yes, their main target nowadays is the infiltration of politcs/institutions and legit economy minimizing the number of homicides; Cosa Nostra has still a hierarchical structure that's why it kills less than other organizations that have a horizontal one, like the Camorra

We always talk about Falcone and Borsellino but there were so many judges policemen communist leaders and others killed in Riina's war. Cosa Nostra is still very powerful maybe even underrated nowadays because Ndrangheta is now in the spotlight.

He responded about Baiardo !

Messina Denaro would have commented on the declarations of Salvatore Baiardo , the Graviano brothers' loyalist who spoke again on Sunday in the program "Non è l'Arena" . The same Baiardo who last November had prophesied the imminent capture of the mafia boss, reporting his serious illness and his possible surrender.
“No, Baiardo didn't know anything - he would have said from his single cell in the L'Aquila prison - He couldn't have known that I had cancer. For the simple reason that five people knew I was sick in my house. Just five or six. How did Baiardo know? He took a guess ” . And then again: "I'm pissed off about the news I hear from the news... Lies are told and it's all the result of misunderstandings" .
Almost lapidary statements accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders.

Just as Riina rejected the idea of having been the object of a negotiation to guarantee Bernardo Provenzano's hiding, so Messina Denaro wants to remove any suspicion of having been the object of sacrifice in favor of other bosses.

The Messina Denaro Dynasty between arrests and fugitives
Rosalia, sister of the fugitive, ended up in prison today

ANSA Editorial Staff
PALERMO
03 March 2023

Even if buried by life sentences and hundreds of years in prison, they have always been under investigation and for this reason forced to exercise maniacal caution, they have never renounced the mafia "faith".

A criminal dynasty that of Messina Denaro, historic mafia family of Castelvetrano that today with the arrest of Rosalia, sister of the ex fugitive Matteo loses another piece.

In the beginning it was Don Ciccio, the undisputed boss of the district, who died on the run. His body, ready for burial, was found on November 30, 1998 on the street after an anonymous call to the police.
Don Ciccio had four daughters and two sons. Of the males, the designated heir to the top of the family, Matteo, was captured on January 16 after a 30-year hunt.
The other, Salvatore, the eldest, released from prison in 2006 after serving a sentence for the mafia, was re-arrested on the same charges in 2010. It didn't go any better for the daughters and for the rest of the family: Patrizia, sentenced in definitively of 16 years for mafia association and her husband Vincenzo Panicola; Rosario Allegra, husband of Giovanna, died in his cell and Gaspare Como, husband of Bice, is detained at 41 bis. Today it was Rosalia's turn.

Sister of Sicilian mafia’s ‘last godfather’ arrested over secret notes
Matteo Messina Denaro’s hand-typed instructions found hidden in sofa at home of his sister Rosalia, say police

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...over-secret-notes-rosalia-messina-denaro

Looks like she still lived in the house where MMD grew up.

She is also the mother of his lawyer Lorenza Guttadauro. According to the police, the woman was becoming the new "strategic force" behind Cosa Nostra.
The detectives found that the note in the chair leg referred to a hospital patient. The detective had previously determined that Matteo Messina Denaro had Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestines. This had been discussed in tapped telephone conversations. The information on the note provided clues that were decisive in the search for Matteo Messina's whereabouts. The police photographed it and put it back. Rosalia Messina was not allowed to know that the police had found the note.
There were also striking technical terms in the notes, apparently code language. The police believe that this indicated corrupt contacts in the government apparatus. And one “Parmigiano” would be a corrupt very big businessman.

A handwritten letter resembling a political manifesto, apparently written by Matteo Messina, was also found and was addressed to his sister. In it he sketches the Cosa Nostra as a kind of resistance organization against the background of Italian history. According to him, it is "an honor" to be prosecuted for mafia membership. Messina Denaro writes, among other things:

We've been persecuted like we were villains. Treated like we were not of the human race. We have become an ethnic group to be wiped out. And yet we, children of this land of Sicily, are tired of being overwhelmed by first a Piedmontese and then a Roman state that we do not recognize. We are Sicilians and we wanted to stay that way. They have made up a big lie for the people. We the bad, they the good.

