Over time, the Italian police have been unravelling the deadly embrace of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra mafia, making unspectacular gains that have gradually weakened the grip of the murderous crime families who terrorised the island, and further afield, for decades. Today Cosa Nostra is by no means dead, but it has been overshadowed by the ‘Ndrangheta, the organised crime gang based in Calabria, the mainland region nearest Sicily.
The capture this week in a Palermo cancer clinic of mafia “capo” Messina Denaro (60), after 30 years on the run, is a major coup for the police. Denaro had been a central figure in orchestrating the war waged by Cosa Nostra against the state in the 1990s and still controlled the organisation from his home in a remote village of the western region of Trapani. In recent times, while maintaining his criminal empire, he demonstrated his renowned business savvy, managing assets and infiltrating legal economic enterprises, including wind energy companies
Denaro was convicted in absentia in 2020, and sentenced to life, for his part in the infamous 1992 murders of two anti-mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and the bombings in 1993 in Florence, Milan and Rome that left 10 dead. He has been linked to dozens of murders, including the kidnapping and strangling of a mafia turncoat’s 12-year-old son, whose body was dissolved in acid. He was a protégé of the ruthless late Cosa Nostra “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, who declared all-out war on the Italian state as prosecutors tightened the noose on the mafia’s criminal activities in the early 1990s.
In recent years many of his second tier of command have been arrested and prosecuted and the authorities have confiscated assets worth some ¤150 million. Observers fear a murderous and uncertain fight for succession.
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Times are changing. As the heavily armed and masked police took him into custody and high-fived each other, crowds on the Palermo streets applauded. Omerta is losing its power to cow.