Authors: Clare Longrigg
Saveria Palazzolo’s name began to show up again and again. In a very short space of time she had acquired substantial shares in a building company, Italcostruzione, 12 hectares of land near Castellammare and an apartment in Palermo. The carabinieri found her name on two further properties and two plots of land in the suburbs, as well as a vacant lot in Palermo’s fast-developing viale Strasburgo.
By the time the carabinieri went looking for Saveria, she had already left Cinisi. ‘She had disappeared’, recalls Pellegrini. ‘We set up investigations into the family and in the area, to see if we could find any leads that would take us to her, and to Provenzano. We didn’t find her.’
His report read: ‘La Palazzolo, officially spinster and housewife, possessing no assets prior to 1972, in the course of five months, from December ’72 to April ’73, acquired property for the considerable sum of 26 million lire [
£
13,000]. Her investments were managed by the well-known mafia accountant Giuseppe Mandalari.’
Four months after the carabinieri demanded to see the deeds of the plot where they were building, the report went on, ‘La Palazzolo hurriedly sold all her properties to the company Simaiz s.p.a., a company set up for the purpose and administered by Mandalari. This sale is without doubt directly related to the discovery of building works which were intended to construct a safe house (far from prying eyes) for Bernardo Provenzano.’
Saveria Palazzolo was charged with money-laundering in November 1983. Provenzano was charged with Mafia association, and a business associate was arrested for money-laundering. The latter went to prison, leaving a wife and two children to fend for themselves, while the lovers were nowhere to be found.
The case against Saveria Palazzolo came to court in 1990, and she was required to explain where she had got the money to acquire properties and shares. Her reply, sent by post and delivered to the court in her absence, revealed her own profound double standards. The letter appealed to the court’s belief in the virtue of women – she mentions a maiden aunt and her own role in caring for her. She also portrays herself as a dutiful daughter, and a woman who understands little of
the difficult world of business, merely signing complicated documents as required. Her acquisition of a small fortune was not only legitimate, she maintained, but the result of considerable personal sacrifice.
Most illustrious Signor Presidente
The assets that are alleged to be the profits of illegal activity are in fact monies earned by the undersigned in her own right. In point of fact, the undersigned has always earned her own money from legal employment first as an embroiderer working from home, subsequently as a seamstress.
In between times, the undersigned assisted her paternal aunt Benedetta Palazzolo in her activity as a dressmaker, without receiving any financial recompense, because of the special relationship between herself and this particular aunt. And in fact, the undersigned also took on the duty of caring for her and assisting her in all matters until the end of her life.
According to family tradition, since the young woman had taken particular responsibility for looking after her aunt, the aunt took care of her niece’s future. She and another relative bought the young woman a piece of land worth 13 million lire.
One day the undersigned met the Cavaliere Sebastiano Provenzano, and recalling that her father had spoken well of him, decided to ask him for advice about her investments.
The Cavaliere replied that if a good opportunity turned up, he would let her know. Years went by, and when she was least expecting it, the Cavaliere contacted her with a proposal that she buy two plots in Latomie district, in Castelvetrano.
The undersigned admitted she lacked sufficient funds to make the acquisition, but the Cavaliere told her not to worry, since the deal would require a small initial investment, while the rest could be covered by a complex network of loans and bank cheques guaranteed personally by himself, to be repaid with the profits of agricultural production (olives and vines).
The down payment was arranged by the Cavaliere via mutual funds and complex bank processes which the undersigned is not technically capable of accurately describing.
Conveyancing and all other matters concerning the transaction, as well as investment of the remaining funds, were handled by the Cavaliere, leaving the undersigned merely to add her signature as required.
From the above information it is clear that the funds are all from legitimate sources.
Signed
Saveria Benedetta Palazzolo
The letter aimed for the right note of virtuous industry: here was an enterprising young woman doing her family duty, with ambitions to run her own business. She had a clear idea of what she wanted but needed legal advisers to sort out the complicated financial stuff. If they had done anything underhand, she implied, it was nothing to do with her.
