The commander of the investigation unit of the Special Operations Group of the Carabinieri has recounted in an interview the small print of the operation Arcidiacono had spent eight years attempting to pay money for the final godfather of the Sicilian mafia and some of the wished criminals on this planet. Is Matteo Messina Denaro, the final boss of the Italian mafia?
For eight lengthy years Colonel Lucio Arcidiacono had pursued Matteo Messina Denaro and through these eight years, probably the most wished capo in Italy had eluded him. Until final January 16. As he was leaving a personal clinic within the Sicilian metropolis of Palermo, two of Lucio Arcidiacono’s males stopped him and the colonel approached him and requested: What’s your title? Messina Denaro replied: You know who I’m. He was proper.
“Not every part was straightforward. We bought to him solely with our investigations, with none confidants,” the commander of the investigation unit of the Carabinieri Special Operations Group informed the Italian Rai radio after arresting the final dwelling image of the Cosa Nostra, after 30 years on the run.
Since he was transferred to Palermo in 2015, Lucio Arcidiacono had a mission. The MISSION: seek out the tremendous fugitive. He additionally had intensive expertise monitoring down mobsters. In 2005 he collaborated within the arrest of Paolo di Lauro, some of the highly effective drug traffickers on this planet, and his crew arrested Raffaele Amato, head of a Neapolitan clan, in Spain. The seek for Messina Denaro “was like being on a curler coaster,” Arcidiacono stated in an interview with The Guardian. “There are moments whenever you suppose you’re near the purpose. Then there are moments whenever you fly very low and months later you notice that the path has grown chilly.”
The arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro, on January 16. CARABINIERI HANDOUT
This was the police operation
The arrest occurred early within the morning on Monday, January 16. Dozens of plainclothes policemen waited within the rain for his or her goal to look. Lots of rigidity. Finally he seems and Arcidiacono provides the order to his males. For no less than a yr, Denaro had been receiving common therapy for most cancers at a clinic in Palermo underneath the title of Andrea Bonafede. Three days earlier than the arrest, the carabinieri obtained a discover: on Monday he would return to the clinic for therapy.
“The night time earlier than the arrest, I didn’t sleep,” admits the mastermind of the police operation that caught probably the most wished mobster to the British newspaper. Their lives crossed lengthy earlier than. In 1993, Messina Denaro fled and Arcidiacono, on the age of 20, despatched his request to the Carabinieri Academy. “The murders of the anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino the earlier yr had deeply affected me and had given me the decisive push to turn out to be a Carabinieri officer,” he now recollects. Those years have been the worst for mafia terror in Italy.
Colonel Lucio Arcidiacono provides particulars of the operation on January 16 after the arrest of Messino Menara. Salvatore Cavalli/APTN
Nicknamed Diabolik, the Sicilian kingpin went as far as to say: “I crammed up a cemetery, on my own.” In 2022, Messina Denaro was discovered responsible and sentenced in absentia to life in jail for having personally killed or ordered the killing of dozens of individuals. Year after yr, Italian investigators seized his enterprise, arresting greater than 100 accomplices. Every time they appeared to get nearer to their goal, Denaro would disappear.
In early 2022, some telephone conversations between mobsters appeared to include a clue: the boss had colon most cancers and wanted speedy therapy. The Carabinieri requested the Ministry of Health entry to the medical data of sufferers with one of these most cancers. The researchers rummaged by the data of 1000’s of sufferers, till they discovered one: Andrea Bonafede.
First photos of the house the place the mobster of the Cosa Nostra Matteo Messina Denaro took refuge
After the arrest, Messina Denaro was transferred to a most safety jail within the central Italian metropolis of L’Aquila, the place he’ll proceed his most cancers therapy. But for Lucio Arcidiacono, the mission entrusted to him eight years in the past continues. “We have an obligation to search out out who protected him all these years. Our work isn’t executed. We have a protracted highway forward of us.”