40 years on the run end quietly for Italy’s Mafia boss of bosses

ROME – For more than 40 years he eluded arrest. He dispatched orders on little typewritten notes and shunned telephones that might pinpoint his location. His resume allegedly included some of the most gruesome murders in Mafia lore.

On Tuesday, the reputed godfather of the Cosa Nostra and Italy’s most-wanted fugitive was captured in a ramshackle farmhouse outside the Sicilian town of Corleone, a name made infamous by author Mario Puzo and Marlon Brando.

Bernardo “The Tractor” Provenzano was unarmed and did not resist arrest, authorities said. Not a shot was fired.

The man who authorities say is responsible for one of the bloodiest chapters of Sicilian history was later seen being bundled into police headquarters in Palermo, handcuffed and surrounded by masked security agents as people in a crowd outside pumped their fists in the air and shouted “murderer.”

Provenzano, 73, has been on the lam since 1963, surviving thanks to a network of faithful henchmen, his family, and corrupt police and politicians. Authorities say he became the “capo di tutti capi,” the boss of bosses, following the arrest in 1993 of Salvatore “The Beast” Riina.

From behind the scenes, Provenzano continued to pull the strings, directing the Cosa Nostra, as the Sicilian Mafia is known, in its aggressive pursuit of protection rackets, extortion and white-collar crimes such as fraudulent public works construction, prosecutors say.

He was convicted in absentia in the 1992 bombing murder of a leading anti-Mafia prosecutor in Sicily. Ruthless and cunning, he earned the nickname “The Tractor” from his reputation for mowing down people in his youth, when he was an up-and-coming hit man for the Corleone clan.

“With this arrest, the Mafia has been beheaded,” Piero Grasso, Italy’s top anti-Mafia prosecutor, said in a news conference, adding that the circle around Provenzano had been tightening since his surreptitious trip a few years ago to a medical clinic in France.

Provenzano was found in a rundown farmhouse with sheep corralled outside and a single bed within, according to a source in Sicily familiar with the arrest operation. He was sitting at a typewriter when police burst in, with a white scarf around his neck that he apparently used to conceal a telltale scar.

It was his penchant for communicating with his followers through small notes that finally did him in, authorities said. Law enforcement investigators followed couriers handling the delivery of several notes, some hidden in packages of clothes from a laundering service run by his family. One such package was tracked from the family home in Corleone to Provenzano’s hide-out just a couple of miles away.