Boss of Bosses (39 page)

‘This car turns out to be registered to the wife of Bernardo Riina [no relation to the former Boss], who has a criminal record for Mafia association. He lives just by the junction above Corleone.

‘At this point it feels like we’re getting somewhere. We decide to focus our investigation on Riina.’

Throughout those early months of 2006 Bloodhound and the other special agents were working night and day, tracking their suspects around Corleone without being seen. ‘Following these guys with bags was incredibly difficult’, he recalls. ‘We had just one agent in a car – two agents and you’d attract attention instantly. They’d drive around, sometimes right into a garage, so you wouldn’t see them taking the
bag out of the car. Lo Bue drives incredibly fast and takes evasive action, so it was extremely hard for us to follow him and find out where he goes. There were times we thought we’d never get to the end of the trail, or that we’d made a mistake and were following the wrong man.’

It was an increasingly difficult and demanding job the unit was doing: progress was excruciatingly slow, but they could not take their eyes off the monitors for a second in case they missed something that might be important. There was also the strain on family life: they couldn’t tell anyone – including their families – they were doing this job, because they were all from this area.

‘It was about the end of January when we started following these blessed plastic bags,’ Bloodhound takes up the tale, ‘and we were still following them at the end of March, trying to figure out where they led. Fortunately for us, they got into a routine. Their movements started to look too regular. Once they got into a routine, they were in trouble – as we would have been. Once your movements become predictable, you’ve had it.’

One early morning towards the end of March the surveillance operation managed to keep track of the packages going from Saveria’s house to Lo Bue’s father and other bags coming back via the same route within an hour. Provenzano must be very near.

‘One time one of our guys managed to follow Lo Bue’s father in his car through the narrow streets of Corleone. He got out of his son’s car and into Riina’s silver Golf, then headed towards the edge of town. Our guy overtook him, and as he carried on the main road, he could see Riina’s car behind him, turning off towards the old main road. We closed off two of the upper roads to see which way he came back, but he came back by another route – that’s when we discovered he was coming back from Montagna dei Cavalli.’

The valley above Corleone, overlooked by the massive Rocca Busambra, is approached along a winding mountain road. As you enter the valley, it opens up like a secret garden. Following a gentle slope, there are fruit trees and palms, villas and farm cottages. Horses graze in small paddocks. Its exposed sloping sides and beguiling open landscape made surveillance extremely difficult without being seen.

‘As we stepped up the surveillance on Bernardo Riina,’ Bloodhound went on, ‘we had to dress to fit in with the surroundings; we all have our own wardrobe at home for different surveillance jobs, I’ve got a hat that looks pretty rustic: it did fine for this job.

‘We discover Riina’s going up to this place every few days, even though he hasn’t got any property up there. We set up a watch from the mountain behind Corleone, 8 km away, to see if he’s visiting relatives who live on the other side of the valley, but he doesn’t appear. We’re mystified. Where is he going?’

To find out, the group had to change their surveillance position, to a much riskier spot just 1.5 km away. This would give them an open view of the other side of the valley. On 3 April they watched Riina’s Land Cruiser turn off the main road through the valley on to a track leading to a sheep farmer’s yard. Riina left again shortly afterwards.

The group had, perhaps, found the packages’ ultimate destination. The farm was visited by several people in the mornings, who stopped to get fresh water from the spring and buy the farmer’s ricotta cheese. It seemed an unlikely place for the Boss of Bosses to remain undiscovered, but they had taken so long to get this far, it had to be worth the effort to keep it under surveillance.

‘He seemed to have chosen a place that was so obvious it was completely overlooked’, said Gualtieri. ‘No one believed it possible that he could be there. Certainly, if he was there, he never went out.’