The hearing of the trial in progress before the Caltanissetta assize court of appeal is scheduled for tomorrow, in which Matteo Messina Denaro is accused of the massacres of Capaci and Via D'Amelio which cost the lives of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and escort agents.
Lorenza Guttadauro, niece of the mafia boss, whom he appointed trusted lawyer, will not defend the godfather in this proceeding.
You have in fact renounced your mandate because, according to what is learned, you would not have had the time to prepare the defense speech scheduled for tomorrow.
At the last hearing on January 18, scheduled two days after the arrest of the boss, the criminal lawyer asked the court for a term in defense precisely to study the proceedings of the trial followed up to then by the lawyers of office. But her commitments dictated by her visits to her uncle detained in L'Aquila and by participation in the interrogations to which he was subjected would not have allowed her to complete the investigation of a very complex process.
In the first instance, Messina Denaro was sentenced to life imprisonment. At the last hearing he chose not to participate via videoconference.

Emanuele Bonafede and his wife Lorena Ninfa Lanceri have been arrested they were in the closest circle of the mafia boss.
The couple is framed by a photo of the boss smoking a cigar and holding a cognac glass in his hand, taken at the home of the two spouses accused of aiding and abetting. The shot, in the living room of the house, dates back to a few years ago and shows only the body of the then fugitive, whose face was specially cut off.

The woman, Lorena Lanceri, would have been very close to Matteo Messina Denaro, according to what emerges from the investigation by the Carabinieri del Ros, who took her and her husband to jail. The military found numerous evidence of the relationship between the boss and Lanceri. Messina Denaro, to hide her true identity, called her Diletta.

Bonafede and MMD speak in a supermarket.

“I pay for the surname I carry" - The loyal sisters of Sicilian Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-sisters-of-sicilian-mafia-boss-matteo-messina-denaro

Mafia superboss Matteo Messina Denaro said he planned to take his own life before his cancer got the better of him, according to a letter penned to his sister before his capture and published by La Repubblica newspaper on Monday.
"I will not die of cancer, as soon as I cannot take it any more I will kill myself at home and you will find me.

I will tell you when the time comes," wrote the now jailed Messina Denaro, who was captured at a Palermo cancer clinic in January after 30 years on the run.

The former fugitive spent 5 years in Campobello di Mazara a few kilometers from Castelvetrano, his home town. He used the name Francesco Salsi as a cover identity and went around on a BMW enduro motorcycle.

Mafia, Messina Denaro: "I didn't give the order to kill little Di Matteo"
Messina Denaro tries to reduce his role in the killing of little Giuseppe Di Matteo by unloading the responsibility on Giovanni Brusca

Posted 1 dayFrom editorial staff
Kidnapping yes, murder no. Matteo Messina Denaro tries to reduce his role in the killing of little Giuseppe Di Matteo by unloading the responsibility for having ordered the child's suppression onto Giovanni Brusca. The boss, as reported by the Livesicilia.it website, thus answered the questions of the investigating judge Alfredo Montalto.

Giuseppe Di Matteo was kidnapped in the stables of Villabate where he rode on horseback on November 23, 1993. He was just 12 years old. With the kidnapping, the mafia wanted to induce father Santino Di Matteo, who had become a collaborator of justice, to retract his revelations. While waiting for an afterthought that never happened, Giuseppe was transferred from one prison to another in the provinces of Palermo, Trapani, Agrigento.

The first farm to which he was taken, hooded and locked in the trunk of a car, was in Campobello di Mazara, the very town of Messina Denaro's last hideout. Here the little boy spent a period of his horrible imprisonment in the country house of Giuseppe Costa, a loyal follower of the fugitive boss at the time. After an ordeal lasting more than two years, on 11 January 1996 Giovanni Brusca gave the order to kill the child who was strangled and dissolved in acid. It is precisely from this horror that Messina Denaro has now distanced itself. That order, he repeated, did not come from him.

