Authors: Clare Longrigg
As far as Provenzano’s family was concerned, the boy was doing all right. ‘In the 1950s the Mafia was the only means they had to climb the social scale’, says historian Salvatore Lupo. ‘They did not join out of idealism, but purely material concerns: survival, affirmation and power, money. These are people from modest families. They’ve done well for themselves in the Mafia.’
Nino Giuffré, who worked as a teacher, recalled that when he was initiated into the Mafia, his boss said to him: ‘Now you’re a rich man indeed. You’re already a Sicilian, and you’ll be wealthy too.’
Binnu’s parents were a poor peasant couple, Angelo Provenzano and Giovanna Rigoglioso. He was born in Corleone on 31 January 1933, the third of seven brothers and sisters. Peasant labourers in those days gathered in the chill of dawn and waited to be called by name, by the all-powerful farm managers. A day’s hard work in the fields would scarcely bring in enough to feed nine, and the crowded household was occasionally sullen with hunger. Binnu dropped out after the second year of primary school, semi-literate, and went to work in the fields with his father. While most boys his age struggled on for another few years in class, he was living on his wits at the age of seven.
His father died in 1958, when Binnu was already established as part of Liggio’s notorious armed gang. His sisters, Rosa, Maria Concetta and Michela Arcangela, had all married local boys, but his brothers still lived at home, and his mother, who pressed and starched their shirts, barely knew where they were most of the time. Binnu would get home in the early evening and eat supper, then he would be out of the door.
She suffered a good deal from worrying about the company he kept, but at least he came home at night. Soon he would have to drop out of sight, and for the rest of her life she would see him only fleetingly, on secret visits.
On 9 May 1963 four men, Provenzano among them, met at first light on the edge of Corleone, shotguns slung over their backs. They
were waiting for one of Navarra’s men, Francesco Streva, who was living in hiding, but Binnu had information that he was due to pass that way. Streva was always armed, and extremely cautious. When Provenzano caught sight of him that May morning, he called out to him. Streva fired at the group and took off across the fields. The gang dispersed, and for the next few months they lived in hiding, staying with trusted family members, meeting after dark, plotting how to kill their enemies and avoid being killed. It was Provenzano’s first taste of exile, and although he didn’t go far from home, he experienced the profound loneliness and exhilarating freedom of living in hiding, which would become his daily reality.
Months later Provenzano contacted Streva, offering to meet for peace talks. They made an appointment early in the morning of 10 September, in the wooded countryside near Corleone. Above them lowered the imposing and craggy Rocca Busambra, an impenetrable hiding place for bandits and outlaws.
A local farmer taking out his flock heard shots and looked out across the field to see two men, one of whom he recognized as Provenzano, both carrying guns, making off towards the shadowy foot of the mountain. Later that day Streva’s body was found in the woods, alongside two of his men.
The dead men’s grieving relatives reported the murders to the police – an unusually drastic and risky move in such a small community. But the sense of outrage was high, and its target was Liggio’s thugs, in particular Bernardo Provenzano.
The police reaction to the Corleone Mafia’s activities had thus far been muted. Liggio himself, already a notorious criminal, had been served a polite request by the police to ‘live honestly, respect persons and property, and observe the law’. But after the murders of Streva and his men, people who had been threatened and intimidated, robbed and driven off the land, finally rebelled and signed witness statements. A joint report by Corleone’s police and carabinieri landed on the Palermo prosecutor’s desk, accusing Provenzano of aggravated murder. In spite of numerous witnesses, when the first major case against Provenzano eventually came to court, he was acquitted. He had confronted his enemies face to face, been
shot in the head, arrested and tried – it seemed nothing could touch him.
Provenzano’s burning ambition was to make it in the city. Through their gradual takeover of the illegal meat market Liggio, Provenzano and the rest of the Corleone clan made the journey from their rural home town to the capital of Cosa Nostra.
