Authors: Clare Longrigg
Provenzano had the phlegmatic character and diplomatic skill to manage a man of Ciancimino’s arrogant and abrasive manner. Ambitious and unscrupulous, with a sharp tongue and a ready put-down, Ciancimino intimidated people. He could also be utterly ruthless. When an old friend and company manager who had been paying Ciancimino millions of lire in kickbacks for contracts came to see him with a problem, the old weasel told him, ‘
sono cazzi tuoi, stai molto attento
’ (‘It’s not my fucking problem, just watch yourself’).
Riina, perhaps recognizing Ciancimino’s aggressive manner as close to his own, couldn’t stand him, and the feeling was mutual. ‘Provenzano is all right’, Ciancimino told Giovanni Brusca, an ally of the Corleonesi. ‘I can’t be doing with Riina.’
Provenzano had to nurture and manage the relationship not only between Riina and Ciancimino but also between the supposed political allies Ciancimino and Lima. The two politicians were a couple of prima donnas, always falling out, and it was Provenzano’s job to smooth things over and find a way to keep both of them happy. Riina became increasingly exasperated with their constant demands and competitive bickering, and eventually lost patience with Ciancimino
altogether. Brusca recalled: ‘Riina said he couldn’t take any more, he would have to fight his
paesano,
this fellow Corleonese, he needed to teach him a good lesson. He had been put on the spot so many times when Ciancimino failed to deliver on his commitments, and he couldn’t stand the way Provenzano was always defending him.’
But Provenzano’s patient approach paid off. During the 1970s Ciancimino was doing more for his Mafia friends than signing thousands of illegal building licences. It later emerged he was laundering money for the Corleonesi on a grand scale in Canada.
When Ciancimino became mayor of Palermo in 1970, since his Mafia connections were well known, it caused such a scandal that he was obliged to resign after a few months. After that, Ciancimino remained a more discreet presence behind the scenes, building up his portfolio and maintaining a patronage system that meant people’s jobs in public office were held for them while they served time in prison. He also kept his position in Provenzano’s inner circle, advising him on political matters.
During this period the increase of Cosa Nostra’s power, fuelled by drug money, was astonishing. One heroin trafficker was described by historian Pino Arlacchi as a ‘travelling milk salesman in the 1950s, a small-scale building contractor in the mid-’60s, and during the ’70s, until his arrest for drug trafficking in March 1980, one of the leading financiers and industrialists in Sicily’. The Corleonesi were determined to tap into this well of opportunity.
Liggio was finally arrested in 1974, at the flat in Milan where he was living under an assumed name with his companion and their two-year-old son. After years of evading arrest and fixing trials, he would not leave prison alive again. He had already handed over executive power to his deputies, Riina and Provenzano, but continued to instruct them from prison. He made them joint leaders of the Corleone family, and they were to alternate as boss every two years. Riina, his ambition on fire, took the first turn as leader and never stepped down.
This arrangement seems to have suited Provenzano. The differences between the joint leaders were emerging: Provenzano liked to move behind the scenes, quietly building his empire; Riina displayed
Liggio’s uncontrollable violence, his leadership characterized by cunning, ferocity and ruthlessness. Riina’s joint rulers on the commission, Badalamenti and Bontate, were entirely unprepared for his tactics. In 1975 he kidnapped and murdered the father-in-law of one of Bontate’s most valuable and prestigious contacts, the tax collector Nino Salvo. It was a breathtaking act of disrespect, and Riina piled on the humiliation by refusing to give up the body, denying any knowledge of the crime.
Provenzano stayed in the background, studying how to make his political contacts work for him, refining his skills as a mediator. His quiet, questioning approach failed to impress those mafiosi who preferred a more direct, even aggressive style. While Riina was making millions through the drug trade, Provenzano was focused on more prosaic sources of income: sewage and garbage. Rather than go for the highest margin, he saw public contracts as a less risky way of making money, useful for laundering profits and consolidating territorial control.
Badalamenti, the wealthy boss of Cinisi and head of the commission, had got rich on drug trafficking and kickbacks from the construction of a new airport sited at Punta Raisi, an alarmingly narrow strip between the mountains and the sea. The Corleonesi pronounced that his hoarded drug millions were sufficient pretext to expel him from Cosa Nostra, removing one of their most formidable rivals at a stroke.
