Italy’s most-wanted Mafia boss nabbed after 30 years on the run
Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, a Mafia boss convicted of helping to mastermind some of the nation’s most heinous slayings, was arrested Monday when he sought treatment at a private clinic in Sicily after three decades on the run.
Matteo Messina Denaro was tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, including helping to mastermind, along with other Cosa Nostra bosses, a pair of 1992 bombings that killed top anti-Mafia prosecutors — and led the Italian state to stiffen its crackdown on the Sicilian crime syndicate. He faces multiple life sentences that he is expected to serve in a maximum-security prison and under the particularly restrictive conditions reserved for top organized crime bosses.
He went into hiding a year after those bombings while still a young man — but he was still considered one of Cosa Nostra’s top bosses even as a fugitive. Hundreds of police officers were tasked over the years with tracking him, the last of three longtime top-level Mafia bosses who managed to elude capture for decades.
He is now 60, and his health condition helped investigators zero in on him, according to Carabinieri Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police force’s special operations squad.
“It all led to today’s date [when] he would have come for some tests and treatment” at the clinic, the Carabinieri general said.
Authorities did not say what he was being treated for, but he was captured at La Maddalena clinic in Palermo, an upscale medical facility with a reputation for treating cancer patients, and Italian media said he had been undergoing treatment for a year.
During an evening news conference, authorities said Messina Denaro’s treatment could continue at a hospital prison ward.
Investigators said he was unarmed and dressed like a typical patient at the upscale clinic, wearing a watch worth at least $33,000.
“He didn’t resist at all,’’ Carabinieri Col. Lucio Arcidiacono told reporters.
A pair of Carabinieri officers, each holding an arm, walked Messina Denaro down the front steps of the clinic to a waiting black van in pouring rain. He was dressed in a brown leather jacket trimmed in shearling, a matching white-and-brown skullcap and his trademark tinted glasses. His face looked wan as he stared straight ahead.
When dozens of police officers, wearing ski masks, converged on the clinic, local residents knew something big was about to happen. When Messina Denaro was brought outside, applause rang out on the sidewalks.
Rocco Morabito was convicted two decades ago in absentia of drug-trafficking as part of the fearsome ‘Ndrangheta organized crime syndicate.
Palermo Chief Prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia told reporters that the fugitive had used the pseudonym Andrea Bonafede and had an Italian identify card in that name. He used the alias, whose surname roughly means “good faith” in Italian, to book a morning appointment at the clinic.
In addition to convictions for the killings of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, he was also found guilty of killing Falcone’s wife and several of their bodyguards as well as the grisly murder of a Mafia turncoat’s young son, who was abducted and strangled before his body was dissolved in a vat of acid.
He also was among Cosa Nostra bosses convicted of ordering a series of bombings in 1993 that caused fatalities and damaged the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, two major churches in Rome and an art gallery in Milan.
“We captured the last of the massacre masterminds” of the 1992-1993 Mafia killings, prosecutor De Lucia said. “It was a debt that the Republic owed to the victims of those years.”
A magistrate slain by mobsters in Sicily has been beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, the last formal step before possible sainthood.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni tweeted that Messina Denaro’s capture is a “great victory of the state, which shows that it doesn’t surrender in the face of the Mafia.”
Monday’s arrest came 30 years and a day after the Jan. 15, 1993, capture of convicted “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, in a Palermo apartment after 23 years on the run. Messina Denaro went into hiding in the summer of that year.
A large trial has opened in southern Italy against the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate, arguably the world’s richest criminal organization.
The Italian Mafia boss who set the record for the longest time on the lam was Bernardo Provenzano, who was captured in a farmhouse near Corleone, Sicily, in 2006 after 38 years as a fugitive. Once Provenzano was in police hands, the hunt focused on Messina Denaro, but despite numerous reported sightings of the boss, he managed to elude arrest until Monday.
That all three top bosses were ultimately arrested in the heart of Sicily while they led a clandestine life for decades won’t surprise Italy’s police and prosecutors. Law enforcement has long said that such bosses rely on contacts and confidentiality of fellow mobsters and complicit family members to move the fugitives from hideout to hideout, supply basic needs such as food and clothes and communication, under a code of silence known as “omerta.”
Riina and Provenzano lived out the last years of their life in the strictest of Italian prison conditions reserved for unrepentant organized crime bosses, and refused to cooperate with investigators.
News Alerts
Get breaking news, investigations, analysis and more signature journalism from the Los Angeles Times in your inbox.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
Messina Denaro was believed to have enjoyed a more comfortable lifestyle in his decades hiding from police, leaving some to speculate whether he might agree to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for more lenient prison conditions.
During his years on the run, he had a series of lovers and passed time by playing video games, according to Italian media reports.
Felix Cisneros Jr. of Murrieta helped the unnamed associate of a criminal organization by providing updates on investigations and deleting info from a government database, prosecutors said.
Wary of being tracked down by cellphone use, Mafia bosses frequently resort to handwritten notes known as “pizzini.” When Provenzano was nabbed in his rustic, almost primitive hideaway in the countryside, police found a stash of such notes.
On Monday, Italian state TV transmitted what it said was an audio recording of a 1993 appearance by Messina Denaro before a Sicilian court. A judge sought to confirm his identity and asked basic questions to fill out documents.
When asked his occupation, he replied “farmer” and added that his brother was a banker and his four sisters homemakers. For his residence, he cited Castelvetrano, a farm town near Trapani, which was his crime clan’s power base and where he was assured of logistics support during his time as a fugitive, according to investigators.
The brother was convicted years ago of Mafia association. One of the sisters was convicted of helping run the crime clan during Messina Denaro’s years on the run, Italian news reports said.
With the crackdown that began in the 1990s against Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the island’s mafiosi started losing their dominance in Italy compared with other organized crime syndicates.
On the mainland, the ‘Ndrangheta syndicate, based in the “toe” of the Italian peninsula, steadily eclipsed Cosa Nostra in reach and influence. Unlike Sicily’s crime syndicates, the ‘Ndrangheta draws its rank and file based on family ties, leaving it less vulnerable to its members flipping. The ’Ndrangheta is now one of the world’s most powerful cocaine traffickers.
But the Sicilian Mafia still runs drug-trafficking operations. Other lucrative illicit businesses include infiltration of public works contracts and extortion of small-business owners who are threatened if they don’t regularly pay “protection money.”
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
