After being chased for 30 years, Italy’s top mafia chief, Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested on Monday by heavily guarded police at a private hospital in Sicily. Denaro had been receiving treatment for cancer and was hiding since 1993.
Also called “Diabolik” and “‘U Siccu” (The Skinny One), for his part in the murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone in 1992, crimes that shook the country and triggered a crackdown on the Cosa Nostra, Messina Denaro had been given a life sentence in absentia.
The 60-year-old Sicilian mafia boss was taken out from Palermo’s “La Maddalena” hospital by two carabinieri policemen, equipped with weapons, and put into a waiting black minivan.
According to the judicial sources, he was receiving treatment for cancer and had undergone an operation in 2022, after which he was taking appointments with a false name.
“We had a clue to the investigation and followed it through to today’s arrest,” Palermo prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia said.
Magistrate Paolo Guido, another in charge of search operations in the case of Messina Denaro, said tearing down his network of people was the main element in achieving the result after years of work.
Another man who helped Denaro enter the hospital was also apprehended simultaneously on the suspicion of supporting the mafia.
Pictures of the arrests were doing rounds on social media which showed people expressing happiness at it, thanking and congratulating the police, who wore balaclavas, as Denaro was taken away from the suburban hospital to a discreet place.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni came to Sicily to congratulate police in-charges after the arrest.
“We have not won the war, we have not defeated the mafia but this battle was a key battle to win, and it is a heavy blow to organized crime,” she said.
Sister of the murdered judge, Maria Falcone, expressed the same sentiment. She said, “It proves that mafiosi, despite their delusions of omnipotence, are ultimately doomed to defeat in the conflict with the democratic state.”
Messina Denaro faces life imprisonment
Messina Denaro belongs to the town of Castelvetrano close to Trapani in western Sicily, and is the second generation mafia after his father, also a mafia boss.
The mafia was still being run in the territory of Trapani, where he had his regional base, according to police reports from last September. Before he was on the run, he splurged on expensive cars and his taste for owning finely tailored suits and Rolex watches was well known.
He was given a life sentence, in 2020, for his involvement in bombings in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed 10 people in 1993 and is alleged by prosecutors of being either independently or jointly responsible for numerous other murders in the 1990s.
In 1993 he helped plan the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, so that he could prevent his father from providing evidence against him, say the prosecutors. The boy was kidnapped for two years and at the end was throttled and his body dissolved in acid.
Nearly 30 years ago the police had apprehended Salvatore “Toto” Riina, Messina Denaro’s strongest boss. After years in jail, he died there, not ever breaking his code of silence.
Italy’s organized crime network
“It is an extraordinary event, of historic significance,” said Gian Carlo Caselli, who was then a prosecutor in Palermo.
Italy still struggles to control organized crime organizations whose tentacles reach far and wide notwithstanding the euphoria.
Experts say that Cosa Nostra has been seized by the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, major Italian Mafia-type organized crime syndicate.
“There is a sense that the Sicilian Mafia is not as strong as it used to be, especially since the 90s, they have really been unable to enter the drug market and so they are really second-fiddle to the ‘Ndrangheta on that,” said Federico Varese, Professor of Criminology at Oxford University.
