Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro has evaded arrest for 20 years. But for how much longer?
The December 2013 arrests of 30 of Matteo Messina Denaro's affiliates and family members – among them his sister, Patrizia, above – are seen by many as the beginnning of the end of the mafia boss's long time on the run. Photograph: Direzione Investigativa Antimafia
Tom Kington
This morning, somewhere in western Sicily, Italy's most wanted mafia killer woke up in his gilded hideaway and probably logged on to Facebook, browsing fan pages that honour his courage, his cunning and the Robin Hood status many Sicilians have conferred on him.
"Cosa Nostra works for the poor and the oppressed, seeking, in its own way, to correct mistakes," states an adoring page named after him, without explaining exactly how the mafia corrects "mistakes".
"Do you want to know what best sums up Matteo Messina Denaro?" said one veteran anti-mafia investigator. "It is the letter he wrote to a fellow godfather where he talks about the police and claims, 'These demented Torquemadas will never stop me.' The point is, the man believes he is in the right. He believes he is not a criminal."
If Messina Denaro, the last of Sicily's notorious fugitive bosses, feels comfortable name-checking the 15th-century head of the Spanish Inquisition, it is also a reflection of the cultured side of a criminal who has used his sharp intelligence to avoid a police dragnet for 21 years. He has remained at large after Cosa Nostra supremos Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, the notorious Corleonese bosses who evaded arrest for decades, were finally captured.
Seeing himself as philosopher, folk hero and serial seducer, Messina Denaro, 51, has apparently kept up his luxurious lifestyle and entertained a string of lovers after going on the run two decades ago. He went into hiding after taking part in the Sicilian mafia's bombing campaign in the early 1990s, which killed magistrates and bystanders in Sicily, Rome and Florence.
Today, the man who famously claimed "I filled a cemetery all by myself". and took his nickname, Diabolik, from an uncatchable Italian comic book criminal, is wanted for more than 50 murders and has made top 10 lists of the world's most-wanted criminals. A recent photofit shows a middle-aged man with cold, staring eyes.
But despite long-standing rumours that he enjoys the protection of police and politicians, the net is finally tightening. Investigators have seized suspected investments made by Messina Denaro in shopping centres, food distribution firms, wind farms and agriculture that are so extensive it is hard to tell where the economy of western Sicily stops and his empire begins.
Four months ago, police rounded up 30 affiliates and family members, allegedly part of Messina Denaro's close-knit inner circle of backers who have funded and managed the complex chain of "postmen" used to smuggle notes, or pizzini, to and from his hideouts. The prize catch was his sister, Patrizia Messina Denaro, 43, accused of running the effort to channel extorted cash to fuel her brother's life on the run.
"To understand Matteo, you should meet his sister," said a second investigator, who, like others hunting for Messina Denaro, would only speak freely if guaranteed anonymity. "She is aggressive, determined and happy to use her surname to scare extortion victims. It was her first arrest, and although she didn't say much, she was defiant and communicated with her eyes, which is a Sicilian thing."
News of her brother's reaction to the crackdown arrived in January from an informant. Messina Denaro, it was claimed, was hunting for enough explosives to mount a spectacular bomb attack on the Palermo magistrate leading the hunt for him, Teresa Principato. Taking the threat seriously, police increased patrols around Principato's home – an apartment in a beautiful, crumbling palazzo in the labyrinth of streets that squeezes between Palermo's 12th-century cathedral and the city's daunting, fascist-era justice building.
Elegantly dressed in black in her high-ceilinged sitting room, surrounded by antiques, Principato appeared unfazed by news of a possible attempt on her life, calmly tapping her cigarette ash into a silver ashtray that had been placed strategically on a coffee table by a housemaid seconds before she had entered the room.
