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Mafia boss controlled works contracts and politicians { April 11 2006 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/world/europe/11cnd-mafia.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/world/europe/11cnd-mafia.html
April 11, 2006
Alleged Boss of Bosses Is Caught in Sicily
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO, International Herald Tribune
ROME, April 11 — After 43 years on the run, Bernardo Provenzano, the alleged boss of all bosses of the Sicilian mafia, was arrested today by Italian police officers in a farmhouse near Corleone, the hilltop town made famous by Mario Puzo's Godfather novels.
According to law-enforcement officials the 73-year-old Mr. Provenzano ran a vicious Mafia family that dominated organized crime on the island of Sicily for decades, leaving behind a long trail of blood, in murdered prosecutors, reporters and investigators. He has already been sentenced at least six times in absentia to life in prison as a member of the so-called Mafia Cupola responsible for coordinating the mob's strategies.
The police have been conducting surveillance on Mr. Provenzano's wife and two sons. Today they spotted a bundle of laundry being sent from her house to a remote farmhouse. As investigators explained it, they saw a hand come out from a door to take the package, and they decided to act.
Mr. Provenzano did not put up a struggle when police special forces burst into a remote farmhouse near Corleone on Tuesday morning. "He didn't say a word," the Palermo police chief, Giuseppe Caruso, told reporters at a packed news conference in Rome.
When Mr. Provenzano arrived at a Palermo police station, bystanders called out insults. Television newscasts showed an unruly crowd yelling "assassin" and "bastard" at the diminutive, speckled, silver-haired man, dwarfed by the black-hooded police officers jostling him through.
Officials involved in the arrest described the leadup as complex, dating back several years. Working from one of the few known photographs of Provenzano, a 1959 snapshot, the police produced a computer rendering of his current appearance, and picked up his trail when he underwent surgery in a clinic in Marseilles, France, in 2003.
Mr. Caruso said cameras had been planted in fields surrounding Corleone, where, according to Pietro Grasso, Italy's top anti-Mafia prosecutor, the ailing mobster had come "to take refuge," near to those "he most trusted."
On Tuesday morning, police tailed a courier carrying a bundle of clean clothes from Provenzano's family home in town to the remote farmhouse. When police burst in, he put up no resistance.
"He was imperturbable," Mr. Caruso said, adding that Mr. Provenzano was in good health, but undergoing unspecified treatment.
"The Mafia has lost its most prestigious leader," Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said at the press conference. "It has undergone an undeniable decapitation."
Mr. Grasso said "an entire world" of professionals, businessmen and politicians had aided Mr. Provenzano during his time on the run, and Mr. Caruso said that other investigations should lead to results "in the coming months."
Mr. Provenzano's ability to outwit investigators for 43 years has become legendary but it also made him a lingering symbol for many Italians of the state's inability to eradicate the Mafia. And it raised suspicions that the elusive mobster had high-ranking friends who helped him stay hidden.
Mr. Provenzano went underground in 1963, when he became a suspect in the murder of a rival mobster. Under the heavy hand of Salvatore (Toto) Riina, the Corleonese family dominated organized crime in Sicily for 30 years, and mounted an attack on the state that culminated in the 1992 murders of top anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and their bodyguards, in separate attacks. Mr. Riina was arrested in 1993, and Mr. Provenzano is believed to have replaced him.
Mafia turncoats arrested over the past decade confirmed to investigators that Mr. Provenzano was at the head of a criminal organization that controlled public work contracts and a sizable protection racket.
Mr. Grasso said it was unlikely that the mobster would turn state's evidence, "though I hope I'm mistaken."
The arrest of one Italy's most wanted men was greeted with satisfaction by politicians mulling over the election results and Mafia investigators.
But in a televised interview prosecutor Giancarlo Caselli, who once headed Palermo's anti-Mafia team warned that other important bosses had been captured in the past, "and this didn't mean the end of the Mafia."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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