Boss of Bosses (38 page)

Rotolo was one of the most senior bosses in Cosa Nostra, with a high degree of autonomy. He was an assiduous disciple of Provenzano, imitating his style in his letters and preaching the Boss’s message to his men. ‘You have to be loved – it’s very different from being feared. Respect, my friends, is one thing. Fear is a different matter: as soon as you turn round . . . and someone gets the chance, they’ll put a fist in your face. But if you, as they say, do good, no one’s going to touch you.’

Rotolo knew he would be in the front line if the Inzerillos returned seeking revenge, and he was determined to uphold the commission’s order of banishment. The men who made that ruling are no longer with us, he argued, so we have no authority to change it. Rotolo lived in fear of the Inzerillos’ reprisals, knowing that if anyone came looking for vengeance, they would come to him first. But the
scappati
, the ‘escapees’, were already slipping back into Sicily, and Provenzano was offering Rotolo no support to hold them back.

Rotolo was serving a life sentence when he was diagnosed with a dangerous heart condition; he was allowed to serve his sentence under house arrest. But police keeping watch at his villa in a residential estate
in western Palermo watched as the supposedly ailing capo leaped over his garden fence and held meetings in a corrugated steel builder’s hut in an alley behind his villa. Agents who were keeping Rotolo under surveillance knew he had anti-bugging detectors. Shortly before the parties arrived, they would deactivate the devices so that the machine would not pick up their presence. Once the room had been ‘swept’ for bugs, the devices would be switched back on.

As the agents listened, Rotolo would read Provenzano’s letters aloud to his men and comment bitterly on them. Provenzano, realizing he had an explosive situation on his hands, had prevaricated and refused to give Rotolo a free hand. He played for time, telling both sides what they wanted to hear. ‘The agreement was made, they have to stay over there’, he wrote to Lo Piccolo’s man. ‘I was wondering if you know anything about this. I don’t want to comment as yet’, he wrote to Rotolo.

In his little cottage above Corleone, Provenzano was drawing on all his experience and skills as a mediator to diffuse this potential disaster. His letters were masterpieces of neutrality and ambiguity. ‘I’ve talked to everyone from that family, and we’re in agreement.’

Rotolo was spitting. ‘Everyone from that family? Which family? The Inzerillos, I suppose!’

‘I know nothing more about this matter than you have both told me’, Provenzano continued, with measured formality. ‘I hear you both, but I cannot give my opinion, however much my heart desires it, for several reasons beyond my control. My motto is: may God give us the certainty . . . that we have erred . . . and the strength to come to an agreement, and forgive.’

‘Why won’t he take responsibility?’ Rotolo fumed.

‘In Cosa Nostra the tendency is to eliminate the potential danger immediately’, says Grasso, ‘and not to take any risks. Provenzano took time to prevaricate . . . he said it wasn’t his decision, only the people who had given the order could revoke it, and they were all in prison. He didn’t resolve the situation, but he bided his time.’

He was avoiding, with admirable skill, conclusive action by one party or the other and successfully keeping both sides convinced that they had his special attention.

Provenzano typed: ‘There are only three people left with the power to decide this matter: you, me and Lo Piccolo.’ Rotolo was not satisfied. With the hut wired for sound, police heard how the situation in Palermo was hurtling towards war.

‘One shot, here, that’s all it’ll take’, Rotolo instructed his men. The agent listening at the end of the wire realized he was planning to murder Lo Piccolo and his son.

But while Provenzano had played for time, the Inzerillos were coming home, and the question of the
scappati
became academic. Rotolo did not have anyone shot, but he did have the satisfaction of kicking one of Lo Piccolo’s men out of the organization. The Boss’s tactics had angered him, but they had, for the moment, held him at bay.

Provenzano’s talents as a mediator were required in family life as well, where a quarrel over money had blown up into a feud between the three brothers.

