What next for Sicily's Mafia after arrest of kingpin

Matteo Messina Denaro’s lengthy file as a killer — turncoat mobsters stated he’d boast of sufficient murders to fill a cemetery — drastically burnished his credentials amongst his friends as a significant boss within the Sicilian Mafia.

After 30 years eluding seize whereas nonetheless operating a lot of the Mafia’s affairs, he was arrested on Monday at a Palermo clinic, the place the convicted mobster was receiving chemotherapy.

But whereas he was hustled off to a maximum-security jail on the Italian mainland, his seize is hardly anticipate to deliver the demise of the Cosa Nostra, due to the syndicate’s greater than century-old roots and guidelines.

Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro was arrested at a Palermo clinic, the place the convicted mobster was receiving chemotherapy. (AP)

“What will happen in detail, we can’t know,” Palermo Prosecutor General Lia Sava, stated on Rai state radio about the way forward for 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″ led to 1993, with the arrest in a Palermo hideout of Salvatore “Toto” Riina, who had been Italy’s high fugitive for 23 years.

According to trial testimony that led to his conviction for a lot of murders, together with the 1992 bombings that killed Italy’s high two anti-Mafia magistrates, Riina was in command of Cosa Nostra’s “commission” that ran illicit companies and devised a technique of lethal retaliation towards the state for its crackdown on the mob.

“After Riina there was never an absolute boss,″ said Rome Chief Prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi, who took up his post last year after serving as Palermo chief prosecutor, helping coordinate the hunt for Messina Denaro.

Anti-Mafia campaigners took to the streets of Palermo in Sicily after the arrest of crime boss Matteo Messina Denaro. (AP)

Even if the “capo di capi” figure still existed, Messina Denaro wouldn’t have qualified because he came from Castelvetrano on Sicily’s western edge, not from Palermo or its surrounding countryside, Lo Voi noted, citing Cosa Nostra’s rules.

Still, Messina Denaro, the son of a crime boss, “was one of the essential bosses and (he) had ties with different legal organisations in Italy and overseas,″ Lo Voi instructed The Associated Press.

“That’s why his arrest surely represents an earthquake at this moment for Cosa Nostra,″ Lo Voi said.

Also boosting Messina Denaro’s prestige was his fierce record as a murderous clan boss, holding sway over a large swath of western Sicily, Lo Voi said.

A military plane ferried Messina Denaro on Tuesday to a maximum security prison in L’Aquila, in the central Apennine mountains, where strict rules for top organised crime bosses who won’t cooperate with authorities include sharply limited visitor privileges.

Younger generations of people on Sicily have taken a tougher stance against organised crime on the island. (AP)

Italy’s national anti-Mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Melillo, said that finally putting Messina Denaro behind bars won’t change the strategy Cosa Nostra has followed for more than a decade.

That strategy is “now not certainly one of violence” against the state, Melillo said on state TV, referring to the 1992 bombings that killed Palermo prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and the 1993 bomb attacks against Rome churches, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and an art gallery in Milan, part of the Mafia’s bid to try to get the state to drop its crackdown on Cosa Nostra.

Instead Cosa Nostra is lying low, opting to “co-penetrate the social and financial cloth” of Italy, Melillo said.

A small army of turncoats helped Italian authorities put scores of Cosa Nostra members behind bars in the last few decades, and as a consequence, gave boost to the ‘ndrangheta crime syndicate in Italy’s southern “toe,” allowing it to eclipse the Sicilian mob in influence to become one of the world’s biggest cocaine brokers.

In the 1980s, an FBI undercover operation working with Italian investigators, including Falcone, broke up a multi-million heroin ring and cocaine distribution operation involving Sicilian Mafia figures and the Gambino crime family in New York.

A mural of assassinated anti-Mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino on a street wall in Palermo, Sicily. (AP)

But Cosa Nostra lately “has gone again in an enormous solution to drug trafficking,” including cocaine, synthetic illegal drugs and heroin, Lo Voi said. With enough drug trade to go around, there’s no real rivalry between Cosa Nostra and the ‘ndrangheta, he added.

With drug trafficking, “the earnings are huge and the exercise is much less harmful than extortion,” Lo Voi said.

Pressuring local businesses to pay crime clans monthly protection money, known as “pizzo,” has long been a mainstay of Cosa Nostra’s activity.

But some 15 years ago, grass-roots groups of young people in Palermo rebelled against their elders’ longtime surrender to the practice. Forming an organisation called “Addiopizzo,” or “Farewell Pizzo,” they encouraged businesses to report extortionists to authorities instead of paying them.

Control of local territory is crucial for the Mafia’s existence.

Lo Voi said during the COVID-19 pandemic, neighbourhood mobsters supplied residents with groceries when breadwinners lost jobs.

A joint anti-Mafia operation by Italian police and the FBI in 2019 led to multiple arrests. (AP)

That complex relationship — a combination of benefit, fear and even complicity — is suspected of helping Messina Denaro elude the law for 30 years, most of that time in Sicily.

Since his capture, police have been searching his most recent hideout — a home on a dead-end alley in Campobello di Mazara, near Trapani. The owner is Andrea Bonafede, the name the fugitive used on an identity card to receive his cancer treatment.

The real Bonafede is under investigation, including at least one of the doctors who had been involved in the fugitive’s treatment at the clinic beginning in late 2020, Italian news reports said.

Fellow cancer patients told La Repubblica daily that the man who wore designer scarves and hand-painted shirts freely chatted with them while receiving chemotherapy and sometimes gave them bottles of olive oil.

Six years ago, Italian authorities confiscated 13 million euros ($20 million) worth of olive groves and bottling facilities linked to Messina Denaro in the countryside near Trapani.

Shouts of “Bravi!” rose in the street outside the clinic when two Carabinieri officers brought him out of the clinic.

But others wondered about why it took decades to capture him.

“I had anticipated for a very long time that it could occur, however it’s absurd that it took 30 years,″ Salvatore Borsellino, brother of the slain prosecutor, instructed AP in a video interview from Palermo.