A top Italian Mafia boss who once bragged he could
“fill a cemetery” with his victims was busted by police after 30 years on the lam Monday.
Matteo Messina Denaro, a convicted organized crime leader and Italy’s top fugitive, was picked up at a private clinic in Palermo, where he was receiving undisclosed medical treatment, paramilitary police said.
The 60-year-old was still considered to be the top Sicilian Costra Nostra figure, running his Trapani-based operation even while in hiding for the last three decades, officials said.
He was the last of three longtime fugitive top-level Mafia bosses who had eluded capture for decades.
Messina Denaro had been convicted of dozens of murders in absentia and faces multiple life sentences — including for two 1992 Sicily bombings that killed anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
The captured billionaire boss was also convicted of killing a turncoat associate’s young son, who was strangled and his body dissolved in a vat of acid.
His capture came 30 years and a day after the capture of his mentor, convicted “boss of bosses” Salvatore “Toto” Riina, in a Palermo apartment after 23 years on the run.
In retaliation for Riina’s arrest, Denaro and his bloodthirsty crew “put bombs in Milan, Rome and Florence. They blew up national monuments and a museum,” Cyprien d’Haese, co-director of a new episode of Netflix’s “World’s Most Wanted,” told The Post in 2020.
nypost.com
