How the Tractor Was Mowed Down

By Jeff Israely/Corleone

You have no idea what you've done," the 73-year-old man muttered after he failed to bar the farmhouse door to Renato Cortese, the police officer who had burst through to take him into custody. Cortese brushed off the remark as a typical bad guy's pro forma plea of innocence. He was certain he had his man. The soft-spoken, cigar-smoking cop with a salt-and-pepper beard had been on the hunt for seven years, staring at version after version of sketches of the fugitive. "I'd had dreams about him, of his face, of the capture," he said. When the actual moment arrived, even Cortese's quarry--who had been at large for four decades--understood the jig was up. "We just looked each other in the eye," Cortese told TIME. "We knew it was over for both of us."

After 43 years, Bernardo Provenzano, the Sicilian Mafia's elusive capo dei capi, the boss of bosses, was run to ground just a mile west of the town of his birth, Corleone, a place made famous by the fictional protagonists in Mario Puzo's saga The Godfather. Provenzano had run the enormous La Cosa Nostra crime organization by way of messages on slips of paper, called pizzini, smuggled out from his hiding places over the years. But Cortese finally found him by following peripatetic packages of clean laundry from the home of Provenzano's wife in Corleone. Each delivery of clothing went from way station to way station until it finally reached a farmhouse. At around 10 a.m. on April 11, Cortese, belly down in the brush on a hilltop less than a mile away, stared through high-powered Celestron binoculars and saw a hand reach out and take a package of laundry dropped off by a man from Corleone. It was the first time Cortese had seen any sign of life from inside the farmhouse after days of surveillance. "When I saw someone take the package, I was pretty sure it was him," says Cortese, 41. "The adrenaline was pumping." After an impromptu hushed meeting with his team in the woods, Cortese and the police piled into a van and rolled slowly down the hill to the property. Revolver drawn, Cortese led the charge, busting open the plate-glass outer door. Provenzano's odyssey was over. He was going to prison for life, having been convicted in absentia on multiple counts of murder.

His appearance was amazingly consistent with the speculative police portraits drawn over the years; the last known photograph was taken in 1959. The boss had evaded capture by living a peasant's life, by counting on cover from the locals--and perhaps on the strength of his hit-man nickname "Bennie the Tractor." (You didn't want to be mowed down by Bennie.) Cortese actually came close to Provenzano in January 2001, but his target slipped away during a raid near the town of Mezzojuso. Last year, after 50 of Provenzano's aides were captured in a sweep, Cortese said it was logical that Provenzano might move closer to his hometown. "If we'd scorched the earth around him, where would he go? We figured he'd go to where his oldest friends were."

They were right. In the farmhouse near Corleone, Provenzano stayed tucked safely inside while a shepherd served as cover, tending a flock and making cheese. After the arrest, police found a rudimentary bathroom, a double bed, an electric heater and a nightstand. On a table, there were two typewriters and several Bibles with underlined passages, as well as some 100 pizzini, which investigators hope will lead to further arrests. Two days after Provenzano's capture, the shack where he had slept and worked was sealed off as police conducted forensic studies. But a walk through the adjoining barn and makeshift area for producing cheese offered the sour smell of turned sheep's milk and a scene strewn with strainers, aluminum buckets filled with blocks of Pecorino cheese and a large bag of salt. Hanging on the wall were pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic saint Padre Pio, and four 2006 freebie calendars, none of which had yet been turned to April. The squalid conditions were "evidence of [Provenzano's] dedication to pure power," Interior Under Secretary Alfredo Mantovano told TIME. "He had acquired this perverse charisma, a figure who appears to take nothing for himself for the opportunity to rule over everyone else."

Provenzano grew up poor in Corleone. The real-life don began his rise after World War II, when he and his paesano Toto Riina did much of the whacking for rising boss Luciano Liggio. In 1958 Riina and Provenzano led a deadly ambush on the ruling boss Michele Navarra, leaving Liggio the undisputed godfather. Provenzano disappeared into the hills in 1963 after an internal Mafia feud erupted. When Liggio died in prison in 1993, Riina took over as top boss, with Provenzano as his No. 2. Riina was captured the same year and remains behind bars. Provenzano transformed the Mafia into a less violent, more economically efficient machine after Riina's bloody war with the Italian state in the 1980s and early 1990s put the squeeze on La Cosa Nostra.

Giuseppe Lumia, a member of the Italian Parliament's anti-Mafia commission, says the arrest is ultimately a chance to get closer to the core of Italy's organized-crime problem. "We need to take it to the next step, to break the Mafia's bonds with elements of the political and economic system," he says. But the arrest can also cut another way. Remember what Provenzano said? "You have no idea what you've done." Lumia is worried that those words may signal a bloody battle for succession.