Top Mafia Boss Arrested in Sicily

Matteo Messina Denaro, considered the top boss of the Sicilian Mafia, was arrested in Sicily on Monday after 30 years on the run, according to The Associated Press.

Denaro was captured at a private clinic in Palermo where he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed medical condition.

He was considered Sicily’s top boss even while a fugitive and was the last of three longtime fugitive top-level Mafia bosses who had for decades eluded capture.

The mob boss was tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, faces multiple life sentences, and is set to be imprisoned for two bombings in Sicily in 1992 that killed top anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, Falcone’s wife, and several of their bodyguards.

Other grisly crimes he was convicted of include the murder of a Mafia turncoat’s young son, who was abducted and strangled before his body was dissolved in a vat of acid.

Denaro’s capture came 30 years and a day after the Jan 15, 1993 capture of convicted Mafia “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, in a Palermo apartment after 23 years on the run.

Denaro went into hiding in the summer of that same year, as the Italian state stiffened its crackdown on the Sicilian crime syndicate following the murders of Falcone and Borsellino.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni tweeted that Denaro’s capture is a “great victory of the state, which shows that it doesn’t surrender in the face of the Mafia.”

The three top bosses were ultimately arrested in the heart of Sicily while they conducted decades of a clandestine life, which won’t surprise Italy’s police and prosecutors.

Law enforcement have long said that such bosses rely on contacts and the confidentiality of fellow mobsters and complicit family members to move them from hideout to hideout.

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