It is a significant blow to Cosa Nostra: After three decades on the run, Italy's most wanted mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has been arrested.
The Mafia has always used films as a way of presenting itself.
Until last Monday (January 16, 2023) he was Italy's invisible man: apart from a few supporters, nobody knew what Matteo Messina Denaro, the country's most wanted mafia boss, looked like.
The only known passport photo until it was accessed in Sicily's capital, Palermo, dates from the early 1990s;
In 1993, the mafioso went into hiding who is said to have once boasted that he could "fill a whole cemetery" with the people he had killed himself.
The day after Italy's crackdown on organized crime, attention is drawn to the banal for a moment: the pictures taken in front of the La Maddalena clinic show a short man in a cream hat, sunglasses and a brown leather jacket lined with sheep's wool.
Only the accessories, such as a 35,000 euro watch,
which, according to the public prosecutor's office, he is said to have worn, fit the image of the mafia that pop culture likes to draw.
Nothing of the wealth can be seen in these photos.
The investigators found him in the last hiding place of the arrested person in the small town of Campobello di Mazara.
On the night of Tuesday (January 17, 2023), carabinieri and special forces secured expensive clothes and watches in his apartment.
Matteo Messina Denaro was wearing a 35,000 euro watch when he was arrested
But the current pictures of Messina Denaro, who was sentenced to life imprisonment twice for murder in absentia, have nothing to do with those who draw mafia films like "The Godfather", "Scarface" and Co.
"People have always said that the cinema copies the mafia, but it's the other way around: the mafia imitates the cinema," Italian author Roberto Saviano once reported in an interview with "Münchner Merkur" - citing Camorra boss Walter as an example Schiavone, who had a villa built "based on the model of Tony Montana's villa, which he saw in 'Scarface'".
Schiavone dubbed the house "Hollywood".
Of course - "everything here became a legend", writes Saviano in his book "Gomorrah".
Roberto Saviano has been considered a mafia expert since his book "Gomorrah".
One may smile at that, but for the 43-year-old it is problematic when cinema creates a myth.
This is exactly what mafiosi are interested in, he warns.
“They write their own legends – and they're extremely media savvy.
The film gives them a grammar, a syntax, a language that they can use in public.” Another expert even called Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990) the “best commercial for the Mafia ever made".
+
Journalist, author and mafia expert: Roberto Saviano.
© Marcus sleep
To make it clear how much cinema influences reality, Saviano prefaced his 2007 bestseller with quotes that relate to each other, although one comes from the world of fiction, the other from Italy's reality: "The world is yours". it in Brian De Palma's "Scarface" (1983), and "People are worms, and they should remain worms" is the transcript of a phone call between two mafiosi.
The director Matteo Garrone used motifs from Saviano's book for the feature film "Gomorrah - Reise in das Reich der Camorra" (2008).
Some of his amateur actors were subsequently arrested.
It was found that they, the film maniacs, had only stopped working for the Camorra in order to be able to act.
Even more: it is said that a criminal was recognized by prisoners,
when Gomorrah was set in an Italian prison.
By the way, Saviano is not against mafia films.
“It would be interesting to add an economic perspective to this in the cinema by showing how the mafia gets money and how it is organized economically.
This could counteract the glorification.”
The cinema loves the mafia - and the mafia loves the cinema
Back to reality: after Messina Denaro's arrest, people in the streets of Palermo applauded the carabinieri.
"Now we've done it," said a woman into the TV cameras.
There was even talk of the “end of an epoch”.
Italy's police do not share this relief.
Despite this success.
