Matteo Messina Denaro, a convicted killer and high-ranking mobster with the Sicilian Cosa Nostra who had eluded capture for three decades, has died in a hospital in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, where he had been serving time in a maximum-security prison. He was 61.
Mr. Messina Denaro had been treated for cancer for years, and fell into a coma that doctors said on Friday was irreversible. The Italian news agency ANSA reported early Monday that he had died.
Mr. Messina Denaro was arrested in January while waiting to undergo chemotherapy at a private clinic in Palermo. He had been using a fake identity, and investigators discovered that he was being treated for cancer when they found a scrap of paper with his medical history rolled up in the leg of a chair in his mother’s home in Castelvetrano, Sicily.
Since he was not treated under his real name, they used national health service records to identify patients with similar conditions and narrow it down.
Despite operating in the shadows, Mr. Messina Denaro had remained at the top of Italy’s list of most wanted fugitives for decades. His ability to confound investigators on a dogged, if frustrating, mission to find him added to his aura of invincibility.
“La Cattura” (“The Capture”), a recently published book about hunting him down written by Maurizio de Lucia, the chief prosecutor in Palermo, calls Mr. Messina Denaro “one of Italy’s greatest mysteries.” He was, Mr. de Lucia wrote, “the mobster who ferried Sicily’s Cosa Nostra into a new era, within a criminal system that unites many segments.”
An undated file photo showing Mr. Messina Denaro as a young man.Credit…EPA, via Shutterstock
In 2020, Mr. Messina Denaro was convicted in absentia for his role in the high-profile murders of two of Italy’s top anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in 1992, and for deadly bombings the next year in Milan, Rome and Florence that prosecutors believe were part of a Cosa Nostra strategy against the state.
He also received a life sentence for his involvement in the kidnapping and death of the 12-year-old son of a Mafia turncoat after the boy was strangled and his body was dissolved in acid, and in the death of a police officer.
Lirio Abbate, an investigative journalist, has also written a book about Mr. Messina Denaro. In that book, “U Siccu,” published 2020, Mr. Abbate said that Mr. Messina Denaro had confided in a friend that he could make “a cemetery” out of all the people he had killed or ordered killed.
What little is known about Mr. Messina Denaro comes by way of the testimony of Mafia turncoats and arrested mobsters, as well as court records, police reports and hearsay. Before his arrest, investigators had little to go on: a 1988 recording of his testimony about a murder and a handful of photographs of him as a young man.
Nicknamed U Siccu (Sicilian for slim), Mr. Messina Denaro was said to have had a penchant for fast luxury cars that he could…
2023-09-24 23:07:50
Source from www.nytimes.com
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