Authors: Clare Longrigg
Provenzano, preoccupied as ever with health matters, had to be updated about his wife’s medical appointments. Angelo had gone with his mother to visit a doctor in Catania about her constant headaches: she was suffering from sinusitis, which was aggravating her painful condition. He asked permission to contact 1012234151512. 14819647415218. ‘As for the other doctor I asked your permission to contact, I found him in the phone book, I’m glad to say he is still practising and I’ll make an appointment as soon as I can.’
Saveria has had problems with her health: surgery to unblock her intestine went wrong, and she had to undergo a second operation, by the specialist Giuseppe Guttadauro, a close associate of her husband.
According to Nino Giuffré, the reparatory operation was so successful that the doctor won Provenzano’s gratitude for life. When the doctor’s enemies (Giuffré included) were plotting to get rid of him, the Boss ordered them not to touch him.
It seems strange that Angelo would need his father’s permission to see a particular doctor, but there is a studied reverence in the son’s tone. Was Provenzano excessively cautious and controlling, or was this another hidden message? Investigators worked on the numerical code and cracked it without too much trouble (A was 4, B was 5, C was 6 and so on). The doctor Angelo wanted permission to consult was Giovanni Mercadante, a Forza Italia politician and nephew of the senior Mafia strategist Tommaso Cannella. Investigators had been circling Mercadante for years, but this was the first time he had been explicitly linked to Provenzano. The family letters began to look less innocent and domestic.
Bernardo’s sons were not the only ones struggling to negotiate with the absent family member. All was not well between Binnu and his brothers. A letter from Salvatore referred to an ongoing family feud over an inheritance. This quarrel had been rumbling on for years, in spite of Bernardo’s talents as a mediator. Salvatore’s querulous letter did not stint on emotional blackmail:
‘My brother, I don’t want to quarrel with anyone, I am just hurt that because of something said out of turn or misunderstood, there’s a great drama blowing up, because I really believe we both want the same thing, or anyway to settle this issue between us, but we have a different way of figuring out how to get there, with the result that we can’t understand each other; I am not saying this because I want to quarrel with you, I repeat – I don’t, it’s just that when you try to explain what you want, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, I’m referring in general to our correspondence, and I hate to talk like this, but it’s the truth and you might as well hear it.
‘I will close wishing you the grace of God, may He watch over you and protect you wherever you are, we send you our dear and affectionate greetings and kisses with all best wishes for the new year, may it bring you joy and peace, a brotherly hug from your affectionate brother.’
Such avowals of fraternal love bely the irritable tone of the rest: Binnu’s family was clearly under undue and unwelcome pressure, and – Saveria excepted – didn’t mind him knowing their grievances. Saveria’s letters are mild, fond and cheery, maintaining a housewifely tone that must have required heroic efforts to achieve.
The Provenzano family kept a low profile in Corleone. They wrote to the absent father and made arrangements for him where they could, trying to take care of his failing health and his security while avoiding the attentions of law enforcement. When they were forced to talk to the police, for a minor traffic violation or a parking offence, they were unfailingly polite and well mannered. They had very few people around them: their cousin Carmelo Gariffo was in and out of prison and offered little in the way of support. Saveria was almost never seen around town: Angelo would drive her to the shops, and she would stay in the car while he went inside. He drove her to Cinisi to visit relatives, but otherwise, like so many housewives in small towns in rural Sicily, she ventured out only very rarely. Most of the time she stayed indoors, preparing meals, polishing ornaments or writing letters.
Less than a year after Saveria and the boys took up residence in Corleone, the Riina family had come back to town. The two families could not have been more different.
After her husband’s arrest, Ninetta Bagarella, deposed as first lady of Cosa Nostra, hurriedly left the villa in central Palermo the family had occupied for the last few years of their comfortable life as privileged fugitives. She and the four children, aged thirteen to nineteen, were collected by one of Riina’s men, who packed them and everything they could carry into the back of his car and dropped them at the railway station. There they got a taxi home to Corleone – a winding little road over the mountains, a long, uncomfortable hour’s journey crammed into a stranger’s car. The taxi dropped them outside the family house in via Scorsone, a narrow street in the old part of town. After twenty-three years living as a fugitive, under an assumed name, Ninetta Bagarella was home.
