Italian police have arrested the head of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Matteo Messina Denaro. As the carabinieri announced, the mafia boss and Italy’s most wanted criminal was arrested in Palermo. Special forces managed to arrest him in the private clinic “La Maddalena”, where he wanted to be treated. He is said to have had a tumor, the newspaper reported Corriere della Sera. The arrested man was first taken to a military barracks and was to be flown out of Palermo to take him to a high-security prison.
Messina Denaro went into hiding in 1993 and had been on the run for almost three decades. In absentia he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for several murders. He is said to have committed or organized dozens. Among them were the deadly 1992 bombings of mafia hunters Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. And he was considered the confidante and then successor of former mafia bosses Bernardo “Zu Binnu” Provenzano and Salvatore “Totò” Riina.
In the past decades, various anti-mafia agents have been looking for Messina Denaro. In countless raids on Sicily, however, he was repeatedly missed. In the underground, the man became big and rich. His fortune was once estimated at ten billion euros, and that didn’t even include the profit from the drug trade.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni spoke on Monday of a “great success for the state, which shows that it has never given in to the Mafia”. Mobile phone videos circulated on the Internet, which are said to show the arrest or the moments afterwards. They show people applauding in Palermo.