Sicilian Mafia "Boss of All Bosses" Apprehended

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 "b*stard" 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."

 

On a side note, has anybody played the new Godfather game?

 

No, it's from Reuters, it's big news in Italy.

 

(ANSA) - Corleone, May 11 - A month after the arrest of Mafia king Bernardo Provenzano, Italy is gripped by an intense fascination for anything connected to the shadowy figure who ran the Sicilian Mob for 43 years .

Families have their photos taken in front of the farmhouse where he was arrested, software experts pore over his encoded messages and office workers debate who will now take supreme power in Cosa Nostra .

The media, fed with regular titbits by investigators in Palermo, is maintaining its interest in Provenzano. A rash of internet websites has popped up devoted to him and book shops are well stocked with new studies and biographies .

In Corleone, Provenzano's home town, young entrepreneurs are thinking about buying up the house where the feared mafia chieftain was finally apprehended and turning it into a country guesthouse .

"It would attract lots of tourists," said one, suggesting that the best approach would be to leave all the rooms exactly as they were when the police arrived at dawn on April 11 .

It would be more of an 'experience' for visitors if they could see the piles of cashmere sweaters that Provenzano accumulated and the typewriters with which he hammered out his henchmen's instructions .

Distrustful of phones, Provenzano favoured letter writing as a way of communicating with mobsters all over Sicily. He wrote them on an old typewriter, then folded up them up tightly, giving them to his personal 'postmen' to deliver by hand. Because of the picturesque contrast they offer to mobile phones and email, these 'pizzini' have struck a chord with many Italians and frequently feature in the routines of television comedians .

Now, in banks and offices where people used to send out 'memos' and 'reports', employees playfully promise each other that a 'pizzino' is on the way .

Provenzano's correspondence, containing eye-opening insights into the running of the criminal underworld, has been the subject of intense study by investigators. But plenty of amateurs have been having a look as well, intrigued by the Mafia boss's use of secret codes to refer to key people in the Cosa Nostra hierarchy and his support organisation .

A group of Treviso-based experts in internet and software security have been applying their minds to the numeric codes that Provenzano used to be fond of. They discovered that when he talks in one letter about "512151522 191212154" he is referring to "Binnu Riina", the nickname of Bernardo Riina, one of his henchmen. The code, explained Alessandro Martignano, is a classic 'Caesar cipher' system, in which a series of sequential numbers takes the place of the letters of the alphabet. The simplest system expresses A as 1, B as 2 and so on. Provenzano made it harder by having A as 4, B as 5 and continuing from there. Hence, "5-12-15-15-22" spells out "Binnu", the Sicilian abbreviation for Bernardo .

But it seems he realised that this system was too easy to break and in his later 'pizzini' he uses number codes which have no apparent logic. The recipients knew who he was referring to .

So, for example, his still unidentified chauffeur was '5', his equally mysterious doctor was '60' and his nephew, who acted as secretary, was 123 .

The people of Corleone, most of whom are tired of being associated with the Mafia and its leader, are less inclined to absorb themselves in the minutiae of Provenzano's life and style of administration .

But they don't want to remember the man so much as the day he was arrested. The town council has approved a measure to rename the road which goes past his last residence. It is to be called Via 11 aprile .

"It seemed impossible that he would ever be arrested," said mayor Nicolo Nicolosi. "We want to leave a sign for future generations that nothing is impossible. With the right culture and commitment, this city can really say goodbye to the Mafia" .

http://ansa.it/main/notizie/awnplus/english/news/2006-05-11_1117144.html

 

Ciò è un giorno triste per La Cosa Nostra.

 

Halliburton and its controllers are the real organized crime power. How many us and Iraqis been wacked for their interests the last 3 years?

2.5 american soldiers per day, 100,000 iraquis per 3 years.