Despite their shared history, Ninetta the schoolteacher and Saveria the seamstress did not meet for coffee and chats about the old days on the run. Ninetta engaged with the press, fought rhetorical battles with
prosecutors and followed her husband’s legal processes assiduously. Every court appearance he made, every time he angrily rejected accusations of involvement with Cosa Nostra or accused magistrates of communist activism, his wife was there in the public gallery – a formidable figure in sun-glasses. Saveria doesn’t go to court, according to her lawyers, because she’s just not interested in drama. She never speaks to reporters. Her husband is known as the Phantom of Corleone because, although his presence was suspected, he was never found; but she is the real phantom – a shadowy figure haunting the town, guarding her silence. The only recent photo of her has been the subject of a legal injunction.
According to insiders, the presence of the two women and their children in Corleone was proof that their husbands, once brothers in arms, were now enemies. According to supergrass Tommaso Buscetta, Provenzano had a deal with Riina, under which their family members would be protected on their home ground.
Saveria dresses simply, and never gets her hair done: she only visits the hairdressers on rare occasions, to have her greying curls cut short.
When Riina’s men cleared out his villa in Palermo after the arrest, they found a whole room full of furs, and a safe containing jewellery. Ninetta may have started out as a schoolteacher, but she has evidently acquired a taste for the finer things in life. Saveria and Angelo had opened a launderette, The Splendor, on the outskirts of town, which barely covered its costs.
Giovanni and Salvo Riina opened a business selling agricultural equipment on the main road into town. In a place where Alfa-Romeos and tractors are parked side by side, it blended in perfectly. The company was also a cover for the Riina boys’ movements: they had clients in Palermo, Trapani and all over the rest of the island, whom they had frequent reason to visit. It took a few years for the authorities to close the business on the grounds of extortion, money-laundering and Mafia association.
Maria Concetta Riina was elected class representative at Corleone High School, which caused a huge row. Were the children in Corleone’s classrooms obeying the old Mafia hierarchy? One magistrate implored the children of mafiosi to renounce their fathers, to
state on record that they rejected organized crime. Maria Concetta wrote an impassioned riposte, defending filial bonds and daughterly devotion. Angelo and Paolo Provenzano kept their heads down, studied hard and learned to loathe their father’s world. Nobody ever voted them class rep.
When her son Giovanni was arrested in June 1996 for Mafia association and suspicion of murder, La Bagarella issued an emotional plea for his release. Her letter to the press was a beautifully calculated example of the Mafia’s appropriation of religious language for public relations purposes, reasoning that whatever he had done, the boy was redeemed by his mother’s love: ‘I have decided to open my heart, the heart of a mother overflowing with grief at the arrest of my son . . . In the eyes of the world, my children were born guilty. We have brought up our children making enormous sacrifices, overcoming tremendous difficulties, giving them every possible love and support. We have raised them to respect the family and love their neighbour . . . The motto of the Riina household is “Respect everyone and everything”.’
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The wife of the boss of San Giuseppe Iato, Bernardo Brusca, kept a low profile while her husband was boss of the local clan. But when her sons were arrested in 1996, she came out with a firebrand speech in their defence. Giovanni was Totò Riina’s hit man, known as ‘
lo scan-nacristiani
’, the strangler of Christians (i.e., men of honour). At the time of his arrest he had killed, by his own admission, more than 150 people but fewer than 200 – he couldn’t remember an exact figure. As far as his mother was concerned, he was innocent, because she had brought him up in the Church. His arrest was an aberration, a matter of spiritual blindness. Signora Brusca told journalists: ‘If the Holy Spirit will enlighten our minds, and the judges’ minds, my sons will not be convicted.’
