owned by Carmelo Amato, sixty-four, a quiet man who hung posters bearing spiritual slogans on his office walls. He was a man nostalgic for the old Mafia and bewildered by how difficult the world had become since the bombings, but he was happy enough to host meetings for the Boss.

On a given day Giuffré and the other capos would turn up and wait for their appointments, sitting on a sofa under the stairs. At various times Giuffré recalled seeing Provenzano’s old friend and former driver Ciccio Pastoia and his consigliere Pino Lipari coming or going. Then he’d be called in for his private meeting with Uncle Binnu.

The carabinieri listening in on Provenzano’s strategist Tommaso Cannella’s phone heard him say he was going to ‘Amato’s, to see about Binnu’. Agents followed him and kept the place under surveillance for weeks. Through their micro-cameras they watched mafiosi coming and going but never caught a glimpse of Provenzano. Then suddenly the visits stopped. One afternoon Amato’s son-in-law walked over to the television and turned it around. Agents held their breath as he inspected the back and eventually found the bug. In the surveillance room the screen went blank.

‘I got a call to let me know that the meeting place had been discovered by the police’, Giuffré later recalled. ‘After that we found a new place to go. No one went there again.’

Fast as the carabinieri implanted listening devices and cameras, the Mafia seemed to find them, but still Provenzano was afraid his capos weren’t taking the matter seriously enough. Security had become something of an obsession, and Giuffré began to find it slightly wearing.

‘He had one of these devices . . . I actually gave him one of these things back in about ’96 or ’97, I gave him one of these instruments to search for bugs. It wasn’t anything particularly sophisticated, a bit
of plastic, let’s say, nothing very . . . I remember it because it was a time when he was holding meetings in my area. He would bring this instrument, which was a little receiver, like a transistor radio, with an antenna . . . not really an antenna but a bit of red wire sticking out. And he’d always have it with him in his jacket pocket. As soon as he set foot indoors, he would go over the whole room, going “all right, all right, all right”. . . and he’d do the same thing with all our cars. He was increasingly fearful, during this period, and would never get in a car without sweeping it for bugs with this machine. Honestly, his obsession with this thing was just crazy. And pointless, because even though he told the men hundreds of times, they just didn’t take any notice and just carried on talking, and he’d end up shouting, “Would you just stop talking!”’

Provenzano and the investigators who sought him constantly tried to outsmart each other. The long-term fugitive thought and planned long and hard about how to protect himself and avoid detection while keeping the flow of essential correspondence going. The judges wrote: ‘Over the months and years he recruited different people, ever careful continually to bring in new “filters” between himself and people assigned the dangerous task of collecting and delivering the correspondence.’

Meetings between Provenzano and his closest aides always revolved around the same problems of security and restricted contact, as Giuffré recalls: ‘We were told to be careful about broaching these subjects, not to talk, to try to find a defence against mobile phones that could be used to locate us, and to try to find new manpower, men with no record who could move around without being under the glare of the investigators, so as to protect those in hiding.’

Provenzano told his men that good days for meetings were hunting days in the forests around Palermo, since people got used to seeing strange fellows in tweed jackets wandering about the woods. But then he received a tip-off that not only mafiosi but also the police were taking advantage of the hunting days to wander about in the woods, disguised in green hunting jackets and hats, shotguns and game bags slung about their shoulders. Instead of game, they were hunting fugitives. A new directive went out: no one was to move on hunting days.