‘Last godfather,’ who said he ‘filled a cemetery,’ dies

Matteo Messina Denaro, known in the Italian press as “the last godfather” of the Cosa Nostra, died Monday under police guard at a hospital. He was 61.

Denaro died from colon cancer, which he had been battling for years. His diagnosis led directly to his capture in January. Denaro went into a coma on Friday and was declared dead Monday at 2 a.m., doctors said.

“You should not deny prayers to anyone, but I can’t say I am sorry,” Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini wrote on Instagram.

Denaro had been fighting cancer for many years and was under a robust police guard at the hospital where he lived his final days. Prosecutors in Sicily still requested an autopsy to confirm his cause of death.

Police obtained no information about the Mafia from Denaro in the nine months he was behind bars, according to Italian media reports, which said “he took with him his secrets.”

Denaro had been on the lam for 30 years and became Italy’s most-wanted mob boss in 2006, following the capture of Bernardo Provenzano, another Mafia leader.

Police tied Denaro to more than 20 deaths. He once boasted, “I filled a cemetery, all by myself.” Denaro was most notorious for two 1992 bombings that killed Italy’s top Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Those bombings prompted a nationwide crackdown on the mob, resulting in the Jan. 15, 1993, capture of Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the “boss of bosses” at the time. Denaro went into hiding months later, communicating only via coded, handwritten messages.

But before he disappeared, Denaro also helped orchestrate bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan that killed 10 people. He was tried in absentia for a series of crimes, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Decades later, investigators figured out that the crime boss was receiving treatment for colon cancer under a fake name at a private hospital in Palermo. They staked out his appointment on Jan. 16, and arrested him. His treatment continued in a prison medical facility and later under heavy police guard at a hospital.

“We have captured the last of the massacre masterminds,” Palermo’s chief prosecutor, Maurizio De Lucia, said at the time.

Denaro’s daughter, whom he met for the first time only after his capture, was reportedly at his bedside during his last days.