At 8.20am final Monday, Andrea Bonafede was queueing on the check-in of a non-public medical clinic in Palermo, Sicily. Suffering from colon most cancers and considered 59, he had already undergone two operations and chemotherapy on the clinic, typically bringing the employees presents of olive oil and exchanging cellphone numbers, and textual content messages, together with his fellow sufferers. He was identified to decorate in flashy garments: that morning he was carrying a sheepskin coat, a white hat, Ray-Ban shades and an costly Franck Muller watch.
Waiting for his Covid take a look at, he went outdoors and walked in direction of the Fiat Brava, and the motive force, that had introduced him there. The undercover officers watching him apprehensive that he had realised he was underneath surveillance and that he is likely to be about to bolt. A colonel from the Carabinieri, Italy’s militarised police, determined to maneuver in: “Are you Matteo Messina Denaro?”
“You know who I am,” got here the weary reply.
The 150 police and Carabinieri who had been in place inside and out of doors the clinic instantly sprang into motion. Totò Schillaci, the previous worldwide footballer from Palermo, was caught up in the blitz, later evaluating it to “a madhouse, a wild west”. Armed forces in balaclavas burst out of unmarked automobiles and blocked exit routes and streets. After 30 years on the run, Italy’s most needed man – nicknamed U Siccu, or “Skinny” – had lastly been captured.
Realising what was taking place, members of the general public started to applaud. Some high-fived the boys in balaclavas. In lower than an hour, the arrest of Messina Denaro was front-page information throughout the globe. The Italian president, Sergio Mattarella (whose brother, Piersanti, was murdered by the mafia in 1980 when he was governor of Sicily) thanked the police and prosecutors. The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, instantly flew to Palermo to congratulate the particular forces on capturing the person who had helped plan a terrorist-style bombing marketing campaign throughout Italy in 1992 and 1993.
In these years, because the certainties of the First Republic disintegrated, the standoff between the Italian state and Cosa Nostra had changed into violent confrontation. Two dogged investigators, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, had persuaded a former mobster, Tommaso Buscetta, to show state’s witness. The mafia’s secretive organisation and political connections had been, for the primary time, clearly revealed. In mass trials, 338 mafiosi had been convicted.
When these sentences had been upheld on enchantment, the mafia took its brutal revenge: their political protector, Salvo Lima, was executed in March 1992 and later that 12 months each investigators had been killed in very public bombings on the island. Falcone, his spouse and three bodyguards had been murdered on the street between the airport and Palermo in May; Borsellino was murdered in Palermo in July, together with 5 bodyguards, as he visited his sister and mom. Messina Denaro was concerned in the operational planning of each bombings.
The following 12 months the phobia marketing campaign turned to the mainland. At 1.04am on 27 May 1993, a bomb exploded outdoors the Uffizi gallery, in Via dei Georgofili in Florence, destroying numerous artistic endeavors and killing 5 folks, together with a nine-year-old woman, Nadia, and her two-month-old sister. Two months later, on 27 July, a bomb outdoors a up to date artwork gallery in Milan killed 5; the subsequent day, there have been two additional bombs in Rome, this time with out victims. Messina Denaro was convicted, in absentia, of getting additionally ordered and deliberate the mainland bombing marketing campaign.
Born in 1962 in the province of Trapani, Matteo Messina Denaro is the son of a convicted mobster who had labored for the rich D’Alì household. He grew to become the protege of Totò Riina, the boss of bosses, and was famend for being each a party-loving womaniser and a ruthless killer. He fell in love with an Austrian lady working in a lodge in Selinunte and when her supervisor, Nicola Consales, was overheard complaining in regards to the “little mafiosi” who had been lounging across the lodge, he was – in Palermo in 1991 – shot lifeless.
A 12 months later, one other mobster complained about Riina’s technique of a frontal assault on the Italian state. Messina Denaro invited Vincenzo Milazzo to a gathering, shot him, and strangled his pregnant associate, Antonella Bonomo. Later that 12 months, he was a part of the group that tried to homicide a policeman, Calogero Germanà. When one mafioso turned state’s witness, Messina Denaro was a part of the cupola – the group of prime mafia bosses – that ordered the kidnap of his 12-year-old son, Giuseppe di Matteo. The boy was held captive for 779 days earlier than being strangled and dissolved in acid. Messina Denaro as soon as boasted that he had killed sufficient folks to fill a cemetery.
But throughout his three a long time in hiding, Messina Denaro additionally took the mafia in a brand new path. Drive-by executions and semtex bombings assured solely crackdowns and unhealthy headlines, and U Siccu had seen how the Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, had enriched itself by quietly infiltrating and investing in legitimate businesses. Messina Denaro put his dirty money into clean energy, using an unknown electrician as a front to build a wind-power empire worth €1.5bn. He created a €700m chain of 83 shops through another frontman.