Palermo was a busy, overcrowded town, swarming with country folk moving off the land and desperate to make a living. The narrow, noisy neighbourhood markets heaved with meat trucked in from the hinterland and fish freshly caught: swordfish with their great glassy eyes and fat tuna like rubber tyres. Stalls were piled high with huge fennel bulbs and fragrant tomatoes. Watermelons were piled up on street corners like bowling balls, the vendors calling out,
o molone!
As an enforcer for Liggio’s urban loan-sharking business, Provenzano came into contact with a better class of victim. The moneylending business was based in the centre of the old city, by the bronze lions of the Teatro Massimo. It became a massive money-laundering operation, and the businessmen who ‘invested’ money to be lent to clients at extortionate levels of interest included drug traffickers with links to American mobsters.
In the early 1960s Palermo was the scene of an outbreak of savage violence. War broke out over control of drug trafficking between two Palermo clans, the aristocratic and apparently respectable Greco family and the upstart La Barberas. They fought in the crowded streets and markets of Palermo and in other cities further afield; Angelo La Barbera was shot and seriously wounded in Milan. In Palermo mafiosi exchanged gunfire over bar tables; a famous gun battle was fought across a fish stall, blood mingling with ice and mussel shells flying as men dived for cover, firing from behind dripping swordfish and tuna.
The war reached its grisly climax when a car bomb killed seven policemen. An Alfa Romeo Giulietta had been abandoned with a flat tyre near Mafia boss Salvatore Greco’s palatial villa in Ciaculli, a leafy outpost of Palermo. Responding to a tip-off, carabinieri sealed off the area and saw a crude device on the back seat of the car. Once the bomb had been defused, they searched the car for clues. One officer
opened the boot, setting off a massive explosion. The Ciaculli bomb was calamitous: after years of impunity it brought down the full weight of the law against the Mafia.
Nearly two thousand arrests were made, and Liggio was captured the following year, in November 1964. After making a hasty escape from a Palermo clinic, he had sought refuge with two sisters, spinsters, in Corleone, who nursed him back to health. In a peculiar twist, one of the women had been engaged to a man Liggio had murdered, the trade unionist Placido Rizzotto. Liggio’s ‘possession’ of his victim’s fiancée was the ultimate insult.
The prosecutor who signed an indictment against Luciano Liggio and 115 members of the criminal underworld in response to the Mafia war was Cesare Terranova, a judge of great courage and diligence. Terranova also oversaw the creation of a parliamentary anti-Mafia commission, which delivered regular reports on the latest intelligence on organized crime. The state had finally mounted a co-ordinated response to Mafia violence that had made whole areas of Sicily unliveable.
After the crackdown the Mafia’s ruling body was hastily disbanded, and the various families went to ground. Liggio ordered a cessation of all criminal activity. But once the killings stopped, the pressure from law enforcement let up a little and allowed the Mafia to regroup. It was a lesson that Provenzano did not forget and would later use to great advantage.
Terranova had understood that the Corleonesi’s activities extended far beyond cattle rustling, murder and extortion. His report detailed the bloody years of the vendetta between Navarra and Liggio. But it also demonstrated how the Corleonesi had moved beyond their rural home in the shadow of Rocca Busambra, extending their insidious influence over Palermo and the rest of western Sicily, through their political contacts. They had, he explained, ‘got control of areas ripe for development, by seizing key posts within the public and private administration’.
The trial took place in Calabria, to avoid any possible jury-rigging or corruption of magistrates. There was no court of law big enough to hold so many defendants and their lawyers, so the proceedings took
place in a primary school. Among Liggio’s protégés, Provenzano and Calogero Bagarella were still on the run, although Riina and Leoluca Bagarella, two angry young men, were in the dock. Strangely enough, the prosecution’s star witness seemed to have suffered some sort of breakdown and, having denied everything in court, spent the rest of his life confined to a mental asylum. The trial ended in a raft of acquittals.
