Inside Mob Boss's Hideouts: Cellphones, Viagra

2 hideouts found in close proximity, just 5 miles from Matteo Messina Denaro's birthplace
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 19, 2023 9:50 AM CST
Inside Mob Boss's Hideouts: Cellphones, Viagra
Top Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro arrives for treatment at a private clinic in Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily, on Monday.   (Carabinieri via AP)

Italian police have uncovered two hideouts believed to have been used by Cosa Nostra mob boss Matteo Messina Denaro toward the end of his 30 years on the run. Car keys in his possession during his arrest on Monday led authorities to a home in the Sicilian town of Campobello di Mazara—just 5 miles from Messina Denaro's birthplace of Castelvetrano—where they found a "comfortable" ground-floor apartment, about 645 square feet, containing designer clothes, expensive furnishings, two cellphones, and Viagra pills, suggesting he had company, per the BBC. Reuters notes it also contained "a well-stocked fridge and restaurant receipts."

A neighbor tells the BBC that the mob boss wasn't exactly hiding, as the pair would greet each other regularly while out and about. "He had a regular life, he went to the supermarket," says Magistrate Paolo Guido, per Reuters. Messina Denaro is believed to have lived in the apartment for the past year. However, a second hideout, found in a home a stone's throw away from the first, also appears to have been inhabited recently, per the BBC. Accessed from the back of a wardrobe, the bunker is "barely big enough for one person," the outlet reports.

It reportedly contained gemstones, jewelry, silverware, and empty boxes, which might have been cleared of documents following Messina Denaro's arrest outside a clinic near Palermo, Sicily, where he was receiving chemotherapy under the name Andrea Bonafede. Authorities learned the real Andrea Bonafede, a nephew of deceased Mafia boss Leonardo Bonafede, wasn't in Palermo at the time of the treatments. He does, however, own the apartment in which Messina Denaro was living, per Reuters. Bonafede is now under investigation, along with the doctor who treated the mobster, who will continue to receive cancer treatment in prison in L'Aquila. (More Mafia stories.)

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