Mafia Boss's Bible Key to Code?

Sept. 8, 2006 — Bernardo Provenzano, the now jailed "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, might have created a powerful "Apocalypse code" to communicate with his lieutenants, according to Italian investigators who have turned to the FBI for help.

Since the boss's capture last April in a farmhouse about just a few miles from his Sicilian hometown Corleone, Italian detectives had been trying in vain to make sense of a worn Bible filled with underlined passages, arrows and notations on post-it notes.

A favorite of Provenzano's was the Book of the Apocalypse. He typed out entire passages, adding notes on the exact meanings of words such as "fornicate" and "lust."

According to the daily Corriere della Sera, the investigators handed the Bible to experts at the Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Va.

The code breakers will scrutinize the book in an attempt to verify whether the 73-year-old's scribbles hold the key to a secret code.

Italy's anti-Mafia chief Piero Grasso told reporters it is not known for certain whether such a biblical code exists.

"We need to do anything we can, and we have no problems in having other aids. Perhaps they will get to the same conclusions we did," Grasso said.

'Binnu the Tractor'

Provenzano is accused of numerous murders, including the 1992 killings of two judges for which he received a life sentence in absentia. Also known as "Binnu u tratturi" (Binnu the tractor) for his reputation for mowing down people in his youth, Provenzano is not new to encrypted messages.

Indeed, he spent most of his 43 years on the run writing cryptograms on little pieces of paper, known in the Sicilian dialect as pizzini.

The Italian police found hundreds of pizzini in Provenzano's hideout. Most have been decoded, resulting in several arrests.

Many of these earlier notes were deciphered with the help of Antonio Giuffré, one of Provenzano's right-hand men who turned informer after his arrest in 2002.

Cracking the Code

At least one coded note, written in January 2001 by Angelo Provenzano to his father, had a strong resemblance to what is known as the Caesar cipher. This is an encryption scheme used by Julius Caesar more than 2,000 years ago to protect important military messages.

While the classic Caesar cipher moves everything three letters later (A becomes D, B becomes E, etc.), the "Provenzano code" assigned a number to each letter by simply increasing by 3 the value given to the 21 letters of the Italian alphabet listed in order.

So, A becomes 4 (1+3), B becomes 5 (2+3), C becomes 6 (3+3), etc.

But after Giuffré's arrest, Provenzano could not trust the old code and turned to new cryptography keys.

Italian investigators became suspicious after Provenzano’s arrest, when he asked to bring his scribbled Bible with him to jail. His request was denied.

The Bible-based encryption scheme would have enabled him to communicate with other bosses in jail, according to the Corriere della Sera.

Top Mafia bosses serve their time under a strict regime which prevents any contact with the outside world. However, they are generally allowed a Bible.

Looking in the Wrong Places?

According to Ernesto Oliva, co-author of the book Provenzano: the Accountant of Cosa Nostra, it is unlikely the FBI will crack the code.

"What makes this a hard task is the fact that both the Bible and Provenzano's notes are in Italian. And you need to be Italian, or better Sicilian, to really understand the meaning of certain passages," Oliva told Discovery News.

Oliva, who also co-authored www.bernardoprovenzano.net, the most exhaustive Web site on the old boss, is also skeptical about the biblical code.

"Provenzano's pizzini contained a very easy code. It is unlikely he was able to create such an uncrackable code afterwards. I think he used passages in the Bible to justify his actions under a very distorted religious feeling," Oliva said.

According to security guru Bruce Schneier, author of several books on cryptography, the underlined passages could be the key to a code or they could just be underlined for emphasis.

"Book codes are a very old system of enciphering messages. They're not very complicated, and they're relatively easy to break. If he used a book code, I would expect that authorities would have broken the messages even without the help of the Bible," Schneier told Discovery News.