Sicily's Invisible Man

The fog hung low on a brisk January dawn in 2001, as several dozen police agents silently rolled into position in the rugged hills around Mezzojuso, a sleepy town 40 km south of Palermo. For months, investigators had been casing a red-roofed concrete house where they believed top Mafia bosses were planning an important lunchtime summit. Benedetto Spera, among the most feared and powerful figures in Cosa Nostra, was also scheduled to get a doctor's visit at the hillside farmhouse that day to treat his prostate cancer. The summit was considered so important that authorities suspected Bernardo Provenzano, the Sicilian Mafia's boss of bosses, might even make an appearance.

Just after 10 a.m., when the fog had lifted, two helicopters swooped in over the mountainside and a phalanx of police cars, jeeps and armed agents charged up. Spera, then 60, was captured at gunpoint and hauled away to serve multiple life sentences for the 1992 car-bomb executions of anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The property's owner, Nicola La Barbera, and Spera's doctor, Vincenzo Di Noto, were also arrested, and both later served time for Mafia association. But there was no sign of Provenzano.

Authorities may never get that close to him again. A turncoat Mob informant later confirmed that Provenzano, who's been on the lam in Sicily for the past four decades, had indeed been in Mezzojuso that morning. But the capo dei capi was some 200 m up the hill in a smaller shack when cops arrived at the main house. So Provenzano, who some believe was tipped off to the raid, hunkered down as investigators finished their work below. "He was lucky," an undercover agent involved in the raid recalled. "If he'd been inside that day, we would have had him."

Three years later, Provenzano, 71, is still at large. Since taking over the Mafia a decade ago, he's managed to stay one step ahead of special police units, a team of magistrates and a reported j2.5 million reward for information leading to his arrest. In early August, police nabbed Pasquale Tegano, 49, leading boss of the Calabrian mob clan 'ndrangheta, but Provenzano remains untouchable. Authorities are still upbeat, though. When top Mob lieutenant and Provenzano associate Antonino Giuffré was captured two years ago and turned state's witness, a window was cracked open that provided a rare glimpse of how the man known as the Tractor — for his skill in mowing people down — runs a sprawling criminal organization while eluding capture. With the new scraps of knowledge, investigators are better able to "identify with him," as one put it, to track him down. "Capturing him would be an immense blow, striking at his image of invincibility and impregnability," says Lucio Carluccio, commander of Italy's anti-Mob police investigative unit.

Michele Prestipino, the Palermo magistrate who oversees the investigative unit set up specifically to hunt Provenzano, says secrecy is the key to the Mob leader's elusiveness. So while the boss has "the entire organization at his disposal" to run Cosa Nostra's economic activities, including construction contracting, drug trafficking and extortion, Prestipino explains that only a handful of confidants know Provenzano's whereabouts at any given time. "He is extremely cautious," Prestipino says. "So we try to pull the ground out from under his feet. And of course, hope for a false step."

Provenzano has rarely put a foot wrong in more than 50 years with the Mafia. As a poor teenager in Corleone in central Sicily, he latched onto Michele Navarra's clan after World War II. With his buddy Totò Riina, the young mobster then served as muscle for ambitious boss Luciano Liggio, who once reportedly said that Provenzano "has the brains of a chicken but shoots like an angel." In 1958 Riina and Provenzano led a fatal ambush on Navarra, riddling his car with 112 bullets, leaving Liggio as the undisputed godfather. An internal Mafia war followed, and Provenzano disappeared into the hills in 1963. Liggio was arrested in 1974 and died in prison 19 years later, leaving Riina as the top boss and Provenzano as his No. 2.