Authors: Clare Longrigg
Whenever there was trouble, Provenzano would be spirited away to another of his safe houses in the area – Palermo, Monreale, Ciminna. During this period he used his contacts in the health sector to provide him with the perfect transportation to meetings: an ambulance. He was also sighted in a white Mercedes chauffered by the young Giovanni Brusca. He held meetings in private homes, in his friends’ villas, in
offices and businesses. He met his capos in furniture shops, perched on plastic-coated sofas, to settle disputes and nominate debt enforcers.
In Mafia terms the boss’s territory is all-important: he can never go far from his power base and must show his strength in his feudal home. If he has his territory under control, he will always have people to protect him. Riina seldom moved house in twenty-three years ‘on the run’, and enjoyed an existence untroubled by the knock at the door. For several years Provenzano lived comfortably in Bagheria, master of all he surveyed.
‘The Bagheria Mafia was Bernardo Provenzano’s Mafia’, Giuffré explained.
Bagheria was once the playground of the rich, a place where the wealthy of Palermo built themselves grand summer residences. The Villa dei Mostri, in the centre of town, features eccentric gargoyles at the gates, mocking the passers-by on their Sunday
passeggiata
. Recent development has been so haphazard and careless that imposing stone gateposts are left stranded between new apartment buildings. Parts of ancient walls have been incorporated into traffic islands. The town hall in Bagheria is an ugly modern building on the wide main street, flanked by upmarket shops. Its smoked-glass windows conceal a dreary past of graft and greed. For years planning and development in the town were blighted by Mafia interference. Showrooms, villas and blocks of flats sprang up on protected ground, cement foundations paving over the last green spaces. Provenzano’s associates built themselves villas in the centre of Bagheria, even within the parkland of the historic Villa Valguarnera.
‘Everything in Bagheria was run by the Mafia’, said the
pentito
Angelo Siino years later. ‘Nothing moved without the Mafia’s say-so, because the nerve centre of life in Bagheria was in the Mafia’s control.’
To consolidate his power base Provenzano made an unusual alliance. At a time when Cosa Nostra enjoyed close links with some Christian Democrats he nurtured contacts within the Communist Party, which enjoyed a majority on the council. It has since been claimed by collaborators that some councillors signing off development contracts colluded actively with the Mafia, and that whole departments were completely under the control of Cosa Nostra. A
number of building contracts were awarded to the same group of companies, none of them local concerns: behind them were international connections linked to drug trafficking. Party members who raised the alarm were silenced, intimidated or expelled.
On the witness stand Giuffré painted a graphic picture of what he claimed was Cosa Nostra’s grip on a whole town.
‘All roads lead to Provenzano’, he said.
‘What does that mean, exactly?’ asked the prosecutor.
‘It means’, the witness replied, ‘that in Bagheria you are dealing with the not inconsiderable power of Provenzano. It wasn’t just the planning office that was in the Mafia’s hands. The political side was just the same. If a candidate for mayor didn’t get the go-ahead from Provenzano and his people, you can rest assured he would never get elected.
‘If he wanted to canvass votes in Bagheria, if he didn’t have the go-ahead from the family and from Provenzano himself, a candidate could drive past on the A13, but he’d better not stop.
‘I’ll give you an example of how it worked. One local businessman had a brother. I think I met him: I can’t remember his name, but I do remember he had a beard. He was a radical member of the Communist Party, had been for years. As soon as this businessman started dealing with us, his brother was forced out of the Communist Party and made to join the Christian Democrats. There was no room for someone like him on the Bagheria council. If you wanted to get anything done, it had to be with the full knowledge and consent of Cosa Nostra, otherwise forget it.’
Political corruption was not confined to Bagheria by any means. In the neighbouring satellite town of Villabate, the most prominent of Provenzano’s contacts was Nino Fontana, known as ‘Mister Millionaire’. Fontana was the deputy mayor and a front man for Simone Castello, one of Provenzano’s most resourceful allies. Fontana and Castello were old friends and business partners. Fontana was leader of the socialist co-operatives behind the building contracts, but he also ran a scam to get EEC compensation, in which the fruit and vegetable growers’ associations were ordering their members to destroy large quantities of their citrus crops to qualify for EEC grants.