Bloodhound and his colleague Lynx set up watch on the higher slope of Montagna dei Cavalli. ‘We went up there before dawn, dressed in black, climbing rocks in the dark, watching constantly for anyone who might have seen us. We had to stay so still, lizards were crawling over us. After a few days we requisitioned a hut from maintenance staff working on radio masts on top of the mountain, keeping the farm cottage under surveillance through our long-range camera and watching the monitor, for eighteen hours a day. Instead of filming the cottage, we relayed the images directly to Palermo. We didn’t leave the hide during daylight hours, unless absolutely necessary, and we’d go down after dark. I’d get home for two hours, for a quick rest. I didn’t see my wife for the whole time. We took a bottle of water and some biscuits or panini with us, but we had to be
absolutely sure not to leave any trace behind: not a wrapper or a tissue or a plastic cup, not even a cigarette butt, or the game would be up. The same pair of us did the trip every day; we got to know the terrain, what time the shepherd would go past, what movements were usual and what was unexpected. If anyone came near while we were walking up, we crouched down and covered ourselves with a camouflage net.’

A short track led past a little house and into the yard, where the people who came to buy ricotta parked their cars. Two large concrete sheds, where Marino made his cheese, opened on to the yard. The little house had a rough concrete porch with a straggling vine growing up it, a small window and door covered with plastic strips to keep flies out. At seven in the morning Marino arrived and opened the door, but no one ever came out.

Officers on surveillance followed the journey of packages from Palazzolo’s house to the cheesemaker’s yard on 3 April, then again the following day and the next. By the fourth trip the group could see the postmen had got into a routine: they had got lazy. On 9 April the same Spar carrier bag was used for the whole trip. The operations room was at fever pitch.

‘On 10 April we were pinned to the monitor the whole day’, recalls Bloodhound. ‘But no one came. We were pretty discouraged: it had been a year since we started this new phase, and we felt that probably no one would put any money on our investigation. We had no certainty that we were on the right track. We’d been staring at the monitor for the whole day without seeing any movement.’

The group’s moment of dismay didn’t last long. Meticulous police work had led them to this place. All that was missing was a positive sighting that someone, in all probability Provenzano, was hiding in that farm cottage. The following morning they got it.

‘On the morning of 11 April we saw Marino take a container of ricotta into the house and come out again. Then, suddenly, we got our break: just for a moment we caught sight of an arm reaching out through the door.’

The two agents had been watching the hut for ten days. Riina and Marino had gone into the cottage for brief moments, but no one had
come out. That arm, passing out a container, showed there was indeed someone inside. It appeared just for an instant, on their screen.

‘I do manage to stay pretty calm on the outside, but it was an incredibly exciting moment’, said Bloodhound. ‘I called Cortese back at the base. We didn’t know it was definitely him, but whoever it was, we were going to go in. As soon as I let them know there was someone in the hut, the whole group mobilized. Lynx and I stayed up there, to watch what was happening and give the signal. I told them it would be best to wait for two hours, till Marino closed up shop and all the people had left. It was crucial for Renato’s men to get there when everyone had gone but before Marino left. He would be closing up the cottage, and we didn’t know if it had a metal door; it might have a security bar behind it as well. If we were forced to use acetylene torches to break in, it could take fifteen minutes, in which time he could escape down a tunnel or destroy any documents. It wouldn’t be the first time.

‘As the last car was leaving, I called Renato, and shouted: Go!’

The units had sped over from Palermo and were close by at this point; the first car drove up the little track moments later. When he heard the car, Marino ran towards the door, then relaxed when he saw what he thought was Riina’s white jeep.

As Renato Cortese flew out of the car, the old shepherd tried to reach the cottage, but Cortese caught up with him, threw him to the ground and dashed for the door. Bloodhound and Lynx watched intently as their commander disappeared inside, followed by two others. Within moments they had a call.

‘It’s him!’

‘The first call I made was to my wife’, says Bloodhound. ‘I told her, “Everything’s gone according to plan, it’s good news. I probably won’t be seeing you for a few days.”’

‘“That’ll make a change, then.” She laughed.

‘By the time we got down to the farmyard, it was crazy. Everyone was hugging each other and crying, slapping each other on the back. I went inside, to take a look at Provenzano, and introduced myself. He shook my hand and congratulated me. He asked us if we’d had any help in finding him, from informers. We told him no one had helped us, we’d just followed the packages. What made me realize he was
really intelligent was the way he never answered a question. He waited till you had answered your own question, then he would give the merest sign of assent or else say nothing.

