Matteo Messina, the most wanted capo in Italy, was hiding just nine kilometers from his home

Matteo Messina Denaro, the most wanted Cosa Nostra capo in Italy arrested yesterday in Palermo after 30 years on the run, was hiding a few kilometers from the Sicilian town where his entire family lived.

The

and the Palermo prosecutor's office have discovered the hiding place where he spent some of the 30 years in which he was missing.

The place, an apartment in a yellow two-story building, is in Campobello di Mazara, in the province of Trapani and just nine kilometers from Castelvetrano, the town where he was born and raised.

A discovery that confirms the trend of the big bosses on the run and makes the story of Messina Denaro even more disturbing.

According to the neighbors, he led a completely normal life.

Campobello di Mazzara, in western Sicily, was the hometown of Giovanni Luppino, the driver and bodyguard who was arrested Monday with Messina Denaro at the Palermo clinic where the mobster regularly went for treatment for cancer.

The

the assistant prosecutor of Palermo, Paolo Guido, have spent the whole night searching the apartment - in a quiet street in the center of the town and guarded by a small camera - to obtain more information about the life that the mafioso led in recent years. years and the network that helped him hide for so long.

In the morning, a wall of

it closed the passage of the San Vito alley, at the end of which there is an apartment on the ground floor of the building.

“Overall, well renovated.

With expensive objects that denote the economic level of the arrested person”, said the commander of the

, Mario Bottino, just in front of the place.

The apartment where Messina Denaro was hiding is located in a dead end, a perfect metaphor for most of the investigations that have tried to locate him in recent years.

Neighbors attended the discovery in disbelief on Tuesday morning.

One of them, who did not want to give his name and who shared a portal with the mobster, explained to this newspaper that the last great boss of Cosa Nostra had been living there for "several years."

"Suspect?

Why?

He was a polite person who greeted me with in the morning.

Hello and goodbye.

We had ever talked about nonsense.

How was he going to suspect? ”, He pointed to the exit of the yellow building where the detainee was hiding, in a neighborhood at the entrance of the town.

At the corner supermarket, where he or his bodyguards are supposed to have done the shopping,

none of the employees consulted had ever seen him.

“Also, he is very old.

How were we going to recognize him?”, points out one of the cashiers.

Messina is escorted by Italian police after his arrest on Monday.reuters

The local police chief of the municipality, Giuliano Panierino, on the other hand, confirms that Messina Denaro led a normal life.

“Now that the neighbors have seen the photo of him, many have recognized him and have told me that they often saw him at the bar and pizzeria next to his house.

He went in and out like an ordinary citizen, that's the best way to go unnoticed.

According to some neighbors, he said that he was a doctor, ”he points out to this newspaper.

Messina Denaro used an identity document in the name of Andrea Bonafede, another resident of the town, whose family had ties to the local mafia.

The apartment where the mobster was hiding was also in his name.

The arrest of the last great boss of the Cosa Nostra - he was the heir to the Corleonese Totó Riina and Bernardo Provenzano - now opens new avenues of investigation.

Beyond his collaborators, the prosecution is now following the trail of Messina Denaro's multimillion-dollar businesses and a fortune estimated at about 15 million dollars (about 13.8 million euros).

Messina Denaro has spent the night in a cell at a secret location in Sicily.

After his arrest, he was taken to the Boccadifalco military airport.

From there he boarded a helicopter and was taken to a bunker where he will remain until the end of the first phase of the investigation, now focused on dismantling the network of collaborators that helped him hide for these 30 years, what is known in police jargon. as the "mafia bourgeoisie".

No weapons were found inside the house.

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 anti-mafia prosecutors across the country.

The capo, also nicknamed

(El Seco) or

, had been 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 building of the hideout of Matteo Messina, in the Sicilian town of Campobello di Mazzara.Paolo Manzo

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