As recently as a month before he was captured in 2006, his former defense lawyer declared that Mr. Provenzano managed to elude the police for nearly a decade more. But the killings and the bombings of Italian monuments the next summer backfired, prompting a crackdown on organized crime. Provenzano, to pressure prosecutors into backing off. Riina and the five-member Cupola, the commission of mob bosses, which included Mr. His death and the subsequent murder of his top associate, Paolo Borsellino, were ordered by Mr. Falcone was killed with his wife and three bodyguards as their car sped over a culvert packed with explosives on a highway outside Palermo. Provenzano was the only one of the 24 who was not apprehended at the time. Four years later, he and 23 of his top lieutenants were sentenced to life imprisonment in the 1992 bombing death of Giovanni Falcone, the crusading prosecutor whose assassination made him a martyr of Italy’s war against organized crime. Provenzano “shoots like a god but he has the brain of a chicken”). Provenzano as his second in command (despite Mr. Leggio was succeeded by Salvatore Riina, a bloodthirsty boss who installed Mr. Provenzano sided with Luciano Leggio, who ran the clan until he was imprisoned in 1974.

But unlike Vito Andolini in “The Godfather,” he remained in Sicily.

As a teenager, before he was ever wanted by the police, he was being pursued by fellow mobsters during a gang war. He left school to work in the fields when he was 10, the same year the Allies liberated Sicily. Bernardo Provenzano was born in Corleone on Jan.

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