The Godmother, page 11
“It’s a delicate balance,” he said, admitting, “There is a lot of soul-searching to be done.” The priest was arrested in late 2019 for aiding and abetting prostitution and later defrocked.
Things are changing, and the divide between the Catholic Church and the mafia has never been greater. Pope Francis was the first pontiff to address the problem outright, declaring in 2014 just after his election that all mafia members should be excommunicated from the Church, which made it difficult for local parish priests in mafia towns to continue to treat them as they did before. Decades earlier, Pope John Paul II had condemned the mafia, but never as strongly, instead likening silence against the mafia to complicity, but never going so far as to ban members from the Church. Francis decreed that the practice of stopping to pay homage in front of the homes of mafia dons during religious processions was also prohibited. The new rule, enacted in 2014, made it terribly uncomfortable for many small-town parish priests. They had for years counted on hefty donations in return for what looked like a blessing when parishioners, directed by the priests, would choreograph their annual saint processions to swing by important mafiosi homes to pay respects to their biggest donors.
Then at a ceremony in 2018 commemorating Father Giuseppe Puglisi, a priest who was shot at point-blank range on the front steps of a parsonage in Palermo in 1993 for refusing to perform baptisms, confessions, and even marriages for known mafiosi, Pope Francis said that you can’t be in the mafia and believe in God. “A person who is a mafioso does not live as a Christian because with his life he blasphemes against the name of God,” he said, complicating an already complicated relationship.
Pupetta’s top-floor apartment was filled with religious iconography. Small saints were perched on nooks, and once when I visited her before Christmas she was putting the finishing touches on an elaborate nativity scene of the type Naples is so well-known for. I asked her if she went to Mass, and she crossed herself but didn’t answer. She and Pasqualone were married in a massive Catholic wedding, and she still put flowers on his grave in the local Catholic cemetery until she died.
Pupetta’s funeral was scheduled for New Year’s Eve 2021 in the church of Sant’Antonio di Padova not far from her house. The flower wreaths with her name emblazoned on a ribbon adorned the church, and the traditional funeral announcement posters of her death and services were plastered on the metal billboards nearby with the date and time.
But the day before the funeral, the Questura of Naples—the local Neapolitan police authority—ruled that a public funeral could not be held, even dispatching police to make sure no one honored her or memorialized “Lady Camorra” in any way. Instead, the local parish priest blessed her coffin at the Castellammare di Stabia cemetery before it was slid into the family tomb. A group of women she had befriended traipsed from the church to the cemetery with the flowers meant for the altar to lay them near the tomb, but they, too, were turned away. Instead they went back to the church and prayed the rosary for her.
5
’Til Death Do Us Part
After her husband was murdered in 1976, she naturally supported her sons’ bid to avenge their father’s death—the killing was carried out by her thirteen-year-old, Antonio.
Pupetta’s wedding scrapbook had a secret envelope hidden in a back flap where she kept a folded copy of her marriage license to Pasqualone. The typewritten document was faded and looked fake but for the marca di bollo stamp initialed by the court clerk. The date is two days before the lavish ceremony that brought five hundred friends and enemies to celebrate her Catholic wedding ceremony complete with high Mass.
Pupetta carefully unfolded the license and read it to me slowly, as if she had never seen it before. “We married for life,” she said, not looking up. “I will never love anyone like that again.”
Sometimes it seems as if Pupetta forgot that she was well into her eighties and that the prospect of falling in love again was remote. She loved Umberto when they first met, but she said that love died when he killed her son. “Sometimes I don’t know why I stayed on so long,” she said. “The twins needed a father, and I needed financial support, I guess. Women don’t always make decisions based on the heart.”
