Italy’s most-wanted Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has been arrested in Sicily after 30 years on the run.
The 60-year-old Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the bosses of the Cosa Nostra mafia in Sicily and Italy’s most wanted man, had been a fugitive since 1993. He is considered one of the most wanted men in Europe.
How was he captured?
Messina Denaro’s health helped investigators locate him. The authorities located him in a private clinic in Palermo in southern Italy, where he was reportedly receiving treatment for cancer. He was visiting the clinic under a fake name for a chemotherapy course.
Investigators said he was unarmed and dressed like a common man although wearing a watch worth at least 30,000 euros (about $33,000) when officers detained him. “He didn’t resist at all,” Carabinieri Colonel Lucio Arcidiacono told reporters.
Locals praised and shook hands with officers as Denaro was taken away in a black van.
“Messina Denaro was the last godfather, he represented all the secrets of Cosa Nostra. It is the end of a myth and the organization will have to cope with this,” said Anna Sergi, a criminology professor at the University of Essex.
Victory for state
“It is a victory for all the police forces that have worked together over these long years to bring the dangerous fugitive to justice,” Italy’s chief of Police, Lamberto Giannini, said in a statement congratulating the Carabinieri – Italy’s military police – and the Palermo Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni tweeted: “A great victory for the state, which demonstrates that it does not give up in the face of the Mafia.” Meloni said that while Italy had not yet won the “war” against the Mafia, this was a “battle that was fundamental to win.”
Italian President Sergio Mattarella, whose brother Piersanti was killed by Cosa Nostra in 1980, congratulated the minister of the interior and the carabinieri military police.
Defense Minister Guido Crosetto called the arrest “a sign of a state that wins against Mafia.”
Who is mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro?
Known as “Diabolik” after an Italian comic series based around an uncatchable thief, Messina Denaro was the undisputed leader of the Cosa Nostra in the western Sicilian province of Trapani. He is thought by many to be the last “secret keeper” of the Sicilian mafia’s most heinous crimes.
Born on April 26, 1962, in Castelvetrano in Sicily, Messina Denaro grew up in the heart of the organized crime. His father, Don Ciccio, was the head of the local clan, and his godfather, was also a member of the mob.
Denaro is said to have been trained to wield a gun at 14 and allegedly committed his first murder when he was 18.
As head of the Castelvetrano clan, he was associated with the Corleonesi clan, which was immortalized in The Godfather films.
He was convicted of awful crimes in his absence. These include the 1992 killing of anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and the deadly 1993 bomb attacks in Milan, Florence, and Rome.
In one of the most notorious incidents, he was also involved in the kidnapping, torture, and killing of the 11-year-old son in an attempt to dissuade his father from giving evidence against the mafia, according to prosecutors. The boy was held for 779 days before being strangled and his body dissolved in acid.
“With the people I have killed myself, I could fill a cemetery,” the ruthless killer is said to have boasted.
Prosecutors said that Messina Denaro has built an empire in the waste, wind energy and retail sectors, potentially worth billions of euros.