Who is Matteo Messina Denaro? Italy's most wanted mafia boss arrested in Sicily

After 30 years on the lam, the Carabinieri in Italy arrested Matteo Messina Denaro, the country’s most wanted fugitive and convicted Mafia boss on Monday. Denaro was apprehended at the La Maddalena private clinic in the Sicilian capital of Palermo where he was reportedly receiving chemotherapy. The convicted mafia boss is the alleged boss of the Cosa Nostra, a crime syndicate founded in Sicily, Italy.

“Today, January 16, the carabinieri ... arrested fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro inside a sanitary structure in Palermo, where he had gone for therapeutic treatment,” General Pasquale Angelosanto of the Carabinieri told Italian media. Denaro had so far survived the high-scale investigation into the Cosa Nostra led by the Italian police and was considered the Cosa Nostra’s top boss even when he was a fugitive from the law. He has already been convicted for life imprisonment having been in the Most Wanted list of Italy since 1993.

Italian President Giorgia Meloni took to Twitter to commend the news of the arrest and said that it was a “a great victory for the state which demonstrates that it does not give up in the face of the mafia”. Meloni expressed her gratitude to “the entire government, the police forces, and in particular to the Ros dei Carabinieri, to the national anti-mafia prosecutor and to the Palermo prosecutor for the capture of the most significant exponent of mafia crime”. She also reiterated the government’s priority to fight mafia-related crime in the country.

Denaro was born on April 26, 1962, in Castelvetrano, a town in Sicily, Italy with a population of not more than 35,000 people. He has also come to know by the nickname - 'Diabolik' after a comic book character that portrays an anti-hero image of a ruthless thief that commits heinous crimes. A Wanted poster from the Italian government states that he has been a fugitive since 1993 for associations with the mafia, homicide, grievous bodily injury, and more.

He is also listed on the Europol website as one of Europe’s most wanted fugitives, which indicates that he’s been convicted to prison for life. The poster reads, “As one of the [bosses] of the Italian mafia-type [conspiracy] named ‘Cosa Nostra,’ he committed several serious and brutal [murders] and took park in slaughters and firearms [offenses].” He is considered a prime successor for the “boss of bosses" Salvatore “Toto” Riina, who died in November while serving 26 life sentences. Denaro had a power base in the port city of Trapani, in western Sicily.

What crimes has Denaro been convicted of?

He has been sentenced in absentia to a life term for two bombings in Sicily in 1992 that murdered top anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Falcone’s wife and several of their bodyguards. He also faces a life sentence for his role in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan which killed 10 people and caused 93 injuries the following year. Among other grisly crimes he was convicted of is the murder of a Mafia turncoat’s young son, who was abducted and strangled before his body was dissolved in a vat of acid, reported AP.

The arrest on Monday comes 30 years and a day after the January 15, 1993, capture of Riina in a Palermo apartment after 23 years on the run. Messina Denaro went into hiding in summer of that same year, as the Italian state stiffened its crackdown on the Sicilian crime syndicate following the murders of Falcone and Borsellino.

Italy’s Mafia boss who set the record for the longest time on the lam was Bernardo Provenzano, captured in a farmhouse near Corleone, Sicily, in 2006 after 38 years as a fugitive. 

The Cosa Nostra in Sicily is still known to run drug trafficking operations. Other lucrative illicit businesses include infiltration of public works contracts and extortion of small business owners who are threatened if they don’t regularly pay “protection money.”

(with AP inputs)