Mafia Boss On The Run For 30 Years Captured

The Italian Mafia appears to still be around…

Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has finally been arrested after evading authorities for over 30 years.

Italian authorities arrested Denaro who at one time touted he has killed enough people to fill a cemetery, at a clinic where he was receiving chemotherapy.

Denaro was placed in an Italian maximum security prison and will stay there before he goes before a judge to face murder charges along with a slew of other charges.

BREAKING: Top Mafia Boss Captured After 30 Years On The Run. Full Story Here: https://t.co/3mUMW9mfAC pic.twitter.com/nkUTEZwa4v

— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) January 16, 2023

VIDEO. People clapping and cheering Carabinieri police in the streets of Palermo after the arrest of Italy's top mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro after 30 years on the run – @repubblica pic.twitter.com/W6ptsXu7lL

— Antonello Guerrera (@antoguerrera) January 16, 2023

The Hill dropped more details:

Matteo Messina Denaro’s long record as a killer — turncoat mobsters said he’d boast of enough murders to fill a cemetery — greatly burnished his credentials among his peers as a major boss in the Sicilian Mafia.

After 30 years eluding capture while still running much of the Mafia’s affairs, he was arrested Monday at a Palermo clinic, where the convicted mobster was receiving chemotherapy. But while he was hustled off early Tuesday to a maximum-security prison on the Italian mainland, his capture is hardly expect to bring the demise of the Cosa Nostra, thanks to the syndicate’s more than century-old roots and rules.

“What will happen in detail, we can’t know,” Palermo Prosecutor General Lia Sava, said on Rai state radio about the future of the Mafia.

“But one thing is sure. Cosa Nostra is made up of rules. It has supported itself on these rules for 150 years, so certainly it will put into motion those rules to repair the damage, and thus create the new leadership structure needed after the arrest,” Sava said.

While Messina Denaro wielded great influence in the Mafia, for decades Cosa Nostra has lacked a supreme capo, investigators say.

The practically mythical figure of a “boss of bosses” ended in 1993, with the arrest in a Palermo hideout of Salvatore ”Toto” Riina, who had been Italy’s top fugitive for 23 years.

Italy's most wanted mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested by police at a private hospital in Sicily, where he was being treated for cancer https://t.co/MKESeTAN6U pic.twitter.com/OsGpMtZUan

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 16, 2023

Here’s what the New York Times reported:

Even by mafia standards, his crimes curdled the blood.

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Authorities linked him to dozens of murders in the 1990s, including the kidnapping and strangling of a mafia turncoat’s 12-year-old son, whose body was dissolved in acid. He played a role in the murders of Italy’s two leading anti-mafia prosecutors, in deadly bombings in Milan, Rome and Florence, and in the strangulation of a pregnant woman.

But on Monday, after 30 years on the lam and achieving infamy as Italy’s most wanted fugitive, Matteo Messina Denaro, 60, the last Italian mobster linked to a savage period in which Sicily’s “black hand” declared war on the Italian state, was quietly arrested outside a clinic in Palermo after he showed up under an alias for a medical appointment.

“Until this morning,” said Palermo’s chief Prosecutor, Maurizio De Lucia, “we didn’t even know what face he had.”

Italian officials, including the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who flew to Sicily to congratulate local law enforcement, immediately heralded the arrest as proof that justice, even if slow, would ultimately catch up with the country’s mobsters.

“This was a fundamental battle to win,” Ms. Meloni told reporters outside the Palermo courthouse. “This is a hard blow to organized crime.”

Italy’s police arrested the mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the country’s most wanted fugitives who eluded capture for three decades. He was sentenced in absentia for the 1992 murder of two prosecutors and other crimes. https://t.co/azqDn7YefI pic.twitter.com/6o2n4nTQeq

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 16, 2023