THE BOND WITH THE CUNTRERA -CARUANA - 13/15

by Giuseppe Pipitone | JANUARY 16, 2023
It is also on the basis of this long experience in the field that Paci has reconstructed the origins of Messina Denaro's criminal career. The magistrate has carried out an investigation that order in 40 years of forgotten judicial papers. The result was to cast a different light not only on the fundamental role that Matteo played in the massacres, but also on the high connections established in remote years by the Messina Denaros in the complex criminal landscape. Paci discovered that already in the 1950s Don Ciccio Messina Denaro was linked to the Cuntrera and Caruana : even a member of the Siculiana clanhe was a witness at the wedding of Matteo's father. In the 1960s, the Cuntreras and Caruanas left the province of Agrigento to emigrate to Canada and then also to Great Britain and Venezuela: in a short time they would become among the main drug traffickers in the world. It is estimated that 80 percent of the drugs produced in Colombia arrived in the United States via Caracas: there it was the people of Siculiana who distributed them. The peak, according to the DEA , was reached in 1983: 3 billion drug dollars laundered by the Agrigento mafiosi, who worked with the Colombian cartels, from Pablo Escobar to Calì. The link between Venezuelaand Messina Denaro also emerges from other old forgotten papers. There is a Mafia turncoat, a minor one, called Franco Safina: twenty years ago he said that Messina Denaro had a treasure in Venezuela, created after investing five million dollars in a poultry company. Isn't five million for a poultry company a bit much? Was it poultry or was it cocaine? Salvatore Grigoli, Don Pino Puglisi's killer, also speaks of Venezuela : in the 1990s he was wounded after an attack in Alcamo. With him was Matteo, who told him: "If you want, you can go to Venezuela for a certain period and don't worry". Grigoli never went to Venezuela. Messina Denaro who knows.

DELL'UTRI'S FRIEND
The one who has certainly been a guest of the Cuntera and Caruana is Filippo Alberto Rapisarda , a flashy man who had ended up in Milan from the heart of Sicily to lead Inim, a company that had become the third largest Italian real estate group. Well dressed, pleasant and with bloody manners, he had established his headquarters in via Chiaravalle, in a large sixteenth-century building a stone's throw from the Duomo: it is there, in those nine thousand square meters with frescoed ceilings, that years later the first Forza Italia club. In fact, when he was at the height of his success, another young Sicilian transplanted to Milan had gone to work for Rapisarda: his name is Marcello Dell'Utri and he had already worked in the real estate field, as close collaborators ofSilvio Berlusconi at the Edilnord.

The experience of the third largest Italian real estate group, however, goes badly: the companies collapse and an arrest warrant is issued for Rapisarda for fraudulent bankruptcy. The Sicilian flees, leaves Milan and Italy and runs away on the run for seven years. He first goes to Paris, then to Venezuela where he is a guest of Cuntrera and Caruana. Those are years in which Caracas and Castelvetrano seem very close. Rapisarda, in fact, will attempt to carry out a real estate speculation near Selinunte, near the ruins of the ancient Greek city. As had already happened in the Inim affair, even in the Selinunte affair Rapisarda's partner is Francesco Paolo Alamia, a very thin engineer with important friends: he was a man of Vito Ciancimino, the former mafia mayor of Palermo, the mastermind of the "sack" who destroyed the city center to create one of the most impressive building speculations in Italian history. Very close to Don Vito, Alamia will also have relations with Messina Denaro. A circumstance that emerged only a few years ago, shortly before the engineer's death. After forty years of judicial investigations, in fact, Alamia was suspected of having ordered the murder of one of his associates, Antonio Maiorana , who disappeared into thin air together with his son in 2007. That affair will greatly disturb the waters within Cosa nostra: Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who at the time was the undisputed leader of Palermo, will even order an internal investigation of the mafia to understand who had dared to commit that double crime without his consent. He will even ask Messina Denaro for explanations, summoned to his villa on the outskirts of Palermo for a summit. That meeting will never take place: on the same day, in fact, Lo Piccolo is arrested after a quarter of a century in hiding. Matteo, on the other hand, manages to save himself once again.