A mafioso’s life of violence does not preclude religious faith. In fact, it is a central part of the culture of Cosa Nostra, although in a form most people would not recognize. The mafioso believes himself the executor of divine justice. If he kills, he is doing nothing less than God’s will.
Ninetta Bagarella invoked the divine law in her plea for her son’s freedom – the law that protects the family bonds above all else, including
mere laws of state. All human beings are born free, she continued, life is a gift from God . . . in this vein she enters an unfathomable realm of denial.
She cited the commandments, the holy bond between parent and child, and a higher order of ‘justice’. She accused the judges of visiting the sins of the father on the son. The attribution of the sins of the father is a vexed question. Hardline anti-Mafia campaigners demand that the children of mafiosi disown their fathers and disavow any links with Cosa Nostra.
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Others maintain it would destroy the very fabric of society if children were set against their parents. The law remains on the side of the family: you cannot be prosecuted for aiding and abetting your father – and yet, as Angelo discovered to his cost, there are ways in which the sons’ very DNA is contaminated by the father’s crimes.
Angelo found that, as the son of the fugitive boss, his efforts to be law-abiding would never be enough. He would fail again and again to get a commercial licence since it was assumed that his father would use any family enterprise to launder money. In the past he had done exactly that, but Angelo felt the whole thing was massively unfair. Although Angelo’s family connections have effectively ruined his life, he has no one but the family to protect him.
‘I am against every form of violence’, he protested in a rare interview. ‘And on a personal level, my actions speak for themselves. I have had a moral education, and I believe I have always followed my principles. I have made my choice. But how am I supposed to defend myself against the accusation that my chromosomes are contaminated?
‘I have no criminal convictions. Let me make my living honestly, that’s all I ask.’
Riina’s sons had no such compunction: they were involved in contract-fixing in Palermo, and eager to be initiated into Cosa Nostra. Giovanni was taken under the paternal wing of his uncle Leoluca Bagarella, a man of ill temper and unpredictable violence.
Saveria Palazzolo has never written to the papers, nor has she made use of the many requests for interviews she received over the months and years to defend her husband’s name. She focused on keeping her sons out of the public eye as they tried to establish a normal life for themselves. Occasionally journalists would wander into the launderette,
posing as customers with dirty clothes, and then, once they’d got the proprietor chatting, make a bid for an interview. Saveria would generally give them short shrift and shut the door firmly behind them.
Possibly the only journalist to engage Saveria Palazzolo in conversation, just before lunchtime closing at the launderette, was
La Repubblica’
s grand old man, Attilio Bolzoni. He portrays her as the stereotypical Mafia wife and martyr, campaigning against her husband’s unjust persecution.
‘My husband has been persecuted since he was a boy’, ran the story, ‘since 1963, when terrible things started happening here in Corleone and they put the blame on him. Since then, no one has left him in peace, no one has left me in peace, and above all, no one has left my sons in peace.
‘Ask the old people here in town who know him, ask them what they think of my husband. I know what they’ll say. They’ll say Bernardo Provenzano is a man who has always worked for a living. He worked in the fields from dawn till nightfall.’
This interesting picture of bucolic innocence is not entirely accurate, considering that Provenzano, as a young man, sowed terror among the farmers for miles around, looting, stealing sheep, smashing wine barrels and setting fire to corn stacks. The Mafia wife in her media incarnation waxes eloquent with overblown piety, a high moral tone and intense focus on the family.
‘This persecution isn’t justice. I know only divine justice; I don’t believe in what they call “justice” in this world. I answer only to God, and He alone will judge us.’
One of the main functions of Mafia women is to perform as the intermediaries between men of honour and the outside world, making statements and appeals on their behalf through the media. Lawyers for Saveria Palazzolo maintain this interview never took place but point out that its publication shows what a self-effacing person La Palazzolo is. ‘Do you think anyone would have got away with writing that stuff about Ninetta Bagarella? They’d have been trussed up and strangled.’