Boss of Bosses (34 page)

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.

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.