‘I asked him what he’d have done if he’d seen us up there.

‘“I would have exercised my right to escape”, he said.’

Caldarozzi and Bloodhound put Provenzano in an unmarked car and drove him down to Boccadifalco, an airport near Palermo. They drove without sirens or escorts so as not to attract attention. Marino, the old shepherd, was arrested.

From Boccadifalco, Provenzano was taken to police headquarters in Palermo, where an angry crowd had gathered in the spring rain. As he was bundled from the car into the building, he was jostled and pushed, as the crowd surged forward shouting ‘Bastard! Murderer!’ as he was ushered through the gateway and escorted inside. News of the Boss’s capture had been released almost instantaneously on the wires, and TV trucks were already pulling up outside police HQ.

Provenzano was dwarfed in the jostling, baying crowd of police officers in balaclavas and bulletproof vests. With his spectacles on a string and an enigmatic smile, he looked like a simple, harmless old man.

Prosecutors Marzia Sabella, Michele Prestipino and Pietro Grasso left their offices in the court-house and roared straight round to police HQ to meet their prisoner and make sure everything was in order before he was transferred to the maximum-security unit at Terni, in Umbria. After trailing him for so long, it was an emotional moment.

‘As the investigation intensified, I had started thinking I saw him everywhere’, Sabella recalls. ‘But when it came to it, I would never have recognized him. He didn’t look like the Boss.

‘He was a bit bewildered by finding himself in the midst of a noisy crowd and so much confusion after spending all that time alone. Not that he made a scene, he was perfectly dignified. We tried to create a bit of order, asked the police – who were jostling to get a glimpse of the Boss – to clear out and leave only essential personnel. We made sure he had what he needed. He asked for some medicine, a nurse was called, but I think he had it in a pocket.’

They introduced themselves, though she was aware no introductions were necessary – as the only female member of the team, it was obvious who she was. When Provenzano offered his hand, it was a great moment, something like a diplomatic encounter. ‘It was only a cease-fire’, Sabella says. ‘The next time we saw him he was uncommunicative. But that day I felt sorry for him. He just looked like a sick, old man. He looked beaten.

‘It was hard to register that what we had waited for so long was actually happening . . . that he was there in front of us.’

After Provenzano was escorted out for the short drive to the airfield Sabella and her colleagues drove up to the farm, to examine for themselves the conditions in which he had been living. After months of concentrated detective work it was a strange experience.

‘Going into the hideout, I had a moment of
déjà vu
. We had studied his habits and methods in such depth, I felt like I already knew everything that was there’, says Sabella. ‘I had the feeling of having been there many times: everything was strangely familiar. Through the
pizzini
and the
pentiti’
s reports we were aware of a lot of his habits and needs, and we recognized many things from descriptions. We found exactly what we expected to find.’

Sabella was, however, shocked by the Boss’s living conditions. ‘It was a rustic cottage kept in the most appalling state’, she said. ‘The standards of hygiene in the kitchen left a lot to be desired – the stove was filthy with baked-on food.’ However, a new bathroom had obviously been built on the side of the cottage, with a shower, lavatory and sink, and that was clean.

‘He was quite well organized: he had sent his dirty laundry to be washed just about every day, and the freezer was full of meat. There had been a problem with the television, and there were written instructions from his son on how to make it work.’

The police had been instructed to seal off Marino’s farmyard and make a thorough and detailed search or the contents of the Boss’s last hideout. After the fiasco of Riina’s hideout, which the carabinieri had not only failed to search but did not guard, leaving mafiosi free to go in and remove important evidence, it was vital that no such omissions
were repeated. It was hoped that the contents of Provenzano’s hideout would give important clues as to how he had remained hidden for so long, and over the following days an exhaustive inventory was made, of everything from thirty rolls of Sellotape to incontinence pads for his prostate problem. Outside the cottage two handguns were found hidden under a large stone. There were bundles of cash, each one counted, tied and systematically labelled with the name of the person it was going to. It was an orderly, centralized financial system. There was a calculator with a bit of cardboard taped to the back giving the conversion rate of old lire to Euros.