On April 11 last year when the Italian police burst into the den of mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, they found him at work on a pizzino - a small piece of paper on which the boss would write his orders to other members of his organisation. Hidden in these small notes, or pizzini, was the secret code of one of the most violent criminal organisations in the world.
Now, one year after Provenzano's capture, the code has finally been deciphered. The man responsible is Michele Prestipino, the 48-year-old state prosecutor who headed the investigation that led to the boss' arrest. Cracking the pizzini code has led to the arrest of several mafia associates, most recently Tommaso Cannella, 67, boss of a small Sicilian town of Prizzi, near Palermo. He was captured two weeks ago along with nine other members of the Cosa Nostra (Sicilian mafia). They were ready to initiate a war.
Provenzano is known as 'U Tratturi' (The Tractor) because - in the words of one informant - he mows down people. Before his arrest he was the super boss of one of the most feared criminal organisations in the world.
Provenzano was born on January 31, 1933 in Corleone, the small Sicilian town made famous by Francis Ford Coppola's celebrated film, The Godfather, and the home of Italy's most brutal mafia family: the Corleonesi. Provenzano committed his first murders in the 1960s. He was not a boss yet, but he already had what it took to be one. Luciano Liggio, one of the most ruthless mafia killers in Sicily, said of him at the time: 'He shoots like a god, but he has the brain of a hen.'
In the following decades, Provenzano would prove that Liggio's statement was not entirely correct. In 1963, Provenzano was wanted for the murder of three men. He disappeared before authorities could apprehend him. For the next 40 years, the only traces the police had of Provenzano's existence were brief voice recordings taken years earlier (even these would mysteriously disappear from the courthouse in Agrigento) and a mugshot taken by police on September 18, 1959.
In the photo, a slim, clean-shaven Provenzano stares out at the camera; he looks nothing like a powerful mafia boss.