"Matteo Messina Denaro is particular because he represents both the old and new mafia," she said, settling into a sofa. "Like the old mafiosi, he sees the mafia as a superior state, involving a select few who are worthy of the honour. He allows in only those who are close to him. But he is also modern, he is not Bernardo Provenzano," Principato said. In 2006, after 43 years on the run, the 80-year-old Cosa Nostra boss was captured in an isolated farmhouse in Sicily, where he lived like a monk, ate whatever local farmers could bring him, and read his Bible.
"Messina Denaro is not living in the country eating chicory. His is a golden lifestyle," Principato said. "He is a greedy, ruthless, money-maker who will get involved in any business that makes a profit – and his methods work."
Recent seizures of property and companies suspected of being fronts for Messina Denaro give an idea of how well those methods have worked, starting with firms involved in preparations for America's Cup races in Trapani in 2005, to the €1.5bn empire of Vito Nicastri, the so-called "lord of the wind", who built wind farms near Messina Denaro's home town of Castelvetrano. Allegedly acting as an able middle man between local mob bosses and corrupt politicians, Nicastri would secure all the permits required, then build and deliver functioning wind farms – totalling at least 250 turbines – to Spanish, Danish and Maltese operators, with profits finding their way back to Messina Denaro.
Construction firms worth €550m belonging to building magnate Rosario Cascio and €700m worth of property and business concerns have been confiscated from Giuseppe Grigoli, whose retail and distribution group allegedly laundered Messina Denaro's cash. Prosecutors have also sought permission to seize the assets of entrepreneur Carmelo Patti, a former owner of the Valtur holiday village group, who has been accused by turncoats of being a front man for Messina Denaro.
Soon, Messina Denaro will have nothing left around him," said Giuseppe D'Agata, the head of the Palermo outpost of the Italian interior ministry-run anti-mafia task force, the DIA, which brings together Italy's various, and often competing police forces. The team is based at the DIA's new headquarters, a former country villa built by a Jewish emigre to Palermo in the 19th century and now sandwiched between grim tower blocks in the city's western suburbs. In the car park, an official proudly points out the latest seizure from the Messina Denaro clan: a pearl white Fiat 500 with plush, red leather seats taken from Patrizia, which will now be used for plain-clothes police patrols.
As the scorched-earth policy around Messina Denaro cuts off the cash he needs to keep on the move, investigators suspect he has stayed close to Castelvetrano. Just like the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta bosses who live in subterranean bunkers under their home towns, Messina Denaro knows a true capo clan must stay close to his power base.
A town of 35,000 inhabitants where local farmers sell fennel bulbs and cauliflowers from their car bonnets on street corners, Castelvetrano looks neat and well kept, despite its traffic-clogged narrow streets and the odd collapsed house left over from the 1968 earthquake.
Law enforcers report low levels of petty crime, despite, or more likely because, the town has been in the vice-like grip of the Messina Denaro family for decades, dating back to the rule of Matteo's mob boss father, Francesco, who died while in hiding in 1998. On his death, his formally dressed corpse was left to be discovered by authorities, ready for burial.
As an up-and-coming capo in the 1980s, young Matteo cut a flash figure among the farmers, driving a convertible, dressing in Versace, Armani and sporting his Rolex Daytona watch. To prove nothing would stop his romantic conquests, he murdered a hotel manager who had protested about his affair with an Austrian receptionist. But Messina Denaro also showed he was no soft touch with women. After he murdered a rival boss, he strangled the man's pregnant girlfriend.
By 1993, he was ready to join Cosa Nostra's all-out war with the Italian state, teaming up with the notorious killer Giovanni Brusca to mount bombing raids on the mainland to pressure politicians into cancelling the new, tougher jail regime for mafiosi. In 1993, Messina Denaro was the brains behind the bombing of the Uffizi gallery in Florence, destroying paintings by Rubens and Giotto. According to Brusca, Messina Denaro was given the job of picking the paintings to target because of his knowledge of art.
Messina Denaro was also part of the gang that in 1993 snatched Giuseppe di Matteo, the 11-year-old son of a turncoat. They held the boy prisoner for more than two years to persuade his father not to give evidence, and eventually strangled him.
