Boss of Bosses (14 page)

Serious gastronomy is a manly concern in Sicily; every Sunday men drive many miles to get the best beef cuts or the freshest cheese. The guests would outdo each other to bring something particularly good. They would bring pasta al forno, with ragù and tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese that melted into long strings; some would bring packages of meat that the barbecue king, the bearded murderer Calogero Ganci, would sear expertly on his home-built grill. They’d bring fish, or seafood, to be grilled and spruzzed with lemon and olive oil. On one occasion Giovanni Brusca brought prawns and scoffed the lot while the other guests were distracted by the beefsteaks and involtini of minced veal and melting caciocavallo cheese. The rest would bring puddings: cannoli from Piana degli Albanesi, the little mountain town isolated from the world, where the sheep’s-milk ricotta makes the perfect sweet creamy filling. There would be the best local wines to drink, and cases of champagne.

These men-only banquets were exuberant occasions where this happy band of murderers could let off steam, releasing some of the tension that had built up between them and the continual stress under which they lived from day to day. Totò Riina, who was naturally sociable, would be ready with witty put-downs; even the normally grim-faced Leoluca Bagarella would lighten up. The banquets would last six or seven hours and would usually end with a food fight or a dousing with buckets of water. Once, Brusca recalled, the Trapani boss was trapped on a table, screaming for mercy, surrounded by murderers trying to tickle him.

The festive scene was very different from another Christmas banquet, some years before, when the Corleonesi were rising to power. In 1982 Riina had invited Rosario Riccobono, boss of Partanna Mondello, to the west of Palermo, and his men, to a friendly barbecue. Riccobono had tried to prove his loyalty to the ambitious Riina by betraying members of his own family, but he underestimated
Riina’s notion of loyalty. After a congenial barbecue, sated on grilled spicy salsiccia and beefsteak, Riccobono dropped off in his chair. He was woken by his host’s executioners, tightening a rope around his neck. None of his men survived that festive celebration.

The Christmas banquet in 1991 was celebrated in Mazara del Vallo in style: the Corleonesi wanted to show they were riding high. The major capos were all there, and Riina presided, becoming his jovial self as such occasions demanded, teasing and wisecracking with his men. The Christmas feast was a welcome occasion to laugh and joke with each other and, for the time being, forget what loomed on the horizon. But there was one boss who wasn’t present on that Christmas Day.

Provenzano spent the day riding around Mazara del Vallo on his moped. He explained that it was for security reasons, so that he and Riina could not be taken together – in the past both police and Cosa Nostra had used the quiet days of Christmas to strike. The ostentatious banqueting culture was not to his taste, it smacked of decadence. This was to be the last of the great formal Mafia feasts: under Provenzano’s rule only a trusted few were ever invited to sit down with the boss, and no one went to restaurants any more. Such extravagance, such risky effusion, was no longer the order of the day.

By staying away, Provenzano also put a further distance between himself and Riina’s bloody dictatorship. He had seen what was coming, and he didn’t like it.

O
N A BRIGHT
sunday morning in Corleone on 5 April 1992 the carabiniere barracks were abuzz. It was election day, and the armed forces were on the alert throughout Italy, but this local anticipation had less to do with politics than with a highly unusual visitor.

The imposing yellow barracks dominated the wide central square of Corleone, set back behind a high wall. Its courtyard, bristling with palm trees, echoed with the sound of striding boots. Cars parked under the trees outside the gate were showered with blossom. Across the square a few tables were arranged on the pavement outside the bar, but the locals drank their coffee inside, talking earnestly about the impostors from the north who claimed to represent their interests. A huge hoarding advertised ‘Don Corleone’s aperitif’. In front of the barracks, behind a cast-iron fence, a garden stood closed and locked, its fountains dry, its plants withering among the rubbish left by night-time trespassers.

A few days earlier the carabinieri had received a visit from Bernardo Provenzano’s lawyer announcing that his long-time companion, Saveria Benedetta Palazzolo, would be coming to live in Corleone, bringing her sons with her.

