Italy: No 1 wanted Mafia boss held after 30 years on the run

ROME, Italy – Matteo Messina Denaro was caught at a private clinic in Sicily on Monday after being on the run for 30 years. He was a convicted Mafia boss who ordered some of the most brutal killings in the country.

According to Carabinieri Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police force’s special operations team, Messina Denaro was apprehended at a Palermo clinic where he received treatment for an unidentified medical issue.

In the pouring rain, he was brought down the front steps of the posh clinic by a pair of Carabinieri officers, each holding one arm. Messina Denaro was dressed in a brown leather jacket with shearling trim, a matching white-and-brown skull cap, and his signature tinted glasses. His face seemed tired, and he was staring straight ahead.

He was a young man when he went into hiding and is now 60 years old. Even though he was on the run, Messina Denaro was thought to be the most powerful Cosa Nostra leader in Sicily. His power base was the port city of Trapani in western Sicily.

Top Level Mafia Boss

He was the last of three top-level Mafia bosses who had been on the run for decades but had never been caught. Hundreds of police officers had spent years trying to find him.

Italian news outlets say that when Carabinieri asked the fugitive in the clinic if he was Messina Denaro, he said that he was.

Palermo Chief Prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia said that the fugitive was going by the alias Andrea Bonafede. The surname approximately translates to “trustworthiness” in Italian.

Messina Denaro went before a Palermo court shortly after his detention, where a judge sought to check his identity and asked basic questions to fill out paperwork.

When the judge reminded Messina Denaro that he had to answer truly, he replied, “Aware.” When asked what he did for a living, he said “farmer,” adding that his brother was a banker and his four sisters were housewives.

Trapani Italy The Base Of His Crime Clan

According to detectives, he gave the address Castelvetrano, a farm village near Trapani that was the power base of his crime clan and where he was assured of logistical support during his period as a fugitive.

He also informed the court that he was one of six children, one of whom worked in finance.

The brief session finished with Messina Denaro saying to the unidentified judge, “Thank you, good day.”

Messina Denaro faces several life sentences after being tried in absentia and convicted of hundreds of killings.

He is scheduled to be imprisoned for the 1992 bombs in Sicily that murdered senior anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and Falcone’s wife and several of his bodyguards. He was also convicted of the murder of a Mafia turncoat’s young boy, who was abducted and strangled before being dissolved in a vat of acid.

30 Years After The Capture Of “Boss of Bosses.”

The arrest happened 30 years and a day after the capture of convicted Mafia “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina in a Palermo apartment on Jan. 15, 1993, Messina Denaro went into hiding in the summer of the same year when the Italian state tightened its grip on the Sicilian criminal syndicate in the aftermath of the Falcone and Borsellino killings.

Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, says that Messina Denaro’s arrest is a “major success of the state” that shows it won’t give up against the Mafia.

Bernardo Provenzano, the head of the Mafia in Italy, was caught in a farmhouse in Corleone, Sicily, in 2006. He had been on the run for 38 years, setting a record for the longest time. Once Provenzano was apprehended, the emphasis shifted to Messina Denaro, who eluded capture until Monday despite multiple confirmed sightings.

The fact that the three senior executives were eventually apprehended in the heart of Sicily while living a hidden life for decades would not surprise Italy’s police and prosecutors. According to law enforcement, such bosses rely on contacts and the confidentially of fellow mobsters and complicit family members to move them from hideaway to hideout, providing food, clean clothing, and communication, as well as an omerta code of silence.

He Had A String Of Lovers On The Run

On the other hand, according to investigators, Messina Denaro traveled overseas while a fugitive, notably to Marseille, a French port city, where he got surgery some years ago.

Riina and Provenzano spent their final years in the harshest Italian jail conditions designated for unrepentant organized crime bosses, refusing to cooperate with authorities.

Messina Denaro was thought to have led a more luxurious life while hiding from police for decades, leading some to assume that he could help with authorities in exchange for more lenient jail circumstances.

According to Italian media reports, he had a string of lovers during his years on the run and spent time playing video games.

One of his girlfriends was arrested and convicted of keeping him hidden for a period while he was on the run. While he had a weakness for women, Messina Denaro could be cruel, according to Italian media, strangling a pregnant woman.

He Kept In Touch With Lovers

Messina Denaro wrote a letter to his then-girlfriend shortly after going into hiding, claiming, “You’ll hear gossip about me, they’ll depict me like the devil, but it’s all falsehoods,” ANSA reported.

Mafia bosses frequently utilize handwritten notes known as “Pizzini” to avoid being tracked down by cellphone use. When police apprehended Provenzano in his rustic, almost primitive hideaway in the countryside, they discovered a stockpile of such notes.

With the 1990s crackdown on Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the island’s Mafiosi began to lose their influence in Italy compared to other organized crime syndicates.

While a small army of traitors considerably damaged the Sicilian Mafia, the ‘ndrangheta syndicate, situated in the “toe” of the Italian peninsula, progressively surpassed Cosa Nostra in reach and power on the mainland. Unlike the crime syndicates of Sicily, the ‘ndrangheta recruits its footsoldiers through familial ties, making it less vulnerable to turncoats. The ‘ndrangheta is today one of the most powerful cocaine smugglers.

However, the Sicilian Mafia continues to operate narcotics trafficking enterprises. Other lucrative illegal businesses include the infiltration of public works contracts and the extortion of small business owners who are threatened if they do not pay “protection money” every month.

SOURCE – (AP)