Authorities said bystanders outside the clinic applauded the police officers, their faces obscured by face coverings, who escorted him into a colored van. Black pulls to a secret location. As the car pulled away, the officers hugged each other and raised their fingers in a sign of victory.
Mr. Guido, the prosecutor, added that like any Italian citizen, Messina Denaro has the right to health care, but will now have to “stay in prison”.
That’s where his former boss Messina Denaro ended up and died.
Salvatore Riina, the “boss of bosses” responsible for a series of brutal murders of Italian prosecutors and police in the 1990s, was arrested in 1993, also in Palermo. He raised Messina Denaro as a young killer with a talent for infiltrating local business and politics. Riina spent the rest of his life in prison, dying in 2017.
Bernardo Provenzano, like Mr. Riina, a member of the Corleone family, withdrew from the fight against Mr. Riina’s state and the killings of top journalists and investigators. He was arrested in 2006, after 13 years of more silent criminal activity.
Salvatore Lo Piccolo, the likely successor, was arrested a year later.
Only Mr. Messina Denaro remained. He disappeared from public life at the age of 31. His father, also a robber, died in hiding in 1998.
Renowned as a ruthless boss with a penchant for designer clothes and a playful lifestyle, Messina Denaro communicates with associates through handwritten letters and messages that he avoids drafting personally. Most of his closest relatives were arrested over the years for mafia-related crimes, but they never betrayed him. But in recent years, the police arrested his associates and seized hundreds of millions of dong, causing his capital to be drained.
In 2020, he was sentenced in absentia to life in absentia for his role in the 1992 murders of two anti-mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and the 1993 bombings of Florence, Milan and Rome that left 10 people killed.
