Italy’s most wanted mafia gangster Matteo Messina Denaro is arrested after 30 years on the run in Sicily

Italy’s most wanted mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro was arrested today after 30 years on the run in his native Sicily.

Italian police rushed to a private hospital in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, where Messina Denaro had been treated for an unknown illness, and arrested him.

Messina Denaro, now 60, was taken to an undisclosed location by police immediately after his arrest.

Denaro was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for his involvement in the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. He also faces a life sentence for his role in bombings in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed ten people the following year.

Matteo Denaro, right, is seen in a car filled with Italian Carabinieri officers shortly after his arrest at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, after 30 years on the run

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hailed the arrest as “a major victory for the state that shows it never gives up in the face of the Mafia”.

The mafia boss, who has not been seen in decades after going into hiding, was pictured wearing sunglasses and a woolly heat while sitting in the back of a car surrounded by Italian paramilitary police officers after his arrest.

Even as a refugee, Messina Denaro, who had a power base in western Sicily, was considered the supreme boss of the Cosa Nostra in Sicily.

Police said in September 2022 that despite his long disappearance, Messina Denaro was still able to give orders regarding the way the mafia was being run in the area around the western Sicilian city of Trapani, its regional stronghold .

Messina Denaro, who comes from the small town of Castelvetrano near Trapani, is accused by prosecutors of being solely or jointly responsible for numerous other murders in the 1990s.

Denaro hasn’t been seen in public since the early ’90s, but a new E-Fit was created in 2014 with the help of another whistleblower.

Italy’s most wanted mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has been arrested in his native Sicily after 30 years on the run. Pictured: A composite image showing a computer generated image released by Italian police, right, and an image of mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro

He is wanted for a range of offenses and a judge found him guilty in absentia in 1993 for his part in the bombings that killed 10 people in Rome, Florence and Milan.

In 1993, he helped organize the kidnapping of a 12-year-old boy, Giuseppe Di Matteo, to dissuade his father from testifying against the Mafia, prosecutors say.

The boy was held captive for two years before he was strangled and his body dissolved in acid.

Denaro also used a five-year-old girl to pass secret handwritten messages between him and other Mafia top dogs.

Denaro used mafia whistleblower Attilio Fogazza’s baby daughter to manage the memos.

Fogazza, himself charged with murder, said in 2016 that Denaro’s deputy, Domenico “Mimmo” Scimonelli, reached out to his daughter to broadcast the messages.

The man on the right had taken his daughter out for ice cream and put the messages in her jacket and backpack.

The daughter and the rest of Fogazza’s family live in a secret location under police protection while he works with prosecutors trying to bring down the “boss of bosses” in the Italian mafia scene.

Fogazza ran a car dealership in southwest Sicily and decided to work with Palermo investigators after he was arrested last December in the 2009 murder of Salvatore Lombardo, who was killed after stealing a van from Scimonelli.

“One day my daughter said ‘Uncle Mimmo’ took her to an ice cream and put the news in her jacket and backpack,” Fogazza said, according to Italian media reports from the public prosecutor’s office in Palermo.

This is breaking news, more to come…