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/20...o-i-rapporti-con-la-politica/6629144/13/

Messina Denaro's mail, pizzini with bosses and infiltrators: "After reading them, don't tear them up but burn them"
The rules of the former fugitive to prevent the messages from being discovered and ending up in the hands of the investigators. The correspondence with Bernardo Provenzano, Salvatore Lo Piccolo, but also with the former mayor Antonio Vaccarino and with his sister "Rosetta" shows that few of him listened to him. I prosecutor: "In all the hideouts you will find letters: exceptional material"


The investigators found many pizzini written by Messina Denaro

"After reading this letter, don't tear it up, burn it", this was the recommendation of the boss Matteo Messina Denaro in the correspondence entertained under the pseudonym of "Alessio" with the former mayor Antonino Vaccarino, alias "Svetonius", who died in 2021 and that through the SISDE years ago he had managed to hook up the ex super fugitive, without however the operation ultimately leading to the capture of the mafioso. A clear and fundamental recommendation which, however, was not respected even by the sister of the mafia boss, "Rosetta", who ended up in prison , and who, precisely because she did not destroy the pizzini - or for having copied them - involuntarily put the investigators on the right track to identify , after thirty years on the run,

The investigating judge: "The boss didn't hide and showed his face to everyone"

Messages with Provenzano, Lo Piccolo and Vaccarino
As stated in the order of the investigating judge Alfredo Montalto which led to the arrest of Rosalia Messina Denaro, alias "Fragolone", the mafia boss "had built around himself a solid and well-tested communication system through pizzini" which, before 16 January last year, when it was blocked at the La Maddalena clinic, it was made up of three well-known strands: one with Bernardo Provenzano (the messages were seized on 11 April 2006, after the capture of the head of Cosa Nostra in Montagna dei Cavalli), another with Vaccarino (who was acquired through the former Sisde) and finally the one with the "baron" of San Lorenzo, the boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo (the notes were also found in this case at the time of his arrest, on 5 November 2007 ).

"Scientific method still in use: pizzini found in all hideouts"
This communication system - made of rolled up notes, sealed with adhesive tape, often hidden in small packets, with code names and hand-delivered by a human chain - according to the investigators "still works today in a scientific and orthodox way within Cosa Nostra". So much so that, as the prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia writes, the deputy Paolo Guido and the deputies Gianluca De Leo and Pierangelo Padova, who coordinate the investigations of the Ros "in all the sites in the availability of Messina Denaro's family members were found, meticulously concealed , a consistent number of pizzini".

The "ingenious rules" of the mafioso
The former fugitive had always "characterized the transmission (and above all the conservation) of the pizzini by the adoption of ingenious precautions - reads the precautionary custody order - first of all the rule of the absolute prohibition of leaving any material trace of the written : it has always been a peremptory order from the boss to his epistolary interlocutors to burn and/or destroy the pizzino received immediately after reading it".

''No worsening for Messina Denaro'', says the Head of Oncology at the L'Aquila hospital
AMTwo thousand 08 June 2023
"There has been no substantial worsening of the state of the disease, no hospitalization is in sight, the situation is characterized by a normal course of a cancer patient". This was told to the ANSA agency by Professor Luciano Mutti , head of the oncology department of the L'Aquila hospital, head of the team that is treating the mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro , suffering from colon cancer, locked up under regime of 41bis in the maximum security prison of L'Aquila. With very measured words given the delicacy of the case and the great reserve that is imposed on the affair, the professor underlines that there is therefore no cause for immediate alarm for Messina Denaro.
The former fugitive, arrested in Palermo on 16 January and from the following day locked up in the prison located in the Aquilan hamlet of Preturo, continues his treatment in prison: in particular, he undergoes, in the clinic created ad hoc for reasons of security, in a prison room in front of his cell, with regular cycles of chemotherapy and pain therapy.
"Messina Denaro continues the treatments, like any other patient suffering from this disease - explained Professor Mutti -. I can only stigmatize the interpretation given to some of my statements: I only said as a general principle that an oncological patient is subject in his journey to hospitalizations. It can happen. But this is not the case. There is noAccording to what has been learned, the 61-year-old mafia boss leads a regular life, moves around, can eat anything: naturally, compatibly with the hard prison regime.