In this environment of corruption and greed, Pio La Torre, recently appointed regional secretary of the Communist Party, made a preliminary effort to clean up the party and expose links with Cosa Nostra, but his demands for an investigation met with ferocious resistance.
Bagheria was still the playground of the rich – not the old aristocracy but the new moneyed criminal class. At the opposite end of town from the death chamber, along the shoreline at Mongerbino ad Aspra, mafiosi built themselves luxurious villas where their friends and families came to spend the summer holidays. On the winding coast road, high above the waves, is the walled entrance to Pino ‘the Shoe’ Greco’s villa – tiered apartments descending to sea-level, among the pine trees. The villa boasts thirty-six rooms in different apartments, where high-ranking fugitives would bring their families to stay, occupying separate floors, each with its own living quarters. From their white-tiled balconies they looked out from the rocky promontory at Mongerbino and drank champagne with their host, the hit man.
To tour the little winding roads along the shore is to trace a map of Mafia country: in Aspra, Brancaccio boss Giuseppe Guttadauro had an elegant house by the shore, with a glassed-in terrace overlooking the water. Along the coast is a pretty fishing village with blue- and red-striped boats pulled up on the sand; a couple of streets back is the seaside hideout used by Trapani capo Matteo Messina Denaro. Police identified it by following Messina Denaro’s girlfriend. Inside they found unmistakable clues to his presence: cigarette butts of his favourite brand and his greatest passion, a Playstation.
At the end of a narrow sandy path, right on the beach, is the villa belonging to Ciccio Pastoia – long-time friend, driver and ‘
alter ego
’ of Bernardo Provenzano. The villa is a masterpiece of 1970s’ modernism: a two-tiered curving glass and cement structure covered, on the outside, with blue glass swimming-pool tiles.
While the Riina family drank cocktails with the Grecos overlooking the sea at sunset, and Ciccio Pastoia clinked glasses with his friends on the sheltered balcony of his villa, not far away men in industrial gloves were dissolving their erstwhile friends in acid baths.
As the capos relaxed and celebrated their latest victories, a young police captain, Beppe Montana, took his little boat out and nosed
about the coves and bays along this stretch of coastline. He suspected that several mafiosi living in hiding had properties along the shore, and he spent his Sundays posing as a holidaymaker, peering into walled gardens and discreet terraces.
Back at the prosecutor’s office, following their paper trail, investigators were pursing links between the various companies connected to Provenzano. Tracing connections between board members or investors, they arrived at a number of companies all located in the same Palermo street. Many of the trails led to Pino Lipari, a former surveyor and consultant for ANAS, the national road transport corporation. He had no criminal record and no apparent connection to Cosa Nostra, but Lipari emerged as one of Provenzano’s most faithful associates and senior manager of his business interests.
Lipari was a busy, clever little man in his mid-forties. He had worked for the Cinisi boss Gaetano Badalamenti and had excellent contacts in local administration. Provenzano had met Lipari while he was in hiding as Badalamenti’s guest. His faith was rewarded when Lipari came up with a system for milking the health system of billions. Together they would cream off a fortune from state funds, putting the Mafia on a new financial footing.
The Sicilian public health system was overstretched and crumbling after years of chronic underinvestment. Lipari had contacts in the local administration who would ask no questions about the inflated prices demanded by Provenzano’s health companies. If hospital suppliers leased them expensive, cutting-edge machines that staff didn’t know how to work, no one objected. Apparently legitimate companies appeared, with proper-sounding names and board members who were almost all relations or girlfriends of Bernardo Provenzano or his consultant Pino Lipari.
These companies were repeatedly awarded contracts for supplying the major hospitals in the region. The success of Lipari’s system showed how much money there was to be made from health supplies if you had the right contacts in the administration – and there was no reason the system couldn’t be rolled out across other areas, even on the mainland.
