Fugitive Mafia boss confesses sins, changes mind

zoomata.com staff

Some sins are too much to bear, even for a Sicilian Mafia don.
Bernardo Provenzano, who has been on the run from police for over 40 years, reportedly confessed his violent misdeeds to a sympathetic priest.

What made the Italian known as the Boss of Bosses ask forgiveness?
An appeal from Pope John Paul II to repent following a particularly bloody series of attacks led Provenzano to a confessional booth, Italian media reported.

It was the summer of 1993 when Cosa Nostra's campaign of terror ripped through Italy in the form of five car-bomb attacks in Florence, Milan and Rome.
The previous year the Mafia, deftly managed by Provenzano, assassinated Sicilian judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The message was not lost on the Vatican and the Pope tried to intervene. He made a plea to Mafia members to repent and turn themselves in and a plea with Italian authorities to protect them and not force them to become turncoats.

With a heavy heart, Provenzano went into a church in Palermo where he spent many hours confessing long career of crime through a grate to a parish priest. Before he went on the lam in 1963, he had already been charged with 52 murders and 21 attempted murders in his home town of Corleone.

In the end, it seems that Provenzano, now 80 years old, perhaps rightly sensed that his immediate salvation lay not in the church but in omertà -- the most mafioso of qualities, hearing, seeing and telling nothing -- that has allowed him to move freely around Sicily's capital for nearly half a century. None of the priests cited in the articles could either name or remember exactly who the mobster's confessor was. ©1999-2004 zoomata.com