ROME (AP) — Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, convicted Mafia manager Matteo Messina Denaro, was captured on Monday at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, immediately after 3 decades on the operate, Italian paramilitary police claimed.
Messina Denaro was captured at the clinic exactly where he was obtaining treatment for an undisclosed health-related ailment, mentioned Carabinieri Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the law enforcement force’s specific functions squad.
A pair of Carabinieri officers, every keeping an arm, walked him down the entrance steps of the upscale clinic and led him to a waiting black van on a grey morning. Messina Denaro was putting on a brown leather-based jacket trimmed in shearling and a matching white-and-brown cranium cap and his trademark tinted eyeglasses. His confront appeared wan and he seemed straight in advance. He was taken to a mystery locale by police straight away just after the arrest, Italian point out tv noted.
A youthful man when he went into hiding, he is now 60. Messina Denaro, who experienced a energy base in the port city of Trapani, in western Sicily, was thought of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra prime manager even when a fugitive.
He was the previous of a few longtime fugitive top-degree Mafia bosses who had for many years eluded seize, and hundreds of law enforcement officers in excess of the several years had been tasked with monitoring him down.
Messina Denaro, who was tried out in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, faces several everyday living sentences.
He is set to be imprisoned for two bombings in Sicily in 1992 that murdered top anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Falcone’s spouse and several of their bodyguards. Amid other grisly crimes he was convicted of is the murder of a Mafia turncoat’s younger son, who was abducted and strangled before his human body was dissolved in a vat of acid.
The arrest Monday arrived 30 years and a working day after the Jan. 15, 1993, capture of convicted “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, in a Palermo condominium soon after 23 several years on the operate. Messina Denaro went into hiding in summer of that exact same year, as the Italian point out stiffened its crackdown on the Sicilian criminal offense syndicate following the murders of Falcone and Borsellino.
Italian Leading Giorgia Meloni tweeted that Messina Denaro’s seize is a “great victory of the state, which exhibits that it does not surrender in the facial area of the Mafia.”
Italy’s Mafia manager who set the history for the longest time on the lam was Bernardo Provenzano, captured in a farmhouse in the vicinity of Corleone, Sicily, in 2006 following 38 years as a fugitive. The moment Provenzano was in law enforcement palms, the hunt concentrated on Messina Denaro, but even with quite a few noted sightings of the boss, he managed to elude arrest, right until Monday.
That all three top bosses were in the long run arrested in the heart of Sicily even though they carried out a long time of a clandestine daily life will not shock Italy’s law enforcement and prosecutors. Legislation enforcement have prolonged reported that these bosses count on contacts and confidentiality of fellow mobsters and complicit loved ones users to transfer the fugitives from hideout to hideout, offer primary requirements, like meals and thoroughly clean outfits and conversation, and a code of silence recognized as “omerta’.”
Riina and Provenzano lived out the previous yrs of their everyday living in the strictest of Italian prison situations reserved for unrepentant arranged criminal offense bosses and refused to cooperate with investigators.
Messina Denaro was considered to have relished a extra at ease life-style in his many years hiding from police, leaving some to speculate no matter if he could concur to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for far more lenient jail problems.
Throughout his yrs on the run, he had a collection of fans and passed time by participating in video game titles, according to Italian media studies.
1 of his girlfriends was arrested and convicted of having hidden him for a time when he was a fugitive. But though he experienced a weak spot for women of all ages, Messina Denaro could be cruel, strangling a lady even though she was expecting, according to Italian media.
Correct just after he went into hiding, Messina Denaro sent a letter to his then girlfriend, declaring, “You can hear talk about me, they will paint me like the satan, but it really is all falsehoods,” ANSA quoted the letter as stating.
Cautious of staying tracked down by cellphone use, Mafia bosses regularly vacation resort to handwritten notes acknowledged as “pizzini.” When Provenzano was nabbed in his rustic, practically primitive, hideaway in the countryside, law enforcement identified a stash of these kinds of notes.
With the crackdown that started in the 1990s versus Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the island’s mafiosi began shedding their dominance in Italy in contrast to other arranged criminal offense syndicates.
Though the Sicilian Mafia was drastically weakened by a little military of turncoats, on the mainland, the ‘ndrangheta syndicate, centered in the “toe” of the Italian peninsula, steadily eclipsed Cosa Nostra in attain and influence. Not like Sicily’s criminal offense syndicates, the ‘ndrangheta attracts its footsoldiers centered on household ties, leaving it a lot less susceptible to turncoats. The ’ndrangheta is now one of the world’s most highly effective cocaine traffickers.
But the Sicilian Mafia nonetheless operates drug trafficking operations. Other lucrative illicit corporations consist of infiltration of public performs contracts and extortion of compact small business entrepreneurs who are threatened if they don’t frequently spend “protection cash.”
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