Bernardo Provenzano holds [held] a record. He has been [was] a runaway, wanted for murder, since the day –10th September 1969– in which he took part in Corleone, in the attack to one of the soldiers that Our Father Michele Navarra still had left. More than 40 years, then, as a fugitive of justice. And as Riina before him, it is almost certain that Provenzano has spent the majority of that time in Western Sicily. His face is well known in Italy, especially a police sketch, since the last known picture of him shows an anxious 26 year-old with hair fully covered with cream (taken in September 1959). There is no other more evident example of what the Mafia’s territorial control means in practice than Provenzano’s constant ability of avoiding being captured.
During the major part of the last four decades Provenzano’s role within the Cosa Nostra was seriously underestimaded, and for a while it was even thought that he had died. In fact, his own nickname, The Tractor, is a sign of how badly he has been judged. The world found out about him thanks to Antonio Calderone’s testimony, one of the pentity [repented] who has most stood out during the 80s, who, from his distant perspective in Catania, to the East of the island, considered Provenzano little more than a ruthless assassin, much less sly than Riina The Short. Other better informed Mafia desertors have now modified such image: Corleonese usually refer to The Tractor more frequently as The Accountant or zu Binnu (Uncle Berna). They state that Provenzano’s commercial and political mind is much more developped than Riina’s. Gioacchino Pennino, doctor, DC politician, person of the world and man of honour, who became witness for the prosecution in 1994, used to state that it had been mainly Provenzano the one to sponsor with his weapons the political career of the “aggressive embezzler” Vito Ciancimino. In a particular occasion, in 1981, Pennino himself had expressed out loud his intention of abandoning Ciancimino’s group in Palermo’s City Council. Uncle Berna had him called and, without even listening to his explanations, told him clearly to stay quiet and put.
For many years, Provenzano acted under Riina’s shadow. While the latter was occupied with his own war against the State, Provenzano discreetly worked on the webs of commercial and political friendships, which had always provided the Sicilian Mafia its main income. He started his commercial career as debt collector for a loan company created by Luciano Liggio in order to launder his drug trafficking money, and who he had already specialised in the health, building and the waste disposal industries. Like the major part of the Sicilian economy, they were industries basically dominated by the public sector, and, consequently, they were businesses well related with politicians.
Inminent Corpses
But uncle Berna, obviously, is far from being a peaceful character. As a veteran member of the commission, he has accumulated in absentia several life sentence for some of the murders of eminent corpses, including thise of Falcone and Borsellino, as well as for having planned the murders campaign carried out throughout the Italian peninsula in 1993. In the early 90s Provenzano lead personally a war between the Cosa Nostra and a new federation of bands established in the south and east of Sicily and originally made up by men of honour previously outcast from the organisation; they were called la stidda, which means both “the shining star” and “bad luck”. Many of the victims of Provenzano’s campaign -300 in three years in the Agrigento province alone- were teenage gunmen bought by the stiddari for little money.
Since becoming capo di capi after Leoluca Bagarella’s capture in 1995, Provenzano has changed the Cosa Nostra’s strategy. Judges define his tactics as that of immersion due to its main goal, to keep the Cosa Nostra below the public arena’s radar. Consequently, since Provenzano took charge no new deaths of high-profile State representatives has taken place. Murders –significantly, almost all of them businessmen- take place away from big cities. Even small felonies have descended drastically in Palermo and Catania under Provenzano’s mandate. Roberto Scarpinato, a judge specialised in the relationship between organised crime, business and politics, states maintains that uncle Berna has managed to capture the fundamental rule of post-modern society: that which state that whatever does not exist in the media does not exist in reality either.
Old mafia men who used to know Provenzano have stated that he has a much more conciliatory managing system style than that of Riina’s, and that he shows himself more open to share profits. Inside the Mafia he is associated to the saying “mangia e fai mangiare” (“eat and let other eat”). Some of the intercepted business letters of the capo di capi give an idea of his approach, “finally I will tell you that I am entirely at your disposal. I wish you the best and I send you my most affectionate regards to you and your father. May God bless you and protect you”. The Cosa Nostra is still a centralised organisation, but it is no longer the dictatorship in which it had become under Riina The Short’s mandate. Provenzano’s priority is internal peace. Uncle Berna’s Cosa Nostra has also gone back to cultivating its fundamental protection business. The pressure on the legal business for them to pay il pizzo [to have protection] has noticeably increased over the recent years. Protection activities go quite well with the immersion strategy, since they rarely require the use of the ultimate and loudest sanction of murder; a fire, a beating or a series of repeated robberies are usually enough to convince anybody resisting to scratch his pockets.
