“Heads in the Sand”: Code of silence in a Sicilian town protecting mafia bos

It’s hard to believe that in the small Sicilian town of Campobello di Mazara, where everyone knows everyone and their secrets, no one would dare to ask about the identity of the man who showed up out of the blue with no known family or friends over a year.

The street in front of the apartment in Campobello where a seemingly secret bunker was found. Photo: Alessio Mamo for the Guardian

Impeccably dressed in designer clothes, he could be seen most mornings sipping espresso at the local coffee shop, eating at a pizzeria, strolling the streets, shopping and greeting his neighbors warmly.

Until Monday, when he was arrested leaving a clinic in Palermo and revealed to be Matteo Messina Denaro, the last godfather of the Sicilian mafia and the world’s most wanted crime boss.

Denaro will be taken out of the clinic in Palermo on Monday. Photo: Press Office of the Italian Carabinieri

There’s a Sicilian proverb that roughly translates to “he who speaks little will live to a hundred years.” It refers to the code of silence, the mafia’s first rule that protected Denaro and dozens of other mafia bosses from him for three decades.

“I cannot deny that I feel great resentment and disbelief to learn that Matteo Messina Denaro lives right in Campobello,” said the city’s mayor Giuseppe Castiglione. “Unfortunately, there are citizens here who have stuck their heads in the sand.”

According to Mafia whistleblowers and prosecutors, Denaro, nicknamed Diabolik or U Siccu (the Drought), holds the key to some of the Sicilian Mafia’s most heinous crimes, including the 1992 bombings that killed anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and the 1996 assassination of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a gangster-turned-state witness who was strangled and dissolved in acid. In 2002, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in absentia for personally killing or ordering the killing of dozens of people.

A bartender watches the news of the arrest in Castelvetrano, the mafia boss’s hometown. Photo: Alessio Mamo for the Guardian

Before his arrest, while emerging from a well-known private clinic in the Sicilian capital where he was being treated for a tumor, Denaro — who once claimed “I filled a graveyard all by myself” — had been in hiding since 1993, year after year Italian investigators seized relentlessly pursued his businesses and arrested more than 100 of his allies, including cousins, nephews and his sister, and scorched the earth around him.

But every time the investigators seemed to get closer to their goal, Denaro would disappear again, disappear and reappear all over the world. Former gangsters claimed to have seen him in Spain, England, Germany and South America. What he did in those 30 years and which countries he visited is not yet known. What is certain, however, is that in early 2021 he decided to move to his Sicilian stronghold in the province of Trapani and hide out in Campobello, five minutes from his hometown of Castelvetrano and an eleven-minute drive from his mother’s house.

Locals gather on the street in Castelvetrano. Photo: Alessio Mamo for the Guardian

He bought a modest apartment not far from the town center about two miles from the sea on Sicily’s south-west coast, where Carabinieri police said Thursday they had found a poster of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Godfather with the face of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone .

The deeds to the apartment were in the name of Andrea Bonafede, whose identity Denaro established while fleeing.

A poster of Marlon Brando in The Godfather, found in Denaro’s apartment. Photo: Carabinieri

“I saw him at the bar every morning,” said Piero Indelicato, a neighbor. “He seemed like a friendly person. But I never thought he could be the boss, Denaro.”

Another neighbor said: “I didn’t know who he was. Why should I have suspected anything? To me he was a gentleman who said “good morning and good evening”.

While police officers from around the world tried to track him down, Denaro lived like a free man in Campobello – a Sicilian echo of Osama bin Laden’s final years in Abbottabad, Pakistan, his home for five years before he was killed in a raid by US forces in 2011.

“I didn’t know who he was,” said the owner of a cosmetics store on the corner of Denaro’s apartment. “I don’t remember seeing him here. Maybe I saw him somewhere in town.”

Maurizio De Lucia, Palermo’s chief prosecutor, has his suspicions.

“There are more than a few questions regarding the fact that someone like Denaro could have gone unnoticed at Campobello,” he said. “But we knew people wouldn’t race to give us information…”

A newspaper article about the arrest at a bar near Denaro’s home in Campobello. Photo: Alessio Mamo for the Guardian

Investigators say Denaro has been protected by politicians and businessmen during his 30-year run. But he was also protected by Omertà, the code of conduct in communities across southern Italy that values ​​silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders, often reflecting a lack of trust in state institutions.

Anti-mafia posters hang on a gate in Castelvetrano. Photo: Alessio Mamo for the Guardian

For 14 years, Giacomo Di Girolamo, a Sicilian journalist and author of a biography of Denaro entitled The Invisible, began his daily radio show on Rmc 101 by asking, “Matteo, where are you?”

Born and raised on the same land as Denaro, Di Girolamo knows what it means to live in places overshadowed by the mafia.

“People are resigned,” he said. “The mafia in these parts has operated as a welfare state. When the bosses were arrested, the state failed to fill this gap and people lost trust in the authorities. In a place like Campobello – population 10,000 – about 50 people celebrate Denaro’s arrest. Dozens more fear arrest for protecting him. And then there are the remaining 9,000 residents who have simply resigned themselves to living in an area abandoned by the Italian state.”

Denaro had apparently maintained his luxurious lifestyle. Police found designer clothes, expensive shoes, perfumes and ties by Yves Saint Laurent at his home Monday night.

The Carabinieri Police stand guard near Denaro’s apartment. Photo: Alessio Mamo for the Guardian

On Wednesday, police also uncovered a possible secret bunker suspected of being used by the gangster in another apartment not far from the first. The entrance to the bunker was covered by a closet full of clothes. Investigators said they found emeralds, diamonds and other precious stones there.

On Tuesday, Denaro was transferred to a maximum-security prison in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, where his cancer treatment is continuing. After his arrest, the public prosecutor investigated at least four people, including two doctors.

The maximum security prison in L’Aquila where Denaro was transferred. Photo: Lorenzo Di Cola/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

During the first hours in prison, the boss was calm and smiling, some witnesses said. Denaro had 30 years to nominate his successor, hide his money and hide evidence of his illicit dealings. For two days, investigators have been searching every inch of his Campobello hideout for confidential documents.

Police are hoping to find the “secret archives” of the Sicilian mafia’s “boss of bosses,” Totò Riina, who died in 2017. According to some Mafia whistleblowers, the archives were stolen from Denaro and allegedly contain the secrets of the last 40 years of Mafia murders.

The search for Denaro may be over, but the search for secrets has only just begun.