Sicilian mobster who boasted ‘I filled a cemetery by myself’ managed to stay hidden without going far from home
Photograph: Carabinieri handout/EPAPhotograph: Carabinieri handout/EPAwas arrested in 1993, after 23 years on the most wanted list, he was living comfortably in Palermo with his wife and four children. Thirteen years later, his sidekick, living like an ascetic, eating cheese and chicory and reading his Bible in a shepherd’s hut near his birthplace, Corleone, was run to ground.
“If you asked, where is Matteo Messina Denaro, people would say, he’s either dead, or he’s in the province of Trapani,” said Giacomo di Girolamo, author of a biography of Denaro called The Invisible. “He wasn’t one of those mafiosi who would go abroad, to Brazil, or northern The mafia has always been adept at changing with the times, and Denaro’s enduring strength was his connection with the “grey zone” where organised crime coexists with politics and business. As the mafia expert John Dickie puts it in his bookRepublic, the grey zone is “an area of society where complicity with the bosses is hard to detect, and where the partnership between the bosses and the businessmen, or between the gun and the laptop, is by no means always tilted in favour of the former”.
Although there is no doubt that the capture of a mass murderer is a triumph for law enforcement, some are reluctant to emphasise the importance of Denaro today. “He was never the boss,” says Principato. “He was a member of the commission, but that’s a different thing. He never took over Palermo, but remained the regional boss in Trapani.”in the north.
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