Free Boss of Bosses by Clare Longrigg

know Bernardo Provenzano has an immense property in Bagheria, in the grounds of a grand villa’, one
pentito
later testified. ‘I’ve never known exactly where it was, but from what people told meit was a beautiful place, in classical style . . . Provenzano lived here undisturbed with his family.’ 11
    In the mid-1980s a series of high-profile Mafia crimes turned up the heat on Riina and Provenzano and led to a series of arrests. Binnu and his family decamped to Trapani, where the boys attended school under an assumed name.
    When Provenzano began to receive substantial kickbacks from waste management and other public contracts, he needed to start investing his profits. He bought businesses and properties, which he registered to members of his
fidanzata
’s family. A tenacious investigator managed to uncover the extent of Provenzano’s property investments.
    Colonel Angiolo Pellegrini arrived in Palermo in early 1981, just as the Mafia war was breaking out. It was a frenzied time: while the Corleonesi were murdering their rivals on their own territory, Cosa Nostra’s influence was spreading.
    Pellegrini was working with Giovanni Falcone, who had begun his painstaking paper trail, following drug money through international banks. Rotund, moustachioed and every inch the no-nonsense army investigator, Pellegrini liked to work the same way: investigations based on diligent, detailed detective work.
    ‘We asked for a computer, to log the data we were collecting, and were told it was not essential’, he says jovially. Now retired from the army, it’s unlikely he has let a day go by without buttoning himself into his suit and trimming his tidy goatee. ‘Now it’s easily done with a database, but we wrote everything by hand in old ledgers and created a massive index. It was essential for us to be able to make the links.’
    A particular case had come to Pellegrini’s notice, in which a modest family from Cinisi had made some spectacular property acquisitions. The family name was Palazzolo. They had no criminal record, although it emerged during the course of the investigation that the daughter, Saveria Benedetta, had left home and was living with the fugitive Bernardo Provenzano. It was the first time investigators had heard that the outlaw from Corleone had a woman living with him. They were also surprised to discover that he had two children. Pellegrini enteredthe Palazzolo family in his ledger and proceeded to track them through title deeds and company registers.
    Saveria Palazzolo’s name began to show up again and again. In a very short space of time she had acquired substantial shares in a building company, Italcostruzione, 12 hectares of land near Castellammare and an apartment in Palermo. The carabinieri found her name on two further properties and two plots of land in the suburbs, as well as a vacant lot in Palermo’s fast-developing viale Strasburgo.
    By the time the carabinieri went looking for Saveria, she had already left Cinisi. ‘She had disappeared’, recalls Pellegrini. ‘We set up investigations into the family and in the area, to see if we could find any leads that would take us to her, and to Provenzano. We didn’t find her.’
    His report read: ‘La Palazzolo, officially spinster and housewife, possessing no assets prior to 1972, in the course of five months, from December ’72 to April ’73, acquired property for the considerable sum of 26 million lire [
£
13,000]. Her investments were managed by the well-known mafia accountant Giuseppe Mandalari.’
    Four months after the carabinieri demanded to see the deeds of the plot where they were building, the report went on, ‘La Palazzolo hurriedly sold all her properties to the company Simaiz s.p.a., a company set up for the purpose and administered by Mandalari. This sale is without doubt directly related to the discovery of building works which were intended to construct a safe house (far from prying eyes) for Bernardo Provenzano.’
    Saveria