Authors: Clare Longrigg
In spite of the investigators’ best efforts to keep pace, a number of near misses gave them an idea they were being handicapped. In September 2002 a patrol acting on a tip-off that Provenzano might be in the area spotted a jeep that was driving through the dark with no lights. As the patrol got closer, the jeep disappeared from sight and the mystified carabinieri couldn’t figure out how it had vanished – until the following morning, when they returned in the light and found a farm track. It later emerged that Provenzano had indeed been travelling in the jeep, and his driver had been forced to make a quick turn-off. It was a close thing. In a letter to Giuffré, he thanked Our Lord Jesus Christ, who had helped him make his escape.
His driver, Angelo Tolentino, was deeply shaken by the experience. ‘I thought we’d had it this time’, he told a friend. ‘I’ve never been so scared in my life. The Accountant was in that car.’
Tolentino and Episcopo used to use a farmhouse in the Ciminna countryside to go through Provenzano’s mail and compose their replies. The carabinieri had their bugs in place and were listening to the men’s idle chat, when suddenly they heard a shout: ‘Fuck! These wires are connected!’ Detectives heard a lot more swearing before the wire was cut.
Provenzano’s men came up with ever more sophisticated ways of evading the authorities’ attention. His faithful friend Pino Lipari was arrested at the end of 1998 and declared himself proud to serve yet another sentence on Uncle Binnu’s account. Ever conscious of Uncle’s security concerns, Lipari spent hours cutting up his letters to Provenzano and stitching them into the hem of his trousers, which would be picked up by his wife with the laundry. His son would piece together the scraps of the letter and rewrite it, as though from himself.
Lipari later came up with the brilliant idea of pretending to collaborate. His whole family had been arrested, and, although he expected no favours for himself, he was eager to secure their release. He had also understood the role of sabotage in Provenzano’s new strategy: it was better to derail a police investigation than to put a bomb under the station. Unfortunately for him, the government spies had already planted their bugs under the table in the prison visiting room. ‘I’m only telling them stuff done by dead men, trials that are over and
done with, people who’ve already got life’, Lipari confided to his wife and grown-up children. Thanks to the little listening device, Lipari’s plans to fake a collaboration were exposed.
Provenzano’s main weapon against being caught was not a dodgy electronic device running on batteries but, according to prosecutors, allegedly corrupt carabinieri and politicians who passed on key information about investigations into his whereabouts and activities, allowing him to stay one step ahead of the police. The magistrates’ case in this regard has been revealed in the course of a long trial brought against the alleged Mafia associates.
At the centre of a flurry of leaks and counter-intelligence was Michele Aiello, the private health entrepreneur recently convicted of being Provenzano’s key business contact. The prosecution claimed that Aiello sought out an old connection, Maresciallo Borzacchelli, a senior investigator of corruption in public administration and a centre-right member of the Sicilian regional assembly (or, as he was described by one magistrate, ‘another of those bastards who took the piss out of us’). Borzacchelli had known Aiello for over ten years, and prosecutors claim that during this time he gave the developer the benefits of his excellent contacts, as well as information on investigations into his activities, in return for money, use of a villa and other perks.
It was Borzacchelli, according to prosecutors, who introduced Aiello to another maresciallo of the carabinieri, Giorgio Riolo. Riolo would prove an invaluable asset, being one of the carabinieri’s foremost experts on installing bugs and secret cameras.
They were an ill-matched couple: Aiello tall and thin, scratchy and irritable, with thinning hair and glasses; Riolo short and round-faced, with curly hair and dark, beady eyes. He confessed he was flattered by Aiello’s attention, and the power information conferred on him. In exchange for details on investigations into Cosa Nostra’s activities, Riolo was given money, a car, an entrée into a different world.
Aiello, who investigators revealed had been working as the legitimate face of the Bagheria Mafia for over a decade, was anxious to avoid risks and greatly appreciated his friends’ advice. He was careful to pass the information along to Provenzano’s men. But Provenzano’s
security arrangements were suddenly, devastatingly, breached when, in April 2002, the carabinieri arrested his right-hand man, the capomafia of Caccamo, Nino Giuffré.
