2024-09-09 12:22:31
Investigators knew a lot about Italian mobster Matteo Messina Denaro. That he likes to wear designer clothes and rolexes. Or that he plays computer games. They also knew the list of his victims. But for three decades they could not find out where the gangster was hiding. He was only caught in the spring of 2023 in front of a private clinic in Palermo. Soon after, he died of cancer without revealing the details of his criminal organization.
The last of the big bosses of the Italian underworld, the head of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra mafia and probably the most wanted man in the modern history of the country, is told in a new feature film called The Sicilian Letters. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival this week.
It focuses on a short period at the beginning of the millennium when Denaro was hiding in his native Sicily. And he questions whether the Italian police have really done everything to catch him since 1993, when they issued an arrest warrant for him.
“How is it possible that our country, whose culture is admired by the whole world, could not resist such terrible mediocrity for so long and allowed this man to evade justice for so many years?” asks Italian actor Toni Servillo. He has already portrayed the former prime ministers of his country, Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi. In the novel, he took on the main role of a former mayor who tries to lure a mobster out of hiding.
The film was written and directed by Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia. When creating the script, they were inspired by what in the world of the Italian mafia were called pizzini – these were slips of paper with encrypted messages that Denaro sent from hiding through a series of couriers. This is how he ran his empire.
The police found dozens of messages in 2006, when they caught the head of the Sicilian mafia at the time, Bernardo Provenzano. Denaro took over after him.
Toni Servillo plays a former mayor who has to lure a mobster out of hiding. | Photo: Giulia Parlato
“The human side of him shines through those messages,” says Elio Germano, who plays a gangster inspired by Denaro in the film. The character has a slightly changed name, in the film they call him Matteo.
“It’s important to realize that he really was human. He could be kind, sensitive, and even follow certain rules. But he also committed the most horrific atrocities. Which is disturbing because it shows that within each of us lies the potential to become someone like that,” thinks the actor.
Toni Servillo embodied the former mayor and at the same time Denar’s godfather. At the beginning of the film, he leaves prison after six years. He lost his political career, money and wife and has nothing else to lose. He can’t even finish his luxury hotel, which he built illegally before his arrest. At that moment, the police present him with a tempting offer: we will give you permission to build a hotel if you can track down your godson Matteo.
The mobster’s father, whom the former mayor knew, recently died. And the sentimental gangster actually responds to the ex-politician’s message. The messages they start sending each other should lead to their personal meeting, during which the police want to arrest the criminal.
Servillo’s character is also fictitious, but inspired by the former mayor of the mobster’s hometown, Catello Polumbo, who actually corresponded with the gangster in 2004 through pizzini. Thanks to them, the police almost caught the dreaded criminal back then.
Toni Servillo and Elio Germano filming The Sicilian Letters. | Photo: Giulia Parlato
“The mayor reminded us of an archetypal character from Italian comedies,” notes one of the film’s directors, Fabio Grassadonia.
It was while he and a colleague were working on the project early last year that Denaro was arrested. In the following weeks, the Italian press brought more information about the mobster, as a result of which the directors slightly modified the script.
“Fortunately, the overall picture of him and the world he built around him pretty much matched our ideas, so we didn’t have to redo it drastically,” adds Grassadonia.
With Antonio Piazza, he has already shot two crime films in the last decade, Salvo from 2013 and Ghosts of Sicily, which were awarded for their script at the American Sundance festival. The authors entrusted one of the secondary roles in their novel to Slovak actress Barbora Bobuľová, who has been living in Italy since the mid-1990s.
The Sicilian Letters is one of 21 films competing for the main prize of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The winner will be announced on Saturday night.
Matteo Messina Denaro was among the ten most wanted criminals in the world. According to the police, he was responsible for the murders and attacks that Cosa Nostra committed in 1992 and 1993. Hundreds of judges, politicians and priests died in them, and others lost their lives in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan.
The mobster was also responsible for the kidnapping and killing of the eleven-year-old son of another gangster who was reporting to the police. Denaro himself allegedly declared that he could “fill a cemetery” with his victims. After his arrest, he was placed in a maximum security prison. By that time, however, he had been struggling with colon cancer for the third year. Despite two operations, his health deteriorated, he fell into a coma and died last year after being weaned off artificial nutrition.
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