Italian police discovered on the night of Monday to Tuesday the small anonymous building in a Sicilian town where Italy’s most wanted mafia godfather Matteo Messina Denaro was hiding, arrested Monday in Palermo after 30 years on the run. The stash of Matteo Messina Denaro, 60, was in Campobello di Mazara, a small town of 10,000 not far from his stronghold of Castelvetrano in the Trapani province, where he was born and raised.
Police raided the small, yellow-painted two-story apartment building. The apartment where the godfather would have stayed for a long time has been sealed. Inside, the investigators did not find weapons, but perfumes and luxury clothing. The small building is under permanent police surveillance that prevents anyone from approaching. Contacted by AFP, the carabinieri refused to give details.
Sent to a high security prison.
Matteo Messina Denaro was transferred on Monday night aboard a military helicopter to Abruzzo, a region east of Rome overlooking the Adriatic Sea, where according to the media he is to be imprisoned in a high-security prison, probably in the town of L’Aquila.
The journey of Matteo Messina Denaro, a cruel assassin at the helm of an important financial network, follows in the footsteps of the great historical leaders of Cosa Nostra, Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, who died in prison in 2017 and 2016 respectively.
It benefited from “significant protections”
He was arrested Monday morning outside of a medical visit to the La Maddalena clinic in Palermo, a well-known facility where he was treated, under a fictitious name, for colon cancer. He was very well dressed and wore a luxury watch valued between 30 and 35,000 euros. During his career, “he benefited from significant protections and the investigation is focused on these protections,” Palermo chief prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia said during a press conference Monday night.
The investigation will have to determine if “the last godfather of the Corleone clan” – a clan made famous in the cinema for The Godfather – you stayed on the island during your entire stay or if you also stayed abroad. In the list drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior of the six most wanted criminals in Italy, Matteo Messina Denaro, born in April 1962, ranked first.
He had been sentenced in absentia in 2000 to life imprisonment for murder, and in 2020 for the attack on anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, assassinated by order of Cosa Nostra in 1992. Matteo Messina Denaro is one of the last great figures of Cosa. Nostra, largely decimated by the incessant operations of the state after the murder of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Source: BFM TV