On 8 June, Falco, ‘Hawk’, was on duty in the Palermo HQ, listening to a conversation between Provenzano’s two brothers, Simone and Salvatore, via a device planted in Salvatore’s home in Corleone. The three-storey corner house was wedged into the end of a cul-de-sac, opposite his mother’s family home. It was almost impossible for anyone to drop into the narrow street unobserved, but one of the agents had managed to break into the house and install a bug.

The brothers were moaning about Binnu, the famous outlaw. A long-standing row about an inheritance was rumbling on, despite the Boss’s immense wealth and the good offices of his nephew Carmelo Gariffo, who was trying to smooth things over. They complained that Bernardo’s sons were getting unfair advantages.

‘What the hell did he contact me for’, grumbled Salvatore. ‘Did he really send for me after eight years to have an argument?’

In the police operations room Hawk strained to hear every word. The brothers’ bitterness was palpable. Binnu’s status as Italy’s most wanted man was apparently becoming an intolerable burden.

‘So he’s still here then.’

After hours of listening to rambling, irritable conversations Hawk was not sure he had heard right. But when he cleaned up the tape and played it back without the background noise and interference, there
it was. ‘Iddu’, they called him: ‘Himself’. There was no doubt who they were talking about. Hawk got straight on the phone to the chief, and told him to come in right away: ‘You’ve got to hear this.’

These few ill-tempered words by Provenzano’s brother had let the Catturandi know their prey had come home to roost and was living in Corleone.

T
HE FAMILY: IT
was the last refuge, a natural network when all else failed. Provenzano had gone home to Corleone, where he could be cared for and protected by people he trusted. He had quarrelled with his brothers, it was true, but now he was in difficulties and needed their help.

The investigation initially focused on the Boss’s favourite nephew, Carmelo Gariffo, who had recently come out of prison and was living just around the corner from Saveria in Corleone. He had evidently lost no time getting back in contact with his uncle, but the police couldn’t follow him without being spotted. Conducting surveillance on foot within Corleone was almost impossible. An agent wandering about the narrow streets would be noticed within minutes, and asking for the neighbours’ co-operation was out of the question. A tiny camera was planted on a street light outside Saveria Palazzolo’s house to record every visitor, every movement to and from the house. Cameras were fixed on Gariffo’s door, just around the corner. Listening devices inside the houses relayed their every word, but no one ever mentioned Provenzano.

Investigators turned up other interesting links. Gariffo’s daughter Mariangela was married to Giuseppe Lo Bue, an ambitious young mafioso living in Corleone and working with Provenzano’s older son, Angelo, in the domestic appliance firm. Angelo in general kept himself to himself and spent his time with his mother or his fiancée, but over the winter of 2005 he was seeing a lot of Lo Bue. The cousins were the same age and had a fair amount in common; they spoke on the phone a lot, and Lo Bue dropped by the house most days. In fact, as the police intensified their surveillance on Palazzolo’s house, they noticed that he
dropped in on ‘Aunt Saveria’ with surprising regularity, not always staying long enough for a meal or a chat. Sometimes he dropped by even when he had called ahead and had been told Angelo was not there. This pushiness was odd, and aroused agents’ suspicion; could he have had an ulterior motive for his visits?

Police observers began to notice a pattern: the same people coming and going, the same habits repeated. Gariffo, although active in the family business and in contact with Provenzano, never visited his aunt, although she occasionally went to see him, usually with Angelo in tow.

Numerous phone conversations between Angelo and Giuseppe, monitored around the clock by agents in the darkened operations room, revealed nothing of interest to the investigation until they started talking about ‘stuff’ that needed to be delivered.

Whenever Lo Bue called by, he would leave with a blue or white plastic bag. It looked, to the agents studying the images, as though he was taking out the rubbish, but he walked right past the street bins outside the house and took the bags with him in his car.

