Fugitive Sicilian godfather Matteo Messina Denaro was caught by the Italian anti-mafia police on Monday. Matteo was apprehended after a 30-year-long manhunt for Italy’s most wanted mobster. The 60-year-old reportedly became the “boss of bosses” following the death of Salvatore “The Beast” Riina in November 2022.
He once even claimed that he could “fill a cemetery” with his victims.
“Today, January 16, 2023, members of Carabinieri’s ROS (Special Operations Group) and members of the GIS (Special Intervention Group) and the territorial commands of the Sicily region as part of investigations coordinated by the public prosecutor’s office of Palermo arrested fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro inside a health facility where he had gone to undergo clinical therapies,” Carabinieri military police Major General, Pasquale Angelosanto, said.
Hailing the arrest, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the arrest of the “most significant” mafia boss in his native Sicily was a “great victory” for the state in its war against organised crime.
The mobster was nabbed “inside a sanitary structure in Palermo, where he had gone for therapeutic treatment”, special operations commander Pasquale Angelosanto informed in a video statement.
He has been sentenced in absentia to a life term for his role in the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. He also faces a life sentence for his role in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan which killed 10 people the following year.
Matteo has been number one on Italy’s most-wanted list but he has eluded but the only known photo of him dated back to the early 1990s.
In 2015, police discovered he was communicating with his closest collaborators via the pizzini system, where tiny, folded paper notes were left under a rock at a farm in Sicily.
(With inputs from agencies)
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