Thanks to the excavation in sources, testimonies, and judicial acts, we are given back a story that has risked remaining in oblivion, while it constitutes another piece of that terrible mosaic of secrets, plots, and mysteries that were the 1990s of the massacres and the State-Mafia negotiation, a mosaic that after more than 20 years still awaits to be deciphered in its entirety.

Bernardo Provenzano, called 'u Tratturi by his enemies, zu Binnu by his subordinates, the Accountant by investigators. A man with many names, able to remain in the shadows for forty years and, in the shadows, able to command. Before his arrest in 2006, few know his face, no one wants to describe it, all one has is a very old photo. Yet Alessandro Scuderi, inspector of Catania's mobile squad, has been holding a sketch, of impressive fidelity, since 1997. He obtained it by following the investigation into the murder of Luigi Ilardo, a collaborator of justice who had brought the Ros within a stone's throw of Cosa Nostra's number one. How is it possible that Provenzano's ghostly face had been described and drawn almost a decade before his capture? Why in 1995 did the Ros not act to arrest Provenzano? Why, a few years later, was the portrait Scuderi obtained, that trail sketched with insight and hard work, not deemed credible? Giampiero Calapà reconstructs the story of how the young Scuderi untangled himself in the darkest season of the tug-of-war between the State and the Mafia, the one that followed the Falcone and Borsellino murders, following now-abandoned leads, piecing together a complex picture of clues, until he identified the face of the enemy. A contradictory affair that unravels over 30 years of Italian history, amid merciless men, complex police operations, deception and negotiations, in a rural Sicily devoted to bloodshed, in whose farms criminals hunted for decades hide.