Mafia members arrested in Sicily

ROME - A new Mafia war was narrowly averted with the arrest on Tuesday in Sicily of 45 alleged gang members, including the three men - a professional mobster, a doctor and a builder - who are said to have been in charge of Cosa Nostra since the arrest of capo di capi Bernardo Provenzano in April.

Piero Grasso, the national anti-Mafia prosecutor, commented after the arrests, "We can confirm that the Mafia organisation, at this moment, is on its knees."

The multiple raids were hurriedly brought forward after investigators learned from wire taps that a new Mafia war was on the point of breaking out, after 13 years of relative gang peace on the island.

According to Grasso, one of the men arrested, recidivist gangster Nino Rotolo, "was planning a series of murders to annihilate the family of Lo Piccolo and become the undisputed boss of the clan in the city." Salvatore Lo Piccolo, is seen as one of the two possible successors to Provenzano, the clan's legendary leader.

Nobody was talking on Tuesday about the Mafia being finished: its grip on Sicily is too firm and it is too well entrenched to be defeated by the loss of a few men at the top.

But if Grasso's claim is right, Cosa Nostra has been decapitated twice within three months - which will put a severe strain on the mob's ability to re-group.

The three men at the top of the organisation were named as Rotolo, Antonio Cina, the doctor who treated Provenzano, and Francesco Bonura, a builder.

The arrests were the culmination of years of patient police work rare in the often dubious annals of the Italian state's fight against the Mafia.

The hunt for Provenzano himself, who had not been seen by the police since 1963, had been under way for ten years, and began picking up speed last year as more and more of the messengers used to deliver the "pizzini", hand-typed notes, by which Provenzano kept in touch with his underlings, were identified and arrested.

A vital breakthrough came when DNA samples of Provenzano were obtained from the hospital in Marseilles to which he had travelled secretly with his wife in 2003 for a prostate operation.

The pressure was building, to the extent that in March the Provenzano family's lawyer said that Provenzano "has been dead for years." The claim was greeted with shock and disbelief: there had been no rumours that the gang boss was in poor health.

But once he was actually netted, on the day Berlusconi lost the general election, the lawyer's words were interpreted as meaning that the gangster was "finished." In the dilapidated shack outside Corleone where Provenzano had been hiding for months if not years, police found numerous messages from the gangster's correspondents.

Many were in code, but Grasso claims police have now cracked it, and the intelligence in the notes led them to yesterday's raids.

Grasso and his team learned that the "triumvirate" in charge of the Mafia held meetings in a steel-lined garage in Palermo, sitting on plastic chairs around a table, with no telephones or other electronic equipment present (though the police managed to install a spy camera): spartan conditions, like Provenzano's, that belied the millions of Euros of extortion money and public works kickbacks they were distributing.

As well as the three men at the apex of Cosa Nostra, Grasso said that the "regents" of 13 Mafia families in six districts had been arrested in Tuesday's blitz.

[Among other acts of extortion and intimidation, police learned of the attempts by the mob to frighten Chinese shopkeepers around Palermo's railway station en masse into paying protection money, by putting Superglue in the locks of their shop shutters - a traditional warning.]

"It's a good day for Parliament," Italy's Interior Minister, Giuliano Amato, said on hearing of the arrests.

"The struggle against the Mafia remains a priority for our country."

- INDEPENDENT