The former seamstress had disappeared from view more than fifteen years earlier, after a brief courtship with the outlaw from Corleone, and was presumed to have been living with him as a fugitive all these years. The lawyer had insisted on total secrecy, to avoid a press scrum.

Saveria arrived promptly at the station with her lawyer and her sons in tow. She hurried in through the tall gates, her heels clicking over the flagstones. She wore a dark suit and pearl ear-rings – an ageing look for her forty-seven years. Her greying hair was swept back from
her face, which had an intelligent, if guarded, look. Her eyes were pale blue and penetrating, with sharp, expressive eyebrows and high cheekbones. If she was nervous about voluntarily entering a carabiniere station after years of avoiding the police, she certainly didn’t let it show.

‘Signora Palazzolo here has come to see the captain’, her lawyer announced to a young officer on the desk.

‘Well, he’s extremely busy, you know there’s an election . . .’

‘I don’t think you understand. Signora Palazzolo
Provenzano
is here to see the captain’, the lawyer explained.

The young officer blanched and leaped into action, fairly running off to inform his senior officer that the distinguished visitor had arrived.

Signora Palazzolo was ushered into the captain’s office, anxious to get the formalities over with, and drew on all her reserves of dignity to confirm her personal details: ‘Born in Cinisi, in Palermo district, on 13 July 1945, permanent address via Generale Artale 48, Cinisi.’ She announced, for the official record, her boys’ names and ages, and their paternity. The two boys, aged nine and sixteen, acutely uncomfortable and sensing themselves observed, listened in silent humiliation. Years later they described that fateful day in an interview with the BBC.

‘At the police station that day they asked us a lot of questions’, said Angelo. ‘It was a very strange thing for me, I’d never been in that situation before. I felt like a fish out of water. I was sixteen, and he [Paolo] was only nine, he didn’t even understand what was going on, they just stood him in the corner.’

‘I was just watching what was going on and not really understanding, as usual’, added Paolo, laughing.

‘They asked all the usual questions that have been asked of us endlessly – where had we been, who had been protecting us . . . but these are questions I will never answer.’

What had life been like for them on the run, before they and their mother came out of hiding to live in Corleone?

‘I’ll give you a short answer, but I’m not going to explain it’, Angelo replied. ‘It was like being under house arrest.’

The captain was longing for answers to his questions, but he could not insist: he remained congenial and respectful, hoping, perhaps, to build a good rapport with the Boss’s wife. The wife of one of Italy’s most wanted was sitting in front of him, and there was nothing the captain could do to make her tell him where he was. He ventured: ‘I hope your husband will follow your excellent example . . .’ Every time he mentioned her husband, she raised her eyes heavenwards, with exasperation, or possibly hinting that he was no longer on this earth.

The warrant for Palazzolo’s arrest had been revoked some months previously, after her three-year sentence for money-laundering had been commuted to aiding and abetting, which for family members was not a crime (Italian law has always favoured the principle of keeping the family sacred, a principle that the Mafia has always successfully exploited). There had been frenzied preparation for this apparently spontaneous appearance: her lawyer had been working for months to make sure that there was no risk of her being arrested. Tommaso Cannella, one of her husband’s closest allies and his strategist, had smoothed the way for her return by obtaining guarantees from local politicians that there would be no trouble.

‘I have no outstanding debt to the law’, announced the Boss’s wife. ‘I wish to reside in Corleone undisturbed, I intend to bring up my boys here, and I will be living with my brother-in-law Salvatore.’

With that announcement she had clearly said all she intended to, and her manner left no opening for further questions. The carabinieri had, for the first time in over two decades, a living link to one of their most wanted criminals, within their grasp – but they could find no pretext to detain her. Instead, they politely gave her a lift up the hill to her brother-in-law’s house, a large but unpretentious ochre town house on the corner of via Colletti, a narrow cul-de-sac in the old part of town.