By then Messina Denaro was in hiding from the authorities. He fathered a daughter in 1995, who has grown up in Castelvetrano. A year later, while living anonymously on the outskirts of Palermo, in a flat supplied by local bosses, he started an affair with a woman who would stock up on the latest video games to take to her lover. "Donkey Kong 3 is out and I can't wait for it to be on sale," she wrote in one note. Since then, Messina Denaro is believed to have moved between flats and villas provided by a network of loyalists, preferring to be close to people rather than stuck on a remote hillside like Provenzano.
One investigator said the number of people used to smuggle pizzini to Messina Denaro – some of whom have no idea what they are carrying or for whom – made it tough to track him.
"He is like Bin Laden," he said. "He has no direct contact with his group. Hi-tech equipment is of limited use: he won't use a cell phone or computer more than once, satellites cannot see a pizzino and a drone wouldn't be able to follow someone down narrow alleys. Bugging is hard when suspects talk on the beach, in olive groves or in cemeteries, but never indoors."
As well as female company, Messina Denaro is known to keep an armed guard. "You can expect a fierce gun battle when police finally catch up with him," said one former investigator.
But according to the one man in Castelvetrano who has communicated with him in the last decade and is prepared to talk about it, Messina Denaro is a man in search of affection.
runs a small cinema in the back streets of town, but once served as mayor before being jailed for five years for mafia membership – on the basis, he claims, of false accusations made by a turncoat. The courts acquitted him of mafia offences on appeal, but judges upheld a drug-trafficking charge, "just to justify my jail time", he said.
Fresh out of prison in 1997, he was approached by Italy's secret services with a novel idea. Would he cultivate the Messina Denaro clan with the aim to getting close to Matteo to convince him to turn himself in? After three years of ingratiating himself with the family, Vaccarino received his first pizzino, brought by the husband of Matteo's sister Patrizia. "Messina Denaro wrote that he would sign as 'Alessio' in future letters and I would be 'Suetonius'," Vaccarino recalled.
Reaching across his desk in his office above the cinema, Vaccarino takes a pink Post-It note and folds it as small as possible. "The pizzini came like this, wrapped in sellotape so there was no way of opening them undetected, and sometimes they would take months to arrive."
When they were delivered, Vaccarino said he would take them to Rome to open them with a team of secret service officials. "I had proposed a business venture, but instead I became a kind of confessor," he said. "We discussed philosophy, religion and his family, particularly his daughter, whom he had never met."
Messina Denaro wrote that his respect for Vaccarino stemmed from an incident when he was a 12-year-old boy and Vaccarino, around 30 at the time, spotted him in a shop and gave him money for a purchase. "The fact you recognised me made me feel important," he wrote.
Over four years of correspondence, the fugitive wrote that he regretted not going to university and said he had become an avid reader, quoting from Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado and French writer Daniel Pennac.
While most mob bosses claim to be religious (Provenzano took a pastoral tone with his correspondents and crammed his pizzini with so many biblical references, investigators assumed he was using them for some kind of code), Messina Denaro declared that Catholicism left him cold. "I don't challenge death," he wrote, "I simply kick it in the head, because I have no fear of it. It's not down to courage, it's because I have no love for life, and after life there is nothing."
The correspondence ground to a sudden halt in 2007. After Provenzano's arrest the year before, police reading through his collection of pizzini found letters from Messina Denaro in which he discussed Vaccarino. News of the cinema owner's correspondence on behalf of the secret services soon leaked.
The final letter Vaccarino received came by regular post. "You have thrown your family into an inferno," it stated. "In my absence, someone will come to collect your debt to me." This time, it was signed "Matteo Messina Denaro".
Seven years on, Vaccarino is still alive. By living openly in Castelvetrano, despite the threat, he has prompted suspicions among mafia watchers that he has never been totally honest about his relationship with Messina Denaro, although the two screens on his desk showing live CCTV images from the alleys around his office suggest Vaccarino is concerned Messina Denaro may yet pay him a visit.
