Sicilian Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro arrested after eluding capture for 3 decades

Convicted Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro was arrested on Monday at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, after three decades on the run, Italian paramilitary police said.

Messina Denaro was arrested at a clinic where he was receiving treatment for an unknown medical condition, said Carabinieri General Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police’s special operations squad.

In a police photo showing him sitting in a police van, Messina Denaro is wearing a brown leather jacket and a white skull cap and his trademark tinted glasses. His face looked pale. He was taken to a secret location by police immediately after his arrest, Italian state television reported.

A young man when he went into hiding, he is now 60. Messina Denaro, who has a power base in the port city of Trapani, in western Sicily, is considered the top boss of Cosa Nostra in Sicily despite being a fugitive.

He is the last of three fugitive top-level Mafia bosses who have eluded capture for decades.

Messina Denaro, who was tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, faces several life sentences.

He will be jailed for two bombings in Sicily in 1992 that killed anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Among the other grisly crimes he was convicted of was the murder of a young Mafia turncoat, Giuseppe Di Matteo, who was strangled and his body dissolved in a vat of acid.

He also faces a life sentence for his role in the 1993 bombings in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed 10 people.

Previous apparitions

Arrest there came 30 years and days after January 15, 1993, taken in 1993 from the convicted “boss boss” Salvatore (Toto) Riina, in the Palermo apartment after 23 years on the run. Messina Denaro went into hiding in the summer of the same year, as the Italian state launched a crackdown on Sicilian crime syndicates after the murders of Falcone and Borsellino.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni tweeted that the arrest of Messina Denaro was “a great victory for the country, which shows that it does not give up in the face of the Mafia.”

The record-breaking Italian Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano was captured in a farmhouse near Corleone, Sicily, in 2006 after 38 years on the run. After Provenzano was in the hands of the police, the search focused on Messina Denaro, but despite the many reported sightings of the boss, he managed to elude arrest, until Monday.

That all three main bosses were finally arrested in the heart of Sicily while carrying out decades of clandestine life will not surprise Italian police and prosecutors. Law enforcement has long said the bosses rely on the contacts and secrecy of fellow mobsters and complete family members to move fugitives from hideout to hideout, provide them with basic necessities, such as food and clothing and clean communication, and a code of silence known as “omerta . . .

Riina and Provenzano lived out their last years in Italy’s strictest prison conditions for unrepentant crime lords who refused to cooperate with investigators.

Wary of being tracked using cell phones, Mafia bosses often use handwritten notes called “pizzini.” When Provenzano is arrested in a rural, almost primitive, hideout in the countryside, the police find a stash of notes.

With the crackdown that began in the 1990s against the Cosa Nostra from Sicily, the island’s Mafiosi began to lose their dominance in Italy compared to other organized crime syndicates.

When the Sicilian Mafia was significantly weakened by a small army of turncoats, on the mainland, the ‘Ndrangheta syndicate, based on the “thumb” of the Italian peninsula, regularly eclipsed Cosa Nostra in reach and influence.

But the Sicilian Mafia still conducts drug-trafficking operations. Other lucrative illegal businesses include the infiltration of public works contracts and the extortion of small business owners who are threatened if they do not pay “protection money”.