Cream beanie on his head, small tinted glasses and drawn features.
It's been many years since we've seen the face of Matteo Messina Denaro, soon to be 62, Italy's most wanted mafioso.
Surrounded by over-armed police in the passenger compartment of a car, the criminal, arrested in a clinic in Sicily where he was receiving treatment, appears much less flamboyant than on the last known images of him.
At the time, in his youth, with his dandy airs of the 1980s, he was in the sights of the authorities.
With his arrest in Sicily after 30 years on the run, the carabinieri, the Italian police, sign a victory in their fight against organized crime which has plagued the country for decades.
Matteo Messina Denaro was considered the successor of Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, mafia clan leaders and historical founders of the very deadly Cosa Nostra, which is particularly rife in Sicily.
Matteo Massena Denaro this Monday at the exit of a police station in Palermo in Sicily.
(Reuters/Carabinieri)
The Sicilian, who begins his "career" at the bottom of the criminal ladder, grew up rocked by illegality: he is the son of the boss of Castelvetrano, a mafia gang based in the Trapani region, in the west of Italy. mediterranean island.
It is in the shadow of the ferocious Totò Riina de la Cosa Nostra that the young man cuts his teeth.
A mentor known for his brutality.
Read alsoAt the heart of the Sicilian mafia: "I am responsible for around 100 assassinations"
Question violence, the young Denaro is not left out.
The one who is nicknamed "Diabolik", in reference to an Italian comic strip - one of his hobbies - would have killed dozens of people before his 30th birthday.
The teenager handles his first weapon at the age of 14 and would have committed his first murder at the age of 18. "With all those I have killed, I could fill a cemetery", boasts even the one who took the maquis in 1993, but is suspected of maintaining a strong hand on his Cosa Nostra lieutenants.
A bloodthirsty mobster
Also called "Don Ciccio" or "U Siccu"
("the thin one")
, he received several life sentences, particularly for particularly sordid crimes.
In 1996, the young Giuseppe Di Matteo, 12 years old, son of a repentant mafioso, was kidnapped by Cosa Nostra.
The little boy will be kept for two years by his captors before being found strangled and his body dissolved in acid.
Convicted of criminal association since 1989, Matteo Messina Denaro was sentenced in 2000 to 30 years in prison for this crime.
He would also have killed a young pregnant woman whose companion he suspected of belonging to the secret services.
The 60-year-old was being treated for colon cancer in Palermo.
(DR/Carabinieri)
Yet another life sentence, since the Sicilian godfather accumulates heavy sentences: for attacks in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993, or for the assassinations of anti-mafia judges Falcone and Borsellino in 1992.
The former playboy, a fan of luxury clothes and cars, one of the only known photos of which shows him with his shirt open and his head held high, was arrested at the La Maddalena clinic in Palermo, where he was being treated for breast cancer. colon, far from the image that remained of him in the collective imagination.
“Diabolik” had been admitted there under an assumed name, and came out surrounded by heavily armed police.