Vaccarino apart, in Castelvetrano there are few other locals who will refer to Messina Denaro by name, preferring instead to discuss "the fugitive".
"There is a grey zone here where people happily talk about defending 'legality' but then privately support the mafia culture, and who see Messina Denaro as a Robin Hood who represents the people," said local headmaster Francesco Fiordaliso, who has had his car, and a previous school he worked at, torched because of his anti-mob stance. "People whisper his name but his presence is tangible," added Fiordaliso, whose school is attended by Messina Denaro's daughter.
What is clear is that in the last 20 years Messina Denaro has continued to focus his activities on Castelvetrano and western Sicily, rather than aspiring to keep the Sicilian mafia intact. Cosa Nostra has meanwhile struggled as a loose federation of mandamenti, or local groups. In January, it was revealed that Riina was angry with Messina Denaro for concentrating on his own back yard while Cosa Nostra drifted.
During prison-yard chats with another mafioso, which were picked up by hidden microphones, the 83-year-old former boss said that as a young man Matteo had been entrusted to him by his father for training up in the ways of the mafia. But now, he said, Matteo had become too obsessed about making money from wind turbines, and angrily advised his former protege to "shove them up his arse".
Many Castelvetrano residents, by contrast, could not disagree more. "May the Lord keep you in good health for a long time, with love," stated a typical, anonymous, message addressed to Messina Denaro, daubed last year in large letters on a wall by a road heading out of town.
Instead of demanding protection money, Messina Denaro has focused on nurturing local businesses, ensuring they get rich on public works thanks to tenders fixed by corrupt officials, then leaning on them to bankroll his hideouts.
Beyond the railway line, out near the highway at Castelvetrano, Messina Denaro's alleged frontman Giuseppe Grigoli, the operator of a chain of supermarkets in western Sicily, opened a smart new shopping centre, Bellicitta, which employed hundreds of locals, and where a woman's clothes store was allegedly used by mafiosi for meetings.
"A shopping mall in Castelvetrano was a statement, a sign of wealth – it felt like a bit of America," said Giacomo Di Girolamo, author of The Invisible, a book about Messina Denaro. According to Principato, building firms linked to the Castelvetrano mafia were also able to obtain subcontracts for the construction of a new McDonald's close to the shopping centre.
Today, following the confiscation of Grigoli's retail empire, Bellicitta has been handed over to government administrators, and without mob backing, business is down dramatically. On a winter evening this year, a handful of customers drifted up and down the mall's atrium, eyeing up a display of paintings of the Madonna and child.
"Incredibly, when the government managers went to the bank to keep lines of credit open for the mall, they were turned down," Di Girolamo said.
"What you hear all the time in town, and on blogs, is how the mafia gives work and the government takes it away," said Francesco Garofalo, a member of Libera, the national association that lectures on how to fight the mafia and send volunteers to work in fields seized from the mob. "There are people here who would like to see Messina Denaro appointed mayor."
According to Principato, Messina Denaro also has supporters in very high places. "That he has friends in the police has been confirmed to us from various sources," she said. "We have never found one, but many turncoats have spoken of them. We have seen people who know where bugs have been placed – we have seen suspects enter rooms and go and remove bugs."
A handful of Italian politicians and policemen are currently on trial, accused of entering into secret talks with Cosa Nostra 20 years ago to stop its bombing campaign. It's likely those involved would rather Messina Denaro was not arrested if there was any risk he might tell police what he knows.
Messina Denaro is allegedly shielded by powerful freemasons in the port town of Trapani, near Castelvetrano, where magistrates probing mafia-masonry links last year received anonymous death threats and discovered a listening device in their office. "In Trapani, the mafia and the masons are intricately linked," Principato said.
