The Italian boss Matteo Messina Denaro died this Monday at the age of 61 in the San Salvatore hospital in the city of L’Aquila, in the center of the country, due to colon cancer and eight months after his arrest.
His health deteriorated a month ago after two operations and, in addition to being sedated for a few days, family visits had been suspended, according to Italian state television Rai.
Mesina Denaro was, until his arrest last January, one of the last great godfathers of Cosa Nostra and a fugitive from Justice for three decades.
Since his arrest, he had been interrogated by Palermo prosecutors on numerous occasions, although at no time did he collaborate.
“I don’t want to be a superman, not even arrogant; “They caught me because of my illness,” the Italian boss declared during one of the interrogations, referring to the fact that his arrest occurred after he went under a false name to the La Maddalena clinic to receive his cancer treatment.
His criminal activity dates back to the 1980s, when he was not yet 30 years old, and marked some areas of the country for decades, for which Justice sentenced him to two life sentences.
The last of them derives from its connection to the 1992 murders of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two historical tragedies of the Italian authorities’ fight against organized crime during the 1990s.
Although this sentence emphasizes that the mafioso had no role in the execution of the attacks that ended the lives of the judges – the Capaci and Via D’Amelio massacres -, it does conclude that the mafioso offered help to monitor the magistrates at the moment when the person largely responsible for the attacks, Salvatore Riina, decided to launch the operations.
