The end of the line for Matteo Messina Denaro came in mundane fashion. On a Monday morning this month, the mafia boss was waiting in a queue for a Covid vaccine in Palermo when police closed in. A colonel from the carabinieri, Italy’s militarised police, asked him: “Are you Matteo Messina Denaro?”
“You know who I am,” came the reply.
The Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo and Clare Longrigg tell Michael Safi that the capture of such a high-ranking mafia boss is significant but does not kill off the organisation, which has evolved into a different proposition for authorities than it once was. Police hope it will allow them to solve murders stretching back decades.
The last confirmed sighting of Denaro before his arrest was in Tuscany in 1993, around the time explosives in a parked Fiat were detonated outside the Uffizi gallery, killing three people, injuring more than 40 and damaging priceless works of art.
Photograph: CARABINIERI/Reuters
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