How cancer treatment led Italian police to fugitive mafia boss

Matteo Messina Denaro was a feared mafia boss, nicknamed Diabolik after an Italian fictional comic character who was a ruthless master thief.

Having been condemned in absentia to life imprisonment for several horrendous crimes pinned to his name, Messina Denaro had been a fugitive for 30 years until last week.

He was arrested by police at a private medical facility in Palermo where he was receiving cancer treatment under the alias Andrea Bonafede.

A thin, frail man in his 60s, gentle, dressed smartly and sporting a €30,000 watch, Messina Denaro was, however, a pale shadow of the ruthless Diabolik involved in several horrific murders in the 1990s perpetrated by Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia.

But the State finally caught up with him and cancer was his downfall.

Strangling a pregnant woman and torturing a child

In July 1992, Messina Denaro and others killed mafia boss Vincenzo Milazzo, who started questioning the authority of Totò Riina, Cosa Nostra’s boss of bosses. A few days later, Messina Denaro also killed Milazzo’s girlfriend, Antonella Bonomo, by strangling her. Bonomo was three months pregnant.

In November 1993, Messina Denaro was involved in the kidnapping of 11-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo, the son of a mafia turncoat. Tortured and strangulated, the boy’s corpse was dissolved in acid.

But Messina Denaro was also involved in the 1992 assassinations of anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and the 1993 bombings in Florence, Rome and Milan that left 10 dead and more than 100 injured.

For these crimes and others, Messina Denaro was sentenced in absentia to life in prison.

It was in the summer of 1993 that he went on holiday in Tuscany and slipped under the radar. He remained a fugitive from justice for 30 years.

In 1998, after the death of his father Francesco, Messina Denaro became the head of the Castelvetrano clan and represented the Trapani province inside Cosa Nostra.

Power from the shadows

Investigators only had early photos of the man. He used false names to get around and proxies to ‘invest’ in legitimate businesses where he laundered proceeds coming from drugs and other illicit activities. Some of the online gambling companies he used as fronts to launder money were also based in Malta.

An attempt by the Italian secret service to coax him out of hiding by using a former mayor of Castelvetrano, with known links to the mafia, also failed. The mayor used to communicate with Messina Denaro using codenames, informing him of public contracts he could bid for and win but the ruse eventually fell through when the mayor’s name as a collaborator came out in public.

Messina Denaro became the last of the ruthless big bosses from the 1990s to remain on the run, commanding wealth and power from the shadows. But even big bosses can get sick and it was cancer that eventually brought Diabolik down.

Phone intercepts of people close to Messina Denaro revealed that he was suffering from liver cancer and was also treated for Crohn’s disease. As with any cancer, this required specialised treatment that cannot be obtained from ordinary doctors or regular clinics.

The oncology database

Police accessed the health database of cancer sufferers and started a process of elimination by cross-checking basic facts such as age, residence and type of cancer.

Messina Denaro’s name was not on the list but investigators honed in on one name - Andrea Bonafede, a resident of Campobello di Mazara with known links to the mafia, who matched the clinical profile of the boss.

Through phone intercepts, police knew that this ‘Bonafede’ had an appointment on Monday 16 January at Palermo’s La Maddalena clinic, where he had been receiving treatment for the past year.

Hundreds of Carabinieri lay in wait with no visual evidence to compare patient Bonafede’s face with that of Messina Denaro.

All they had were digital composites created over time to mimic the mafia boss’s ageing face.

When the fake Bonafede turned up, investigators knew that the real Andrea Bonafede was elsewhere in Sicily and so they swooped in.

“I am Matteo Messina Denaro,” the boss confirmed to the police officers who arrested him shortly before 10am. The State had finally caught up with the secret-keeper of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra.

A network of enablers

In the subsequent days, police tracked down three properties in Campobello di Mazara, where Messina Denaro had been living a relatively comfortable life in plain sight. Jewellery, expensive branded clothes and shoes, condoms, Viagra pills and indications that Messina Denaro dined in the finest restaurants, painted a picture of relative normality.

The searches for Messina Denaro’s wealth and notes are continuing but investigators have also set their eyes on the people who enabled the boss’s activities to continue in the shadows.

Andrea Bonafede, who lent his identity, and Giovanni Luppino, Messina Denaro’s driver, who was also arrested with him, are being investigated as collaborators of the mafia. But so are the doctors, who treated Messina Denaro.

Investigators are trying to unravel the complex network that kept the mafia boss’s whereabouts and identity secret all these years.

As much as they want to nail Cosa Nostra by uncovering its inner secrets, investigators want to chip away at the network of enablers that has allowed mafia bosses to wield power even when they are on the run.