The legend about the great bosses who fled from Cosa Nostra indicates that the day they are found it will not be far from their home.
Power is granted by the territory and it is not convenient to stray too far from it.
Matteo Messina Denaro, the most wanted mafia boss in Italy, the last great leader of Cosa Nostra, has confirmed it this Monday.
The 60-year-old mobster had been on the run for 30 years and was considered the last link in the old organization that put the entire country in check in the 1980s and committed the most bloody attacks.
He was arrested after nine in the morning in a private clinic in Palermo specializing in oncology where he had been treated for two years, according to the commander of the Carabinieri, Pasquale Angelosanto.
Apparently, he always lived near his house in Castelvetrano (Trapani).
The mobster had registered at the Maddalena clinic under the false name of Andrea Bonafede.
This morning, when he understood that the situation was not favorable, he tried to flee without much conviction, according to the first information.
"Yes, I'm Matteo Messina Denaro," he replied to the agents when they asked his name.
After his arrest, together with a driver who accompanied him, he was transferred to the Bocca di Falco military airport (Palermo) and transferred to a secret location.
The first images released by the carabinieri show a man very similar to the robot portraits that had been made in recent years and of whom neither fingerprints nor photographs were possessed.
Messina Denaro is the author of some fifty homicides —including children and pregnant women— and of the bloodiest attacks by Cosa Nostra in the 1990s.
The hunt for him had become a matter of State and an absolute priority for the Anti-Mafia prosecutors throughout the country.
Messina Denaro, also nicknamed
U'Siccu
(El Seco) or
Diabolik
, was a ghost since he disappeared in 1993 after a vacation in Forte dei Marmi (Tuscany) when accusations and convictions for crimes of mafia association, attacks, robberies, possession of explosives or fifty homicides.
The capo belongs to the clan and to the time when Cosa Nostra began an escalation of attacks in which judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and General Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, among others, were assassinated.
Among his victims, in addition, there was also a 13-year-old boy, the son of a mobster, who was dissolved in nitric acid after a 779-day kidnapping to prevent his father from collaborating with justice.
Until today he lived in hiding.
In fact, he has a daughter born in 1996 whom he has never visited and who has preferred to stay away from his family.
At the time of the arrest, people on the street began to clap and shout in celebration.
The Messina Denaro story was an open wound for the entire country.
A failure of the State and emotional torture for the victims.
The President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, whose brother was murdered by Cosa Nostra, was one of the first to celebrate the news.
The Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, was also quick to express herself on the matter.
Any president of the Council would have wanted to be able to do it during his term.
“It is a great victory for the State, which shows that we must not surrender to the mafia.
The day after the anniversary of the arrest of Totò Riina, another boss of organized crime has been handed over to justice”.
But after 30 years on the run,
The Italian Police show two robot portraits of the Sicilian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, in October 2020. Europa press
The Messina Denaro are from Castelvetrano, in the Sicilian province of Trapani.
But he was always seen as the last member of the Corleonese, the clan that Totò Riina commanded and that had all of Italy in check with an internal war that left some 1,700 dead and the exodus of several families to the United States in the eighties.
His arrest definitively liquidates the triad that ruled Sicilian organized crime during that time and made up of Bernardo Provenzano (arrested in April 2006 near his home) and Riina himself, considered the kingpin of kingpins and his great godfather from Corleone (arrested in Palermo in 1993 and died in a prison hospital in 2017).
Riina, in fact, always saw in Messina Denaro the smartest of his godchildren, but it made her ugly from prison that he took more care of his business than of Cosa Nostra.
The capture of the last great capo, who suffered from strabismus and according to the trace of the investigation was in Barcelona in 1994 to undergo surgery at the Barraquer clinic, was the great obsession of the Italian State.
The police had not seen him since 1988, when he was questioned as a witness at the Castelvetrano police station and claimed that he was a simple farmer.
For years the circle around the fugitive had been tightening, but no one spoke, no one gave clear clues.
And the passage of time invited us to think that perhaps he would have died.
The police regularly arrested businessmen, politicians or magistrates accused of being part of their criminal network.
Giuseppe Grigoli, considered the king of supermarkets in Sicily, was arrested in 2013 for his links to the capo.
He confiscated 12 companies and 700 million euros that led to the mafia boss.
But it was only part of the boss's business.
Messina Denaro's interests also included real estate in northern Italy, wind power throughout the island and
online gambling.
Messina is escorted by Italian police after his arrest on Monday.reuters
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