Sometimes mafia women instead ignore what should be common sense and really do blindly follow their hearts. Antonietta Bagarella, a once-slender, dark-eyed beauty, is a prime example of a woman who surely should have known what she was getting into when she married Cosa Nostra superboss Salvatore Totò Riina. His nicknames included la Belva, “the Beast,” and Totò ú Curtu, “Totò the Short,” which should have been a clue. But Antonietta married him anyway while he was a fugitive on the run for murder and used her devotion to her criminal husband as a cover that protected her from prosecution more than a few times. Ninetta, as she was locally known, was herself the daughter of a midlevel Cosa Nostra mobster who spent time in a high-security prison for mafia collusion but whose rank was far lower than one might assume to offer a daughter to such a high-ranking boss. She was the fifth of six children, and her mother was a hairdresser who ran a small business out of the family kitchen in Corleone. Ninetta was a teacher at the Sacred Heart College of Corleone in Sicily when she met the far less attractive don, who captured her heart despite the fact that he had committed his first homicide when he was just seventeen years old. Because Pupetta’s husband died so early in their marriage it is impossible to know how their relationship would have played out, or if he, like Umberto, would have become a literal partner in crime. But Totò the Beast’s influence over Ninetta was clear, and it undoubtedly kept her faithful over the years, given the unthinkable sacrifices she would have had to make—both emotionally and physically—to love such a bloodthirsty man and live so long in hiding.
Totò the Beast had a bird-beak mouth with thin lips and vacant eyes. Thick, tufted eyebrows made him look mean even on the rare occasions when he was not. That first homicide involved strangling a man with his bare hands as a rite of initiation ordered by his father to prove he was ready for the full Cosa Nostra membership.[1] Years later he was found responsible for the heinous deaths of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and for the murder of a foe’s young son, whom he dissolved in acid.
Soon after news of their romance got out, Ninetta lost her teaching job after the nuns she worked for asked police about her. The nuns, who already knew her father had served time for mafia affiliation, had seen her name mentioned in a local newspaper tied to the murderous criminal and had been too nervous to ask her personally about her rumored relationship. Instead they had gone to the authorities, who confirmed the nuns’ worst fears. Confident they wouldn’t face retaliation because of the long-held belief among many mafiosi that clergy are untouchable, they fired the teacher.
A year later, Ninetta was brought in by an anti-mafia magistrate, who accused her of running messages between various thugs hiding around Corleone. She faced a sentence of “internal exile”—which meant essentially sending her off to be alone somewhere in the country and strictly forbidding contact with anyone from home.
The use of such a punishment began in 1926 when Benito Mussolini ordered antifascists to remote islands and cutoff villages. It has been used periodically for mafia criminals, usually leading to the exilee’s death from suicide sparked by extreme loneliness, paranoia, and fear. Ninetta escaped the unusual punishment entirely because she played the “weak woman” card, pretending to know nothing of her lover’s line of work, even though she had lost her teaching job because of it. She was sent home, where she quietly slipped away to join her beloved mobster in hiding. Had she been convicted, she would have been the first woman to be sentenced to such exile.
Totò the Beast and Ninetta’s relationship is somewhat of a fairy-tale love story, albeit one stained with blood. At the time, Totò was the most wanted fugitive in all of Italy. They married in a secret hideaway, but then famously spent their honeymoon gallivanting across Italy, spending the final days of their romantic getaway in Venice. That he was able to move so freely implied corruption in the police, who would have had to turn a blind eye. The complicity would have also extended to hotels, restaurants, and even the gondolier who took them through the romantic Venetian canals. Their faces were both recognizable from press reports, and not even a disguise would have kept them anonymous from all the people they would have encountered. Their marriage was spent moving between hideouts and in later years, prison visiting rooms. They raised four children in the twenty-four years they lived on the lam, during which time Totò was accused of ordering the deaths of 150 people. He was caught and jailed in 1993 and given multiple life sentences.
Totò the Beast died of kidney cancer in a maximum-security prison in Sicily in 2017. Thanks to reforms that came into effect in the mid-1990s, big funerals are not allowed for mafia bosses, so Ninetta, having by then faded into a dowdy Sicilian nonna, had to lay him to rest at a private ceremony in the Corleone cemetery as photographers snapped photos through the wrought-iron gates. The cemetery priest, Father Giuseppe Gentile, gave an extended prayer and blessed the coffin before it was interred, but he could not conduct a full funeral—at least not in public. More than a few journalists reported that Father Gentile had, in fact, secretly conducted the Catholic funeral rite before Totò the Beast was hauled to the graveyard after the family made a sizeable donation to his church coffers.
