Italy ramps up search for mafia godfather

Italian police arrested the closest aides of Cosa Nostra kingpin Matteo Messina Denaro on Thursday, clamping down on a tightknit, familyrun clan which has kept the mobster safely hidden over a quarter of a century on the run.

Twenty-one people were arrested in towns near the Sicilian city of Trapani where Denaro’s criminal empire is based, as part of the “Year Zero” police investigation that allowed authorities to uncover a system of paper notes, or “pizzini”, that Denaro uses to give orders to his most faithful associates.

Those include brothers-in-law Gaspare Como and Rosario Allegra, both in custody, who allegedly manage their boss’s most important affairs.

“THE TRAPANI MAIA Is (securely) In the hands of fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro and we can say that because its most important members are his own family,” said Pasquale Angelosanto, head of the Italian carabinieri’s ROS special investigative unit.

Angelosanto was speaking at a press conference in Sicilian capital Palermo.

Palermo’s assistant public prosecutor Paolo Guido said that six of the accused were local MAIA Bosses.

Denaro, now 55, vanished in 1993, with the police seeking his arrest on a range of crimes including dozens of murders, and authorities say he has evaded justice by being more “mobile” than others on the lam, who tend to hunker down in hideouts.

“It would be pointless to say we’re closing in on him. He’s a different type of fugitive to the other big targets, who’ve all been arrested, and that means locating his whereabouts is particularly hard,” said Palermo prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi.

Police also arrested a businessman involved in the online gambling industry, one of Denaro’s suspected income sources.

Police told reporters that despite reports of Cosa Nostra’s decline, the Trapani branch was “particularly lively and active in control of the area” and operating In THE longstanding MAIA industries of extorsion, property fraud and clinching public works contracts.

Police told AFP that the gang used people apparently above suspicion to take part in judicial auctions to buy seized assets cheaply and sell them on At A proit.

POLICE Also Conirmed THE EXISTENCE of a wiretapped recording of one of those arrested on Thursday praising the notorious January 1996 murder and dissolving in acid of 14-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo.