Word: provenzano
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After 43 years, Bernardo Provenzano, the Sicilian Mafia's elusive capo dei capi, the boss of bosses, was run to ground just a mile west of the town of his birth, Corleone, a place made famous by the fictional protagonists in Mario Puzo's saga The Godfather. Provenzano had run the enormous La Cosa Nostra crime organization by way of messages on slips of paper, called pizzini, smuggled out from his hiding places over the years. But Cortese finally found him by following peripatetic packages of clean laundry from the home of Provenzano's wife in Corleone. Each delivery...
...taken in 1959. The boss had evaded capture by living a peasant's life, by counting on cover from the locals--and perhaps on the strength of his hit-man nickname "Bennie the Tractor." (You didn't want to be mowed down by Bennie.) Cortese actually came close to Provenzano in January 2001, but his target slipped away during a raid near the town of Mezzojuso. Last year, after 50 of Provenzano's aides were captured in a sweep, Cortese said it was logical that Provenzano might move closer to his hometown. "If we'd scorched the earth around...
They were right. In the farmhouse near Corleone, Provenzano stayed tucked safely inside while a shepherd served as cover, tending a flock and making cheese. After the arrest, police found a rudimentary bathroom, a double bed, an electric heater and a nightstand. On a table, there were two typewriters and several Bibles with underlined passages, as well as some 100 pizzini, which investigators hope will lead to further arrests. Two days after Provenzano's capture, the shack where he had slept and worked was sealed off as police conducted forensic studies. But a walk through the adjoining barn and makeshift...
...Provenzano grew up poor in Corleone. The real-life don began his rise after World War II, when he and his paesano Totò Riina did much of the whacking for rising boss Luciano Liggio. In 1958 Riina and Provenzano led a deadly ambush on the ruling boss Michele Navarra, leaving Liggio the undisputed godfather. Provenzano disappeared into the hills in 1963 after an internal Mafia feud erupted. When Liggio died in prison in 1993, Riina took over as top boss, with Provenzano as his No. 2. Riina was captured the same year and remains behind bars. Provenzano transformed the Mafia...
...chance to get closer to the core of Italy's organized-crime problem. "We need to take it to the next step, to break the Mafia's bonds with elements of the political and economic system," he says. But the arrest can also cut another way. Remember what Provenzano said? "You have no idea what you've done." Lumia is worried that those words may signal a bloody battle for succession...