Sicilian Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro arrested after eluding capture for 3 decades | 24CA News

Convicted Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested on Monday at a non-public clinic in Palermo, Sicily, after three many years on the run, Italian paramilitary police mentioned.

Messina Denaro was captured on the clinic the place he was receiving remedy for an undisclosed medical situation, mentioned Carabinieri Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police power’s particular operations squad.

In a police picture exhibiting him sitting in a police van, Messina Denaro was carrying a brown leather-based jacket and white cranium cap and his trademark tinted glasses. His face seemed wan. He was taken to a secret location by police instantly after the arrest, Italian state tv reported.

A younger man when he went into hiding, he’s now 60. Messina Denaro, who had an influence base within the port metropolis of Trapani, in western Sicily, was thought of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra prime boss even whereas a fugitive.

He was the final of three longtime fugitive top-level Mafia bosses who had for many years eluded seize.

Messina Denaro, who was tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, faces a number of life sentences.

He is ready to be imprisoned for are two bombings in Sicily in 1992 that killed prime anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Among different grisly crimes he was convicted of is the homicide of a Mafia turncoat’s younger son, Giuseppe Di Matteo, who was strangled and his physique dissolved in a vat of acid.

He additionally faces a life sentence for his function in bomb assaults in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed 10 individuals in 1993.

Previous sightings

The arrest Monday got here 30 years and a day after the Jan. 15, 1993, seize in 1993 of convicted “boss of bosses” Salvatore (Toto) Riina, in a Palermo residence after 23 years on the run. Messina Denaro went into hiding in summer time of that very same 12 months, because the Italian state waged a crackdown on the Sicilian crime syndicate following the murders of Falcone and Borsellino.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni tweeted that Messina Denaro’s seize is a “great victory of the state, which shows that it doesn’t surrender in the face of the Mafia.”

Italy’s Mafia boss who set the report for the longest time on the lam was Bernardo Provenzano, captured in a farmhouse close to Corleone, Sicily, in 2006 after 38 years as a fugitive. Once Provenzano was in police palms, the hunt centered on Messina Denaro, however regardless of quite a few reported sightings of the boss, he managed to elude arrest, till Monday.

That all three prime bosses had been in the end arrested within the coronary heart of Sicily whereas they carried out many years of a clandestine life will not shock Italy’s police and prosecutors. Law enforcement have lengthy mentioned that such bosses depend on contacts and confidentiality of fellow mobsters and complicit relations to maneuver the fugitives from hideout to hideout, provide primary wants, like meals and clear clothes and communication, and a code of silence referred to as “omerta.”

Riina and Provenzano lived out the final years of their life within the strictest of Italian jail situations reserved for unrepentant organized crime bosses and refused to co-operate with investigators.

Wary of being tracked down by cellphone use, Mafia bosses continuously resort to handwritten notes referred to as “pizzini.” When Provenzano was nabbed in his rustic, nearly primitive, hideaway within the countryside, police discovered a stash of such notes.

With the crackdown that started within the Nineties towards Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the island’s Mafiosi began shedding their dominance in Italy in comparison with different organized crime syndicates.

While the Sicilian Mafia was considerably weakened by a small military of turncoats, on the mainland, the ‘Ndrangheta syndicate, primarily based within the “toe” of the Italian peninsula, steadily eclipsed Cosa Nostra in attain and affect.

But the Sicilian Mafia nonetheless runs drug trafficking operations. Other profitable illicit companies embrace infiltration of public works contracts and extortion of small business house owners who’re threatened if they do not frequently pay “protection money.”