Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro is notorious for his ruthlessness, having been involved in many murders, gang killings and even terrorist bombings.
Matteo Messina Denaro, a mafia boss who terrorized Italy in the 1980s and 1990s, died in a hospital in central Italy at the age of 61 from colon cancer on September 25.
Since his arrest in January, the "last godfather" of the Italian mafia, as the media has nicknamed Denaro, has served nearly eight months of 20 life sentences, related to a series of bloody crimes that he directly caused or directed to be carried out over decades.
Matteo Messina Denaro was born on April 26, 1962, in the town of Castelvetrano, near the city of Trapani in western Sicily on the Mediterranean Sea, southern Italy. His father was Francesco Messina Denaro, a mid-level commander of the local mafia.
Matteo Messina Denaro followed in his father's footsteps into the underworld , using guns from the age of 14-15 and may have started killing at the age of 18.
The Castelvetrano clan was allied in the 1970s and 1980s with the Corleonesi family of Palermo, one of the most powerful and aggressive families in the "Cosa Nostra", as the entire Sicilian mafia is known. The Corleonesi were led at the time by Salvatore Riina, nicknamed "The Beast" for his willingness to kill his opponents to reach the pinnacle of power and become "the boss of bosses".
Matteo Messina Denaro (center) is escorted by police after being arrested in Palermo, Sicily in January. Photo: Reuters
Thanks to the Corleonesi gang's connection to the Castelvetrano gang, Denaro was recruited by Riina as a trusted subordinate. He participated in many gang-killing missions, once boasting that the number of people he had killed "could fill a cemetery".
Police accuse him of assassinating rival gang boss Vincenzo Milazzo and Milazzo's pregnant girlfriend, whose bodies were found buried on the outskirts of Palermo.
The court accused Denaro of planning the murder of two prominent anti-mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in 1992. The two cases shocked the country, leading to Italy's Anti-Mafia Act and arrest warrants for Salvatore Riina and then-boss Leoluca Bagarella.
Italian authorities also accused Denaro of organizing the kidnapping of 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo in 1993 to prevent his father from providing evidence against mafia gangs in a national court. Giuseppe Di Matteo was imprisoned for two years, before being killed by mafia members who covered up the evidence and disposed of his body in acid.
The court also held Denaro responsible for a series of 1993 retaliatory bombings against the government in three cities, Rome, Florence and Milan, which killed 10 people and injured 93.
After the terrorist bombings, Denaro went into hiding and rarely showed his face in public. However, anti-mafia investigations in the early 2000s found him working for Bernardo Provenzano, the heir to the Corleonesi family and leader of the entire Cosa Nostra.
Matteo Messina Denaro after being arrested by police in January. Photo: Italian Police
Denaro unified much of the Mafia around the city of Trapiani in the late 1990s and early 2000s, connected with Colombian drug cartels, and laundered money by investing in wind power. Denaro’s criminal empire profited mainly from organized gambling and drug trafficking.
When boss Provenzano was captured in 2006 after 43 years on the run, Denaro was seen by Sicilian crime circles as the heir apparent to the title of "boss of all bosses".
In the 2010s, Denaro directed his associates to use social media to build the image of the mafia as an organization that takes from the rich to give to the poor, protecting the poor from injustice. This was actually part of a strategy to ensure the criminal network’s cover and reduce the risk of the boss being exposed by the public.
Francesco Garofalo, a member of the anti-mafia advocacy group, said there was a time when criminal groups were so effective in their propaganda that "there were people who wanted Messina Denaro to be elected mayor".
Denaro had barely been seen or seen in public for nearly two decades before his arrest in January. Italian police in 2009 obtained just one video , less than two seconds long, from a traffic camera in Agrigento, Sicily, of the car believed to be carrying Denaro.
Investigators had to use photos of the boss in the 1980s and early 1990s, compare the statements of several witnesses and use facial-aging technology to simulate Denaro's portrait.
Some sources say he had plastic surgery and had all his fingerprints removed. Some Mafia members arrested over the years have said he fled to Spain, England, Germany and South America, while others say Denaro never left his hometown of Castelvetrano.
The scene of the car bomb attack that killed prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, who led anti-mafia investigations, in Palermo in 1992. Photo: SIPA
A series of conflicting reports about Denaro’s whereabouts have led to Italian police repeatedly issuing arrest warrants for the wrong person. A typical example is the 2019 raid by Italian armed police on a hospital in Sicily to arrest a man from Castelvetrano, only to realize he was a patient in the neurology department.
In September 2021, a 54-year-old British man was arrested by armed Dutch police at a restaurant in The Hague. He was handcuffed, covered with a black bag over his head and dragged away in front of dozens of panicked diners. The arrest was made following an international arrest warrant and extradition request from Italian police, who suspected that he was Denaro. After several days of re-examining the information and realizing the mistake, the British citizen was released.
The kingpin has been on the run for 30 years thanks to his no-electronics rule, sending messages only by paper through his many trusted associates. In addition, Denaro has a network of subordinates who are both loyal and terrified of him, knowing full well that he is always ready to order assassinations to cover up the clues, as he did decades ago.
After more than 30 years of pursuit, Italian prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for more than 100 of Denaro's subordinates, accomplices, and relatives. By 2022, police learned that the boss was seriously ill and frequently visited a private clinic in Palermo.
When he was arrested on January 16, the boss did not resist and the police did not need to use weapons to suppress him. The first words the notorious mafia godfather said to the police were to confirm himself: "I am Matteo Messina Denaro".
Felia Allum, professor of organized crime at the University of Bath in the UK, describes Denaro as the last boss of the old generation of mafias. "He represents the last link between the aggressive and open Cosa Nostra of the early 1990s and the quiet, corporate mafia of the 21st century."
Thanh Danh (According to Reuters, AFP, Daily Mail, Guardian )
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