‘We see him go in to the house with bags, or packages, and when he comes out he’s almost always got a bag with him’, recalled Giuseppe Gualtieri, head of the flying squad. ‘It looks like he’s got clothing in those bags, but it’s puzzling, because why should he take his washing for Angelo’s mother to do . . . Another thing we notice is that, whenever Giuseppe Lo Bue leaves Saveria Palazzolo’s house, he always, without exception, goes to see his father, on the outskirts of Corleone. When he leaves his father’s house, he hasn’t got the packages any more, or else he’s carrying something small. He is leaving those bags at his father’s.

‘It’s an unbelievable job, trying to carry out surveillance in a town like Corleone. It’s a perfectly normal town, but it’s in the mountains, which means you’re always overlooked, and any novelty, anything that looks out of the ordinary, is immediately noticed and instantly reaches the ears of those few criminal members of the community. So the micro-cameras we use have to be extremely well placed. We can’t have them all over the town, as someone will inevitably spot one, and then they’ll go looking for the rest. We have to operate in and around Corleone without being spotted, which is no mean feat. People talk
about Provenzano as the Phantom of Corleone, but it’s our boys who were the real phantoms.

‘We posted look-outs all around the area, using high-powered binoculars, to cover whoever was putting the cameras in place: that way we could warn them that someone was coming, that an old guy seemed to have noticed them, that the cattle herdsman was on his way through.’

The police logged constant trips by Lo Bue to pick up packages or drop something off. During this time officers listening in on the couple’s phone line late one February night heard his wife complaining that she barely saw him any more. Mariangela had an immaculate Mafia pedigree, but just recently Giuseppe had got far more involved than she expected. She was at home with the baby, and he was never around.

Mariangela: This isn’t like being a family, I’m sick of only ever seeing you when you’ve got a gap in your schedule.

Giuseppe: For the moment, there are more important things, like making sure the children lack for nothing. Of course it’s better when we can spend time together, but you know there are times when there are other demands on us, and we’ve got to put up with it.

M: But we’ve been living like this for eight months now . . .

G: Yeah, I’ve been doing this for eight months, but at least, when you want to sit down and have a rest for five minutes, you can. I can’t even do that.

M: OK, go ahead, you carry on and let’s see where it gets you . . . as far as I can see, you do things because you’ve made commitments to other people and you don’t want to look bad.

G: Well then, you should be proud of your husband if he doesn’t look bad . . . you know you should be proud to say, if my husband makes a commitment he sticks to it.

M: I don’t need you to tell me why I should be proud of my husband, thanks. But I do know I’ve got a virtual husband – he only ever talks to me on the phone.

G: But I’ve taken this on for everyone’s sake.

M: We’ll see, one day, when you’re on your own . . . [in prison]

G: Mariangela, listen: I could be on my own for three or four years, then I’d be back with you . . . and I would do the same thing again, to make sure, like I said, the children don’t miss out. Maybe you haven’t understood that.

To the police this tragic little late-night conversation provided a strong clue that Lo Bue was involved in something important within the organization, and had been for several months. If their instinct was right, that those bags were on their way to Provenzano, the Boss could not be far away.

Police surveillance later revealed there were other pressures on Mariangela. Her husband talked on the phone with his mistress and made arrangements to go and see her in Trapani, over an hour’s drive away. One late afternoon there was a frenzied volley of calls as he tried to drop off a package before heading out to see his mistress, and found no one home in Corleone.

By the end of January it was clear that Giuseppe Lo Bue was collecting packages from Angelo and Saveria and taking them to his father. But where did they go next?

Bloodhound was one of the most senior members of the Gruppo Duomo. He described the intense period leading up to the arrest. ‘We start watching Giuseppe Lo Bue’s father. After his son’s visits he takes boxes or containers out to his car. We set up look-outs along the roads to see if we can spot where he’s taking them. This is a slow process: he seems very wary and spends a lot of time watching out of the door of his workshop. We can’t tell if he’s seen something, if he’s looking for us, or something else. To avoid being spotted we have to follow him just a short way on one trip, then another short distance the next. Finally we get a break: the father is seen meeting a man, and we manage to get down the number plate.