Sicilian Mafia's ‘Boss of Bosses’ Arrested After 30 Years on the Run

Matteo Messina Denaro, Italy’s most wanted mafia boss, has been arrested in Sicily after 30 years on the run. 

Denaro, the 60 year old head of the Sicilian mafia the Cosa Nostra, who once claimed “I filled a cemetery, all by myself”, was caught in a clinic in Palermo on Monday. 

Nicknamed “Diabolik”, he was wanted for his role in a catalogue of brutal murders and bombings in Sicily in the early 1990s for which he was later sentenced in absentia to multiple life terms. 

These included the notorious car bombing of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, a bomb attack on Florence’s Uffizi gallery as well as other blasts in Rome and Milan which killed 10 people and left 93 injured in 1993 and the kidnap, strangling and dissolving in acid of 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo, the son of a state witness the same year. He was also wanted for 50 other murders. 

The violent campaign against the Italian state was sparked by the arrest of mafia boss Salvatore Riina and stricter prison conditions for mafia gangsters.  

“This is a very important arrest at a psychological level for Italy because Matteo Denario is the Sicilian mafia’s most prominent fugitive,” Federico Varese, Professor of Criminology at Oxford University, told VICE World News. 

As military police led Denaro out of the clinic where he was being treated for an unknown illness, there was cheering in the streets. 

“This clapping shows that not everyone in Palermo supports the mafia, quite the contrary,” said Varese. “He’s been convicted for very heinous crimes, very violent crimes, so it's a great success for the Italian state that he's finally in custody. He was the only big Sicilian mafia boss left to be caught.” 

Varese said the Sicilian mafia had been in “significant decline” as a significant global player over the last three decades because it has been edged out of the lucrative international drug trade by the Calabrian mafia. But it has not disappeared. “The Cosa Nostra is still rooted in neighbourhoods in western Sicily,  where not everyone would be clapping.It is not just a criminal organisation, it’s an organisation which exists for deep-rooted political, social and economic reasons. These have to be addressed to get rid of the mafia forever.”

According to Varese, Denaro, born in Castelvetrano, Sicily in 1962, is an “old style, reserved mafia boss, incredibly ruthless and violent, who has been very loyal to the Cosa Nostra”. It was no surprise he was caught in a hospital, rather than driving a Ferrari or on a flashy holiday in Dubai, said Varese. 

Photographed on a 2001 cover of Italian magazine L'Espresso under the headline: "Here is the new head of the Mafia", Denaro is thought to have become capo de capo (boss of bosses) of the Cosa Nostra following the jailing of mob bosses Bernardo Provenzano and Salvatore Lo Piccolo in the late 2000s. 

In 2021, a 54-year old British man from Liverpool identified as Mark L was arrested while having dinner with his son in a restaurant in the Hague, Netherlands after being mistaken for Denaro. 

“Messina Denaro is the essence of the great historical power of the Cosa Nostra,” said mafia expert Anna Sergi, a criminology and organised crime professor at the University of Essex. “He was the messiah and the cult leader of the group. He is the last one, the most resilient one, the purest Sicilian mafioso remaining. This arrest means closure for Italy.”