2023-09-25 07:44:03
Trapped after thirty years on the run from justice, Matteo Messina Denaro, the last great boss of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, died tonight without revealing his secrets. He had been ill with colon cancer for some time and, in fact, he was arrested at the beginning of the year in a private health clinic in Palermo, where he had gone to undergo chemotherapy under a false identity. Since then, investigators had wanted him to explain the information he was guarding, starting with the so-called file of Totò Riina, the great mafia boss of Cosa Nostra, which his pupil managed to hide after his arrest three decades ago, but it has been taken to the grave. He died quietly at the age of 61 in the detainee area of the San Salvatore hospital in L’Aquila, in the center of the country, where a maximum security prison is located where he spent the last eight months of his life under strict regime 41 bis dedicated to gangsters, without any type of contact with the outside world.
In extremis, but the Italian State won the battle at the last moment. Messina Denaro’s dream was to die on the run, like what happened to his father, Francesco, or Don Ciccio, a boss from Castelvetrano, his town in Sicily, who died in 1998 in search and capture. His son, Matteo, who published an obituary for him every year in Il Giornale de Sicilia, would have wanted to suffer the same fate, but in January they found his hiding place. “You caught me because of the illness, without it you wouldn’t have done it,” he said, in a provocative tone, to the Palermo prosecutor, Maurizio de Lucia, and to his deputy, Paolo Guido, when he was interrogated in February. “In the meantime we have caught him,” the prosecutor responded.
The figure of Messina Denaro has great importance. He had several life sentences for dozens of murders and the attacks in 1992, which ended the lives of the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, of whom he was the mastermind. The mafia boss had lost track of him in the summer of 1993, after the mafia massacres in Rome, Milan and Florence. “He probably won’t talk, but he might know some important things. For example, who indicated the objectives of the 1993 massacres,” explained prosecutor De Lucia in an interview with this newspaper. After a summer in Forte dei Marmi, Messina Denaro wrote a letter to his girlfriend at the time to announce his new life in the shadows: “You will hear about me and they will paint me as a demon, but it is all falsehoods,” he announced.
The state won the game at the last minute; he always wanted to die on the run
He was from Castelvetrano, in the province of Trapani, but he was considered the last member of the Corleoneses, the most bloodthirsty clan of the Cosa Nostra of which he pulled the strings from his hiding place since the arrest of the great bosses Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, according to They tried the pizzini, the little pieces of paper with which they sent messages. Like them, he managed to escape for decades. Riina was on fire for 23 years and Provenzano for 38. He was, therefore, the last great representative of that terrorist mafia that challenged the State. He was also considered the culprit of some fifty homicides, among them that of little Giuseppe Di Matteo, son of the pentito (collaborator of justice) Santino Di Matteo, an eleven-year-old boy who was kidnapped for two years between Palermo and Agrigento to try to his father to withdraw what he had told a prosecutor. Afterwards, they decided to strangle him and dissolve the body with acid.
“With the people I have killed I could make a cemetery,” Messina Denaro told a friend. Among her victims was also Antonella Bonomo, partner of boss Vincenzo Milazzo, strangled when she was three months pregnant. She was called U’Siccu (the dry one) or Diabolik, after her favorite comic, for which she had two machine guns installed on the hood of her Alfa Romeo. At 14 she already knew how to shoot and at 20 she was among Riina’s henchmen. He did not imitate him in everything. When he had free rein, and with a nose for business, he decided that Cosa Nostra would return to its origins and control the territory quietly, and making a lot of money. They linked him to the wind energy sector in Sicily, to gambling and to real estate.
However, and despite this resume, being the most wanted mobster in Italy and appearing on all the FBI lists, they did not find him hiding on a beach in Latin America, but in Campobello di Mazara, a small Sicilian town less than ten kilometers from Castelvetrano, his hometown, where he lived a normal life, going to bars, restaurants or the supermarket, without any neighbor ever raising his voice. Like Riina and Provenzano, he never strayed too far from his home, protected by the omertà of the territory and by a network of friends and family. Among them, his sister Rosalía, his driver Giovanni Luppino, his personal doctor, Alfonso Tumbarello, or Andrea Bonafede, who had lent her his identity. He was even able to travel to Barcelona in 1994 to have surgery at the Barraquer clinic for the strabismus he suffered from.
Police device following the arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro, last January
REUTERS
“I have never defamed anyone and I will die without defaming anyone, this is Messina Denaro,” he announced to judge Alfredo Montalto a month after being arrested. In August he underwent surgery for an intestinal obstruction but, although the surgery went well, his health conditions became increasingly worse. In his last will and testament document, the criminal had asked that his life not be prolonged with treatments or machines. During his agony in the hospital he was accompanied by his sister Giovanna, his niece and lawyer Lorenza Guttadauro, and his only known legitimate daughter, Lorenza, 27, who agreed to meet him in April when visiting him in prison, and who apparently has accepted to take his last name. He was an atypical Sicilian mafioso in a Cosa Nostra linked to tradition and religiosity. With a reputation as a womanizer, he was not married, he had a daughter out of wedlock and in his last will he also wrote that he rejected any type of religious celebration because “it is made of filthy men who live in hatred and sin.” And he continued: “God will be my justice, my forgiveness, my spirituality.”
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