Italian investigators knew a lot about Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro.
He liked to wear designer clothes, expensive sunglasses and Rolex watches, loved video games and had a passion for luxury foods. He was also a ruthless killer who once claimed to have killed enough people to fill a graveyard.
They didn’t know where he was.
But on Monday, after 30 years on the run, Italy’s most wanted mafioso was finally captured, seizing himself at a private clinic in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, after police learned he was receiving cancer treatment there Is.
“It is a day of celebration when we can tell our children that the mafia can be beaten,” said Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister who flew directly to Sicily, underlining the importance of the arrests.
Messina Denaro was born in 1962 in the town of Castelvetrano, in southwestern Sicily, the son of a mafioso. He followed his father into the crowd and by age 15 was already carrying a gun. Police believe he committed his first murder when he was 18 years old.
The Castelvetrano clan was allied with the Corleonesi, led by Salvatore “The Beast” Riina, who became the undisputed “boss of bosses” due to his ruthless pursuit of power.
Nicknamed “‘U Siccu” (The Skinny One), Messina Denaro became his protégé and showed he could be just as pitiful as his mentor, receiving 20 life terms in trials held in absentia for his role in an array of mob murders. Carrying terms of imprisonment.
The details of his crimes came to light in several court hearings.
Police say he was involved in planning the murders of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 – crimes that shocked the nation and sparked a 1993 crackdown that led to Riina’s arrest.
He was also held responsible for subsequent bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993, which killed 10 people in an apparently failed bid to force the government to stop its war on Sicilian mobs. known as the Cosa Nostra (Our Thing).
He was also found guilty of helping to organize the kidnapping of 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo in an attempt to prevent the boy’s father from giving evidence against the Mafia. The boy was kept for two years before being strangled and his body dissolved in acid.