Boss of Bosses

Provenzano’s choice of Forza Italia was a decisive moment in his leadership. He could at last separate himself definitively from Riina’s politics; he also believed he had found a solution to the organization’s immediate crisis: a high-ranking official in a political party who was willing to support changes to the law in their favour.

Cosa Nostra doesn’t clean stables for anyone

Di Carlo, a detached and amusing narrator whose account of events has been hotly contested by dell’Utri, said he was only invited along to make Bontate look good.
‘I shook dell’Utri’s hand, but I didn’t kiss him . . . I’ve never really gone in for all that kissing. Besides he wasn’t Cosa Nostra . . . if he had been, I suppose I’d have been obliged to kiss him.’

Cannella told him bluntly that if they were going to get him elected, they would have to do a deal with the Mafia bosses, to ‘kiss some hands’, as he put it, however disagreeable this might be.

Guttadauro had plans for a huge development in Brancaccio: a shopping centre and multiplex cinema. He planned to sell developers his own land, and then become the guarantor for protection of the site, while making sure that a significant number of Mafia people were employed. It was the perfect business plan for Provenzano’s philosophy.

First we threatened them, then we offered them a guarantee of safety; it worked every time

‘I would say that man is prudence personified. We would go out and about, taking the usual precautions, usually in the early morning, but he was capable of going to ground for months at a time. He walled himself in. When we saw him again, his skin was as white as paper.

So, at the age of twenty-five, Bernardo Provenzano got his first criminal charge, for stealing cheese.

After making a hasty escape from a Palermo clinic, he had sought refuge with two sisters, spinsters, in Corleone, who nursed him back to health. In a peculiar twist, one of the women had been engaged to a man Liggio had murdered, the trade unionist Placido Rizzotto. Liggio’s ‘possession’ of his victim’s fiancée was the ultimate insult.

Navarra was well connected in politics and industry, and wielded considerable power in the region. In Corleone, Dr Navarra was known as padre nostru, Our Father.