Matteo Messina Denaro, a Cosa Nostra Mafia leader in Sicily and Italy's most sought man, was apprehended by police while receiving treatment at a private health clinic in Palermo, prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia said Monday.
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| Matteo Messina Denaro during arrest in Sicily, Italy |
Matteo Messina Denaro, the boss of Cosa Nostra, has finally been apprehended by the carabinieri del Ros. However, in mafia fiction, the inquiry does not finish with the apprehension of the wanted man: it frequently begins right there. It happened on January 15, 1993, with Salvatore Riina. It happened again on Tuesday, April 11, 2006, with the detention of Bernardo Provenzano. It will very probably happen today, with the capture of the final long-term fugitive: Messina Denaro, 60, was stopped in line at a Maddalena clinic in Palermo and then moved from an Arma barracks without even handcuffs.
From the murder of little Giuseppe Di Matteo, strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996 because he was the son of a justice collaborator, through the attacks of Capaci, via D'Amelio in Palermo, Rome, Florence, Milan, and Rome in the terrible two-year period 1992-93. Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo, Paolo Borsellino, eight escort agents, and 10 other persons were killed, including two little sisters aged 9 years and 50 days. He injured scores of people, including journalist Maurizio Costanzo and his partner, Maria De Filippi. The phrases, however, support these facts.
Hopefully, Messina Denaro will also be asked to account for cases that have never been resolved: secrets that he, operating at the top of Cosa Nostra alongside Riina and Provenzano, must certainly know. Here are the main ones, even the less famous ones.
The missing red diary of Matteo Messina Denaro
The loss of Paolo Borsellino's red diary, a personal journal seized from his pocketbook and given to state agents during the July 19, 1992 tragedy. The tip to the Mafia that resulted in the killing of Luigi Ilardo in 1996, the collaborator who was assisting the carabinieri in arresting leader Provenzano ten years earlier. The involvement of several police officers in the deception of the fake collaborator Vincenzo Scarantino, as well as in the investigations and trial of the Via D'Amelio massacre. Arnaldo La Barbera's double duty as a policeman and a Sisde agent in Palermo. The former police officer Giovanni Aiello's secret activity in Sicily and throughout Italy. The death of urologist Attilio Manca, registered as an overdose.
If the detained boss can throw light on these puzzles, Italy will be a better place. The killing of Dr. Manca is undoubtedly one of the most despicable of the clandestine operations carried out by that devilish alliance of interests that has united the silences of the mafia with the action of some governmental agencies for three decades, since since the arrest of Tot Riina. Matteo Messina Denaro was a guarantee of the alliance following the capture of Bernardo Provenzano.
The death of Attilio Manca
Attilio Manca, 34, originally from Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto in the province of Messina, was discovered dead in his Viterbo house on the night of February 11 and 12, 2004, where he worked as a urologist in the municipal hospital. The findings and a report by the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission corroborate the premise that the doctor visited a Sicilian patient at the invitation of a friend. And he recognized Provenzano in him while he was a fugitive and before his prostate cancer operation in France.
Doctor Manca's death is made even more cowardly by the staging of syringes discovered in his flat, which taints his memory with each passing day. Mafiosi used to proclaim themselves respectable men, despite the fact that their criminal, military, and political activities were everything from honorable. The oncological disease that struck Matteo Messina Denaro may not give him much time to live: at the very least, he is a man, and given that Riina, Provenzano, and many others are no longer alive, he must summon the courage and assist us in dismantling the diabolical alliance of which he was a member. He does it at least for Caterina and Nadia Nencioni, the two small children he murdered in Florence's Via dei Georgofili.
And for Mrs. Angela Gentile, Dr. Manca's mother, who like many other mothers, wives and daughters in Italy.