Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/ SICILY: Italy’s most-wanted Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has been arrested in Sicily.
The most wanted mobster has been caught on a visit to a clinic after a policeman approached him and asked him his name.
Matteo Messina Denaro did not lie. He simply looked up and asked: “You know who I am. I am Matteo Messina Denaro.” The mobster was heading to a cafe outside a private Sicilian clinic.
According to BBC News, until that moment, the armed forces of Italy were not sure the man really was the Mafia “boss of all bosses”. The forces have had been hunting him for almost 30 years. He had checked for an appointment at the clinic under the name of Andrea Bonafede.
It happened only after years of painstaking search and research, and only a computerised image went on that Carabinieri military police of Italy were sure enough that he was the man they had been looking for since three decades.
During his time while atop the Cosa Nostra organised crime syndicate, Denaro oversaw money-laundering, illegal waste dumping, racketeering besides drug trafficking. He was convicted in absentia in 2002 for a string of murders. Messina Denaro vanished in 1993. For 30 years, the investigators relied only on a facial composite and short voice recordings to trace him.
Matteo Messina Denaro arrested in Sicily
Reported sightings placed him everywhere from the Netherlands to the Venezuela but he was in Palermo — the heart of his homeland of Sicily — from where he was apprehended. “It took so long to arrest him because — as it happened with other Mafia bosses — he was being protected by a very dense network of complicities, extremely powerful and deeply-rooted in Sicily and beyond,” Andrea Purgatori, an Italian journalist told the BBC.
Many believe that Messina Denaro’s arrest was the result of a tip-off by his associates, who thought the ailing boss had lost utility. After all, for a long time, Italy’s most-wanted mafioso had felt guarded enough “to walk freely in the streets of Palermo, the moral capital of Cosa Nostra,” said Purgatori further.
In the end, he was spotted in the heart of a busy city, hardly a hidden place. The question is what led the police to arrest Denaro after 30 years of searching? The answer to this came at a press conference. The police dismissed the theory of a tip-off. Instead, they claimed they had put together modern technology and old-school investigative methods to narrow down their suspects.
For over 10 years, police cracked down on everyone suspected of protecting Messina Denaro. More than 100 people were arrested meanwhile, including Denaro’s siblings, and businesses worth over £130m were seized. This gradually weakened Denaro’s network and… eventually made him more vulnerable, believes Gen Teo Luzi. The smokescreen had started to clear, he added.
Meanwhile, the homes of the relatives of Messina Denaro were wiretapped. These intercepts, also combined with monitoring of internet searches on liver cancer and Crohn’s disease by Messina Denaro’s associates, led the Carabinieri military to assume the Mafia boss was seeking treatment.
When a chemotherapy session was booked under Messina Denaro name, the police knew it was their chance. On Monday morning, over 100 members of the armed forces encircled La Maddalena clinic. Denaro was on his way to a cafe when he noticed heavy police presence around. He made to turn back, but found more police closing down the street. He didn’t run. Perhaps he, too, had known it was just a matter of time.
