Boss of Bosses (8 page)

Provenzano was thirty-seven, on the run from enemies within the Mafia and from the police. He had been living in different towns all over western Sicily, travelling with his friends from Corleone, protected by mafiosi who knew him as Liggio’s man. In Cinisi he was the guest of the boss, don Tano Badalamenti, who had taken in many fugitives over the years, including Liggio. Giovanni Impastato grew up in Cinisi in an embattled family: his father was a mafioso, and his brother was thrown out of the house, and subsequently murdered, as a result of his outspoken campaign against the Mafia. As a boy, Giovanni
would go with his father to take food and run errands for Liggio. He recalls Provenzano’s arrival created quite a stir. ‘People were fascinated by him’, he says. ‘Here was this young Corleonese who they believed was unjustly persecuted by the law; he was seen as a courageous outlaw on the run. It wouldn’t be hard to be drawn to a mafioso like him; he had charisma, a certain fascination.’

Saveria found herself irresistibly attracted to the outlaw, who was always well dressed but never showy, and seemed much older than her. He came from outside Cinisi and had seen something of the world. She had cousins who had been forced to give up their
fidanzati
because they came from the next village. She wanted more than Cinisi had to offer. According to his reputation, this bold young man was not afraid of anything, and yet he seemed the quiet type. He was drawn to her direct, unaffected manner, her intelligence and resourcefulness. She seemed to understand that he didn’t want to talk all the time, that he liked solitude and needed time to think. She didn’t ask him questions or demand that he visit her constantly. At last he had found a woman who seemed implicitly to understand his life. He courted her in secret, but before long their relationship attracted attention.

Giovanni Impastato, who has carried on his brother’s anti-Mafia campaign, remembers the Palazzolo family, not wealthy nor explicitly connected to the Mafia, but moving in the right circles: ‘Saveria would have understood what kind of man he was’, he says. ‘You can see what those men are like. Women like my poor mother still believed the Mafia was a force for good. Saveria’s family will not have done badly through that connection.

‘They lived in that semi-legal environment; the father didn’t have an active role in the Mafia, but they were very close to [Gaetano] Badalamenti’s family. Anyone with ambition had aspirations to be part of that world – it was the dominant culture. If you could worm your way into Mafia circles, you would never lack for anything.’

If his courtship of Saveria was initially approved, Provenzano’s precarious situation made it difficult for them to marry. It would be hard to find a priest willing to risk prosecution for aiding and abetting a fugitive. And Saveria’s family did not want her to leave Cinisi. So the
couple, no longer in the first flush of youth, were
fidanzati
for a few years, during which time he would disappear for weeks on end, and she never knew whether she would see him alive again. But she always had the sense not to ask him what he had been doing.

She wasn’t seen much around town; since everyone knew each other’s business, she took care to avoid the hairdressers and the shops where women exchanged news. He wasn’t the jealous type, but the last thing she wanted was for Binnu to hear anything about her from gossips.

At last he asked Saveria to run away with him. This was customary practice in those parts when a formal marriage was impossible because the families disapproved, or the couple were too young, or because there wasn’t money for a big church wedding. Often a family member would secretly lend them a room to help out. Once they had spent a night together, the family might bewail their dishonour, but the couple were officially engaged. Saveria and Bernardo stayed with one of her cousins. By now everyone knew they were living together as an unmarried couple.

‘It was a scandal’, the local priest recalled in an interview with Sicilian journalist Salvo Palazzolo. ‘A girl from such a good family . . . how did she end up involved with that sort, everyone wondered. How was it possible? Her mother always came to Mass.’

The local police were embarrassed. When they questioned Saveria about her boyfriend’s whereabouts, she claimed not to know. Then she appeared in town, visibly pregnant and proud. ‘When the police saw I was expecting, they sent for me’, she reportedly told the local priest. ‘They asked me, “How can you tell us you don’t know where Provenzano is hiding, given your condition?” And I said, “Wait a minute, can’t a woman have a baby with anyone other than her husband?”’

