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Bernardo Provenzano, nicknamed 'The Tractor' for his industrial style of killing, was finally caught today. The biggest Mafia boss to be arrested for more than a dozen years, he was the acknowledged head of the commission, or cupola, which runs the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. He had been on the run for 40 years; if the story runs true to form, he will have been shopped by an ambitious subordinate.
It can be no coincidence that this happened on the day Silvio Berlusconi lost power in Italy; Berlusconi has traditionally enjoyed a heavy Sicilian vote, but at this election the island appears to have turned on him. It is a season for a change of power and patronage on both sides of the law in Sicily.
Provenzano was arrested at a farmhouse near Corleone. The mountain town is still home to many
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The leader of the Sicilian Mafia has finally been caught. robert fox charts his bloody history
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of his family, the base for his crime career - and, of course, the name chosen by Mario Puzo for the fictional character who has come to define the Mafia in the popular imagination, Don Corleone aka The Godfather.
The Corleonesi rose to power through two bloody Mafia wars in the Seventies and Eighties, in which the warring clans were killing one victim a day on the streets of Palermo and in the villages of western Sicily.
In the mid-Eighties two magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, brought successful prosecutions against 270 Mafiosi in a marathon trial. However, most of the sentences were handed down in absentia; the most prominent defendants, including Provenzano and Toto 'Shorty' Riina, then boss of the Corleonesi family, were latitante - on the run.
Falcone and Borsellino were both assassinated in 1992; the killings 
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