Cosa Nostra boss remains at large after 40 years on the run

This week the Italian state passed an ignominious milestone: it is exactly 40 years since Bernardo Provenzano, the Mafia gangster who is now capo di capi of the Cosa Nostra, went on the run, on 18 September 1963. He has been missing ever since.

It was on that day, after naming him in the murder of a rival gangster called Paolo Streva, found dead in a country lane by a farmer on a mule, that the Carabinieri designated Provenzano as wanted for murder but "untraceable". Forty years on he remains exactly that.

No one in Italy, perhaps no one in the world, has been on the run for nearly that long. The fugitive Nazis in South America were tracked down in shorter time. Illich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, was on the wanted list for a mere 19 years. Veerappan, the "forest brigand" who haunts the sandalwood forests of southern India and is wanted for 120 murders, has been hunted only since 1987.

In the Carabinieri dossier of 1963 that dealt with his case, No 392/4, Provenzano, then aged 30, was described as "a person of vicious conduct, said to be responsible for many crimes". Yet for the first 20 years that he was "untraceable" no serious attempt was made to track him down. And Provenzano has not merely cheated justice: during his decades as the "Corleone Phantom" he has also risen through the Mafia ranks, emerging as undisputed chief in 1992.

He never uses the telephone, sending his orders typed on slips of paper, using an ancient Olivetti 32 that he carries everywhere. These are then passed through trusted intermediaries.

Only twice have the authorities come close to catching him. Once, towards the end of the Nineties, he was stopped by a police road block on a lane in Enna province: a Mafia supergrass later said that the police manning the road block had failed to recognise the "friendly old buffer" who emerged from the car. Another time, in January 2001, a squad of police were sure that they had managed to corner him in a hideout; again he gave them the slip.

But the strongest guarantee of his freedom is the solidarity of his clansmen, and the fear, among those who live alongside them, of the terrible consequences of treachery.

Provenzano is described by the government's anti-Mafia experts today as the "man of peace" within Cosa Nostra, credited with the "strategy of silence" of the Mafia throughout Sicily, which has seen the island's gangsters adopt a profile almost as low as their boss's.

Yet there was nothing peaceable about Provenzano before he went on the run. The last time he was seen at liberty before disappearing, in August 1963, he walked into the casualty room of a hospital, his shirt soaked in blood, carrying a bullet wound in his head. He told the doctor, "I was walking along when I suddenly felt a terrible pain." The doctor did not ask any questions. That summer, 52 men died in the feud over who was to lead the Corleone clan and 21 more were wounded.

But the height of his infamy came in the summer of 1992, when he and Salvatore "Toto" Riina, then the gang's capo di capi, ordered the murders of the crusading anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellini. Both prosecutors were duly killed in massive bomb attacks. After those killings, and the worldwide condemnations that followed, the hunt for Provenzano began in earnest, with a price on his head of 2bn lire (£725,000).

Old age is catching up with the man who is identified only by a computer-generated image, adapted from a photograph more than 40 years old. He is said to suffer from kidney disease and to have been treated for it in hospital, incognito of course. But that is just one of the many contradictory stories swirling around the phantom. Others say he's "as fit as a fish", "made of iron". Some say he "eats like a bird", others that he has a passion for steak.

Today the reward for information leading to his capture has risen to €2.5m (about £1.75m). But nobody in Sicily is interested.