[1/2]A screenshot from a video shows Matteo Messina Denaro, the country’s most wanted mafia boss, being escorted from a Carabinieri police station after being arrested in Palermo, Italy, January 16, 2023. Carabinieri/Handout via Portal/File Photo acquire license rights
- Messina Denaro had received 20 life sentences
- The gangster was on the run for decades and kept secrets
- At the time of his arrest he was suffering from cancer
ROME, Sept 25 (Portal) – Italian Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, convicted of multiple murders and arrested in January after 30 years on the run, has died of cancer, officials said on Monday.
Messina Denaro, 61, was suffering from colon cancer at the time of his arrest. As his condition worsened in recent weeks, he was transferred to a hospital from the high-security prison in central Italy where he was originally held.
He fell into a coma on Friday and never regained consciousness.
“You shouldn’t deny anyone prayers, but I can’t say I’m sorry,” Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said on Instagram.
Messina Denaro was convicted of numerous crimes, including helping to plan the murders of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 – crimes that shocked Italy and sparked a crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia.
He was also blamed for bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993 that killed ten people, and helped organize the kidnapping of 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo to dissuade the boy’s father from taking action against them Mafia to testify. The boy was held for two years and then murdered.
Dubbed “the final godfather” by the Italian press, Messina Denaro is said to have given no information to police after he was arrested outside a private clinic in the Sicilian capital Palermo on January 16.
According to medical records leaked to the Italian media, he underwent surgery for colon cancer under an assumed name in 2020 and 2022. A doctor at the Palermo clinic told La Repubblica newspaper that Messina Denaro’s health had deteriorated significantly in the months before his arrest.
RUTHLESS
Messina Denaro was born in 1962, the son of a Mafioso, in the southwestern Sicilian town of Castelvetrano. He followed his father into the mafia and was already carrying a gun at the age of 15. According to police, he committed his first murder at the age of 18.
The Castelvetrano clan was allied with the Corleonesi, led by Salvatore “the Beast” Riina, who, thanks to his ruthless pursuit of power, became the undisputed “boss of bosses” of the Sicilian mafia, known as Cosa Nostra (Our Thing).
Nicknamed “U Siccu” (The Thin), Messina Denaro became his protégé and showed he could be as ruthless as his master, receiving 20 life sentences in absentia for his role in a series of mob murders.
He himself once claimed that he had murdered enough people to fill a cemetery.
“You must always respect death because, unlike mafiosi, we respect life until death. But we must not forget who Messina Denaro was, a murderer, a mass murderer who violated his country,” Castelvetrano mayor Enzo Alfano told Adnkronos news agency.
Messina Denaro went into hiding in 1993 as more and more renegades revealed details about his role in the mafia. However, investigators believe that he rarely ventured far from Sicily.
According to police, he spent much of 2022 hiding in Campobello di Mazara, a town of about 11,000 people just a short drive from his mother’s home in western Sicily.
He communicated with other Mafiosi through “pizzini,” small pieces of paper sometimes written in code that were distributed by messengers, some of which were intercepted by police.
He never married, but is known to have had several lovers. Denaro wrote that he had a daughter but had never met her. Italian media said the two saw each other after his capture and she agreed to take his last name.
Despite his fame, prosecutors always doubted that Messina Denaro became the Mafia’s “boss of bosses,” saying it was more likely that he was simply the boss of the Cosa Nostra in western Sicily.
His body is expected to be returned to Sicily in the coming days for an all-private funeral, a government official said.
Reporting by Crispian Balmer; Edited by Gerry Doyle and Bernadette Baum
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