How the police managed to catch Matteo Messina, the most wanted mafia boss in Italy who was a fugitive for 30 years

Italy’s most-wanted mobster was heading to a cafe across from a Sicilian private clinic when a policeman approached him and asked his name.

He didn’t lie.

He just looked up and said, “You know who I am. Am Matteo Messina Denaro”.

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Until that moment, the agents were not sure that this man was really “the boss of all bosses” of the mafia, whom they had been persecuting for three decades.

Your fake identity

I had an appointment at the clinic under the name Andrea Bonafede.

After years of painstaking investigation, and with only a robot portrait of his face, Italy’s Carabinieri – military police – finally knew he was the one they were looking for.

The mob boss, in a mugshot. (GETTY IMAGES).

As the leader of the Cosa Nostra mafia syndicate, Messina Denaro directed organized crime activities, including illegal dumping, money laundering, and drug trafficking.

It was convicted in absentia in 2002 for a series of murders.

According to reports, he was the protégé of Totò Riina, the head of the Corleone clan who, after 23 years on the run, was arrested in 1993.

That was also the year that Messina Denaro disappeared.

almost impossible to locate

To identify him, for 30 years researchers had only a computer-made portrait and short fragments of voice recordings.

The alleged sightings received by the police located him everywhere, from Venezuela to the Netherlands.

But it was in Palermo, in the heart of his homeland of Sicily, that he was caught.

“It took so long to arrest him because, like other mob bosses, was protected by a very dense network of accomplicesdeeply rooted and extremely powerful in Sicily and beyond,” Italian journalist Andrea Purgatori told the BBC.

Police tip or cunning?

Many assumed Monday’s arrest was the result of a tip-off by Messina Denaro’s own associates, who decided the ailing boss was no longer useful to them.

After all, Italy’s most wanted mobster had long felt safe enough “to walk freely through the streets of Palermothe moral capital of Cosa Nostra,” said Purgatori.

The news of his arrest was quite a bomb in Italy. (GETTY IMAGES).

In the end they found him in the center of a busy city; not a hidden place at all. After 30 years of searching, what finally led the authorities to him?

At a press conference, police dismissed the theory as a tip-off. Instead, they claimed to have combined old school research methods with modern technology to reduce the number of suspects.

“Over the years a kind of smokescreen has formed around Messina Denaro, made up of a network of people loyal to him,” said Mitja Gialuz, a lawyer and professor of criminal procedure at LUISS University in Rome.

years of harassment

For more than a decade, police cracked down on anyone suspected of protecting or helping Messina Denaro.

they arrested more than 100 peopleincluding Denaro’s brothers, and businesses worth more than 150 million euros ($161 million) were seized.

“This gradually weakened his network and ultimately made him more vulnerable,” General Teo Luzi said.

The smokescreen had begun to clear.

Your cancer, the key to finding it

In parallel, the houses of the relatives of Messina Denaro were intervened with microphones.

They probably knew their conversations were being eavesdropped, so they only talked about “people with cancer” and “cancer surgeries” in generic terms.

That, however, was enough to alert investigators, given the ongoing rumors that Messina Denaro was ill.

This surveillance, together with the follow-up of the internet searches about Crohn’s disease and liver cancer of Messina Denaro’s associates, led the Carabinieri to assume that the mob boss was seeking treatment.

They then gathered the details of all the male cancer patients born in 1962 near Trapani in western Sicily.

After studying their lives, investigators narrowed the search to 10 suspects and then to 5.

One name stood out: andrea bonafedenephew of the late mob boss Leonardo Bonafede.

According to records, a man identified as Andrea Bonafede underwent two surgeries in Palermo in 2020 and 2021.

But the trace placed the phone of the real Bonafede far from the Sicilian capital on one of the two days in which he apparently underwent surgery.

When a chemotherapy session was booked in his name, the Carabinieri knew it was their chance.

Monday morning over 100 members of the security forces surrounded the La Maddalena clinic.

The time of arrest

Messina, in the police vehicle after being arrested. (GETTY IMAGES).

Messina Denaro was walking towards a coffee shop when she noticed the heavy police presence.

He made to turn around, but saw more policemen closing the street. did not run. Maybe she knew it was only a matter of time.

One of the agents, Colonel Lucio Arcidiacono, told TGcom24 that he had been chasing Messina Denaro for eight years and that he “felt a wave of emotion” when he saw him in person.

“It was him, the man in the photographs that I had seen so many times.”

The mob boss, reportedly “polite and soft-spoken”, was taken to a nearby airport and transferred overnight by military plane to a high-security prison in L’Aquila, in the central Abruzzo region.

Right after his arrest, Messina was taken to the Boccadifalco military airport. (GETTY IMAGES).

How he lived in hiding

Details of how Messina Denaro lived before her arrest are now beginning to emerge. He resided in a house without too many pretensions in Campobello di Mazara, 116 km from Palermo and only 8 km from his birthplace, Castelvetrano.

A neighbor told Italian television that he saw the man frequently and that they greeted each other regularly.

The police found no weapons in his hideout, where there were luxury perfumes, expensive furniture and designer clothesaccording to initial reports.

Messina Denaro’s taste for high-end items was well known. When he was arrested, he was reportedly wearing a watch valued at 35,000 euros (US$37,000). Police revealed that he did not appear to be a “broken man” but rather “well-groomed and in good financial condition.”

Despite being a source of frustration for authorities and the families of his victims, the long delay in catching Messina Denaro fueled his myth, Professor Gialuz said.

“Of course, he was forced to live extremely cautiously and had to time every move to perfection.”

Although his associates’ internet searches may have contributed to Messina Denaro’s arrest, it is unlikely that the boss himself ever used technology because of the risk of leaving digital traces.

“A mafia kingpin, in order to continue to operate undisturbed, must stay away from technology and lead an almost primitive lifegoing back to the roots of verbal communication and creating a parallel and sophisticated secret code of communication with their allies,” explained Professor Gialuz.

One of the bloodiest gangsters

His arrest has surprised the Italians. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni flew directly to Sicily to congratulate the security forces, while praise poured in from all sides of the political spectrum.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni did not hide her satisfaction after the arrest. (GETTY IMAGES).

“Messina Denaro was the last godfather of the toughest generation of mafiosi. After going underground, Cosa Nostra completely changed its attitude, becoming an organization hidden, quieter and almost invisible“, explained to the BBC the journalist Andrea Purgatori.

The mobster once boasted that he could fill a cemetery with his victims.

Purgatori recalled that until the 1990s, murders were committed on a daily basis.

“Messina Denaro perpetrated some of the most violent and cruel crimes that Italy can remember,” he said.

In 2002 he was tried in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment. His crimes include:

University of Essex criminology professor Anna Sergi told the BBC it was doubtful the Cosa Nostra could survive without its mythical boss, who had become a symbol of the mafia’s resilience.

“Who will take over, or if anyone can, remains to be seen,” he said.

Source: Elcomercio