One contemporary figure who has shed light on the dynamics of the Corleonesi’s race to power is Gioacchino Pennino, a doctor of good standing, a respected member of the upper middle class and a mafioso, who had been involved in politics in Palermo. Many years later Pennino, faced with criminal charges, revealed the relationship between Ciancimino and Provenzano.
‘From what I can gather,’ Pennino recalled, ‘the cultural level of my associates was very low, apart from Bernardo Provenzano, who clearly had a good level of knowledge and followed politics very closely. He spoke intelligently, and with enough depth to give me the impression that he ran the political life of the Palermo area.’
He would soon discover the reality of Provenzano’s influence. When Pennino, who was a member of Ciancimino’s parliamentary
group, had had enough of Ciancimino’s high-handedness, he decided to leave, but he couldn’t make a move without permission.
‘I went to see Michele Greco [another respectable middle-class mafioso who later became the boss], explained the situation to him, and said I didn’t feel I could go on like this, at the mercy of Ciancimino.’
The following day Pennino received a visitor, who told him he had an appointment, but didn’t say with whom. The doctor was driven to the meeting in a small Fiat, belting along country lanes towards Bagheria. He was dropped off at a bar, where he was told to wait for his next escort.
‘I was taken to a farmhouse that was used as both a store for vegetables and an office. There I met a man I’d never seen before, who was introduced to me as Bernardo Provenzano, while the other man called him Binnu.’
The meeting did not pan out as Pennino expected. He was barely allowed to speak. ‘I hadn’t even had time to explain what the problem was, when he turned on me. Clearly he knew everything about the situation, and he verbally attacked me. He told me to stay where I was, that things were just fine as they were.
‘At the end of the meeting, which I found utterly mortifying, Provenzano told me I needed to keep quiet and not stir up any rebellious feeling in the Ciancimino camp.’
On a subsequent occasion Pennino was startled to meet Provenzano as he came out of Ciancimino’s villa in Mondello, a palm-lined marina near Palermo and the favourite seaside residence of Palermo’s rich. Pennino was leaving by the main gate when he saw Provenzano going in. ‘It was a few months after our stormy encounter. We nodded in greeting but didn’t stop to talk.’ Pennino related other occasions when he had caught sight of Provenzano strolling openly along the streets of central Palermo, in spite of being officially wanted by the police, clearly with no sense of danger.
As Ciancimino’s fortunes declined, Pennino tried once again to be released from his group and went to see Provenzano at his favoured meeting place, another mafioso doctor’s surgery. Pennino was extremely apprehensive, but this time Provenzano didn’t get furious with
him. He merely wanted to know how many people were planning to desert Ciancimino, and whether there was any way of repairing the damage. He was still apparently hoping to exert his influence and save Ciancimino’s political career.
‘Greco had warned me to be careful, as Provenzano was considered extremely dangerous’, the doctor reported. He was naturally anxious after their last encounter, but to his surprise, he found Provenzano quite civil. The doctor said he had no intention of taking anyone else with him, and Provenzano, satisfied with his reply, said nothing more.
Pennino made it clear that Provenzano exercised power behind the scenes. He also revealed for the first time Provenzano’s nickname,
u ragioniere
(‘the Accountant’). ‘He has infiltrated everywhere,’ he explained, ‘and quite honestly I’m worried about what he might be able to do.’
Ciancimino was thrown out of the Christian Democrats in 1983, after a sustained campaign by his fellow politicians, and was finally indicted in 1984, following revelations about his links with Provenzano and Riina. He was eventually convicted of Mafia association, and the authorities seized assets worth $12 million, which they believed to be a small percentage of his illegal profits. Police found deposit boxes stuffed with notes – and this, the court was reminded, was a man who had never held a job.
Twenty years on, he had still not paid the Palermo city council, which had been a complainant in his trial, a penny of the restitution ordered by the court.