Public Works Contracts
Protection also represents the traditional basic medium of the Mafia in order to have access to public works contracts. In July 2002 the national regulatory authority of public works made public the evidence which proved that the licitation system, established in order to avoid corruption, was systematically being subverted in Sicily. Palermo’s attorney general estimated that 96% of public works contracts had been fixed.
Nowadays, a large part of Sicily’s public spend is provided by the European Union from Brussels, before the Italian government from Rome. The so-called Agenda 2000 is the European Union’s plan to promote development in the poorest ares of the continent. The regional plan for Sicily plans to invest 7,586 million euro in the space of six years –between 2000-2006- with views to reduce in a significant and sustainable way the social and economic lackings, increase competitiveness long term and create the conditions for a free and complete access to employment based on the environmental values and equality of opportunities. Naturally, the new and underground Cosa Nostra does not share this vision, which would be a balanced and sustainable growth of Sicily, at least if we go by the following conversation, recorded in the summer of 2002: “they are advising everybody not to make noise nor call attention upon themselves because we are going to put out hands in all that Agenda 2000”. It is worth remembering that, when Salvo Lima was murdered at gunpoint, he had been a member of the European Parliament for 12 years.
There are no heroin refineries in Sicily anymore. The most recent tendency is that the drug is made in the same place where the opium poppy is grown. But the island is still an important access point to Northamerica’s market. After having eliminated the main drug traffickers in the massacre of 1891-1982, the Corleonese gave immediately to the trafickers that were left what they called a licence in order to act as their agents. There is evindence of links between the drug trafficking in the Sicilian Mafia and the emerging Eastern European criminal organisations. Italian and Russian secret services found out about the celebration of a first encounter between men of honour of high rank and members of the Russian Mafia in Prague in 1992. Apparently, a second meeting took place later on –again having to do with drug tafficking and arms- in Switzerland, in which US mafiosi were also present.
The profits coming from all these illegal activities are nowadays easier to mask, launder, move around and invest than in times of Stefano Bontante, Totò Riina and God’s bankers. The Mafia has always known how to turn to experts, be it in the citric comerce or international finance. And nowadays, more than ever before, the sons and daughters of men of honour have access to the necessary education in order to become lawyers, bankers or real estate agents themselves.
Provenzano’s greatest achievement has been putting an end to the tide of Cosa Nostra deserters. The policy of exterminating the pentiti and their families has ceased to exist as means of encouraging those who have become prosecution witnesses to retract and return to the fold. At the same time, Provenzano has placed the care of prisoners in the special position which it traditionally used to occupy in the list of Cosa Nostra priorities. During the chaotic mid-90s many men of honour who were in remand stopped receiving their salaries. Through the following extracts of letters written by Brancaccio’s capo while in prison to one of his deputies, one can form an idea of the way the capi were beginning to respond to the crisis:
“20 of our men are brankrupt due to the trials. And they have no means of confronting the situatuon. The task is to get three or four apartments to each of them so that they are able to have a secure economic future, them and their families”.
“The guys in prison are always asking me why has their monthly pay been interrupted since I was arrested. I want to say that two million a month is nothing. I used to pay five million. I urge you to do at least what I used to do. When I was on the run we used to lodge a basic quantity of two hundred million a year, and besides, between one thousand and one thousand five hundred million extra. Our active constructors have had to build those flats. If anybody is late he has to be made to pay. Anybody who takes advantage of the guys who are behind bars is disgraceful scum.”
Common Fund for Prisoners
Under Provenzano’s mandate, the common fund for Cosa Nostra prisoners, which finances itself with a tax on the revenue of all the organization, has been reactivated. Consequently, and as the eminent judge Guido lo Forte puts it, between the benefits offered by the State and the ones guaranteed by the Mafia, prisoners are nowadays choosing the latter. During the mid-90s crisis, when it looked like the Cosa Nostra was near defeat, mafiosi parents were reticent to allow their children to be admitted into the organisation. Now iniciations have been started again, although in a more selective way than before: in a attempt to protect the organisation from future pentiti, nowadays young ones coming from families with a long mafioso history are preferred. As Scarpinato says, family ties are an antibody for State collaboration.
