Matteo Messina Denaro, known to be one of the most notorious Sicilian mafia bosses, died on September 25, 2023, at the age of 61. He was also known as “Diabolik”, after a comic book character, for his cunning and ruthlessness.
Messina Denaro was arrested on January 16, 2023, at a private health clinic in Palermo, where he was undergoing treatment for colon cancer. The operation involved more than 100 agents from the Carabinieri, the Italian military police, who raided the clinic and captured him without resistance. The arrest was confirmed by the Italian Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice, who praised the work of the investigators and hailed it as a historic victory against organized crime.
That arrest was the result of a long and complex investigation that involved wiretapping, tracking, infiltrating and seizing assets from his network of relatives, associates and supporters. The investigators managed to reconstruct his movements and contacts, and to identify his hiding places and aliases. They also obtained crucial information from some of his former collaborators who turned state witnesses. The breakthrough came when they discovered that he was suffering from cancer and that he had visited several clinics in Sicily for treatment.
Convicted in absentia of several murders, including the killings of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, and the torture and murder of an 11-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, in 1996, he was also responsible for a series of bombings in Milan, Florence and Rome in the late 1990s that killed 10 people and injured dozens more.
Messina Denaro’s arrest marked the end of an era for the Cosa Nostra, which had waged a bloody war against the Italian state in the 1980s and 1990s, killing judges, prosecutors, politicians and civilians. He was the last of a generation of powerful Mafia bosses who had evaded justice for decades. His capture raised questions about how he managed to stay free for so long, and what impact it would have on the current state and structure of the Cosa Nostra.
How he was able to stay in hiding for decades, despite the all-out efforts of law enforcement to nab him, has been heavily debated, but the answer is simply that like other notorious Mafia figures, he was protected by the local population for whom his presence was an open secret.
“He was living in an unassuming house in Campobello di Mazara, 116km from Palermo and a mere 8km from his birthplace of Castelvetrano. A neighbour told Italian TV that he frequently saw the man and that they would greet one another regularly.”
As the BBC notes, Messina Denaro’s taste for high-end items was well-known. When he was arrested, he was reportedly wearing a watch worth €35,000. Police said that far from looking like a “destroyed man”, he seemed like “a well-groomed man in a good economic condition”.
While he was a source of frustration for authorities and his victims’ families, the fact that it took authorities so long to catch Messina Denaro fueled his myth, said Mitja Gialuz, lawyer and professor of criminal procedure at LUISS University in Rome.
Gialuz added, “Of course, he was forced to live extremely cautiously, and had to calculate every move to perfection.”
Messina Denaro died in a hospital prison ward in L’Aquila, central Italy, where he had been transferred from a maximum-security jail as his condition worsened. His death was confirmed by Italian prosecutors who requested an autopsy.