Investigators became suspicious about various builders and salami-makers who were suddenly making millions through slot machines, stolen archaeological treasures, transport hubs, building companies and tourist resorts and so they began arresting those they suspected of being fronts for the Sicilian “Scarlet Pimpernel”. In 2011 alone, they arrested 140 suspected sidekicks and frontmen, a few of whom flipped and gave investigators insights into Messina Denaro’s enterprise empire.
But the person himself remained elusive. Investigators didn’t even know what he appeared like. There was solely {a photograph} from 1993 which had been artificially aged. The operation to find him was known as Tramonto (“sunset”), named after a poem written by the nine-year-old Nadia who had been killed in Florence. The breakthrough got here when wiretaps of his family members revealed Messina Denaro had colon most cancers. Investigators obtained lists of all sufferers aged over 55 present process oncological remedy for the illness in the provinces of Agrigento, Palermo and Trapani.
Of the attainable matches, one stood out: Andrea Bonafede was the identify of a person on the fringes of the mafia and it emerged that when he was alleged to be on the working desk in Palermo, his cellphone truly revealed his presence in Campobello di Mazara, close to Trapani. The apparent conclusion was that Bonafede had lent his identification to somebody who couldn’t reveal their very own. On 29 December, “Bonafede” booked an appointment in the Palermo clinic for 16 January and when, final Monday morning, the actual Bonafede remained at dwelling, the authorities determined to behave.
But regardless of the preliminary euphoria on the capture of the well-known fugitive, particulars of his life on the run have shocked the nation in the final week. Looking surprisingly just like the artificially aged {photograph}, Messina Denaro was dwelling brazenly in Campobello di Mazara, subsequent to his birthplace in Castelvetrano. He used to go frequently to the native bar, pizzeria and even, in line with experiences, to Palermo’s soccer stadium. The Viagra discovered in his flat suggests he had firm. One physician who was treating him took selfies as if he knew he was in the presence of a star. In a city of simply over 11,000 folks, Messina Denaro was referred for remedy by a GP (identified to be a member of an area masonic lodge) who presumably knew the actual Bonafede.
“He was hiding in plain sight,” says Federico Varese, a professor of criminology on the University of Oxford, and writer of Mafia Life. “It is extraordinary and disconcerting that it took 30 years to arrest this man and that speaks to one fact: there was no help from local informants because of a deep mistrust of people in this part of Italy towards institutions of the state.” Another former fugitive, mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, was in a position to elude capture for 43 years.
But extra than simply the passive omertà, or silence, of the area people, many investigators spoke final week about energetic collusion. Pasquale Angelosanto, the commander of the elite troops behind the Tramonto operation, lamented how the lengthy hunt had been “marked by politicians, law enforcement officers and state officials being arrested or investigated for warning the boss that the circle was closing in”. Repeatedly authorities thought an arrest was imminent, solely to be foiled on the final minute: on one event, police burst into the suspected assembly place in Bagheria the place Messina Denaro was considered assembly one in all his lovers, Maria Masi. They discovered solely recent caviar, a shawl, a bracelet, Merit cigarettes and a jigsaw, all swiftly deserted.
The suspicion of an overlap between institutional figures and organised crime has deepened in current months: in December final 12 months, Antonio D’Alì – a former under-secretary on the inside ministry throughout Silvio Berlusconi’s 2001-06 authorities – was convicted for “external complicity with the mafia”. Both Messina Denaro and his father had labored for the D’Alì household. In September 2022, Totò Cuffaro, a former governor of the island who spent nearly 5 years in jail for “aiding and abetting” Cosa Nostra and breaching investigative secrecy, stood for re-election. His get together or “list” gained 5 seats in the regional meeting. In an on-going trial, many different politicians stand accused of negotiating with the mafia in these disaster years of 1992-93.
The faint hope that the captured man would possibly collaborate with the authorities and reveal among the secrets and techniques of that darkish interval has additionally receded. The resolution to nominate his niece, a infamous defender of mafiosi, as his lawyer suggests he won’t make any revelations or confessions. Nor is there a lot hope that the organisation will likely be considerably weakened. “Mafias are not reducible to their ‘bosses’,” wrote Luigi Ciotti, a lifelong anti-mafia campaigner, final week: “[they have] developed into a lattice of organisations capable of making up for the disappearance of one individual through the strength of the system.”
“The longevity of this criminal organisation is extraordinary,” says Varese. “It has been around since the 1830s, far longer than most businesses. We need to ask what is being done to get rid us not just of the head, but of the root causes of the mafia.”
Tobias Jones lives in Parma. His most up-to-date e book is The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River
