ROME (AP) — Bernardo Provenzano, the convicted Cosa Nostra “boss of bosses” who reputedly led the Mafia’s powerful Corleone clan, died Wednesday, a decade after his capture in Sicily following decades of hiding in the countryside, a lawyer said.

In recent years, Provenzano, 83, had been held under strict security measures at a Milan hospital.

The lawyer, Rosalba Di Gregorio, had cited Provenzano’s increasing physical frailty and mental infirmity in several failed attempts to persuade anti- Mafia prosecutors to ease the prison conditions intended to prevent mobsters from wielding power from behind bars.

The reputed “capo dei capi” (top boss) was arrested in 2006 after 43 years as a fugitive. He had been convicted in absentia of more than a dozen murders, as well as being part of the Mafia’s leadership who ordered the 1992 bombings that, in separate attacks, killed Sicily’s top two anti-Mafia investigators, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

He was also convicted of being a mastermind behind Mafia bombings in 1993 in Rome, Milan and Florence, including one attack near the Uffizi art gallery.

Provenzano was also convicted of being among those giving the order for the 1982 murder in Palermo of Carabinieri Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who had been dispatched to the Sicilian capital by the Italian government to lead the state’s uphill war against the Mafia.

While young, Provenzano received the nickname “The Tractor” for determination displayed in a mob career that began as a hitman. He was believed to have taken over the leadership of the Sicilian crime syndicate after the 1993 arrest of a fellow longtime fugitive boss, Salvatore “Toto” Riina.