Former flying squad chief Giuseppe Linares was a thorn in Messina Denaro's side in Trapani for years, arresting a number of his backers. Rattled, Matteo wrote to Provenzano in 2004 that he had lost control of the neighbouring town of Marsala. "At the moment we don't have anyone, they are all inside, even the replacements of the replacements of the replacements," he wrote. "By the end they will have arrested so many people, they'll have nothing to take but the chairs."
But Linares was transferred to Naples in 2013, prompting questions in parliament about the disastrous effects the move could have on any real possibility of finding Messina Denaro. Meanwhile, in Palermo a bruising turf war between magistrates has not helped the hunt. Last year, Principato was quietly monitoring a suspected extortionist, Leo Sutera, who was believed to be in touch with Messina Denaro, when he was arrested in a roundup on the orders of another magistrate. "We were really close, after two and a half years of exceptional results," she said.
Principato got a break in December thanks to the 30 arrests, which threw up a valuable and unprecedented prize: a cousin who wanted to talk. Lorenzo Cimarosa, the owner of a building firm, revealed new details about companies controlled by Messina Denaro, adding that Patrizia acted as a sorting office for pizzini to and from her brother. Recently, he said, he had handed over €60,000 to keep Messina Denaro solvent.
"My family and I are tired of the arrests, convictions and confiscation of assets we endure for Matteo Messina Denaro, who thinks only about himself," Cimarosa told investigators.
"This has never happened before in that circle," Principato said. "It will create more fractures in a tight group." Cimarosa's break with the rules of omertà appears to vindicate the policy of asset seizures, which have cut Messina Denaro's cash flow and forced him to squeeze his backers harder for funds.
"If Messina Denaro ceases to be useful to the grey mafia – the apparently clean entrepreneurs and politicians who back him – it will be the end for him," Di Girolamo said.
Back in Castelvetrano, there are the first signs of a grass-roots rebellion, starting with Elena Ferraro, 35, who made history in December by becoming the first local businesswoman to stand up to the Messina Denaro family. Two years ago, Mario Messina Denaro, a cousin of Matteo's, visited Ferraro at the private medical centre she manages in Castelvetrano to propose a scheme that would allow him to siphon cash through the clinic. Ferraro, a philosophy graduate who lives with her parents, refused, but Messina Denaro returned. He never explicitly threatened her. "They are very careful, but there is a language they use, they know where you are from, they know your schedule," Ferraro said.
On one occasion, Ferraro asked what right Messina Denaro had to pressure her. "I don't think he was used to speaking to young women," she said. "He replied, 'I am the capo of everyone.' I was terrified." Nevertheless, she went to the police.
Ferraro picks her way past the patients in the clinic's waiting room and heads for the cafe next door for her morning espresso, where men are slurping down cappuccinos, gossiping in dialect and munching deep-fried rice balls.
Ever since Mario was arrested thanks to Ferraro – he was among the 30 rounded up in December – these daily visits to the cafe have become acts of courage, since it is run by the brother of a man arrested for carrying pizzini for Matteo Messina Denaro.
But if the customers notice Ferraro's entrance, they are careful not to show it. "I carry on going there because I am determined my life should not change," she said. "The day of Mario's arrest, they were extremely courteous and the owner said, 'The coffee is on us.'"
Ferraro said that since the arrest some locals had ended their Facebook friendships with her. "But one woman stopped me in the street in tears and said, 'Thank you, you have freed us.'"
The next stop towards freedom will be the capture of Matteo Messina Denaro, who tonight will go to sleep somewhere in western Sicily, possibly in Castelvetrano itself, exercising the same caution he has employed for two decades to stay one step ahead of the police.
"What counts with Messina Denaro is his iron will and his huge ego," one investigator said. "Ultimately he doesn't care about his family, he doesn't even care about the mafia – all that matters to him is not being caught. For us to catch him, it's going to take a mistake on his part, or betrayal by one of his backers."
And when that happens, the police will be ready.
