Caught after 30 years as a fugitive, Matteo Messina Denaro died on Monday without revealing his secrets. He had been suffering from colon cancer for some time and, in fact, he was arrested at the beginning of the year in a private clinic in Palermo, where he underwent chemotherapy under a false identity. Since then, investigators had wanted him to explain the information he had, starting with the so-called file of Totò Riina, the great mob boss of Cosa Nostra, which the disciple allegedly managed to hide after his arrest three decades ago, but he has taken it to the grave. He died quietly at the age of 61 in the area for detainees of the San Salvatore hospital in L’Aquila.
In extremis, however, the Italian State won the battle at the last moment. Messina Denaro’s dream was to die a fugitive like his father, Francesco, or Don Ciccio, a boss from Castelvetrano, his town in Sicily, who died in 1998 in a call and search. His son, Matteo, who every year published a tribute to him in Il Giornale de Sicilia, would have wanted to run the same fate, but in January they found his hiding place. “You caught me because of the disease, without it you wouldn’t have done it”, he said, in a provocative tone, to the prosecutors in Palermo when they questioned him in February.
The figure of Messina Denaro is of great importance. Several life sentences for dozens of murders and the 1992 attacks that ended the lives of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, of which he was the mastermind, weighed heavily on him.
The mobster had lost track of him in the summer of 1993, after the mafia massacres in Rome, Milan and Florence. “He probably won’t talk, but he might know some important things. For example, who indicated the objectives of the killings in 1993″, explained prosecutor De Lucia in an interview with this newspaper.
After a summer in Forte dei Marmi, Messina Denaro wrote a letter to his girlfriend at the time to announce his new life in the shadows: “You will hear things about me and paint me as a demon, but they are all falsehoods”, he announced.
He was from Castelvetrano, in the province of Trapani, but he was considered the last member of the Corleonesos, the most bloodthirsty clan of the Cosa Nostra, of which he moved the threads from the hiding place since the arrest of the great bosses Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, according to the pizzini, the pieces of paper used to send messages. Like them, he managed to escape for decades. Riina was a fugitive for 23 years and Provenzano, 38. He was, therefore, the last major representative of that terrorist mafia that challenged the State. He was also considered guilty of about fifty homicides, including that of little Giuseppe Di Matteo, son of the pentito (collaborator of justice) Santino Di Matteo, an eleven-year-old boy who was kidnapped for two years between Palermo and Agrigento to try to get his father to retract what he had told a prosecutor. Then, they decided to dismember him and dispose of the corpse with acid.
“I could make a cemetery with the people I’ve killed,” Messina Denaro told a friend. Among the victims, there is also Antonella Bonomo, the partner of the boss Vincenzo Milazzo, stabbed when she was three months pregnant. They called him U’Siccu (the dry one) or Diabolik, after his favorite comic, which is why he had two machine guns installed on the hood of his Alfa Romeo. At 14 he already knew how to shoot and at 20 he was among Riina’s minions. He did not imitate him in everything. When he had free rein, and with a flair for business, he decided that Cosa Nostra would go back to its roots and quietly control the territory, and make a lot of money. They linked him to the wind energy sector in Sicily, to real estate and to betting.
They found the most wanted mobster hiding in Campobello di Mazara, a small Sicilian town less than ten kilometers from Castelvetrano, his hometown, where he lived a normal life, going to bars, restaurants or the supermarket, without any neighbors never sees her
Like Riina and Provenzano, he never strayed far from his home, protected by the omertà of the territory and by a network of friends and family. He was even able to go to Barcelona in 1994 to undergo surgery at the Barraquer clinic for the strabismus he suffered from.
The mobster wrote: “God will be my justice, my forgiveness, my spirituality”.
