Italy’s most wanted mafia leader arrested

The head of the Sicilian mafia (“Cosa Nostra”), 61-year-old Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested, a representative of the Italian Carabinieri Corps said (analogous to the Russian Guard. – Vedomosti). He has been on the run since 1993 and topped the list of Italy’s most wanted organized crime bosses. The arrest, as follows from the video distributed by the security forces, was carried out in one of the private clinics of the largest city of Sicily, Palermo, where the mafiosi was being treated.

Denaro is the third “boss of bosses” (that is, the main person in the criminal hierarchy) of the Sicilian mafia, arrested over the past 30 years. In 1993, Salvatore Riina, who occupied this position, was arrested (he died in prison in 2017, accused of murders committed personally), and in 2006, Bernardo Provenzano (died in prison in 2016). Both, like Messina Denaro, hid from arrest for decades.

In Italy, historically, there are several regional structures of organized crime – in addition to the Sicilian mafia, they include the Neapolitan Camorra, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and others. They specialize both in drug trafficking and gambling control, as well as in usury, money laundering, extortion, embezzlement of budget funds, etc.

Italian justice has been looking for Denaro since 1993. Since then, the security forces have repeatedly detained his associates, but the boss himself managed to escape from justice.

In October 2020, Denaro was sentenced in absentia to a second life imprisonment for his complicity in organizing the murders of Italian investigators Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and eight police officers guarding them in Sicily in 1992.