Rome – For more than 40 years he eluded arrest. He dispatched orders on little typewritten notes and shunned telephones that might pinpoint his location. His résumé allegedly included some of the most gruesome murders in Mafia lore.
On Tuesday, the reputed godfather of the Cosa Nostra and Italy’s most wanted fugitive was captured in a ramshackle farmhouse outside the Sicilian town of Corleone, a name made infamous by author Mario Puzo and actor Marlon Brando in “The Godfather.”
Bernardo “The Tractor” Pro venzano was unarmed and did not resist arrest, authorities said. Not a shot was fired.
The man who authorities say is responsible for one of the bloodiest chapters of Sicilian history was later seen being bundled into police headquarters in Palermo, handcuffed and surrounded by masked security agents as people in a crowd outside pumped their fists in the air and shouted “murderer!”
“He was calm,” said Gilberto Calderozzi, one of the police officers who participated in the raid and escorted the gray- haired, bespectacled Provenzano to Palermo for detention. “There was no problem entering (the farm) or in the capture.”
Provenzano, 73, had been on the lam since 1963, surviving thanks to a network of faithful henchmen, his family, and corrupt police and politicians. Authorities say he became the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses, after the arrest in 1993 of Salvatore “The Beast” Riina.
From behind the scenes, Provenzano continued to pull the strings, directing the Cosa Nostra, as the Sicilian Mafia is known, in its aggressive pursuit of protection rackets, extortion and white-collar crimes such as fraudulent public-works construction, prosecutors say.
He was convicted in absentia in the 1992 bombing murder of a leading anti-Mafia prosecutor in Sicily. Ruthless and cunning, he earned the nickname “The Tractor” from his reputation for mowing down people in his youth, when he was an up-and-coming hitman for the Corleone clan.
“With this arrest, the Mafia has been beheaded,” Piero Grasso, Italy’s top anti-Mafia prosecutor, said at a news conference, adding that the circle around Provenzano had been tightening since his surreptitious trip a few years ago to a medical clinic in France.
Provenzano was found in a run-down farmhouse with sheep corralled outside and a single bed within, said a source in Sicily familiar with the arrest operation. He was sitting at a typewriter when police burst in, with a white scarf around his neck that he apparently used to conceal a telltale scar. After realizing he could not escape, he acknowledged to police who he was, said the source, who requested anonymity.
It was his penchant for communicating with his followers through small notes that finally did him in, authorities said. Law enforcement investigators followed couriers handling the delivery of several notes, some hidden in packages of clothes from a laundering service run by his family. One such package was tracked from the family home in Corleone to Provenzano’s hideout just a couple of miles away.
“We had always missed a link in the chain,” said Roberto Centaro, president of the state Anti-Mafia Commission. “Until now.”
When captured, Provenzano was wearing jeans, his pockets stuffed with the little pieces of paper, known in Sicilian dialect as “pizzini,” the Italian news agency Ansa reported. His typewriter also was confiscated.
It was Provenzano who changed the way the Mafia worked, prosecutors and Sicilian experts say. The bloodbaths of the early 1990s, especially the murder of two top prosecutors and the kidnapping of a child who was melted in a vat of acid, turned public opinion hard against the Cosa Nostra.
Provenzano made the strategic decision to lower the organization’s profile and temper its methods, focusing on white-collar crimes to make money and gradually expand its grip on the Sicilian economy.