The Beast was buried in the family tomb, which is adorned by a statue of the venerated Padre Pio and permanent flower vases that Ninetta still fills with fresh chrysanthemums every week. Three of the couple’s children, Maria Concetta, Lucia, and Giuseppe Salvatore, attended the funeral, indignantly batting away the press from behind dark glasses of the kind one might envision on a celebrity as they arrived and left. (Their fourth child, Giovanni, was already serving a life sentence for a quadruple homicide at the time.)
When Totò the Beast was locked in a high-security prison, the job of running the Corleonesi clan of the Sicilian mafia fell on Bernardo “Binnu u tratturi” (the Tractor) Provenzano, whose nicknames also included il ragioniere (the accountant). He was already living in hiding when he came into power after being sentenced to life in the so-called Maxi Trial of the 1980s, which was fed by the confessions of turncoat Tommaso Buscetta, an associate of Pupetta’s Umberto.
Provenzano was never married but was romantically linked to Saveria Palazzollo, herself tied to a criminal family, thus completing the circle. She was a tall, striking woman who was considerably younger than the Tractor, and the two spent their entire relationship in hiding, where they nonetheless had two children.
Before anyone linked her to Provenzano, she was investigated for a slew of her own property and business purchases made over a period of just five months in the early 1970s. Her acquisitions included a construction company, land near Pupetta’s hometown of Castellammare, and a lavish apartment in Palermo. The transactions drew suspicion because Palazzollo had no tax record of income and because her accountant was a known money launderer for the Cosa Nostra. But when police searched for her, they soon learned she was on the lam with Provenzano. A few months after they were on her trail, she sold the properties to a mafia-related company through her shady accountant without ever surfacing, though the forms to finalize the sales—mostly in cash—were all signed by her.
Saveria was tried for money laundering in absentia in 1990. But she did send in her excuse: in a letter to the magistrate, she explained that her windfall came from an elderly aunt and she was essentially trying to obtain her own financial independence and unknowingly consulted the wrong advisers, whom she blamed for the dealings that led to her charges. She was eventually sentenced in absentia to house arrest, but because she was in hiding, the sentence was never enforced. When she eventually surfaced, the statute of limitations had run out.
Meanwhile, with Totò kept in isolation in prison, prohibiting even Ninetta from visiting for years, Bernardo the Tractor pressed ahead with the drug smuggling, extortion, and murder Totò had intended for the organization. Bernardo cut a boxy figure, and his youthful pompadour made his earliest mug shots look almost like model-agency headshots; his last mug shot after years in hiding made him look like a bloated Elvis. He got his nickname the Tractor not for his size, but because he liked to “mow people down.” [2]
In 1992, after the twin assassinations of anti-mafia magistrates Falcone and Borsellino at the hands of Saveria and Ninetta’s men—crimes that inspired Alessandra Cerreti to become an anti-mafia prosecutor—the women showed up together suddenly in Corleone, returning home seemingly out of thin air in a taxi one day after being in hiding for more than a decade. They had with them their six secret children—the two that Saveria had with the Tractor, and the four Ninetta had with the Beast, all born in hiding and without birth certificates or documents of any sort.
The presence of the women at such a volatile time confirmed to many that their husbands knew they would soon be arrested or killed, and they wanted to give their women and children an opportunity to find relative safety. Neither wife cooperated with police, and both swore they had no idea where their husbands were, despite the relatively young ages of the kids, who were not DNA tested.
Ninetta and Saveria are quintessential old-style mafia women, both investigated for crimes relating to their husbands’ work time and again, but never taken seriously as leaders in their own right, in part because their partners were the capo dei capi, or boss of bosses—it is unlikely these women would ever have been able to fill their partners’ shoes. But sheltered as they were by law enforcement’s prejudice, both women could have been far more involved in every aspect of their husbands’ work, not just delivering messages or hiding secrets, but acting as true confidantes.
