According to Italian paramilitary police, the country’s most wanted Mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, has been arrested at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, after three decades on the run.
Carabinieri Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police force’s special operations squad, disclosed that Messina Denaro was captured on Monday, January 16, 2023 at the clinic where he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed medical condition.
A pair of Carabinieri officers, each holding an arm, walked him down the front steps of the upscale clinic and led him to a waiting black van.
Messina Denaro was wearing a brown leather jacket trimmed in shearling and a matching white-and-brown skull cap and his trademark tinted glasses. His face looked pale and he looked straight ahead. It is reported that he was taken to a secret location by police immediately after the arrest.
Reports claim that Denaro had been receiving treatment when he was captured just before 10:00 (09:00 GMT) and taken to a secret location by the Carabinieri.
Over 100 members of the armed forces are said to have been involved in the arrest.
A video circulated by Italian media appears to show people standing in the street and applauding the Italian police as Messina Denaro is led away.
Messina Denaro, who had a power base in the port city of Trapani, in western Sicily, was considered Sicily’s Cosa Nostra top boss even while a fugitive. A young man when he went into hiding, he is now 60.
Messina Denaro was tried in absentia in 2002 and sentenced to life in jail over numerous murders.
He is set to be imprisoned for two bombings in Sicily in 1992 that murdered top anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Falcone’s wife and several of their bodyguards.
Among other grisly crimes he was convicted of is the murder of a Mafia turncoat’s young son, who was abducted and strangled before his body was dissolved in a vat of acid.
Messina Denaro was the last of three longtime fugitive top-level Mafia bosses who had for decades eluded capture.
His arrest comes 30 years and a day after the January 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 summer of that same year, as the Italian state stiffened its crackdown on the Sicilian crime syndicate following the murders of Falcone and Borsellino.
Italy’s Mafia boss who set the record for the longest time on the run was Bernardo Provenzano, captured in a farmhouse near Corleone, Sicily, in 2006 after 38 years as a fugitive.
Great Victory For The State
Italian Premier, Giorgia Meloni tweeted that Messina Denaro’s capture is a “great victory for the state, which shows that it does not surrender in the face of the Mafia.”
Meloni expressed her gratitude to the armed forces for their work in detaining the “most important member of the mafia criminal group”.
Tributes to the work of the armed forces are pouring in from across the political spectrum.
Gian Carlo Caselli, a judge and former Prosecutor General, stated that the arrest of Messina Denaro is an “exceptional… simply historical event” that might lead to significant developments in the ongoing inquiries into the 1993 bomb attacks that killed ten people across Italy.
With the crackdown that began in the 1990s against Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the island’s mafiosi started losing their dominance in Italy compared to other organized crime syndicates.
However, the Sicilian Mafia still runs drug trafficking operations.
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