Justice catches up with Mafia boss of bosses
Bernardo Provenzano, the undisputed chief of the Sicilian Mafia, was arrested while hiding in a farmhouse near Corleone in Sicily.
“Thank God. The hunt is finally over,” said Palermo police chief Giuseppe Caruso after agents nabbed Italy’s most wanted man, scoring the state’s biggest success against the Mafia in more than 13 years.
Provenzano, known as the “Phantom of Corleone” after his native hill town, which was made famous by the Godfather films, has been running the Mafia since former “boss of bosses” Toto Riina was arrested in 1993.
Provenzano was arrested when some 50 policemen swooped on a farmhouse in the countryside near Corleone.
Provenzano, who put up no resistance and acknowledged his identity after first denying it, appeared surprised at having been caught, police said. He was later flown to Palermo and taken to the main police station there. Roads leading from the airport into town were closed to traffic.
An angry crowd shouted “assassin” and “bastard” at Provenzano as policemen wearing black balaclavas escorted him into the building.
“We are the real Sicily,” chanted an angry group of youths from an anti-Mafia association.
President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi expressed his delight over the arrest to Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu.
The news bumped even national election results off the top spot on television news bulletins.
Provenzano, 73, has been wanted since 1963 and was known as Italy’s “super-fugitive”.
He had been sentenced in absentia to life in jail in connection with the Mafia’s most notorious crimes of recent decades, including the killings in 1992 of top anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
The last photograph of him available to police dated from 1959 and with the passing of time, it became increasingly difficult to identify him.
It was not until 2005 that police were able to create a computer-aided identikit image of Provenzano as an old man, based on reports from witnesses at a hospital in the southern French city of Marseilles where the Mafia boss had apparently undergone treatment for prostate cancer, under a false name.
Investigators have said they believe Provenzano has spent most of his years as a fugitive moving from house to house across Sicily, thanks largely to the help of the locals’ reluctance to inform authorities.
Authorities had even tracked the alleged mobster to the clinic in Marseilles where he apparently had prostate surgery, and showed a composite to clinic personnel.
As recently as last month, Provenzano’s former lawyer was quoted as telling an Italian newspaper that the man was dead.
Police said they had found cryptic notes on small pieces of paper known as “pizzini” which Provenzano used to communicate with accomplices and his family. More notes were found in the pockets of the jeans he was wearing when he was arrested.
In Corleone itself, the news of his capture was met by disbelief.
“People were shocked,” said Dino Paternostro, an anti-Mafia journalist. “His myth of invincibility became part of our psyche. Most people believed he could never get caught.”
As a young man he was known as “Binnu the tractor” because of the way he mowed down enemies as a rising hitman of the Corleone clan.
His ability to evade capture for so many years while remaining in Sicily had become legendary.
Last year, Italy’s national anti-Mafia prosecutor, Pietro Grasso, caused a storm by saying Provenzano had been protected by politicians and policemen.
Police came close to arresting him many times but he managed to elude them, often at the last minute.
His wife Saveria and two children have lived in Corleone since 1992. For years she ran the Splendor laundry shop.
In the past 13 years that he had been running the Mafia, investigators say Provenzano instituted a “kinder, gentler” style in an attempt to give the Mafia a lower profile which he hoped would take the police spotlight off the crime organisation.
A new “Pax Mafiosa” settled over the island. The Mafia stopped killing its enemies - police officers, magistrates and politicians - or its own members, allowing them to breathe a little easier as they got on with the business of running extortion and drug trafficking rackets.
The Provenzano doctrine, as investigators called it, was defined by a ceasefire in attacks against the state and the management of internal dissent through consensus, persuasion and paternal largesse rather than execution.
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