The judges did not go for the story about the humble seamstress and the elderly aunt. Neither were they at all convinced by the apparently coincidental meeting between Saveria Palazzolo and the cavaliere Provenzano (no relation to her husband), who was suspected of being a front for another of Bernardo Provenzano’s investments. They wanted to demonstrate that, if the Mafia was going to use women to conceal their illegal business dealings, then the women were no longer off-limits.
In 1990 Saveria was given two years and six months for receiving stolen goods, later commuted to aiding and abetting. She was given a reduced sentence under house arrest, which, since she was already living ‘at home’, whereabouts unknown, was conveniently unenforceable. It did mean that she was no longer free to live as a legitimate citizen, should she decide to do so, and that she and the boys, now aged seven and fourteen, were condemned to life on the run. Binnu had relied on the justice system’s blind belief in the goodness of women and had exposed his wife to prosecution. Now they were tied together in an inexorable bond, united against the law.
T
HE ROAD INTO
Bagheria, once thick with lemon groves, is a jumble of small streets built up with no kind of planning or regulation: most of the houses are plastered but not painted; many are unfinished, clad in scaffolding. This is urban sprawl at its most chaotic and unattractive. A lovely eighteenth-century villa, the towering Villa Cattolica, resting place of the celebrated Sicilian painter Renato Guttuso, appears at the bend of a road on the edge of town. Right next to it, standing in what should be parkland, loom the ugly industrial silos of a concrete plant.
A short distance off the main road stands a warehouse, a rough concrete building with imposing steel doors fastened by an iron pole. There are houses around it now, but once it was isolated, out in the lemon groves. You go up a couple of steps and walk across what was once a small office, where the manager would sit with his paper and his phone. The hangar, now empty, was an ironworks which traded under the name ICRE, making nails and wire fencing, owned by Leonardo Greco. Greco was the main contact for the heroin trade: morphine arrived from Turkey and was turned into heroin in a secret lab in Bagheria, before being exported to New York.
Greco’s warehouse was the reference point and meeting place for mafiosi in the area; it was also known as the ‘death chamber’. Condemned men would be brought to the nail factory to be interrogated and beaten, then strangled, and their bodies dissolved in acid. The acid bath, beneath a grating in the floor, would have been ready for them when they were brought in, its acrid stink filling the airless space. The place is empty now, but the damp greenish concrete, the pitiless, windowless walls, every stain and metal staple preserve its
horrible memories. In one corner is another grating over a cistern, where the victim of a Mafia feud was buried beneath the stones. Two years later, when the feud had been resolved, his remains were given back to the family.
It was here that Bernardo Provenzano first met Nino Giuffré, or
Manuzza
(‘Little Hand’), so called because one of his arms is deformed. Giuffré, tall and reserved, was a striking figure. At this point he was Caccamo boss Ciccio Intile’s driver, a teacher at the technical institute in Caccamo and newly initiated into Cosa Nostra. He would become Provenzano’s most important ally, and ultimately the author of his downfall.
‘Every time we went to Bagheria of a morning, Provenzano was there’, recalled Giuffré years later. ‘This ironworks was one of the most important places in which Provenzano used to make appointments, apart from being where the Corleonesi murdered their enemies. People were given appointments here, people who were perhaps no longer considered trustworthy, and once inside the door, they’d never leave. Provenzano used this place for two purposes: as a death chamber and for meetings with his closest allies.’ The two, as Giuffré of course knew, are not mutually exclusive.
A short way from the warehouse, at the turning off the main road to Messina, on a sharp bend, is a bar, the Diva, painted bright pink, where Giuffré and Intile stopped for coffee when they were in the area. It didn’t matter that there was a police road-block just yards away and they were both wanted men; no one made any attempt to stop them.