The following year Liggio and sixty-two others went on trial in Bari. Provenzano, Ruffino and Bagarella remained in hiding. Yet again Riina was in the dock; yet again the prosecution case was sabotaged. One prosecution witness, a Corleone barber who had seen Provenzano and the others firing at three of Navarra’s men, retracted his statement in court and disappeared shortly after the trial. When the prosecution produced the shattered brake lights from Navarra’s car, collected at the scene of the shoot-out, they realized the glass had been switched for another make of car.
Magistrates demanded life sentences for Liggio, Provenzano and Bagarella. But on 10 June 1969 the court acquitted every one of them on grounds of insufficient evidence (Riina alone was given a small penalty for receiving stolen goods). Provenzano and Bagarella were cleared of the triple murder of Navarra’s men in the forest above Corleone. The judges claimed that the culture of
omertà
had made it impossible to prove anything against the defendants, and Liggio was cleared of murdering Navarra, for lack of evidence. This was in spite of a report by the carabiniere colonel Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, warning that Liggio was ‘to be considered one of the most dangerous elements that the province of Palermo has ever contributed to the history of the Mafia’.
Provenzano and Riina continued to work for Liggio, who now had a place on the ruling body, known as the ‘commission’, and behaved like a capricious child – they were continually having to smooth over problems he had needlessly created. Liggio liked to sunbathe naked, and when he was living on the run, in a villa lent him by a man of honour in Catania, disported himself on the terrace in full view of the neighbouring apartments. One sunny day he received a summons from the local police. Since there was already a warrant out for his
arrest, he sent Binnu down to the station to find out what they wanted. Provenzano didn’t know whether the police had identified the notorious fugitive; when he was told that the neighbour had merely made a complaint about Liggio’s naked sunbathing, he was not amused.
Dodging a police hunt, Provenzano moved constantly around western Sicily, from the Mafia stronghold of San Giuseppe Iato, a traffic-choked little town in the hills inland from Palermo, to Cinisi, another Mafia fortress between the mountains and the sea. He was sheltered by mafiosi who knew that none of the locals, not the old men sitting in their circle of chairs in the square, not the heavily pregnant young mothers struggling with shopping and children, or even the local priest, would ever say a word about a stranger in town.
During the mid-1960s Provenzano was sought by police more assiduously than at any time during the next twenty-five years. The experience gained during this time on the run stood him in good stead when he later became Italy’s most wanted. He understood how much people put themselves out to shelter a fugitive, and tried to return the favour with as much grace as he could muster. As he travelled around, moving at night and staying indoors most of the day, there were several close calls. In Castronovo, a small and secluded town high in the mountains north of Agrigento, he and his friends were ambushed by carabinieri. The stone-built town has a church in every square, where the people took cover from ricocheting bullets as the carabinieri pursued the outlaws through the streets, both sides firing as they ran.
Liggio moved to northern Italy, to make serious money, and Binnu followed him. Milan was becoming a major financial capital, and as the Mafia moved in, it gained a reputation as the New York of organized crime. Police got a tip-off that Binnu always drank his morning espresso at the same bar in Turin. They staked out the place for two weeks, but there was no sign of him.
The Corleonesi were almost all living on the run, moving around and dodging arrest warrants. This underground existence became one of their most feared traits: not even the other Mafia families knew who
they were or what they looked like. This increased their fearsome reputation: you never saw them, you only saw the bodies in the aftermath of their passing. Provenzano’s mystique grew: no one knew for sure whether he was just a hit man or held a more important role. The fact that he had evaded the authorities successfully while notching up several murders increased the mythology around him.
During these years the old city of Palermo was being consumed by a building boom that would see the destruction of much of the city’s charm and most of its green spaces. The Palermo families were infiltrating local government and development companies to cream off a substantial fortune from the building frenzy. Power struggles between families culminated in a massacre that changed the course of Mafia history. And it was this terrible event that gave Provenzano his next big chance.
On 10 December 1969 the builder Girolamo Moncada was holding a late meeting in his office in viale Lazio, the centre of a spate of new development, on the western side of the city. It was attended by, among others, his sons, the firm’s accountant and the Mafia capo Michele Cavataio. Not unusually, all the men were armed.