Matteo Messina Denaro, 60, spends his first days after his capture in the
maximum security prison in
L'Aquila, far from Sicily and 130 kilometers from Rome, which houses other mafia prisoners sentenced to long sentences.
There is also a neighboring hospital with a cancer center where they will treat his colon cancer.
Meanwhile
the Cosa Nostra reorganizes in Sicily
.
So much time has passed since the terrible terrorist attacks of 1992 and 1993 in which the then young Messina Denaro participated.
He reigned as boss of bosses Salvatore "Totó" Riina, head of the fierce Corleone mafiosi who commanded the entire Sicilian region.
Riina was arrested 30 years ago, in January 1993.
The two worst attacks with huge charges of explosives killed magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. They were the worst enemies of Cosa Nostra.
Eight custody officers lost their lives with them.
It was the moment of greatest triumph of the terrorist strategy.
A mural portrays Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in Palermo.
Photo: AP
Radical change
The situation has radically changed since then.
The State has recovered the initiative.
Matteo Messina Denaro rose to the boss of the bosses of a Cosa Nostra that no
longer tightly controls
internal power.
He is considered
the last frontline representative
of one of the most dramatic stations in the history of the Republic born after World War II.
Prosecutor Maurizio De Luca, head of judicial investigators in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, sums up the situation.
“The mafia exists and has changed.
It does not commit more havoc, we do not see as many deaths as in the past.
It is a mob that has changed its face, but is still
just as dangerous
."
A sign in Parlermo warns: "Mafia no".
Photo: AP
Judge Giovanni Falcone said more than once that "Palermo is the military mafia and Trapani is the economic mafia."
Messina Denaro was the king of the mafia of
western Sicily centered in Trapani (west of Palermo), where they say Freemasonry has
more centers than neighborhoods.
Mafia, Freemasonry, politics: the power of Messina Denaro unfolded around this trilogy.
But
Palermo is always the beating heart
of mafia power that for forty years has also spread deeply in northern Italy.
Although the investigative control power of Cosa Nostra has been deployed with great efficiency, with the use of electronics and the deployment of interceptions with new digital devices, partly from the United States, what is happening among the Palermo clans continues in much of
it sheltered in the most secret shadows.
The apartment building in the town of Campobello di Mazara, Sicily, where Messina was hiding.
Photo: Reuters
One thing is certain:
the "men of honor" do not renounce
the ancient mandate to run the Top, which decides control of big business and intervenes to prevent internal conflicts that have historically caused bloody wars for power.
The most remembered stories are those that led to the accumulation of absolute power of "Totó" Riina and the Corleone gangsters.
A new command dome
The information, which transcends in the press attentive to news, indicates that among the bosses of the clans there is a conviction that it is necessary to develop the rules that have allowed Cosa Nostra a secular development.
And the rules call
for the formation of a Command Dome
, as is tradition.
It is not known if there is already a constituted Dome.
The hypothesis is that
there were meetings in 2018
, but that the mafia organization is still in formation.
Names are given.
For example
Giovanni Motisi
, called El Gordo, head of the Pagliarelli clan, over sixty years old.
Wanted for several homicides and participation in the 1992-1993 attacks, he is considered a trusted action man of "Totó" Riina, as was the young Messina Denaro at the time.
There is also
Stefano Fidanzati
, 70, from the Arenella Fidanzati clan, who have built an economic empire between Palermo and Milan.
The "Corriere della Sera" highlights that the researchers consider
others "younger
but no less interesting" such as
Giuseppe Auteri
, who grew up with the boss Calógero Lo Presti, who would manage the safe of the Porta Nuova clan, one of the richest and most powerful of Palermo.
Italian policemen transfer Messina Denaro to a helicopter.
Photo: AP
Among the possible candidates, perhaps already members of the Cúpula,
Sandro Capizzi,
son of the old capo Benedetto Capizzi, historical head of the Santa María de Jesús clan, is also mentioned.
The resounding arrest of the last capo of the old days, Matteo Messina Denaro,
opens the Pandora's Box
whose extraordinary details could be revealed by the "man of a thousand mysteries", as he is called.
After his arrest on Monday at the Maddalena clinic in Palermo, specialized in oncological cures, Messina Denaro was flown away from Sicily.
He is in the maximum security prison, "built with nothing around" in an area of the city of L'Aquila, the capital of the Abruzzo region.
Video image shows Matteo Messina Denaro arriving at the clinic where he was later arrested.
Photo: AP
L'Aquila jail
It is a prison specialized in the custody of detainees subjected to high security regimes.
In particular that of law 41 bis that establishes
harsh treatment
for members of the various Italian mafias.
It currently houses
three hundred convicts,
including common detainees.
There are 142 men imprisoned for mafia crimes and a dozen women in a women's section.
Among them is
Nadia Desdemona Lioce
, who is not a mafioso but a leader of the Red Brigades accused of two homicides.
The rigid and iron management
has prevented escape attempts
or collective protests.
L'Aquila jail, in the middle of nowhere.
Photo: Reuters
The maximum security prison relies on health management at the San Salvatore hospital, which has a good care service for cancer patients.
There he will receive the cures Messina Denado who is already receiving a chemotherapy treatment against colon cancer that he suffers from.
The last boss of the bosses, who according to the investigators
was not in the last years an effective boss of the mafia
in all the Sicilian territory, is hospitalized in an isolated sector of the prison, where the prison chaplain gave him all the clothes and other utilities.
Messina
was willing to dialogue
, thanked how the carabinieri treated him when they captured him on Monday in Palermo and
did not say anything else.
Investigators quickly located the secret place in Campobello di Mazzara, near Trapani, where the mafia boss had resided in recent months.
There they found
luxury clothes, watches and valuable personal jewelry
, an agenda in which he complains because his 27-year-old daughter, who has been his mother, refuses to see him, but nothing more.
Investigators quickly located the secret location where Messina had been residing in recent months.
Photo: AFP
They are looking for what, according to the testimonies of some arrested and "repentant" gangsters, is the most important treasure:
the file of the great boss of the bosses "Totó Riina"
that would have remained in the hands of Messina Denaro.
There ,
great revelations
of how the strategy of the terrorist mafia was developed can come to light.
It is probable, according to the investigating magistrates, that there is
a secret place
that has been or still is the most important hiding place in Messina in these 30 years of permanent flight.
It has been known that in so many years he made at least three trips.
One to Venezuela, another to Spain, where he underwent surgery on his eyes in a clinic in Barcelona, and the third to England.
Rome, correspondent
ap
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