Mafia boss arrested after 30 years on run dies

Sicilian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro – who was arrested in January after spending 30 years on the run – has died.

The 61-year-old – who once claimed to have murdered enough people to fill a cemetery – was suffering from cancer at the time of his arrest.

As his condition worsened in recent weeks, he was transferred to a hospital from the maximum-security prison in central Italy where he was initially held.

He was convicted of numerous crimes, including for his role in planning the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino – crimes that shocked Italy and sparked a crackdown on the Sicilian mob.

He was also held responsible for bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993 that killed 10 people, as well as helping organise the kidnapping of 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo, to try to dissuade the boy’s father from giving evidence against the mafia.

The boy was held for two years, then murdered.

Dubbed by the Italian press as “the last Godfather”, Messina Denaro is not believed to have given any information to the police after he was seized outside a private health clinic in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, on 16 January.

He underwent surgery for colon cancer in 2020 and 2022 under a false name, Italian media says.

A doctor at the Palermo clinic told La Repubblica newspaper that Messina Denaro’s health had worsened significantly in the months leading up to his capture.

The son of a mafioso, Messina Denaro was born in the southwestern Sicilian town of Castelvetrano in 1962.

He followed his father into the mob and at 15 was already carrying a gun. He carried out his first killing when he was 18, according to police.

The Castelvetrano clan was allied to the Corleonesi, led by Salvatore “Toto” Riina – one of the most feared Godfathers in the history of the Sicilian mafia – who was nicknamed “The Beast” during his time in charge of the crime group Cosa Nostra.

Messina Denaro became his protege and showed he could be just as ruthless as his master, picking up 20 life prison terms in trials held in absentia for his role in an array of mob murders.

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He went into hiding in 1993 as a growing number of turncoats started providing details of his role in the mob, but investigators believe he rarely wandered far from Sicily, and lived a short drive from his mother’s house and communicated with other mafiosi via “pizzini”, small pieces of paper sometimes written in code.

He never married, but was known to have a number of lovers – and he wrote he had a daughter he had never met.

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