The blitz that a few days ago in Holland put the Italian National Anti-Mafia Directorate in great embarrassment stems from an almost natural state of mind in the investigators: it is called obsession. And it has become such simply because a little less than 30 years have passed since Matteo Messina Denaro, 59, the last boss of “Cosa Nostra”, lost his tracks. For this reason, the Trento Public Prosecutor's Office, which was following an investigation into international money laundering, gave the green light to the operation to capture the most wanted man in Europe who was sitting - according to investigators - at a table in the Het Pleidooi restaurant in the center of the Hague. The prosecutor Sandro Raimondi was certain, given the information provided by the Guardia di Finanza, that the man was Messina Denaro. And not an Englishman from Liverpool in the Netherlands to attend the Formula One Grand Prix in the company of his son and a friend. This will be discovered only later, in the meantime, the unfortunate citizen of the Channel will end up in prison for a few days until the DNA examination and confirmation of the sensational error. And in Italy, on the other hand, the prosecutors of Trento and Palermo (kept in the dark about the operation despite being engaged for years in the search for the "red primrose" of Castelvetrano) exchange not very delicate emails. Inevitable consequence of a sort of frenzy and frenzy, also, in wanting to arrive before the others, as if the capture of a dangerous fugitive were a sports competition.
It's true, Matteo Messina Denaro is not just anyone. His long inaction, which began exactly in 1993, has already surpassed the noteworthy one of Totò Riina (1969/1993) but is still far from Bernardo Provenzano's record (1963/2006). These are details that matter little to the "godfather", born three decades later of the two Corleonesi and who, being of a different generation, does not have much in common with them. Certainly, the convictions speak, he just shared the cruelty - and some sentences to life imprisonment -, having participated in the massacres of Capaci and via D'Amelio, in which the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and the men of the escort died, as well as the attacks in northern Italy in 1993.