The carabinieri at Termini Imerese had received a mysterious phone call informing them that they would find Giuffré, a fugitive for eight years, on a nearby sheep farm. One report later said that the anonymous caller had tried to make a deal: he claimed that if they did not touch, or read, any of the letters in Giuffré’s possession, the caller would reveal the whereabouts of another fugitive, currently hiding out in the same area.
Giuffré had been living for over a year in a villa in Vicari, a sprawling village of houses and farm buildings by the river San Leonardo. His guardians were the local capomafia, Salvatore Umina, and his nephew Carmelo, a headstrong young man who drove a roaring off-road police jeep (much disapproved of by his uncle) or galloped around the valleys on horseback. Giuffré had taken a shine to him and employed him as his driver and his postman; he even gave Carmelo his sawn-off shotgun to look after (this favouritism, he admitted, caused jealousy among his entourage). Drivers had to be intimately familiar with the terrain: their charges moved only at night-time, without headlights. Easter had come and gone with the usual festive greetings exchanged by letter and a cake sent by the mafioso, who had finally agreed a price for the contract to build a new waste disposal site. Giuffré had let the delivery man keep the cake. There were few enough perks you could give the people you depended on in this situation – even an Easter cake counted for something.
On the morning of 16 April Carmelo had collected him before dawn as usual and driven him across country to the converted barn he used as his office. He had appointments lined up for most of the day starting at 6.30, with one empty slot: Domenico Virga had written to cancel, for the second time running.
As soon as he had got himself organized, with his list of appointments, and Carmelo had roared off, the carabinieri crashed in. He remembered the apocalyptic moment: ‘Complete earthquake, blackout. I couldn’t understand what was going on, the carabinieri turned up, and goodnight . . .’
The carabinieri searched him and found, in the pouch he wore round his waist, a gun and a few newspaper clippings. In his pockets were eight
pizzini
. All bar one of the letters were from Provenzano; one carried the previous day’s date. The two men had met and spent a whole day in private discussion just over a week earlier, close to where Giuffré was staying.
Giuffré thought about who might have phoned the carabinieri to give him away. Then he remembered: one of his deputies had changed his appointment and then failed to show up – Virga. Giuffré had recently taken him and his brother to task for behaving like cowboys – demanding protection money from companies that had already come to an arrangement with the local Mafia or others that didn’t fall within their jurisdiction – and causing no end of trouble. Giuffré had to make a calculation about how best to come out of this situation. If he had been set up, he might as well gain some advantage, since he evidently had enemies within the system. No one knew more about Bernardo Provenzano’s regime than he did. There was another urgent consideration: if he collaborated, his sons would be barred from Cosa Nostra, and this might be the best thing he could do for them.
‘He was worried his sons might become part of Cosa Nostra’, said chief anti-Mafia prosecutor Pietro Grasso. ‘He wanted to stop this happening before it was too late.’
In a statement Giuffré said: ‘I have decided to collaborate for various motives. Finding myself completely alone, and quiet, perhaps for the first time in my life, I found the time to dig deep within myself, a thing I’ve probably never had time to do before. I thought long and hard about what I have done in my life. From these thoughts, and this painful search within myself, I understood that a lot of things I have done have been wrong, and so, without asking for any reward, either in terms of my release or money, I began my collaboration.’
Magistrates kept Giuffré’s collaboration secret as long as they could, to protect his family. If they could get to August, his wife and sons could leave Caccamo to go away on holiday as usual and then disappear. It would certainly be better than a dawn raid, with all the publicity that would entail. His wife still lived in the centre
of Caccamo, on the top floors of a large house overlooking the main square. A flight of broad cobbled steps swept right past her door, where the name Giuffré was still marked on Dymo tape beside the bell.
‘I spent the worst summer of my life’, recalls Grasso, ‘travelling up to the prison in Novara every weekend, in the heat, covered in mosquitoes . . . we went at the weekends so no one would know. The only people in the prison who knew were the governor and the director.’
Another reason for the intense secrecy was that Grasso was hoping Giuffré could lead them to Provenzano. His men followed Giuffré’s description of their last meeting places and staked out the area. But after Giuffré’s arrest Provenzano did not go back. By mid-September the news was out. Word spread among mafiosi that Giuffré’s wife and sons were no longer in Caccamo.