‘When we tapped their phone lines, we discovered that there were meetings held in advance to agree who would win the contracts’, says Pellegrini.
‘We discovered a monopoly of health supplies,’ Pellegrini wrote in his report, ‘a cartel of companies which was grabbing bigger and bigger slices of a highly profitable market, given the high cost of scientific equipment used in hospitals.’
Provenzano’s business activities signalled a new departure for Cosa Nostra: ‘It was something completely new to us,’ says Pellegrini, ‘that a clan could be waging war on one front, while at the same time it was dedicated to developing the health supplies business. This is what became known, famously, as
la mafia imprenditrice
, “Mafia enterprise”, whose methods are largely non-violent and whose front men have no previous convictions.
‘There were some who underestimated what we were dealing with at that time. But not us. We never thought of these people as
viddani
or ignorant peasants, I’ve always liked the Sicilian saying “big boots, smart brain”. Peasants’ boots they may wear, but they’ve got good minds. I have always regarded them as extremely dangerous and extremely shrewd. I always thought of Provenzano as “the Accountant”, because he made calculations. The work he was doing required a good brain.’
Pellegrini’s 1984 report explained Cosa Nostra’s qualitative leap: ‘The mafioso, once his authority is secure, no longer needs to resort to violence or threats to impose his will; his presence and his word are enough for him to be involved in any business on his own terms and conditions.
‘Businessmen have grasped this reality, recognizing the Mafia’s authority: considering that, if they do not submit to the Mafia, they could not pursue their business activity, they have preferred and prefer to deal preventively with organized crime, thus avoiding the high cost of damage and personal harm.’
Since no local businesses could risk reporting Mafia extortion to the police, Pellegrini continued his assiduous tracking of suspects. The most difficult task faced by investigators was conducting surveillance on foot. ‘If we sent anyone to follow a target, they would find
themselves being followed. We’d be spotted in minutes. If they saw a vehicle they didn’t know, they’d send out men in cars to block us in. We did manage to take photographs from inside a van or a truck, while we were pretending to set up road works.’
It came to the team’s attention that the Bagheria Mafia was investing in a new diagnostic health centre, a project of particular interest to Provenzano. Riina used to tease Provenzano about his predilection for investments in health, but he was not the only one to spot a personal interest. Pellegrini has strong suspicions that the health business provided cover for Provenzano while he was on the run. He and his family needed health care over the years, and he also needed access to money, offices, bank accounts and so forth. The various health supply companies provided him with this infrastructure. Pellegrini suspects they also became channels for something else.
‘We had our suspicions that there was drug trafficking going on. We picked up a conversation between two men – it may have been Lipari or Carmelo Gariffo – and one of them said, “Come and meet me, I’ve got something for you.”
‘It was a very intense moment for us, as we were convinced that one of these men would lead us to Provenzano.’
Carabinieri followed Carmelo Gariffo’s car down corso Calatafimi, a long, tree-lined avenue on the outskirts of Palermo where exclusive villas are concealed by high walls, and watched him turn into a courtyard. They waited for him to come out but soon realized, when there was no sign of anyone coming or going, that there must be another exit. Sure enough, two hours later, Gariffo arrived from the other direction in a different car. After his driver searched the street for any suspicious vehicles, Gariffo, carrying a suitcase, got into his own car. The carabinieri gave chase but quickly realized they were being followed by the other driver and turned off.
‘We don’t know whether that suitcase contained drugs or money,’ says Pellegrini ruefully, ‘because we decided not to intervene, as it would have alerted the organization that we were watching them.’
Some years later he learned that Provenzano was staying just 50 metres from that courtyard, in an elegant villa with its own lush garden, surrounded by palm trees and purple bougainvillaea.
Pino Lipari was arrested in November 1983 and charged, along with seventeen others (some of them, including Provenzano and his companion Saveria Palazzolo,
in absentia
), with money-laundering. When Lipari left prison five years later, he was summoned by Uncle Binnu, who valued his business acumen and networking skills enough to risk re-employing a man with a criminal record.