Mafia Boss Busted After 30 Years on the Run

Matteo Messina Denaro, now 60, nabbed in a medical clinic in Sicily
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 16, 2023 7:23 AM CST
Mafia Boss Busted After 30 Years on the Run
Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, center, after his arrest at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, Monday, Jan. 16, 2023.   (Carabinieri via AP)

He was, as the Guardian puts it, one of the most-wanted criminals in the world. But after 30 years on the run, the elusive mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has finally been caught. Italian police nabbed him in the most humdrum of settings—the 60-year-old was visiting a medical clinic for an unspecified illness in the Sicilian city of Palermo, reports the BBC. Even as a fugitive, Messina Denaro was believed to have kept running the Cosa Nostra crime syndicate. As the Washington Post notes, Cosa Nostra is probably the best-known of Italy's three major crime syndicates, in part because of the Godfather movies.

Messina Denaro had been on the run since being convicted in the 1992 fatal bombings of anti-mafia prosecutors, one of the most notorious crimes in modern Sicily. He also was convicted in the kidnapping and murder of an 11-year-old boy, the son of a mafia informer. And he once famously bragged that he could fill an entire cemetery with the people he had killed. It's “a great victory for the state,” said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Videos like this one surfaced on social media of bystanders cheering his arrest in the streets. (Police had previously made arrests that turned out to be cases of mistaken identity.)

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