His Condition Was Worsening And Was Transferred From Prison To Hospital, Italian Mafia Messina Denaro Dies

The arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro. (Source: YouTube screenshot of the Arma Dei Carabinieri YouTube Channel)

JAKARTA - Italy mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, who had been a fugitive for thirty years before being caught last January, AnSA news agency reported his last breath on Monday.

Messina Denaro, 61, suffered from cancer when he was arrested by Italian security forces. His condition has steadily deteriorated in recent weeks, prompting Italian authorities to move him from maximum-security prisons in central Italy to a hospital.

ANSA reported that Denaro did not ask for more adequate medical treatment, while medics stopped feeding him after he was declared in an irreversible coma.

According to medical records leaked to Italian media, he underwent colon cancer surgery in 2020 and 2022 under false names.

Meanwhile, a doctor at the Palermo clinic told La Repubblica newspaper Messina Denaro's health had deteriorated significantly in the months leading up to his arrest.

Having the father of a mafia, Denaro was born in Castelvetrano City, Southwest Sicily, Italy in 1962.

At the age of 15, he had followed his father into the mafia group's activities. At the age of 18, the police said he had first committed murder.

His Castelvetrano clan later allied withcussion, led by Salvatore "The Beast" Riina, who became the undisputed "boss of the bosses" of the Sicily gang, known as the Cosa Nostra.

Dubbed 'U Siccu' (Si Kurus), Messina Denaro became his protg and showed he could be as cruel as his teacher, receiving 20 life imprisonments in trials held in-absentia for his role in a series of mass killings.

In 1993, he decided to hide as more and more traitors began providing details about his role in the gang, but investigators believe he rarely goes far from Sicily.

Police said he spent most of 2022 hiding in Campobello in Mazara, a city of about 11,000 people, not far from his mother's home in western Sicily.

Dubbed by the Italian press as the "last Godfather", Messina Denaro is believed to have provided no information to police after he was arrested outside a private health clinic in the Chilean capital, Palermo on January 16.

Denaro was convicted of various crimes, including his role in planning the assassination of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, the crimes that rocked Italy and sparked a crackdown on the Sisilia masses.

He is also considered responsible for the bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993 that killed 10 people, as well as helped organize the kidnapping of Giuseppe Di Matteo (12), to try to prevent the child's father from providing incriminating evidence to the mafia. The boy was held hostage for two years, then killed.

Although not married, he is known to have a number of lovers. Denaro himself wrote that he had a daughter, but had never met her.

Despite his fame, prosecutors have always doubted Messina Denaro being the mafia's "boss", saying he is most likely just the head of Cosa Nostra in western Sicily.