Not when her husband is a mafioso, as she knew, and the police knew perfectly well. Cosa Nostra takes a strong line on women’s moral conduct. Saveria was apparently enjoying the mystique of her relationship with an outlaw, and unafraid of moral condemnation. She no longer belonged in this small town, and it seemed she didn’t care what anyone thought.

When the rumour reached Badalamenti that Saveria was expecting a baby, he was furious. A young mafioso in his charge, seducing a local girl! It was very bad for Cosa Nostra’s image. As the local boss, he was the people’s moral guardian, and men were to treat women with respect at all times and protect the ideal of the family. (If a wife discovered her husband was having an affair, she’d take the children and go back to her mother’s. The boss would take it upon himself to pay her a visit and persuade her to come back.) Badalamenti couldn’t allow any sort of public immoral behaviour: ‘He told Bernardo Provenzano he had to formalize his relationship with her’, recalls Giovanni Impastato. ‘Even if they couldn’t get married in church, he wanted the situation sorted out.’

Provenzano did as Badalamenti instructed and started looking for a suitable plot of land to build his new family a home. On the outskirts of Cinisi in the stony, sloping countryside Provenzano chose a plot of land to build a home for himself and his beloved. According to investigations by the carabinieri, the deeds were signed and registered by Saveria’s brother Salvatore, and Bernardo had plans drawn up showing a spacious villa for a young family to grow into.

However, once work was under way, the builders received an unexpected visit from the carabinieri, wanting to know who owned the place. Before any further investigations could ensue, the plot was sold, with its unfinished structure, stalled and rusting, still in place. Bernardo and Saveria, who now had a healthy baby boy, named Angelo after Bernardo’s father, would have to find somewhere else to build their first home.

This was Saveria’s first taste of the rootlessness of her life ahead: she could no longer run back to her parents in Cinisi, but she and her new family had no place to call home. She could, however, draw on the intelligence and resourcefulness that Binnu had so admired in her; she had some understanding of the Mafia’s rules and its
raison d’être
. Over the years she spent with Binnu, Saveria, coming from a legitimate family, would need all her personal resources to withstand the pressures of life in the Mafia. She had to renounce any personal ambition and throw in her lot with a man who lived in constant danger. She was fortunate in that Binnu’s nature made him more disposed to
spending time with her and their son than with his Mafia associates, but he was often forced to move around, for security reasons or for meetings, and she would never know where he was going or for how long. She had to accept anything from him, on faith.

‘A woman who comes from a Mafia background doesn’t ask for explanations for the things she sees’, said the
pentito
Leonardo Messina. ‘The true wealth of a man of honour is a wife who understands his role.’

Ninetta Bagarella, who married Totò Riina, grew up immersed in the Corleone Mafia: her two brothers, Calogero and Leoluca, were Provenzano and Riina’s running mates. (Calogero was killed at the viale Lazio massacre in 1969.) At twenty-one, when her
fidanzato
was already on the run from the police, Ninetta earned the dubious honour of being the first woman to be arraigned for aiding and abetting the Mafia, by taking messages between her fiancé and his associates. Young as she was, she had shown an acute understanding of how Cosa Nostra operates within Sicilian society. The attractive young woman wore a light floral dress, and her dark hair long, to make a dramatic appearance in a Palermo court.

‘You say I am guilty, but I am only guilty of falling in love’, she cried. ‘You cannot judge me for loving a man, it’s my natural right. You ask how I could have chosen a man like Riina, about whom people say such terrible things. Is it against the law to love a man like Salvatore Riina? I love him and I know he is innocent.’

She was, inevitably, released without charge and three years later married her man in a church wedding. (The priest who conducted the service was later questioned by police, who accepted his defence that he could not condone two souls living in sin.)

