Fugitive mafia don caught after police overheard family talking about his cancer care

ITALY’S most wanted man readily admitted his identity to police when they finally caught up with him after 30 years on the run. The authorities tracked him down after intercepting calls between relatives talking about an unnamed family member with cancer.

“You know who I am. I’m Matteo Messina Denaro,” the mafia don told officers from an elite unit when they approached him as he left a private clinic in Palermo, where he was being treated for cancer.

Convicted in absentia of multiple murders, Messina Denaro had been a fugitive since 1993. His capture was the culmination of a hunt lasting years, as police and prosecutors searched for him in Sicily, the home of the Cosa Nostra mafia, and beyond. As they closed in on him, they arrested more than 100 of his alleged associates and seized businesses worth more than €150 million (£131.9 m).

Detectives discovered Messina Denaro by collecting information on all male cancer patients born in the province of Trapani, in western Sicily, in 1962, the year of his birth. They narrowed down the list to a man named Andrea Bonafede, the nephew of a mafia boss. Clinical records suggested he had undergone surgery in Palermo within the past three years, but a check of his phone records revealed that he had been nowhere near the city at the time.

When Messina Denaro turned up at an appointment for chemotherapy treatment, police arrested him. “It was him – the man I had seen so many times in the photographs,” said Colonel Lucio Arcidiacono, one of the officers who led the operation.

Within hours of the arrest, police discovered a secret hideout: an apartment in the town of Campobello di Mazara, five miles from the town of Castelvetrano, where the mafia boss was born.

“The fact that the hideout was a 10-minute drive away from his home town is typical of Cosa Nostra. If a boss wants to retain some control, he has to be on his home territory,” Federico Varese, a professor of criminology at Oxford University, said. “It is very different to British gangsters – they run off to the sunshine. But mafia bosses are very local. And they are not flashy – his hideout was an ordinary apartment.”

During a search, police found Viagra pills, condoms, designer clothes and a well-stocked fridge in the flat, but no weapons.