AFTER 30 years of evading capture, and 8 months under custody.
Matteo Messina Denaro, a well-known Italian Mafia boss, has died while receiving medical treatment for cancer.
The 61-year-old passed away in L’Aquila Hospital in central Italy after falling into an irreversible coma.
His arrest earlier this year in Palermo, Sicily, was a significant win for the Italian police, as he was one of the country’s most-wanted Mafia bosses.
His health had been declining. Before his arrest, reports say he had been receiving colon cancer treatment in a hospital in Palermo under a false name.
Following his arrest, Denaro had asked not to receive aggressive medical treatment, so doctors stopped feeding him after he was declared to be in an irreversible coma.
Known as the last godfather of Cosa Nostra or the Sicilian Mafia, Denaro was convicted of several serious crimes, including involvement in the murders of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
These murders led to a crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia.
He was also responsible for bombings in Rome, Florence, and Milan in 1993 that killed 10 people.
He kidnapped 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo to prevent the boy’s father from testifying against the mafia.
Tragically, the young boy was held captive for two years before being murdered.
After informants exposed his Mafia activities in 1993, Messina Denaro went into hiding.
However, investigators believed he rarely left Sicily. In 2022, he was thought to be living in Campobello di Mazara, a town in Western Sicily.
Messina Denaro’s death marks the end of an era of organized crime.
He was one of the successors of Bernardo Provenzano, another Mafia boss arrested in 2006.
Experts say Messina Denaro represented the shift from the violent Mafia of the early 1990s to the more secretive and business-oriented Mafia of the 21st century.
