Downfall of the Godfather

Bernardo Provenzano

ROME - Bernardo Provenzano, 73, the capo di capi of the Sicilian Mafia who had been sought by the authorities for more than 40 years, was caught in a farmhouse outside Corleone, his home town in western Sicily.

He was alone at the time, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Initial reports that he came quietly were later contradicted: The man once known as the "Tractor" for his efficiency with a machine gun, who was said by his first boss to "shoot like an angel", first denied his true identity, then fought to stay free.

He was brought to police headquarters in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, where a crowd cheered his captors and yelled "bastard" when he was taken out of the car.

A video camera caught a fleeting image of the short, grey-haired, bespectacled gangster in a throng of police masked in balaclavas, the first true image of the man known till now only by pictures from his youth and identikit constructions.

The news that the fugitive who had evaded capture longer than probably any other criminal was finally under arrest came yesterday, just a few minutes after it became clear Romano Prodi had won the election.

Last year Piero Grasso, Italy's national anti-Mafia prosecutor, caused a storm by saying that Provenzano had been protected from capture by politicians and policemen.

Provenzano had been the uncontested leader of the Sicilian Mafia since the arrest of his former boss, Salvatore Riina, in 1993, following the assassination in 1992 of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the investigating magistrates who had worked tirelessly to close the Mafia down.

The bloody car bomb killings of the two men, their companions and bodyguards prompted a wave of revulsion against the Mafia, which goaded the Italian state into belatedly taking decisive action.

But Provenzano, who was also one of the brains behind the massacres, remained at large, protected - as Grasso claimed - by powerful men aware that he knew too much.

"After the killings of Falcone and Borsellino," said Salvo Palazzolo, a Mafia expert and correspondent in Sicily of La Repubblica, "thanks to the confessions of supergrasses, the men directly involved in the killings were arrested. But Provenzano and his closest confidants - the men who work, not with Kalashnikovs but calculators - were not touched.

"The mystery of Provenzano is connected to massacres that have never been solved. His real power lies not in weapons but in secrets, and it is with these secrets that he blackmails those with power - politicians and bankers - and remains free.

"They don't want to arrest him because he knows a lot of very inconvenient things."

It was on September 18, 1963, that Provenzano, then aged 30, described in a police file as "a person of vicious conduct, said to be responsible for many crimes," was first logged as missing. One of only two photographs of him dates from 1959.

But for his first 20 years as a fugitive, no serious attempt was made to track him down. It was during these years that the "Phantom of Corleone" rose through the Mafia's ranks, emerging as its undisputed chief after the arrest of Riina.

Though largely uneducated and forced frequently to change location, sleeping in different farmhouses every few nights across the island, Provenzano has ruled the Mafia with an iron hand and is responsible for the 13 years of "Pax Mafiosa" that followed Riina's arrest.

Concerned that the state's first reaction to the killings of Falcone and Borsellino could result in the Mafia's destruction, he ordered a policy of non-violence.

The Mafia continued to be omnipresent in Sicilian life, making money as usual from public building contracts; "pizzi", or protection; and drug smuggling, but Provenzano's policy ensured that the rampant bloodletting came to a halt.

The Mafia, it proved, could get its way without killing.

Provenzano had a healthy contempt for the telephone and other modern means of communication. He issued his orders through thousands of "bigliettini", notes written on an Olivetti 32 typewriter that he carried everywhere, orders framed in quaint and courteous language with numerous spelling and grammatical errors.

The bigliettini were delivered in stages by a network of messengers. Police explained that it was by carefully monitoring the progress of a series of notes between Provenzano and his wife, who lives in Corleone, that they were able to track him to the farmhouse outside the town.

Police followed a package of clean laundry from Provenzano's wife to a series of houses and then out to Provenzano's hiding place. Police closed in when they saw a hand reach out to get it.

Provenzano's capture coincides with the rebirth of a popular anti-Mafia movement on the island, given impetus by the decision of Rita Borsellino, sister of the murdered magistrate, to run for the governorship of Sicily in elections next month.

- INDEPENDENT