Italy captures Matteo Messina Denaro, its most-wanted Mafia fugitive, after 30 years

It took three decades, but Italy has finally captured its most-wanted fugitive, Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro.

He had gone into hiding in summer 1993, about a year after a pair of fatal 1992 bombings that targeted some of the country’s top anti-Mafia prosecutors. The violence backfired as Italian authorities cracked down on crime rather than being deterred by the deaths.

Tried in absentia in 2002, Messina Denaro, now 60, was convicted of killing prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Falcone’s wife and several of their bodyguards in the 1992 bombing. He was also among those found guilty of kidnapping, torturing and murdering the 11-year-old son of a Mafioso who had become an informer, then dissolving his body in a vat of acid.

Other Mafia bosses have faced similar fates after being on the lam for a number of years, including Ernesto Fazzalari, who was nabbed in Calabria in 2016 after 20 years on the run.

Cosa Nostra “boss of bosses” Bernardo Provenzano, who ordered the bombing that killed the prosecutors, was on the lam for 43 years before being captured in 2006. He spent his last years under high security in a Milan hospital before dying in 2016 at age 83.

Giovanni Brusca, Messina Denaro’s co-defendant in the prosecutor bombing and the child’s murder — who also claimed to have killed 150 people in all — served 25 years in prison in Rome and was released in 2021 at age 64.

Now it’s Messina Denaro’s turn, and he faces multiple life sentences that will most likely be served in a maximum-security prison.

He was picked up at about 10 a.m. Monday at a private medical facility in Palermo known for treating patients with cancer, where he was receiving chemotherapy under a fake name, BBC News reported.

According to Italian media, he had already been in treatment for a year. He will continue to receive help, though it will now be in a hospital prison ward.

Besides killing the prosecutors, Messina Denaro was found guilty in a 1993 series of bombings that damaged Florence’s famed Uffizi Galleries, two churches in Rome and a Milan art gallery.

In addition to having killed enough people to “fill a cemetery,” as BBC News said he once boasted, Messina Denaro managed Cosa Nostra’s racketeering, illegal waste dumping, money-laundering and drug-trafficking activities.

“We captured the last of the massacre masterminds,” prosecutor Palermo Chief Prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia told reporters, referring to the 1992-1993 Mafia killings. “It was a debt that the Republic owed to the victims of those years.”

With News Wire Services