Matteo Messina Denaro arrested in Italy, carabinieri taunt him

ITALY – Sacred carabinieri snub a man who eluded them for 30 years. A day after the arrest of Italy’s most wanted mobster, Matteo Messina Denaro, the carabinieri (equivalent to the French gendarmes) posted on their Twitter account a photo of one of their cars parked in Castelvetrano, his birthplace.

“Hello from Castelvetrano”, ironically wrote the Carabinieri this Tuesday morning, January 17, without direct reference to Matteo Messina Denaro. Double snub: the carabinieri car sits in the square just in front of the church… of purgatory.

A few kilometers from Castelvetrano, in Campobello di Mazara, which the mafia godfather has been hiding for several years. Arrested on Monday 17 in Palermo then taken by a military helicopter to Abruzzo, a region east of Rome overlooking the Adriatic Sea, he was held in the high security prison in L’Aquila.

Andrea Bonafede is Matteo Messina Denaro

In Campobello di Mazara, police raided a small two-story residential building painted yellow where the godfather was said to have stayed for a long time, as you can see in the pictures of Corriere della Sera below. Her apartment is comfortable and well equipped. Inside, investigators found no weapons, only perfumes and expensive clothes.

The small building is placed under permanent police surveillance preventing anyone from approaching. Contacted by AFP, the carabinieri declined to provide details. To his neighbors, Matteo Messina Denaro introduced himself as Andrea Bonafede, with a valid identity card, and said he was a doctor.

The journey of Matteo Messina Denaro, a brutal killer of the head of an economic empire, follows in the footsteps of the great historical leaders of Cosa Nostra, Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, who died in prison in 2017 and 2016 according to respectively.

Arrested after medical examination

He was arrested on Monday morning on the sidelines of a medical visit to the La Maddalena clinic in Palermo, a well-known establishment where he was being treated, under an assumed name, for colon cancer. His attending physician, 70-year-old Alfonso Tumbarello, is under investigation.

He was very well dressed and wore a luxury watch worth between 30 and 35,000 euros. In his run, he “significant safeguards were in place and the investigation focused on those safeguards”underlined on Monday night the head of the parquet floor of Palermo Maurizio De Lucia in a press conference.

The investigation must determine whether “the last godfather of the Corleone clan” – clan made famous in movies by godfather – stayed on the island throughout his run or if he also stayed abroad.

In the list drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior of the six most wanted criminals in Italy, Matteo Messina Denaro, born in April 1962, occupied the first place. He was sentenced in absentia in 2000 to life imprisonment for murder, and in 2020 for the attack on anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, who was murdered on orders of Cosa Nostra in 1992.

Matteo Messina Denaro is one of the last great figures of Cosa Nostra, which was largely destroyed by the relentless operation of the state after the murder of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

According to the daily Il Messaggerothe wealth accumulated by the boss will be reached “up to 4 billion euros”obtained through drug trafficking, extortion and money laundering.

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