Both Ninetta and Saveria, once they had committed themselves to these two outlaws, glamorous as they may have been, were destined to live their married lives as fugitives. Saveria and Binnu’s passion grew as they stood together against the ‘unjust persecution’ of the state, and the drama of their lives unfolded within its constrictions. There was money – though not always – and there were gifts. (Ninetta acquired enough fur coats to need a whole refrigerated room to store them, and serious jewels. Saveria was not interested in a fancy wardrobe or furs, but she and Binnu were undoubtedly comfortable.) Ninetta couldn’t
take the children and run home to mamma if her husband strayed, but then the Mafia has its particular code of honour in these matters: ‘You can do what you want,’ Riina reportedly said to a young mafioso who had been caught with his mistress, ‘but you must never disrespect your wife publicly.’ Binnu just wasn’t the type to indulge. While his Mafia friends enjoyed celebratory feasts and wild parties, he preferred to be alone, at home.

By going on the run, Provenzano had (albeit temporarily) cut off his route back to Corleone and his family, and he needed an alternative support structure. Saveria, with her family in Cinisi and her unquestioning acceptance of his chosen career, provided him with the security he needed. He recruited her relations to be his business associates and representatives. Her brother Paolo was a front man for many of Binnu’s enterprises, including the lease of a substantial tract of land. A police report described him as ‘particularly closed. A man of few words, extremely withdrawn and retiring, who never talked on the phone, and never met anyone.’ An extremely difficult subject for surveillance, in other words, and a most welcome addition to Bernardo Provenzano’s family circle.

Provenzano continued to register shares in his wife’s name. The young mafioso Giovanni Brusca later recalled that he and his associates had been told to favour a construction company with which Provenzano’s wife was associated. ‘We wondered, is he crazy, to put his wife in as a partner? We knew that sooner or later he was bound to have problems if his wife was mixed up in it.’

Saveria and Bernardo made their base in Bagheria, aided by his contacts in law enforcement and local government and by a culture that protected the Mafia. During this period they lived a quiet life, with no fear of arrest. When their son was seven, Saveria became pregnant again, and they had another baby, another boy, whom they named Francesco Paolo. In a culture where the customary greeting for newly-weds is
auguri e figli maschi
(‘congratulations, may you have sons’) Provenzano was doubly blessed.

‘I know Bernardo Provenzano has an immense property in Bagheria, in the grounds of a grand villa’, one
pentito
later testified. ‘I’ve never known exactly where it was, but from what people told me
it was a beautiful place, in classical style . . . Provenzano lived here undisturbed with his family.’
¹¹

In the mid-1980s a series of high-profile Mafia crimes turned up the heat on Riina and Provenzano and led to a series of arrests. Binnu and his family decamped to Trapani, where the boys attended school under an assumed name.

When Provenzano began to receive substantial kickbacks from waste management and other public contracts, he needed to start investing his profits. He bought businesses and properties, which he registered to members of his
fidanzata
’s family. A tenacious investigator managed to uncover the extent of Provenzano’s property investments.

Colonel Angiolo Pellegrini arrived in Palermo in early 1981, just as the Mafia war was breaking out. It was a frenzied time: while the Corleonesi were murdering their rivals on their own territory, Cosa Nostra’s influence was spreading.

Pellegrini was working with Giovanni Falcone, who had begun his painstaking paper trail, following drug money through international banks. Rotund, moustachioed and every inch the no-nonsense army investigator, Pellegrini liked to work the same way: investigations based on diligent, detailed detective work.

‘We asked for a computer, to log the data we were collecting, and were told it was not essential’, he says jovially. Now retired from the army, it’s unlikely he has let a day go by without buttoning himself into his suit and trimming his tidy goatee. ‘Now it’s easily done with a database, but we wrote everything by hand in old ledgers and created a massive index. It was essential for us to be able to make the links.’

A particular case had come to Pellegrini’s notice, in which a modest family from Cinisi had made some spectacular property acquisitions. The family name was Palazzolo. They had no criminal record, although it emerged during the course of the investigation that the daughter, Saveria Benedetta, had left home and was living with the fugitive Bernardo Provenzano. It was the first time investigators had heard that the outlaw from Corleone had a woman living with him. They were also surprised to discover that he had two children. Pellegrini entered
the Palazzolo family in his ledger and proceeded to track them through title deeds and company registers.