On one occasion, after knocking back their sugary espressos from scalding white cups, the two men headed over to the ironworks. A car parked outside aroused their suspicion, but while they watched and waited, a ‘friend’ came over. ‘We’ve got a couple of tuna fish in the boot’, he explained. ‘We’re just waiting to unload them. There’s been some problem on the road, and we’re waiting for the all-clear.’ The ‘tuna fish’ in the boot were two corpses, victims of the Mafia war, destined to disappear into an acid bath.
The Corleonesi’s attack on the Palermo families had begun in earnest, with a bewildering ferocity that left mafiosi and investigators
wondering who could be behind it. After the violent deaths of the supreme Palermo boss Stefano Bontate and his ally Totuccio Inzerillo, Greco called a meeting at the ironworks. Giuffré recalls: ‘Leonardo Greco stood up and announced that the Corleonesi’s rise to power had begun, and that he and his family had pretty much made their choice of leader. So it was his advice to the assembled company that the various
mandamenti
should align themselves with Bernardo Provenzano. And that’s what happened.’
But while Riina was fighting his war in Palermo, Provenzano was attending to business. ‘The Mafia’s money had to be kept moving, it had to be invested, and Provenzano was in charge of that side of things’, says Angiolo Pellegrini. ‘While Riina was being the great warrior, Provenzano was managing his companies through front men. Riina was making Cosa Nostra’s military decisions, while Provenzano was running the economy.’
In the early 1980s the carabinieri’s chief investigative tool was the phone tap. With about fifteen men drawn from the companies at Partinico and Corleone, Colonel Pellegrini worked out of the cramped operations room at the Palermo prosecutor’s office, listening to calls and tracing Provenzano’s ever-expanding network. Fortunately for the agents listening in, the mafiosi had not yet learned to exercise discretion while using the phone.
‘Our targets were not as sophisticated as they are now’, recalls Pellegrini. ‘They had basic codes, but weren’t generally as cautious as they subsequently became.’
One day an agent heard the following exchange, picked up on a phone tap:
‘Nardo!’
‘Carmelino!’
‘How’s everything? . . . Could you tell the accountant to get the invoices ready, I’ve got the cheques here for him to sign.’
‘Nardo’ – Leonardo Greco – and Carmelo Colletti, Mafia boss of Agrigento, chatted about business before arranging a meeting at Greco’s HQ, to exchange sums of money. At that point the police listening in to the phone calls did not know the identity of ‘the Accountant’.
Pellegrini discovered companies registered to various blameless individuals, which turned out to share the same electricity account or were connected to the same answerphone. If you phoned the construction company to order cement, you might get through to a supplier of radiography machines. Pellegrini started mapping these curious connections. On one big sprawling graphic of the health suppliers, all the meandering pen lines led to Provenzano’s favourite nephew, Carmelo Gariffo; another showed all the companies connected to Leonardo Greco. And connected, somehow, to all of them, was the mysterious ‘Accountant’.
A few years later the developer Angelo Siino revealed that ‘the Accountant’ was the fugitive Provenzano. Siino also revealed that the investigators’ failure to figure out ‘the Accountant’s identity was a source of great amusement: ‘It was unbelievable, we were all on those tapes, we were talking about “the Hunter” . . . that was Nitto Santapaola [boss of Catania], he was identified; and people were talking about me, using my nickname, “the Builder” . . . We were always talking about this man “the Accountant”, but he was never identified, neither was I . . . and we had such a laugh about the fact that everyone was looking for an accountant . . .’
The carabinieri had also, unknowingly, recorded Provenzano’s phone conversations. After Siino’s revelations, fifteen years after the event, someone was dispatched to look in the archives. But the tapes were no longer there. Provenzano had apparently covered his tracks.
Provenzano made Bagheria his base. He and other capos occupied splendid villas in the town’s lush parkland, beyond the gaze of inquiring eyes. According to one insider, Provenzano lived ‘on the edge of Bagheria in a large villa, full of stucco and frescos, surrounded by high walls which enclose a wonderful garden, full of shrubs and flower beds’.
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