ROME –
Matteo Messina Denaro, a convicted mastermind of a few of the Sicilian Mafia’s most heinous slayings, died on Monday in a hospital jail ward, a number of months after being captured as Italy’s No. 1 fugitive and following a long time on the run, Italian prosecutors mentioned.
Rai state radio, reporting from L’Aquila hospital in central Italy, mentioned the heavy police element that had been guarding his hospital room moved to the hospital morgue, following the demise of Messina Denaro at about 2 a.m. Medical doctors had mentioned he had been in a coma since Friday.
The transient assertion about his demise from the L’Aquila prosecutors workplace did not cite the time of demise, however mentioned each the workplace and that of prosecutors in Palermo, Sicily, had been requesting an post-mortem, despite the fact that it was well-known that Messina Denaro had been “stricken with a really critical sickness.”
Burial was anticipated to happen later within the week in Sicily, Italian media mentioned.
Reputed by investigators to be one of many Mafia’s strongest bosses, Messina Denaro, 61, had been residing whereas a fugitive in western Sicily, his stronghold, throughout at the very least a lot of his 30 years of eluding regulation enforcement because of the assistance of complicit townspeople. His want for colon most cancers remedy led to his seize on Jan. 16, 2023.
Investigators had been on his path for years and had found proof that he was receiving chemotherapy as an out-patient at a Palermo clinic underneath an alias. Digging into Italy’s nationwide well being system knowledge base, they tracked him down and took him into custody when he confirmed up for a remedy appointment.
His arrest got here 30 years and a day after the Jan. 15, 1993, seize of the Mafia’s “boss of bosses,” Salvatore “Toto” Riina in a Palermo condo, additionally after a long time in hiding. Messina Denaro himself went into hiding later that yr.
Whereas a fugitive, Messina Denaro was tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, together with serving to to plan, together with different Cosa Nostra bosses, a pair of 1992 bombings that killed Italy’s main anti-Mafia prosecutors — Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Prosecutors had hoped in useless he would collaborate with them and reveal Cosa Nostra secrets and techniques. However in response to Italian media reviews, Messina Denaro made clear he would not discuss instantly after seize.
When he died, “he took with him his secrets and techniques” about Cosa Nostra, state radio mentioned.
After his arrest, Messina Denaro started serving a number of life sentences in a top-security jail in L’Aquila, a metropolis in Italy’s central Apennine mountain space, the place he continued to obtain chemotherapy for colon most cancers. However within the final a number of weeks, after present process two surgical procedures and along with his situation worsening, he was transferred to the jail ward of the hospital the place he died.
His silence hewed to the examples of Riina and of the Sicilian Mafia’s different high boss, Bernardo Provenzano, who was captured in a farmhouse in Corleone, Sicily, in 2006, after 37 years in hiding — the longest time on the run for a Mafia boss. As soon as Provenzano was in police palms, the state’s hunt centered on Messina Denaro, who managed to elude arrest regardless of quite a few reported sightings of him.
Dozens of lower-level Mafia bosses and foot troopers did flip state’s proof following a crackdown on the Sicilian syndicate sparked by the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, bombings that additionally killed Falcone’s spouse and several other police bodyguards. Amongst Messina Denaro’s a number of homicide convictions was one for the slaying of the younger son of a turncoat. The boy was kidnapped and strangled and his physique was dissolved in a vat of acid.
Messina Denaro was additionally amongst a number of Cosa Nostra high bosses who had been convicted of ordering a collection of bombings in 1993 that focused two church buildings in Rome, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and an artwork gallery in Milan. A complete of 10 individuals had been killed within the Florence and Milan bombings.
The assaults in these three vacationer cities, in response to turncoats, had been geared toward pressuring the Italian authorities into easing inflexible jail circumstances for convicted mobsters.
When Messina Denaro was arrested, Palermo’s chief prosecutor, Maurizio De Lucia, declared: “We’ve got captured the final of the bloodbath masterminds.”
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D’Emilio reported from Rome.
