How did mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro escape arrest for 30 years?

Who is the mob boss?

Italy’s most-wanted criminal, 60-year-old Matteo Messina Denaro, was tried and convicted in absentia of a string of killings and handed multiple life sentences.

He had been on the run for 30 years following his involvement in deadly bomb attacks in Milan, Florence and Rome and in one of Italy’s most notorious crimes: the assassination of the local Sicilian anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in twin bomb attacks in 1992.

Known as “the skinny one” and “Diabolik”, Messina Denaro was considered one of the most powerful bosses in the Cosa Nostra. To Italian authorities, his ability to evade arrest was an unwelcome symbol of the organisation’s endurance.

[ Italy’s most-wanted mafia boss arrested after 30 years on the run ]

How did be become the ‘last godfather’?

Messina Denaro was born in 1962 in the town of Castelvetrano in Sicily, the son of a local boss known as Don Ciccio. The crime ring forced locals to pay protection money, squeezed authorities to be awarded contracts, and oversaw the illegal dumping of waste, money-laundering, as well as the trafficking of drugs.

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While still a young man, Messina Denaro’s precocious role in a feud between two rival clans is thought to have brought him to the attention of Salvatore ‘Totò' Riina, a ruthless boss-of-bosses known as “the beast”.

Messina Denaro gained power as one of Riina’s enforcers: in an infamous boast, he is reported to have said he had killed enough people “to fill a cemetery”. Prosecutors say he helped to organise the kidnapping of 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo in 1993 in an attempt to pressure his father out of testifying against the mafia. After two years in captivity, the boy was killed and dissolved in acid.

[ ‘A man of the past’: Messina Denaro’s arrest saps strength of the Sicilian mafia ]

How was Messina Denaro found?

A series of arrests and seizure of assets over the last decade had helped gradually break down his circle of protectors. Police focused their investigations on medical clinics after gleaning information that Messina Denaro was ill. He was ultimately found attending a clinic in Palermo, where he had been a regular patient after undergoing a cancer operation last year, Italian media reported.

Police only had computer-generated images based on the few photographs of the mob boss that exist: identity document photos dating from the 1980s. In the end, Messina Denaro went down quietly, confirming his identity to police.

Where had he been hiding?

When arrested, Messina Denaro was carrying a car key, which led to a license plate, which led to the address where he had been living: a small apartment in the town of Campobello di Mazara, not far from the medical clinic and 6 kms from his place of birth. He had apparently been living under the borrowed identity of the apartment’s owner.

He seems to have come and gone freely to the apartment and even shopped for groceries, raising questions about whether anyone knew and turned a blind eye. Police found a second hideout nearby, accessed though the bottom of a wardrobe.

[ The Irish Times view on the Italian mafia: a coup for the police ]

What is the reaction to his arrest?

Social media footage showed locals applauding and stopping officers to shake their hands after the mob boss was carried away in a police vehicle. It was welcomed by Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni as “a great victory for the Italian state”.

Following the arrest, a handwritten note was anonymously left on the Palermo tomb of Falcone, the murdered anti-mafia prosecutor remembered as a civic hero. The note read: “Giovà, we did it ... after 30 years!”

Prosecutors hope that the arrest will break the back of the weakened Sicilian mafia and lead to the discovery of organisational documents that would shed light on some of the blackest chapters of recent Italian history.