Free Boss of Bosses by Clare Longrigg Page B

dealings, then the women were no longer off-limits.
    In 1990 Saveria was given two years and six months for receiving stolen goods, later commuted to aiding and abetting. She was given a reduced sentence under house arrest, which, since she was already living ‘at home’, whereabouts unknown, was conveniently unenforceable. It did mean that she was no longer free to live as a legitimate citizen, should she decide to do so, and that she and the boys, now aged seven and fourteen, were condemned to life on the run. Binnu had relied on the justice system’s blind belief in the goodness of women and had exposed his wife to prosecution. Now they were tied together in an inexorable bond, united against the law.

4

Bagheria’s feudal lord

     
     
    T
HE ROAD INTO Bagheria, once thick with lemon groves, is a jumble of small streets built up with no kind of planning or regulation: most of the houses are plastered but not painted; many are unfinished, clad in scaffolding. This is urban sprawl at its most chaotic and unattractive. A lovely eighteenth-century villa, the towering Villa Cattolica, resting place of the celebrated Sicilian painter Renato Guttuso, appears at the bend of a road on the edge of town. Right next to it, standing in what should be parkland, loom the ugly industrial silos of a concrete plant.
    A short distance off the main road stands a warehouse, a rough concrete building with imposing steel doors fastened by an iron pole. There are houses around it now, but once it was isolated, out in the lemon groves. You go up a couple of steps and walk across what was once a small office, where the manager would sit with his paper and his phone. The hangar, now empty, was an ironworks which traded under the name ICRE, making nails and wire fencing, owned by Leonardo Greco. Greco was the main contact for the heroin trade: morphine arrived from Turkey and was turned into heroin in a secret lab in Bagheria, before being exported to New York.
    Greco’s warehouse was the reference point and meeting place for mafiosi in the area; it was also known as the ‘death chamber’. Condemned men would be brought to the nail factory to be interrogated and beaten, then strangled, and their bodies dissolved in acid. The acid bath, beneath a grating in the floor, would have been ready for them when they were brought in, its acrid stink filling the airless space. The place is empty now, but the damp greenish concrete, the pitiless, windowless walls, every stain and metal staple preserve itshorrible memories. In one corner is another grating over a cistern, where the victim of a Mafia feud was buried beneath the stones. Two years later, when the feud had been resolved, his remains were given back to the family.
    It was here that Bernardo Provenzano first met Nino Giuffré, or
Manuzza
(‘Little Hand’), so called because one of his arms is deformed. Giuffré, tall and reserved, was a striking figure. At this point he was Caccamo boss Ciccio Intile’s driver, a teacher at the technical institute in Caccamo and newly initiated into Cosa Nostra. He would become Provenzano’s most important ally, and ultimately the author of his downfall.
    ‘Every time we went to Bagheria of a morning, Provenzano was there’, recalled Giuffré years later. ‘This ironworks was one of the most important places in which Provenzano used to make appointments, apart from being where the Corleonesi murdered their enemies. People were given appointments here, people who were perhaps no longer considered trustworthy, and once inside the door, they’d never leave. Provenzano used this place for two purposes: as a death chamber and for meetings with his closest allies.’ The two, as Giuffré of course knew, are not mutually exclusive.
    A short way from the warehouse, at the turning off the main road to Messina, on a sharp bend, is a bar, the Diva, painted bright pink, where Giuffré and Intile stopped for coffee when they were in the area. It didn’t matter that