ROME — Matteo Messina Denaro, a convicted mastermind of a few of the Sicilian Mafia’s maximum heinous slayings, died on Monday in a hospital jail ward, a number of months after being captured as Italy’s No. 1 fugitive and following a long time on the run, Italian state radio mentioned.
Rai state radio, reporting from L’Aquila hospital in central Italy, mentioned the heavy police element that were guarding his hospital room moved to the hospital morgue, following the demise of Messina Denaro at about 2 a.m. Doctors had mentioned he were in a coma since Friday.
Reputed through investigators to be one in all the Mafia’s maximum tough bosses, Messina Denaro, 61, were dwelling whilst a fugitive in western Sicily, his stronghold, all the way through a minimum of a lot of his 30 years of eluding regulation enforcement because of the assist of complicit townspeople. His want for colon most cancers remedy ended in his seize on Jan. 16, 2023.
Investigators have been on his path for years and had found out proof that he was once receiving chemotherapy as an out-patient at a Palermo sanatorium below an alias. Digging into Italy’s nationwide well being device information base, they tracked him down and took him into custody when he confirmed up for a remedy appointment.
His arrest got here 30 years and an afternoon after the Jan. 15, 1993, seize of the Mafia’s “boss of bosses,’’ Salvatore “Toto” Riina in a Palermo rental, additionally after a long time in hiding. Messina Denaro himself went into hiding later that yr.
While a fugitive, Messina Denaro was once attempted in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, together with serving to to plot, together with different Cosa Nostra bosses, a couple of 1992 bombings that killed Italy’s main anti-Mafia prosecutors — Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Prosecutors had was hoping in useless he would collaborate with them and disclose Cosa Nostra secrets and techniques. But in keeping with Italian media studies, Messina Denaro made transparent he wouldn’t communicate in an instant after seize.
When he died, “he took with him his secrets” about Cosa Nostra, state radio mentioned.
After his arrest, Messina Denaro started serving more than one existence sentences in a top-security jail in L’Aquila, a town in Italy’s central Apennine mountain house, the place he endured to obtain chemotherapy for colon most cancers. But in the remaining a number of weeks, after present process two surgical procedures and along with his situation worsening, he was once transferred to the jail ward of the hospital the place he died.
His silence hewed to the examples of Riina and of the Sicilian Mafia’s different height boss, Bernardo Provenzano, who was once captured in a farmhouse in Corleone, Sicily, in 2006, after 37 years in hiding — the longest time on the run for a Mafia boss. Once Provenzano was once in police palms, the state’s hunt interested by Messina Denaro, who controlled to elude arrest in spite of a large number of reported sightings of him.
Dozens of lower-level Mafia bosses and foot squaddies did flip state’s proof following a crackdown on the Sicilian syndicate sparked through the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, bombings that still killed Falcone’s spouse and several other police bodyguards. Among Messina Denaro’s more than one homicide convictions was once one for the slaying of the younger son of a turncoat. The boy was once kidnapped and strangled and his frame was once dissolved in a vat of acid.
Messina Denaro was once additionally amongst a number of Cosa Nostra height bosses who have been convicted of ordering a chain of bombings in 1993 that focused two church buildings in Rome, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and an artwork gallery in Milan. A complete of 10 other folks have been killed in the Florence and Milan bombings.
The assaults in the ones 3 vacationer towns, in keeping with turncoats, have been aimed toward pressuring the Italian executive into easing inflexible jail prerequisites for convicted mobsters.
When Messina Denaro was once arrested, Palermo’s leader prosecutor, Maurizio De Lucia, declared: “We have captured the last of the massacre masterminds.”
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