Provenzano has surrounded himself with an older generation of capi than the young murderers Riina used to have as his nearest collaborators, whose most emblematic example is Giovanni lo Scannacristiani Brusca’s. The examining magistrates sometimes refer to the Palermo commission, at present directed by Provenzano, as the “Senate”, due to the age of its members, who, with few exceptions, are around sixty. Once again, it is the fear to future pentiti what has made this change. Older men of honour tend to have a longer term vision: they have sons to think about and a patrimony to pass on to them.
Communications between the families and mandamenti mafiosi have also become more compartamentalised, with only a few chosen men of honour who act as communication channels. It seems like nowadays it is common practice that men of honour hide their condition even from other mafiosi.
Provenzano’s answer to the crisis caused by his organisation’s deserters has worked. Since 1997 there has only been an important man of honour to have become a witness for the accusation, and at the same time legislators have tried to impose stricter controls on the use of pentiti. Pentitism, as it is called, has been a specially polemical weapon in judges’ arsenal. The verdict in Andreotti’s first trial came to reinforce the arguments of those who consider pentiti intrinsically untrustworthy. During the process there was a controversy when a key pentito killed another gangster while he was under police protection. Since then, the benefits that judges can offer to Mafia deserters in exchange of information have significally decreased. Moreover, nowadays any evidence brought forward by pentiti more than six months after their capture is null and void; the problem us that six months is not along period of time for a man of honour to be able to give detailed information about a whole life of daily criminal activities.
Provenzano has established a Pax mafiosa while his organisation re-builds the support system hurt by the 80s and early 90s. Since the Cosa Nostra guns have been silent for quite some time, some analysts have even suggested that the Mafia is on its death bedm that the new world of Internet and globalisation is too modern for a semi-illiterate killer like Provenzano to understand. But for the last century and a half the Mafia has answered to all the big challenges of modernity: capitalism, the birth of the nation-state, democracy, the rise and fall of the great ideologies of socialism and fascism, global war, industrialisation and de-industrialisation. Nothing ever projected by the 19th and 20th centuries against the sicilian Mafia has ever been capable of stopping it. It does not make much sense to suggest that, freed from its own power, the Cosa Nostra is unable to face the challenges of the 21st century. The organisation will never fall by its own decision. Judge Scarpinato defines it like a collective brain, capable of learning from its own mistakes, of adapting and counterbalancing whatever measures are used to combat it.
Collective Brain
The fate of this “collective brain” is still up in the air. The Italian law and order powers’s answer to the Cosa Nostra is nowadays more coordinated and efficient than ever. Thus, for example, in July 2002, using GPS tracking micro-units placed on the cars of several suspects, the police arrested to which is stated constituted the whole Cosa Nostra for the Agrigento province: fifteen men, among them a doctor, a nobleman and a member of the provincial government. Apparently, they had got together in order to elect a new capo.
Nevertheless, and as has happened so frequently in the past, the Sicilian Mafia’s fate will depend less on the law and order forces than on politics, understanding by the latter both the organisation’s internal balance of powers and its relationship with the people’s elected representatives. Bernardo Provenzano is [was] facing a crucial political task. He has to find the way of settling the conflict of interests existing between the free capi and the Corleonesi’s historical leaders, men like Riina and Bagarella, who have refused to become prosecution witnesses and have already spent a decade serving irreversible life sentences under a harsh penitentiary regime.
Outside capi need peace and “immersion” in order to carry out a long-term reconstruction strategy. Inside capi urgently need a change in the law; especially the reform of penitentiary conditions –the known as “41-bis law”- which prevent them to keep on operating from captivity, but need also a series of changes in the laws which allow the mafiosi properties confiscations, and even a revocation of the precedents set in the macro-trial; all of this perhaps through retrospective laws which weaken the value of evidence provided by the pentiti. In other words: the demands which triggered the attack to the State during the 80s and 90s and which have still not been fulfilled.
And now, a decade after the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino and of the attacks in the Italian peninsula, some observers fear that the Cosa Nostra might have found somebody in the Government willing to give it what it wants.
Translated from “El último de los Corleone”, by John Dickey, published in El País, 16th April 2006
by John Dickie
SUNDAY- 16-04-2006
