Mafioso spent nearly 30 years on the run
Mafia leader Matteo Messina Denaro, a Cosa Nostra boss who spent nearly 30 years on the run, has died at the age of 61 in a hospital in L’Aquila, central Italy.
The death was announced in the early hours of Monday (25), Sunday night in Brazil, and marks the end of an era for the powerful Sicilian mafia.
Messina Denaro had been fighting colon cancer for three years and had been hospitalized since August, surrounded by tight security. Last Friday (22), doctors declared that he had entered an irreversible coma.
On the basis of the living will left by the Cosa Nostra boss, the hospital suspended intravenous nutrition, since he had expressed his opposition to the therapeutic insistence when there was no longer any possibility of reversing the situation.
The “godfather” has undergone four surgeries and several cycles of chemotherapy since 2020, when he was still at large. Last January he was arrested in a private hospital in Palermo, Sicily, where he was being treated under a false name.
Shortly after his capture, the doctors at the maximum security penitentiary in L’Aquila where Messina Denaro had been taken found that his health conditions were serious. Initially, the mafia member underwent chemotherapy sessions in prison, in a cell equipped with an infirmary, while he served his life sentence in total isolation for mafia association, murders, attacks and possession and transportation of explosives.
In August his condition worsened and he was taken to hospital, from where he would not emerge alive. Before losing consciousness, he recognized his paternity and gave the surname to his daughter Lorenza, born during his period of hiding.
The heiress of the former most wanted man in Italy spent her last days at her father’s bedside, as did her niece Lorenza Guttadauro, the mafioso’s lawyer.
Messina Denaro was seen as the last representative of the Cosa Nostra “era of massacres”, a period between the late 1980s and early 1990s in which the Mafia committed attacks in major Italian cities. Two of them, both in 1992, cost the lives of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
The mafia leader was considered the “boss of bosses” of Cosa Nostra since the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano (1933-2016), successor of the bloodthirsty Salvatore “Totò” Riina (1930-2017), in 2006. Messina Denaro was in between 1993 and January 2023, he tried to remove the Sicilian mafia from the spotlight, also diversifying investments to launder money from criminal activities.
Furthermore, he became known for his womanizing and playboy style, with a penchant for luxury brands, and for his cruelty towards enemies. He boasted of having killed enough people to “fill a cemetery”, but investigators believe that he never managed to rebuild the unitary structure of Cosa Nostra, which fragmented after the era of the massacres.
Messina Denaro will have to be buried in the family tomb in Castelvetrano, Sicily, after a secular funeral, a wish left in writing by the leader of Cosa Nostra. .
Source: Terra
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