If Provenzano was fearful of listening devices, he was far more afraid of collaborators. He had made great efforts to re-establish a positive culture within Cosa Nostra, to revive loyalty to the organization and prevent any more mafiosi turning state’s evidence. Now Giuffré, who had seemed to be old-school, who apparently lived and breathed the values of the honoured society, who had been so ambitious as a young man that he had married into the powerful Stanfa family who ran Philadelphia, had joined the ranks of the traitors. Provenzano had hours to sit in the dark, alone, and contemplate Giuffré’s betrayal. He would say he was doing it for his sons, but he had always encouraged one of his boys to follow his footsteps. Thinking about it, he had his finger in pies all over the place, a contact in every major town. Perhaps he had been thinking of trying to destroy Binnu, even before his arrest.
There was a copy of a newspaper special,
Antimafia 2000
, on Provenzano’s desk, with a photo of Giuffré on the cover. His eyes looked staight to camera, cold, expressionless.
‘Traitor’, Provenzano scrawled across his face.
The man with the crippled hand had been an integral part of Provenzano’s machine: there was not much he did not know. As Giuffré himself put it: ‘He is the director, and I’m the one who puts his politics into practice.’
The treacherous Gino Ilardo reportedly told his carabiniere handler: ‘In Sicily the capimafia either kill each other or they sell each other out.’
Giuffré had avoided death and had opted for betrayal. Once he had decided to talk, there was nothing he would not say.
One of the first names Giuffré mentioned in his long, detailed statements (with lengthy digressions and occasional rhetorical flourishes) was Michele Aiello, the former road builder, now a private health magnate. He confirmed Aiello’s status as a front for the Mafia boss: ‘Aiello is the flower in Bernardo Provenzano’s buttonhole.’ Aiello denied he was ever working for the Mafia, but the judges did not agree. He has been sentenced to fourteen years.
Health was a matter very close to Provenzano’s heart. He laundered money through the health system, but more importantly, after he had started experiencing problems with his prostate, he needed access to private healthcare in a discreet and safe environment. His postmen also used hospital lifts to exchange letters. Two apparent strangers were observed getting into the lift together on different occasions. When detectives put a camera inside, they witnessed these two strangers, as soon as the lift doors closed, embracing and kissing each other on both cheeks, then passing one of Provenzano’s
pizzini
from hand to hand. When the lift doors opened, they emerged poker-faced and went their separate ways.
Following Giuffré’s revelations, agents started intercepting calls to Aiello’s home and to his office. When the ROS decided to pursue their investigation further, it was Riolo they approached to plant bugs in the clinic. Towards the end of 2002 Maresciallo Borzacchelli allegedly broke the news to Aiello that, as a result of Giuffré’s evidence, he was under investigation.
Aiello had another mole inside the judiciary. Giuseppe Ciuro worked for the revenue and had been seconded to the anti-Mafia section, the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA). He had been working for Borsellino’s former pupil the assistant prosecutor Antonino Ingroia, who had always believed him to be a person of utter integrity. Such faith made Ciuro exceedingly well placed to leak highly sensitive information.
From their espionage activities Ciuro and Riolo received various benefits: jobs for family members in Aiello’s company; cars, jewellery and introductions to politicians, in particular to the president of the region, Aiello’s old friend Salvatore Cuffaro. Ciuro was so grateful that he declared lifelong fealty to Aiello (‘my life is in your hands’, he wrote). Aiello for his part claimed that he was an innocent victim of blackmail.
A few weeks after Giuffré began his collaboration, he directed carabinieri to a glass jar stashed under a pile of terracotta tiles in his former hiding place. On a night raid police found the jar containing sixty-eight
pizzini
, mostly from Provenzano. Like other senior members of Provenzano’s entourage, Giuffré kept his letters. Now he handed the whole lot over to investigators, to be pored over, analysed and taken down in evidence. The contents were entered on the carabinieri computer system, many of them still classified as part of ongoing investigations. Riolo copied the files and sent them to Aiello.