Yesterday ended the thirty-year escape of the boss of the Cosa Nostra Mafia Matteo Messina Denaro, arrested by the carabinieri of the ROS in the private clinic La Maddalena in Palermo, 30 years after that of Totò Riina occurred on January 15, 1993. Despite the difficulties in reconstructing his movements and hiding places, much is known about his life. Denaro, who comes from Castelvetrano in the province of Trapani, was born in 1962 in the family of the local mob boss, Francesco called "Ciccio", who was linked to the Corleone clan of Totò Riina. The family business was mainly concentrated in the construction sector, with a prominent role in the Trapani area. As a young man, Denaro studied in Castelvetrano until he retired from the Ferrigno Technical and Commercial Institute to follow in his father's footsteps.
At just twenty years old, Messina Denaro actively participated, on the side of the Corleone clan, in the war against the rebel families of Marsala and Belize, being noticed by Totò Riina. In 1989 his name appeared for the first time in a file of investigation of Paolo Borsellino. Ironically, Denaro would have a key role, indicating to Riina the targets to be hit in the massacres of 1992 and 1993, from the judges Falcone and Borsellino to Maurizio Costanzo, the latter left unharmed together with his wife Maria De Filippi from an attack in Via Fauro in Rome, on May 14, 1993. It was in 1993 that the escape of the boss began, following the mafia massacres of Rome, Milan and Florence, at the end of a holiday in Forte dei Marmi with his trusted friends Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano. In those days Denaro sent a letter to his girlfriend of the time Angela, announcing the beginning of his life as a fugitive and warning her that she would hear "falsehoods" about him.
Under the nickname of “U siccu” (the skinny one) or Diabolik, the boss was sentenced to life in prison for dozens of murders, including that of Giuseppe Di Matteo, who was only 12 years old and kidnapped to force his father Santino to retract his revelations about the Capaci massacre. His nickname, Diabolik, is part of the stories about his tastes that have fostered the mystery: he was in fact a greedy comic book reader, lover of video games, Porsche and golden Rolex. The arrest of Denaro concerns one of the main figures of the Cosa Nostra Mafia after the arrest of Riina, representing the new wave of mobsters also dedicated to business activities.
Of his private life, however, he is known not to be married but to have a daughter, whom he had in 1996 with Franca Alagna, a woman from Castelvetrano. Next to him, his sister Patrizia has always played an important role: in 2018 she was sentenced to 14 years in prison for mafia association, for carrying and receiving messages from and for her brother. The messages were known as "pizzini", or notes used to give orders as an alternative to phones, which were more easily traceable. In the cemetery where there is the grave of his father "Ciccio" (who died of a heart attack in 1998), the cameras have never seen Messina Denaro. His capture adds to the operations of arrest of the greatest mafia fugitives, as in the case of Totò Riina after 23 years of pursuit and that of Bernardo Provenzano, who fled for 38 years. Until now Denaro had never been in prison; finally it is possible to give a face to a man whose last images date back to the 90s.
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