Alleged mafia 'boss of bosses' maintains silence

The reputed boss of the Italian Mafia Bernardo Provenzano maintained his prison silence today as forensic experts searched his hideout and police arrested three men accused of aiding Italy’s No.1 fugitive.

Investigators spent the night reviewing notes found in the dilapidated farmhouse in Provenzano’s hometown of Corleone where his four decades on the run ended yesterday, the ANSA and Apcom news agencies reported.

Reports said the notes, which mentioned people previously unknown to investigators, had been sent to Provenzano from Mafia families across the island and referred to various interests of the Cosa Nostra, in particular public works contracts.

Investigators also found two typewriters, including an old Olivetti on his bedside table, that they suspect Provenzano – known as the “boss of bosses” - used to write orders to Mafia bosses throughout Italy, ANSA said.

Informants have said Provenzano used notes – known as ”pizzini” in the Sicilian dialect – to avoid mobile phones and detection by police.

Using sophisticated electronic equipment, forensics experts searched for possible tunnels from the concrete farmhouse where Provenzano was arrested.

Outside, they combed the grounds, looking for clues.

Provenzano was transferred overnight from a police station in Palermo to an isolation cell in Terni, in Umbria on the Italian mainland, where he will be monitored around the clock. ANSA, citing unnamed sources, said the 73-year-old could be transferred again because of his health.

Held in solitary confinement, Provenzano has refused to talk to investigators.

“He has demonstrated extreme composure,” Gilberto Calderozzi, chief of operations for the Italian state police in Rome, told private Channel 5 television.

The head of Italy’s parliamentary anti-Mafia commission, Roberto Centaro, described Provenzano as the last of the old guard of Mafia bosses, more interested in power than wealth.

“I don’t think the boss will talk, even though anything can happen,” Centaro told journalists at a crime seminar. ”Provenzano always lived with nothing: with great power, but almost as an ascetic style, without needing anything. Therefore, even restrained in jail, he could live better than before.”

Giuseppe Gualtieri, head of operations for Palermo police, told Sky TG24 television on Wednesday that the three newly-arrested suspects played the role of Provenzano’s ”associates, who took care of keeping the boss in touch with the outside, with his exchange of communications, packages, help, even from a logistical point of view.”

Gualtieri said Provenzano’s capture was a “point of departure” for investigators who will now be looking into his support network as well as the internal organisation of the Cosa Nostra. He said the criminal organisation has an internal structure that gives it the ability to find new leadership quickly.

Under Provenzano’s leadership, Cosa Nostra increasingly spread its tentacles into the lucrative world of public works contracts in Sicily, making the Mafia less dependent on traditional revenue-making operations such as drug trafficking and extortion, investigators have said.

Provenzano had escaped capture so often since going into hiding in 1963 that he earned a place in the Italian imagination as The Phantom of Corleone. He got his nickname The Tractor for the determination he displayed in a mob career that began as a hit man.

He is believed to have taken over leadership of the Sicilian Mafia following the 1993 arrest of former boss Salvatore Toto Riina.

During his years as a fugitive, Provenzano was convicted in absentia and given life sentences for more than a dozen murders of mobsters and investigators.

The head of the team that captured Provenzano said the Mafia boss initially appeared stunned, but then gave a look of resignation, “as if to say: ’It’s over.’ “

“When I found myself in front of him, I immediately knew it was him,” said state police operations co-ordinator Renato Cortese. “After working for years on this case, and studying his profile, the family photographs, it was as if I had always known him.”

Provenzano told arresting officers, “You don’t know what a mistake you are making,” Cortese said.

“But it is an expression that all Mafiosi use when they are arrested, in order to emphasise their innocence.”