AWhen Matteo Messina Denaro was arrested by the Carabinieri of the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale (ROS) in Palermo on Monday morning, a wave of relief swept the country. President Sergio Mattarella, who lost his brother Piersanti, then President of the Region of Sicily, in an assassination attempt by Cosa Nostra in 1980 and then went into politics, tweeted congratulations to the prosecutors of Palermo, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni got on the plane to meet in the The Palace of Justice basked in the success, special programs were broadcast on television, and passers-by applauded the police officers in the streets.
For thirty years, the mafia boss was Italy’s best-known unknown, who was at the top of the wanted list. There has been no photo of him since he went into hiding in 1993 after the arrest of his predecessor, Salvatore (“Totò”) Riina. Messina Denaro is said to have committed or commissioned more than fifty murders, he once boasted that he had “filled up an entire graveyard”. “U Siccu”, the drought, is considered the instigator of the attacks on Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 and the attacks in Rome, Milan and Florence in 1993. The court in Caltanisetta sentenced him to life imprisonment in absentia in 2020.
Protected by many helpers
However, the late access also means that the highly professional Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA) was unable to track down the capo dei capi, the boss of bosses, for thirty years. Again and again he was suspected and allegedly seen abroad, in South America and Spain; it is more likely that he was hiding in his territory, the province of Trapani, where he could rely on a network of accomplices. In Castelvetrano, a town in the southwest of the island where he was born in 1962, Messina Denaro had long been known to have cancer.
A year ago he underwent surgery under the name Andrea Bonafede in the private clinic “La Maddalena”, whose oncology department is considered one of the best in the country. He wasn’t recognized. It was only when he came to the follow-up examination that the ROS surrounded the building with more than a hundred police officers and grabbed it on the street. How fortunate the mafia boss, whose fortune is estimated to be between €4 billion and €5 billion, is a private patient, one commentator scoffed, for if he had to rely on the national health service he would have five years left on treatment (and Italy on his arrest). have to wait.
In contrast to Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, his predecessors from Corleone, who came across as conservative, brutal provincials, Messina Denaro played the bon vivant and womanizer who, before his arrest, roared to the nearby beach of Selinunte in a Porsche and threw lavish parties. He did his criminal business with drugs, and supermarkets, hotels, restaurants and a cement company are said to belong to his holding company, which is operated with straw men.
His father Salvatore, Mafia boss in Castelvetrano, is said to have been involved in the 1962 robbery of the Ephebe of Selinunte, a bronze statue from the fifth century BC, which was brought back to the museum in 1968 after a shooting; According to investigators at DIA Trapani, Matteo raked in millions through his association with the art dealer Gianfranco Becchina from Castelvetrano, who offered archaeological loot through his Palladion gallery in Basel and was arrested in 2017.
A flash mob against the mafia took place in Castelvetrano on Monday evening. Mostly young people, led by the boy scouts, celebrated on the piazza and sang the national anthem. Mayor Enzo Alfano, a gnarly man in his mid-sixties from the Movimento Cinque Stelle, spoke of a “Liberation Day” and declared: “Now is the moment to work with the judiciary!”
The arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro is not the end of the mafia. Speculations about his successor are combined with the question of whether a single leader is still relevant given the realignment of the clans. Because these have long since resorted to infiltrating politics, administration and business and proceed quietly and anonymously. This could mean that the face of Messina Denaro, long considered a “fantasma” (ghost), is the last known face of the Cosa nostra. His arrest also marks the structural change in the mafia, which makes it even more difficult to fight them.