The extraordinary true crime story of the man who brought the Sicilian Mafia back from the brink of disaster. In the 1980s, the broad legal mandate of the RICO act succeeded in crushing much of the backbone of the traditional American Mafia. Across the ocean however, in the ancestral Sicilian homeland of La Cosa Nostra , the Mafia was anything but finished. Possessed of a power thought to rival that of the Italian state itself, for the past decades, the Sicilian Mafia has waged a war on the forces of law and order that has not only left thousands dead, but has created a ripple effect of crime and violence that can be felt on the streets of America's cities today. Taking us into the eye of this criminal storm, Boss of Bosses tells the story of Bernardo Provenzano, who rose from humble origins to become the head of the Sicilian Mafia, overseeing a deadly empire of corruption so large in scope, the full sweep of its dark reach has yet to be fully accounted. On the run for over forty-three years before his arrest, Provenzano's life is a testament to Mafia history, and typifies the code of the ultimate gangster.