When Bernardo the Tractor was captured in 2006 after forty-three years on the run, he was living in a ramshackle farmhouse near Corleone, where investigators found ninety religious statues, five Bibles, and a well-used rosary hanging next to the toilet. On the table beside his bed was an unfinished letter to his striking blond wife. The love letter was still on the roller of the Olivetti typewriter he used to compose the secret messages that were delivered to the mafia soldiers across the island and beyond. He was accused of ordering the deaths of at least four hundred people.
A year before he was caught, Bernardo the Tractor had apparently moved to a new hideout closer to Corleone, which is a town of just over eleven thousand people, making its per capita mafia membership one of the highest in Italy. He wanted to be closer to Saveria, though the two had not seen each other in the months before his capture as a precaution to make sure she wouldn’t be trailed. But he hadn’t put enough distance between him and the wife he was trying to protect. She couldn’t stop herself from preparing him fresh pasta and making sure he had clean, ironed laundry. Police say they caught him by trailing a trusted delivery man who had the task of taking the ironed shirts and underwear from Saveria’s house in town to her husband in the hinterland. They pounced when he opened the farmhouse door to bring Saveria’s parcel inside.
“Women have always unwittingly been the ruin of criminals on the run,” Nicola Cavaliere, the anti-mafia investigator in charge of the operation, said when announcing the capture. “So it was in Provenzano’s case that a woman committed a fatal error that led to his capture.”
Blaming Saveria, who at forty-eight was far younger than the seventy-four-year-old Tractor, deserves scrutiny. Police found thousands of secret messages, called pizzini, rolled into tiny parcels and taped tight, ready to be sent out along with intricate codes with the apparently sacred key written into the Bibles he kept at the farm. Investigators had seen these pizzini before, and they knew they came directly from Bernardo. With all the movement of the messages in and out of that little shack, it seems impossible that it was Saveria’s laundry that finally cracked the case. More likely, police were trailing him for many months and waiting until the perfect moment to nab him. A Sicilian anti-mafia detective who wouldn’t consent to being named told me during an interview in Palermo that it was easier to blame Saveria’s “silly housewife mistake” for his capture. “Blaming a pizzini courier or even a foot soldier would have tipped off the whole network they were onto them,” he said, implying that the general population wouldn’t question the explanation that a housewife’s mistake had cost the capo dei capi his freedom.
Among the many notes police decoded from the handwritten legend scrawled inside one of the Bibles were several to his doctor asking for treatments for impotence. Bernardo had been smuggled to Nice, France, a few years earlier for prostate surgery and suspected cancer, and had apparently had a difficult time with erectile dysfunction after that. He was clearly preparing for the moment Saveria could visit, and the doctor had prescribed and arranged for delivery of Viagra among other, herbal remedies.
With the Tractor now in prison, La Repubblica newspaper interviewed Saveria, who insisted they had it “all wrong” about her beloved Bernardo[3] and that he wasn’t the brutal killer they made him out to be. She told the reporters she planned to live out her days in her quiet hometown. “Normally, Corleone is a peaceful country,” she told the paper. “Nothing serious ever happens and nothing particularly important happens here.”
Provenzano died from bladder cancer in a Milan maximum-security prison in 2016. He was cremated and his ashes interred in the same cemetery as his former associate Totò the Beast, just a few rows away. Provenzano, too, was denied any final send-off that would have allowed his foot soldiers to mourn him, and the family ultimately decided to have him cremated in Milan and place his urn in the family mausoleum, though Saveria was able to secure a priest for a private ceremony.
As criminal organizations have evolved across Italy, the significant roles played by women like Ninetta and Saveria, who did not assume leadership but also never left the side of the vicious bosses they married, have not so much evolved as they have been reconsidered. Saveria, especially, has skimmed along the edges of legality for years. Her name showed up on a number of properties owned by her late husband’s associates that were only recently confiscated in a search for the current boss of bosses, Matteo Messina Denaro. She lives freely in Corleone, despite having been on the lam with one of the biggest bosses in the history of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. One of her sons now gives mafia tours in Palermo, pointing out to curious tourists various spots where murders and heists took place.
