Matteo Messina Denaro is a 60-year-old Sicilian Mafia boss. Following the arrests of Bernardo Provenzano on April 11, 2006, and Salvatore Lo Piccolo in November 2007, he was regarded as one of the new leaders of the Sicilian mafia.
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Denaro, the son of a Mafia boss, rose to national prominence on April 12, 2001, when the magazine L’Espresso featured him on the cover under the headline: Ecco il Nuovo capo Della Mafia (“Here is the new Mafia boss”).
Messina Denaro became a fugitive on the most wanted list in 1993, and according to Forbes in 2010, he was one of the world’s ten most wanted and powerful criminals.
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With the deaths of Bernardo Provenzano in 2016 and Salvatore Riina in 2017, Messina Denaro was regarded as the unrivalled boss of all Mafia bosses.
In 2020, he was sentenced to life in prison for fatal bombings in Milan, Florence, and Rome in the late 1990s, as well as the murder and torture of an enemy’s 11-year-old son who testified against the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.
On January 16, 2023, he was apprehended in a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily’s capital.
He was Cosa Notra’s longest-hiding fugitive, having been wanted for nearly 30 years.
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