The capture of mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro today was 30 years in the making.

The “last godfather” was one of Italy’s most wanted fugitives. Despite his bloody past, his arrest came without violence, on a wet January morning in Palermo – albeit with more than 100 members of the armed forces involved.

Messina Denaro was being treated for cancer at Palermo’s La Maddalena private hospital under the alias of Andrea Bonafede when the police intervened and detained him. He was wearing a watch worth €35,000 at the time.

Locals applauded and shook hands with the police as the 60-year-old convicted killer was taken away in a black van.

His arrest comes 30 years and a day after the search concluded for “boss of bosses” Salvatore “the Beast” Riina after 23 years on the run. Riina, who died in 2017, reportedly mentored Messina Denaro.

Experts in organised crime now doubt the strength of the mafia.

One says there are “no big chiefs anymore” to step up and replace the likes of Riina and Messina Denaro.

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‘He represented all the secrets’

Film series like The Godfather have made mafia groups like Sicily’s Cosa Nostra infamous.

But competition between gangs has made life difficult for the clans working out of Italy’s traditional mafia heartlands.

Although Cosa Nostra retains control of its Sicilian territory and a capacity to infiltrate the broader economy, it has been supplanted by groups such as the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta in the drugs trade.

Federico Varese, professor of Criminology at Oxford University, said the fact that Messina Denaro – a native of a town in western Sicily – had been arrested in the island’s capital of Palermo says much about how Cosa Nostra still works.

“Mafias are really not global,” he said. “On the contrary, they are very rooted in their territory and fugitives who want to maintain some sort of control and role in the organisation hang around the place where they operate.”

Anna Sergi, an expert in organised crime at Essex University, thinks Messina Denaro might be the last of his kind.

“Messina Denaro was the last godfather, he represented all the secrets of Cosa Nostra. It is the end of a myth and the
organisation will have to cope with this,” she said.

Ms Sergi said it was not clear who would step in to replace Messina Denaro in what is now a more factionalised mafia.

“If Cosa Nostra wants to rebuild the leadership it had in the past it needs directives, but there are no big chiefs anymore,” Ms Sergi said. She added she expects the group to try to rebuild connections with clans in the United States.

Messina Denaro’s bloody history

Whatever the future holds, Messina Denaro’s violent past is a matter of record.

Also known as “Diabolik” after an uncatchable comic book thief, he was born in Castelvetrano, Sicily in April 1962; his father Francesco, known as Don Ciccio, was the head of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra mafia in the Trapani region.

He was immersed in the mafia lifestyle from a young age. He is said to have been trained to wield a gun at 14 and allegedly committed his first murder when he was 18.

But Messina Denaro is a convicted killer. Despite years on the run, he was convicted of awful crimes in his absence.

These include the 1992 killing of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the deadly 1993 bomb attacks in Milan, Florence and Rome, as well as the kidnapping, torture and killing of the 11-year-old son of a mafioso-turned-state witness.

What’s more, it’s widely thought Messina Denaro boasted about his violent deeds. He is claimed to have once said: “I filled a cemetery all by myself.”

In 2002, he was sentenced to a life term in prison for his involvement in the 1993 bombings.

How crime boss disappeared and evaded capture

When Salvatore Riina was arrested in 1993, Messina Denaro disappeared that summer after holidaying in Tuscany.

During the years of fleeing from place to place, the mafia boss had a relatively comfortable lifestyle. He apparently played video games and entertained many girlfriends, according to the Washington Post.

But he was active enough to prove a slippery fugitive for many years, as fellow mobsters would alert him of any police raids and move him from hideout to hideout.

No one would give up his whereabouts, with a strict code of silence – known as “omerta” – followed by his supporters.

There were close calls and false dawns for the police. In 2021, a Formula One fan from Liverpool was arrested by police in the Netherlands. Officers had mistaken him for Messina Denaro.

He was even featured in the Netflix documentary series World’s Most Wanted. But on Monday he was finally arrested.

He was caught after investigators confirmed his illness and his need for treatment at the Palermo clinic, ending his reign as perhaps the last mafia “secret keeper”.

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