Italian police arrest fugitive Mafia boss at Sicilian clinic
ROME — Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, a Mafia boss convicted of helping to mastermind some of the nation’s most heinous slayings, was arrested Monday when he sought treatment at a private clinic in Sicily after three decades on the run.
Matteo Messina Denaro was tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, including helping to mastermind, along with other Cosa Nostra bosses, a pair of 1992 bombings that killed top anti-Mafia prosecutors — and led the Italian state to stiffen its crackdown on the Sicilian crime syndicate.
He faces multiple life sentences that he is expected to serve in a maximum security prison and under restrictive conditions reserved for top organized crime bosses.
Hundreds of police officers were tasked over the years with tracking him, the last of three longtime top-level Mafia bosses who managed to elude capture for decades.
He is now 60, and his health condition helped investigators zero in on him, according to Carabinieri Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, who heads the police force’s special operations squad.
“It all led to today’s date (when) he would have come for some tests and treatment” at the clinic, the Carabinieri general said.
Authorities did not say what he was being treated for, but he was captured at La Maddalena clinic in Palermo, an upscale medical facility with a reputation for treating cancer patients, and Italian media said he was undergoing treatment for a year.
Authorities said Messina Denaro’s treatment could continue at a hospital prison ward.
Investigators said he was unarmed and dressed like a typical patient at the clinic, though wearing a watch worth about $33,000.
“He didn’t resist at all,” Carabinieri Col. Lucio Arcidiacono told reporters.
When dozens of police officers, wearing ski masks, converged on the clinic, local residents knew something big was about to happen. When Messina Denaro was brought outside, applause rang out on the sidewalks.
Palermo Chief Prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia told reporters that the fugitive had used the pseudonym Andrea Bonafede and had an Italian identity card in that name. He used the alias — the surname roughly means “good faith” in Italian — to book a morning appointment at the clinic.
In addition to convictions for the killings of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, he was also found guilty of killing Falcone’s wife and several of their bodyguards as well as the grisly murder of a Mafia turncoat’s young son, who was abducted and strangled before his body was dissolved in a vat of acid.
He also was among Cosa Nostra bosses convicted of ordering a series of bombings in 1993 that caused fatalities and damaged the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, two major churches in Rome and an art gallery in Milan.
“We captured the last of the massacre masterminds” of the 1992-1993 Mafia killings, prosecutor De Lucia said. “It was a debt that the Republic owed to the victims of those years.”
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni tweeted that Messina Denaro’s capture is a “great victory of the state, which shows that it doesn’t surrender in the face of the Mafia.”
Monday’s arrest came 30 years and a day after the Jan. 15, 1993, capture of Mafia “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, in a Palermo apartment, after 23 years on the run.
The Italian Mafia boss who set the record for the longest time on the lam was Bernardo Provenzano. He was captured in a farmhouse near Corleone, Sicily, in 2006 after 38 years as a fugitive.
During his years on the run, Messina Denaro had a series of lovers, according to Italian media reports. Messina Denaro is believed to have fathered two children while a fugitive.