When a reporter from Rai TV news contacted him by phone to ask whether he was going to pay the moneys the council was demanding, he crowed: ‘I’ve got it all in loose change. They can send a railway car for it, and I’ll fill it up with coins, like a piggy bank!’ Though he disappeared from front-line politics, Ciancimino remained one of the most important members of Provenzano’s entourage.
The mutually beneficial relationship between the minister of works and Provenzano did not go unnoticed. An investigative journalist, Mario Francese, had understood that the Corleonesi were controlling
public contracts through politicians and businessmen, and published some explosive stories in the
Giornale di Sicilia
. He described a ‘third level’ of the Mafia: the bosses who sit behind their desks in public buildings, pursuing their interests through government office.
Before he could dig any deeper, Francese was shot near his home on a chilly January morning in 1979, and his death was recorded as a ‘crime of passion’. Decades would pass before the crime was laid at the Corleonesi’s door.
The Mafia’s code of honour is a shadowy sort of constitution, generally invoked to provide a pretext for murder. If there was ever a rule about not murdering public figures, the Corleonesi defied it. Ugo Triolo, a magistrate in Prizzi, just south of Corleone, would have no truck with the overbearing attitude of mafiosi and, instead of listening to their demands, threw them out of his waiting-room. Riina and Provenzano, schooled by Liggio in the art of terror and intimidation, wouldn’t stand for it. It was the first time they had killed a servant of the state: they gunned him down brazenly in the middle of Corleone, and dumped his body in the street outside his house.
Riina and Provenzano’s strategy unfolded over a number of months. Towards the end of the 1970s they installed as head of the commission Michele Greco, who, according to the supergrass Tommaso Buscetta, was too ineffectual to be anything but a cover for the Corleonesi’s rise to power. They moved insidiously, committing murders that could be blamed on others, exposing the prominent Palermo bosses to police investigation while they remained in the shadows, wreaking havoc.
At a meeting of mafiosi in Palermo, Provenzano and Riina announced their plan to murder the retired police colonel Giuseppe Russo, a tireless investigator who had made life difficult for them. The plan was immediately opposed by the more moderate faction, led by Giuseppe di Cristina, boss of Riesi, in central Sicily. He believed in Cosa Nostra’s policy of not harming representatives of the state. Stung by their humiliating defeat, Riina and Provenzano reported Di Cristina’s opposition back to Liggio, who promptly sentenced him to death.
During the years of Riina and Provenzano’s rise to power, investigators were warned about the two men’s savage reputation. In 1978 Di Cristina contacted the carabinieri and told them he wanted to talk. He had already survived one attempt to kill him, and he knew the Corleonesi were planning to try again. There was no protection system for informants in place at that time, but he wanted the authorities to know what they were dealing with.
‘Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, nicknamed
le belve
, [‘the Beasts’] because of their ferocity, are the most dangerous men Luciano Liggio has at his disposal. They have both committed about forty murders each.’ Di Cristina told the police about the Corleonesi’s tactics of taking over the commission by intimidation and violence, kidnapping and murdering their way to power. He described a situation in which the ‘old-style’ Mafia, the traditional heads of families who lived openly as figures of great respect in their neighbourhoods, were being swept away by the new breed of outlaw, who lived on the run and set their enemies against each other. ‘The Corleonesi are invisible targets because they are almost all fugitives and run few serious risks with regard to their rivals or from the police.’
He tried to steer the police towards capturing Provenzano, who had been seen, Di Cristina said, in Bagheria, a leafy suburb of Palermo, on a Sunday, being driven in a white Mercedes by the young Giovanni Brusca. Bernardo Brusca, the driver’s father, was boss of San Giuseppe Iato and one of Riina’s staunchest allies, an ‘untouchable’, according to Di Cristina. It was a significant tip-off, but Provenzano had several bolt-holes at that time, and the carabinieri didn’t find him.
Di Cristina told police he would shortly be taking delivery of an expensive bulletproof car, as he knew the Corleonesi were trying to kill him. He never received the car. Within a few days of his secret meeting with the police Di Cristina was shot dead in a busy Palermo street. There were no arrest warrants for Riina or Provenzano. Instead, police charged Di Cristina’s friend Totuccio Inzerillo, because he had been murdered on Inzerillo’s territory. Exactly as the Corleonesi had planned it.