The door opened to admit the small party, then closed again, firmly shutting out the officers who had delivered them. From that moment on, the carabinieri kept a close watch on her movements, in a surveillance operation that would continue for the next fourteen years. The locals, old couples who had lived in the same narrow cobbled
streets all their lives, would have noted the arrival and said nothing. Washing hung from every floor, sheets and shirts would have drifted in the breeze, as they do to this day, half-hiding white-haired grandmothers sitting on their balconies. In the dusty streets at the edge of town, between tractors and woodstacks, boys would play in the dust, shouting and chasing each other, just as Binnu used to play with his friends.

Angelo and Paolo followed their uncle up three flights of stairs and put their bags down in their new bedroom. They could step out on to the balcony, with its corrugated plastic roof: from here they could see across the rooftops to the mountain ridge and down onto the tiny courtyard below. This town would have been at once so familiar to them from family stories and so strange. Their father talked to them often about his childhood, the beatings and hardship – and here they were, in his family home. Paolo, as he later recalled, was sullen and brooding about having to make another move. Angelo had to cheer up his little brother and take care of his mother.

As soon as the local police heard about the notorious family’s arrival, they knocked smartly at Salvatore Provenzano’s door and, refusing to be outdone, requested that Palazzolo accompany them to the station to make a statement. ‘I will only come in the presence of the carabinieri’, she told them. The subsequent procession to the local police station, and more fruitless questioning, observed by an officer of the carabinieri, was an uncomfortable ritual for all concerned and did nothing for relations between the two security forces.

Provenzano’s wife’s appearance in Corleone, homeland of the ruling clan of Cosa Nostra, electrified the island, sparking a frenzy of rumour and speculation. Nothing in Cosa Nostra is done without consideration of the signals it will send out; the membership, spread across the island and often unreachable by all the usual means, must rely on the correct interpretation of signals, hints and symbolic actions. Investigators contacted their informers for any inside gossip, trying to grasp the meaning of Provenzano’s wife and children suddenly materializing with no explanation.

In the feverish debate that followed, a consensus emerged: if the boss’s wife and sons were coming out in the open, claiming their right
to live as legitimate citizens in Corleone, it could only mean that her companion of over twenty years was dead.

Where had Palazzolo and her sons spent the years as fugitives from justice? It was said that the boys spoke English and German fluently; how perfect for the sons of an international gangster. Since their father’s younger brother Simone lived in Germany, it was widely assumed they had been living with him. Uncle Simone, who had left Sicily in 1969 after he was charged with attempted murder and conspiracy (of which he was later acquitted), was tracked down in 2000 by a reporter at his modest suburban apartment block in Nordrhein-Westfalen, and asserted that the family had indeed been living with him. Asked about his brother’s millions, he replied: ‘Are you having me on? You have got to be joking. I was the one who supported Bernardo’s boys. Until a few years ago I paid for the house they rented in Corleone. But then they inherited some money.’

Simone was aggrieved by the carabinieri, who had made sudden appearances to search the apartment and once accused him of being his brother. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to endure what I have been through’, he lamented. ‘To be considered a certain way because you’re supposed to be part of something that actually does a lot of good.’
¹⁶

Saveria’s principal income, after she moved to Corleone, was wired to her from Germany, but although they lived modestly, it seems unlikely that Binnu’s wife and two children were supported solely on Simone’s factory wages.

These days the family’s exile in Westfalen is considered an urban myth. Paolo speaks German because he’s a language student. Provenzano never strayed far from home: he regularly attended commission meetings, which would have been impractical if he had been living abroad. But he was always extremely secretive about where he was living: he didn’t tell even his closest advisers, and would usually change drivers
en route
to meetings. Police secretly recorded conversations in the Provenzano home and gave tapes of the boys’ conversations to a dialect analyst, who detected a slight Trapani accent. They took photos of Angelo and Paolo to schools in Trapani, where a few schoolchildren positively identified them.