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.
Then "u siccu" (the skinny), so Matteo Messina Denaro has been nicknamed since he was a boy, he was 30 years old and was a young picciotto on the rise in the criminal hierarchy. Son of Don Ciccio, fugitive chief of Castelvetrano - killed by a heart attack in 1998 and found in the countryside - Matteo had come into the graces of the "chief of chiefs", that Totò Riina who had glimpsed in him intelligence and practical sense. So much so that "zu Totò", intercepted in prison, called him "the businessman" with almost contemptuous tones because he mainly dealt with his interests and cared little for the prisoners.
In fact, Riina's definition was not wrong. Messina Denaro, also here are the inquiries that speak, has invested several million euros in alternative energy (a plant attributable to him had been seized in Ploaghe) by making the companies registered to various figureheads, in particular to Vito Nicastri, an entrepreneur from Alcamo known as the "king of wind power". Thanks to him, “u siccu” has been able to take advantage of hundreds and hundreds of millions, mostly coming from European Union funding. But Nicastri, in 2019, was sentenced to nine years in prison and part of his billionaire fortune was seized. Without getting upset, the "lord of the wind" gets in touch with Paolo Arata, former deputy of Forza Italia and now in the League, to pick up the thread of the energy discourse through politics (there is an ongoing investigation).
In any case, what strikes Matteo Messina Denaro is his ability to remain in the shadows. Hunted for several years, with supporters, relatives and friends who ended up in prison for aiding and abetting, the boss continues to live in freedom, to move in Italy and abroad, but only for a short time. To keep the situation under control you have to stay in Sicily where everyone knows who he is even if very few close friends know his face. His last photograph dates back to when he was twenty. As a free man, the only contact with the police is dated 1988 when he was summoned to the Commissariat of Castelvetrano as a witness to a crime - obviously, he said he had not seen anything -, never an accusation or an investigation into his comparisons. And in 1993, after the attacks on via dei Georgofili in Florence, via Palestro in Milan, San Giorgio al Velabro and San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, which caused the death of ten people, "u siccu" disappeared.
