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 a private clinic, where he wanted to be treated.
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. For example, he is seen as partly responsible for the deadly bombings of mafia hunters Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. And he was considered a confidant of former mafia bosses Bernardo Provenzano and Salvatore “Totò” Riina.
In the underground, Messina Denaro, whom they also call “u siccu”, the thin one, in Italy, became big and rich. He is said to control the entire economy of the Sicilian province, his fortune was once estimated at ten billion euros, and that didn’t even include the profit from the drug trade. The FBI once called him the most dangerous criminal after Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States in 2019.
After Messina Denaro’s arrest, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni spoke of a “great success for the state, which shows that it has never been defeated by the mafia”.