The Carabinieri del Ros arrested Laura Bonafede
, teacher and daughter of the historic boss of Campobello di Mazara, Leonardo Bonafede, for aiding and abetting the sentence aggravated by having facilitated Cosa nostra.
For years, according to the investigations, she would have been close to Matteo Messina Denaro and she would be part of the network of accomplices who protected the mafia boss during his fugitive.
The investigation was coordinated by the Palermo prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia, the deputy Paolo Guido and the prosecutor of the Dda Gianluca de Leo.
Laura Bonafede, who had already come out during the investigation into the godfather's fugitive and
was immortalized by video cameras while talking to the boss at the Campobello supermarket
two days before her arrest, allegedly provided for the fugitive's daily life needs, did the shopping for him having supplies fearing that he might be infected by Covid and could not go out, he would have shared an encrypted language with him to protect the identity of other protagonists of the boss's protection network and looked after his safety with obsessive attention.
The salary of Laura Bonafede, the teacher arrested today on charges of having covered up Matteo Messina Denaro's fugitive, has been blocked.
This is what ANSA learns from those who are following the administrative procedure relating to the teacher.
Already at the end of March, the Regional School Office had validated the precautionary suspension measure which was subsequently extended until the criminal case was settled.
At the same time, a disciplinary procedure was activated to ascertain any further element to evaluate the teacher's conduct.
Laura Bonafede in pizzini, 'the cops are on me'
The teacher would therefore have been one of the pivots around which Messina Denaro's clandestinity revolved as early as the mid-1990s.
Cousin of the surveyor Andrea Bonafede who lent her identity to the boss, cousin of the municipal employee, also named Andrea Bonafede, who provided him with the medical prescriptions necessary for the therapies to be faced for cancer treatment, and Emanuele Bonafede , one of the godfather's sutler arrested together with his wife, the teacher is married to the mafia lifer Salvatore Gentile, in a cell for having committed two heinous murders on Messina Denaro's own orders.
Arrested Laura Bonafede, the teacher close to Messina Denaro
ANSA. it
"I'm Messina Denaro", taken from the super-fugitive Ros - Specials
The fugitive, after 30 years on the run, was arrested inside the La Maddalena private clinic in Palermo, where he had been undergoing treatment for over a year.
Found the hideout, he is in Campobello di Mazara in the Trapani area.
Palermo prosecutor De Lucia: 'Last massacre captured'.
The flanker arrested with him is an olive merchant.
Sentenced to life imprisonment for dozens of murders, including that of little Giuseppe Di Matteo, for the 1992 massacres that cost the lives of judges Falcone and Borsellino, and for the 1993 attacks in Milan, Florence and Rome.
The boss's billionaire business © Ansa
Martina Gentile, daughter of the teacher Laura Bonafede, is being investigated for aiding and abetting and procured non-compliance with the sentence, arrested today by the carabinieri because she is considered one of Matteo Messina Denaro's main supporters.
The prosecutor had asked for house arrest for the girl, but the investigating judge rejected the request due to lack of serious indications of guilt while stigmatizing the behavior of the young woman, linked to the mafia boss by a strong relationship of affection.
The boss, Martina and her mother would also have shared periods of coexistence during Messina Denaro's fugitive.
"After meeting Matteo Messina Denaro in 1997, Laura Bonafede even established
a stable almost family relationship with him, also involving her daughter Martina Gentile
, which lasted from 2007 until December 2017 when it was necessarily interrupted following an important yet another operation of police, to then resume, as soon as the waters 'calmed down' in recent years until the arrest of the fugitive on January 16, 2023".
The investigating judge Alfredo Montalto writes it in the precautionary custody order that ordered the prison for Laura Bonafede, daughter of the boss of Campobello for years the woman of Messina Denaro.
In short, Laura Bonafede was linked to Matteo Messina Denaro "by a decades-long relationship and had, on many occasions, shared spaces of family intimacy with him, sometimes in the company of her daughter, so much so that the three defined themselves as 'a family'
"
.
The two, according to what Bonafede herself wrote in a letter found by the Carabinieri del Ros, met in 1997, when Matteo Messina Denaro was already a fugitive together with his father Francesco.
Both were protected by Leonardo Bonafede, Laura's father, who had "allowed" his daughter to visit Matteo Messina Denaro.
"Twenty-six years ago I asked to visit you and I was granted - the woman recalled in a letter to the boss discovered by the carabinieri - There was no reason for that visit but perhaps a chapter should be opened and so it was. Life is strange, it makes incredible laps and then takes you where it wants. We can only let ourselves be carried away",
The carabinieri found letters and notes from Laura Bonafede in Messina Denaro.
They were in total adoration of Matteo Messina Denaro Laura Bonafede and her daughter Martina Gentile
.
"This adoration has no possible rational explanation and finds meaning only in total adherence to the spirit, ideals and behavior of one of the most ferocious mafiosi known in Italy", writes the investigating judge who ordered his arrest using the evaluations of the investigators.
The adoration of the two women has not diminished even following the judicial vicissitudes suffered by the Bonafedes and their relatives precisely because of their relations with the Messina Denaros.
Salvatore Gentile, husband of Laura Bonafede and father of Martina, is serving a life sentence for having carried out the orders "of a murderous criminal".
Despite this "
"The fugitive's almost maniacal care in annotating any event in his life, in keeping diaries and notebooks in which he also transcribed comments, cannot cast doubt on the existence of material of far greater importance on Messina Denaro's criminal affairs kept in
other hideouts not yet identified
(and of which, moreover, there is already a trace in some of the correspondence between the fugitive and Laura Bonafede who also shows that she knows them)".
The investigating judge Alfredo Montalto writes it in the precautionary custody order that ordered the prison for Laura Bonafede.
Laura Bonafede was strongly interested in the fate of the town's mafia family and its boss Franco Luppino
, whom the woman in code called "Perlana", and shared with her godfather, then a fugitive, the concern that one of the last anti-mafia raids which, in September, had beheaded the family of Campobello and led to the arrest of Luppino, could jeopardize the fugitive of the boss.
It emerges from the pizzini that the woman exchanged with Messina Denaro, found by Ros.
From the letters it is understood that the composition of the Campobello mafia family, the reliability of its affiliates and in general the ability to control the territory, were topics that were very close to Bonafede's heart.
