Messina Denaro, the fugitive and the capture: «If it hadn't been for the illness you would never have caught me»

Matteo Messina Denaro , the last superboss of Cosa Nostra, has died at the age of 61, the Cosa Nostra which in the 1980s and 1990s had started a real, bloody war against the Italian state.

Suffering from cancer, he was hospitalized in L'Aquila, in the inmate wing of the hospital, heavily armored by the police, in an irreversible coma for days.

The end of a life devoted to the mafia cause.

After the arrest of the Chief of Chiefs Totò Riina, “u Siccu” (his nickname, together with that of Diabolik) went into hiding.

And he remained a fugitive for about thirty years, until January 16, 2023 , when the carabinieri finally managed to capture him, in Palermo . What made him reveal his side, after having been protected by a close network of friends, relatives and accomplices, was the treatment and treatment for colon cancer , the very thing which, as it worsened, led to his death.

“If it hadn't been for the illness you would never have caught me,” he would have told investigators after the arrest which took place in front of a private clinic in Palermo.

Since his arrest, the godfather has been questioned several times by the Palermo prosecutors, specifying, from the first meeting, that he would never collaborate with justice.

With him goes the last of the powerful godfathers of the massacre mafia who declared war on the Republic and who sacrificed Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino and many other servants of the country and men and women of the institutions on the altar of their own brutal violence and their own interests .

Born in 1962 in Castelvetrano (Trapani) , MMD was considered the heir of Bernardo Provenzano.

Over the years he has been followed by a myriad of arrest warrants and life sentences for mafia association, murders, attacks, possession and transportation of explosives. In the most serious criminal acts carried out by the Cupola, starting with the massacres of '92 in which Falcone and Borsellino were killed, his hand was recognised. He himself, moreover, boasted of having "killed so many people to fill a cemetery".

(Unioneonline/lf)