Confiscated notes used by Mafia head Bernardo Provenzano to command Cosa Nostra bore fresh fruit Monday with the arrest of a clan leader.
By analysing the notes seized after the boss's arrest a year ago, police identified Giovanni Genovese as a courier for Provenzano.
Genovese, 36, was arrested last year for extortion and has been under police surveillance since he was released from custody.
According to several of the newly deciphered notes, Genovese was in regular contact with top Palermo boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who has taken over from Provenzano in the Sicilian capital.
Despite being under surveillance, he was also managing to lead the clan of his jailed father, police said.
The latest product of the notes, called 'pizzini', came a month after police discovered that the notes also travelled on public transport.
A bus driver on the Palermo-Agrigento line, Vincenzo Piraneo, was among those arrested last month in a crackdown on the Agrigento mob on Sicily's southwest coast.
Police say he confessed to carrying Provenzano's pizzini down from Palermo, and conveying similar messages back.
Police have deciphered most of the pizzini since Provenzano's arrest outside Corleone last April after 43 years in hiding.
They used the information to catch a clutch of top Palermo bosses last summer - an operation that laid the groundwork for last month's Agrigento bust.
FBI HELPING ON SUSPECTED BIBLE CODE.
However, some of the codes hatched by the 74-year-old boss using a Bible have proved tougher to crack.
Police sent the well-thumbed copy of the holy book to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in September.
The FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit is trying to find the remaining ciphers Provenzano used to encrypt his pizzini.
Like several Cosa Nostra dons, Provenzano is said to have been a devoted Catholic, in his own way.
Police found religious trappings including cheap posters of the friar with the stigmata, San (Padre) Pio, in the tumbledown farmhouse in which Provenzano spent his last years.
Provenzano is believed to have had a close support network in Corleone, the town 40km (25 miles) south of Palermo made famous by the Godfather films.
Investigators also suspect he enjoyed protection from local politicians and rogue police officers.
The boss, who took sole command of Cosa Nostra when co-boss Toto' 'the Beast' Riina was arrested 14 years ago, is being held in a single cell in a high-security prison in Terni, central Italy.
He has been convicted in absentia of a string of murders he committed as a young hitman and more recent assassinations he approved including the 1992 bomb slayings of Italy's top anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
