Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro is in a maximum security prison in the Italian city of L’Aquila, after being arrested this Monday in Palermo, police sources reported today.
Messina Denaro faces several life sentences for his role in dozens of murders, including those of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 and that of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a mobster turned state witness and who was strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996.
After being detained at a Palermo clinic on Monday, the mafia boss was transferred to a prison in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, with authorities considering it unlikely that he would return to his homeland in Sicily.
In the last few hours, the house that served as Denaro’s hideout, in Campobello di Mazara, was thoroughly searched in an operation supervised by Palermo’s deputy chief prosecutor, Paolo Guido, who has been investigating the mafia boss for several years.
L’Aquila Prison was chosen because it is a maximum security facility equipped for the harsh prison regime to which Mafia prisoners are subjected, as well as because there is a good cancer center in the city hospital.
The 60-year-old mafia boss was detained at a clinic where he had been treated for cancer for more than a year.
Source: TSF
