Boss of Bosses

Boss of Bosses

Also by Clare Longrigg

Mafia Women
No Questions Asked

A Journey into the Heart
of the Sicilian Mafia

CLARE LONGRIGG

Thomas Dunne Books
St. Martin’s Press
New York

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

BOSS OF BOSSES
. Copyright © 2008 by Clare Longrigg. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

2008039095

First published in Great Britain by John Murray (Publishers),
an Hachette Livre UK company

First U.S. Edition: April 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Adrian

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Epilogue

Sources and notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustration Credits: © Lannino & Naccari/Studio Camera Palermo, viale Lazio © Alessandro Fucarini

I have to thank my great friend Rino Cascio, a brilliant journalist with whom I have been privileged to work, who has been a tireless, resourceful and knowledgeable researcher on this project – and always great fun.

I’d like to thank Linda Pantano for her help with research and, of course, the peerless staff of the Istituto Gramsci in Palermo. Thanks to Rino, Linda and Alberto for their wonderful hospitality.

Thanks to Piera Fallucca and Antonella Maggio for their ideas and Mafia tours.

Pippo Cipriani was incredibly generous with his time and knowledge. Salvo Palazzolo, author of two brilliant books on Provenzano, was a fount of ideas and information, and generous with help on documentation.

Thanks to Saverio Lodato for giving me permission to quote from his excellent books based on interviews with Tommaso Buscetta and Giovanni Brusca.

I’d like to thank the experts – lawyers, prosecutors and investigators – who agreed to be interviewed for this book, especially Alfonso Sabella, Nino Di Matteo and Michele Prestipino, General Angiolo Pellegrini and Rosalba di Gregorio.

Thanks to my agent Derek Johns, to Linda Shaughnessy, to my editor Rowan Yapp, and particular thanks to Roland Philipps. Thanks also to Ian Katz at
The Guardian
, who commissioned the article that set the whole project in motion.

I’d like to thank Emma Cook and Laura Longrigg for their comments on the manuscript, and Dani Golfieri for emergency translation. Thanks to Christine Langan and Christian Spurrier, Camilla
Nicholls, Amanda Sutton, Natasha Fairweather and Rick Beeston, and Denise and Charlie Meredith for their friendship and support. Thanks to Nigel Skeels for help with my website.

Heartfelt thanks to Helen and Bruce Buchanan. Thanks to my mother and sister Francesca for their constant support.

Finally, thanks to my husband, Adrian Buchanan, and my children, Patrick and Alice, who had to put up with my year-long absence.

Boss of Bosses

‘There’s someone inside.’

The voice of Il Segugio (‘Bloodhound’), one of the agents posted on the mountain, crackled over the radio. He had been watching the shepherd’s hut day and night for over a week, looking for a sign of life. This was the signal his commander had been waiting for.

‘We had been watching the sheep farm for days,’ said police chief Giuseppe Gualtieri, ‘and the door to the hut was always closed. Some days the shepherd arrived at seven in the morning and opened the door, but he never went in. He stood in the doorway, and sometimes it looked as though he was talking to the wall . . . it looked wrong somehow. We wanted to go up close at night and see what was in there, but then we thought, careful: if there was someone hiding in the cottage, we didn’t want to risk frightening him off and destroying all our hard work. We would wait.

‘One day we saw the shepherd standing in front of the cottage, fiddling with an aerial. We wondered, what’s that for? Why would you need an aerial on an uninhabited house? It was a couple of days before the elections, so we were thinking, which fugitive takes a keen interest in politics?