He admitted the kidnapping but not the horror of having decided to suppress little Giuseppe Di Matteo, strangled and dissolved in acid in revenge against his father who is a collaborator of justice.
The picture does not change but, by reducing his role, Matteo Messina Denaro has tried to show the human side of the most heinous of the crimes attributed to him.
If not him then who ordered that heinous crime?
In front of the investigating judge Alfredo Montalto, who questioned him, the boss dumped everything on Giovanni Brusca, recently released after 25 years in prison.
It was he, he said he, who gave that repugnant order.
The story of Giuseppe Di Matteo has gone through an incredible ordeal that lasted more than two years.
He was kidnapped in a stable in Villabate on November 23, 1993. He was only 12 years old.
The kidnappers asked him to follow them to take him to his father Santino, whom he hadn't seen for some time.
They introduced themselves as lambs, but immediately turned out to be wolves.
With the kidnapping, the mafia wanted to induce Father Santino Di Matteo to retract his revelations.
While awaiting an afterthought, which never happened, Giuseppe was transferred from one prison to another in the provinces of Palermo, Trapani, Agrigento.
The first farm to which he was taken, hooded and locked in the trunk of a car, was in Campobello di Mazara, the town of Messina Denaro's last hideout.
The little boy spent a period of his horrible imprisonment here in the country house of Giuseppe Costa, a loyalist of the boss.
It was the beginning of an ordeal that lasted over two years.
It ended in a farmhouse-bunker in the countryside of San Giuseppe Jato on 11 January 1996 when Brusca ordered it to end.
Not even a trace remains of Giuseppe Di Matteo.
But his memory, which has never faded in recent years, will be renewed with a symbolic act: the elementary school in Castelvetrano that Messina Denaro attended as a child will be named after him.
The interrogation of the boss has not yet resolved any other node of the investigation following the arrest, including that of the role of his sister Rosalia, the person closest to Messina Denaro: it was she who kept the cash register, updated the accounts, kept a thousands of pizzini in which all or almost all the characters of the boss's magic circle can be found, lovers included.
The woman has not yet opened her mouth and the review court has rejected her request for release.
She remains in her cell and will also pay the expenses.
In the meantime, good news is coming from the prison in L'Aquila about the godfather's health: he has completed his cycle of chemotherapy and is taking drugs.
However, tests and checks continue.