Luciano Mutti, what a name.

Messina Denaro in hospital for surgery
Jailed superboss has urological problems unrelated to cancer

(ANSA) - ROME, JUN 27 - Cosa Nostra superboss Matteo Messina Denaro, caught after 30 years on the run at a Palermo cancer clinic in mid-January, has been admitted to hospital for surgery, sources said Tuesday.
The jailed mafioso, who is being held under Italy's tough 41 bis regime in L'Aquila's maximum security prison, was said to be suffering from urological problems that are unrelated to his colon cancer.

He was taken to L'Aquila hospital, which has been put under extraordinary security measures.
The Trapani superboss has been condemned to life in prison for his involvement in dozens of murders, including the 1992 bombings that killed anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the killing of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a mobster-turned-State witness who was strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996, and bombings at art and religious sites in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed 10 people and hurt 40 more in 1993.
Following his arrest in January, he is now being treated for cancer in a special chemotherapy facility that has been set up in L'Aquila prison.
(ANSA).

They offer Corona stolen files on Messina Denaro, marshal and city councilor arrested
July 20, 2023
The model is investigated, the house is searched. "I am an honest citizen, but since my name is Fabrizio Corona he is suspected of having done something shady"

A marshal of the carabinieri and a city councilor would have tried to sell over seven hundred highly secret files on the investigations that led to the arrest of the boss Matteo Messina Denaro through the mediation of Fabrizio Corona, the former 'king of the paparazzi' for years slipped into an abyss of judicial troubles. The first two were arrested and placed under house arrest according to the provisions of the Palermo prosecutor's office led by Maurizio de Lucia and the deputy Paolo Guido . They are the marshal of the carabinieri of Mazara del Vallo, Luigi Pirollo , and the city councilor Giorgio Randazzo .

The End is near.

Ailing Italian Mafia boss Messina Denaro moved to hospital
Reuters
August 8, 20236:05 PM GMT+2Updated 3 hours ago

ROME, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Jailed top Sicilian Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has been transferred to hospital, Italian media reported on Tuesday, after one of his lawyers said his health had deteriorated and he needed urgent medical care.

Messina Denaro, 61, was suffering from cancer at the time of his arrest in Palermo in January after 30 years on the run.

He was moved under tight security to the San Salvatore hospital in the central Italian town of L'Aquila, close to the prison where he had been detained, the Ansa news agency reported.

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A justice ministry spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Messina Denaro, who had surgery in late June, is now too ill to cope with the strict prison regime imposed on Mafia members, lawyer Alessandro Cerella earlier told the AGI news agency. The former Mafia boss was surviving on a diet of fruit juices and food supplements, he added.

Dubbed "the last Godfather" by the Italian press, Messina Denaro is not believed to have given any information to the police after he was seized outside a private health clinic in the Sicilian capital Palermo on Jan. 16.

I think I read somewhere that Matteo Messina Denaro even traveled to NYC, according to an informant. Now this I kinda doubt, but if true would be awesome. It's proven that he did in fact travel extensively and internationally during his time as a fugitive, but New York seems a bit of a stretch. I suppose anything's possible when you're a fugitive for 3 decades. Anyone heard about this?

Matteo's daughter Lorenza Alagra. His only daughter but there are rumors he had other children.

Lorenza

Never heard that he visited NYC but I wouldn't be suprised. He was a guy who would love the USA.