I don't know how yall missed this.

Former Cosa Nostra boss of bosses Matteo Messina Denaro is now a rat, just like everyone else in the Mafia. Here's the link:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...-in-the-illicit-antiques-trade-pgz6jlsbc

Wow! Cant wait for the book lol

I doubt he'll live long enough to write a book. But he's officially the biggest public rat in Mafia history, bigger than even Joseph Massino.

Are all the rats in Europe in Italy? I don’t really hear much about the other European groups flipping that much. Either Italy is just tougher on organized crime, or they're just really weak.

Pay-Wall; he revealed antiques dealing; guessing he's isolated and spoke out of school. If he were a rat, there'd be headlines and arrests.

HE'S NOT A RAT

Since his capture earlier this year, he has been jailed under Italy's "hard prison regime," reserved for mafia members and other high-security criminals.

Messina Denaro has cancer and underwent surgery for an intestinal obstruction this week. The former mafia boss was surviving on a diet of fruit juices and food supplements, his lawyer, Alessandro Cerella, told the AGI, or Italian Journalistic Agency, Reuters reported.

Cerella had told Italian media that his condition was "incompatible" with the prison regime and that his client required "immediate hospitalization."

Messina Denaro appears to be keeping "omertà," the mafia code of silence, until the end. He told magistrates he had no intention of seeking time off his jail sentence by betraying his fellow mafiosos and has refused to even admit he was in the Cosa Nostra — the Sicilian Mafia.

"He will never talk, partly because he is dying and partly because of his total loyalty to Cosa Nostra," Teresa Principato, a special anti-mafia magistrate who has long taken part in the hunt for Messina Denaro, said, The Times reported.

MMD just defended his father who, according to him was a big antiques dealer not a mafioso.

His words in the interrogation after his capture: «I will never regret. You caught me thanks to the disease”
In the interrogation report the Cosa Nostra boss challenged the magistrates by denying having committed massacres and murders and having trafficked in drugs. «I feel like a man of honor but not as a mafioso, I know the Cosa Nostra from the newspapers. Maybe I was doing business there and I didn’t know it was Cosa nostra», Messina Denaro said after the arrest to the Palermo prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia and to the deputy Paolo Guido. “My life hasn’t been sedentary, it’s been a very adventurous, eventful life,” he also stated, effectively admitting that he was on the run and that he had bought a gun, but never used it.

During the interrogation, Messina Denaro also told prosecutors that he was captured because of the disease. “I don’t want to be a superman or arrogant, you took me for my illness,” said the mafia boss, adding that he gave up technology “as long as he could” because he knew it would be a weak point.

“My father was an art dealer”
When asked by the Palermo prosecutor if he had ever trafficked in drugs, Messina Denaro replied that he lived well “from my own, from my family” because his father, Francesco Messina Denaro, godfather of Castelvetrano, who died as a fugitive and was considered one of the loyalists of the Corleonesi di Totò Riina, was “an art dealer”. And then again: “I’m passionate about ancient history from Rome to go up – the mafia boss tells the prosecutors – then my father was an art dealer and where I live there is Selinunte (an archaeological site in the Trapani area, ndr). My father didn’t go there to dig but in Selinunte at that time there were a thousand people and they were all digging. In general, my father bought 100% of the works which were then sold in Switzerland and then arrived everywhere from Switzerland: in Arabia, in the Emirates and we saw things that passed through my father in American museums », he concluded.

Totally agree,he never turned rat.

Oh thank goodness, I'm glad that I'm wrong. Yeah, I couldn't read the fucking article because they’re charging, and I'm not about to go through the trouble of subscribing.

I honestly had an inkling that he didn't flip, but like I said I couldn't read the article so wanted to get some reactions here.

We have a few of cases in France with the Corsican mafia and the Marseille clans.

France recently created a witness protection program, mostly to fight against the Corsican mafia. The first protected witness are associates of the two major crews in the Corsican Mob ("La brise de Mer" in the North and "La bande du petit bar" in the South). But so far no key member of the Corsican mafia has turned informant.

I'm not so sure that 41 bis would make me turn rat, because I enjoy being alone anyway. But anyway, why do you think that no key members have flipped? Is it because they're tougher?

I don't think they're tougher although there is definitely a strong omerta culture in Corsica.

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that this option didn't exist until recently so there was simply no choice of cooperating. Even if someone wanted to cooperate, the French justice system had nothing to offer him and would not have been able to "handle" him from an legal and administrative point of view.

I think, once the Corsicans will see that this option is working, they will start consider it and i wouldn't be surprised in the near future if one or two high level Corsican guy decided to testify. It would be very interesting because the inner working of the Corsican mafia is still relatively unknown.

Yes they are still obscure compared to their Italian cousins, however there are several good movies/series dealing with the Corsicans.