ROME: While some mobsters flee to the tropics to avoid prison, most of Italy’s mafia fugitives stay close to home, where they can continue to rule from the shadows.
“Going to state prison means failure for a mafioso. The mafioso wants to die in his bed, not behind bars,” Italian journalist Attilio Bolzoni, an expert on Italy’s criminal underworld, explained to AFP.
Specialized police “Hunter Squadrons” tirelessly track down these fugitives, who have gone overland in Sicily, the forests of Sardinia or the mountains of Calabria.
It is in the midst of the towns or villages where they were born, that they bear their first arms, shed their first blood, and continue to pull the strings under the protection of their followers – but always at the risk of betrayal.
Like Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, the Sicilian mafia godfathers before him, Matteo Messina Denaro, who was arrested on Monday after 30 years, was a stone’s throw from his hometown of Castelvetrano in Sicily.
The 60-year-old was arrested after visiting a health clinic in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, where he was being treated for colon cancer.
Messina Denaro, who once claimed he could “fill a cemetery” with his victims, was a key figure in the real-life Sicilian crime syndicate Cosa Nostra, as portrayed in the Godfather films.
The last surviving great Sicilian “capo” (boss) was living in a comfortable apartment and went out during daylight hours for coffee at the local bar, to get pizza or to do his shopping. He was armed with fake papers and was pretending to be a doctor.
He could not give orders from afar or risk any challenge to his power. He had to stay among his men at any cost.
Owners have been known to hide in specially adapted “bunkers” with bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens, in the basements of safe houses or small buildings, accessed by hatches hidden behind furniture, carpets, false floors or mirrors. .
Some wear wigs, dress like women, or have cosmetic surgery.
Their hosts are friends, colleagues or family members who provide for them, with whom they play cards or celebrate Christmas under the noses of the authorities.
According to the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, investigators found condoms and Viagra boxes at Messina Denaro’s hideout.
Others do not have this luxury, condemned to seek refuge deep in the wild countryside of southern Italy.
In 2016, two leaders of the Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, were discovered in a miserable “bunker” located among the trees in the mountain, where they “lived like animals”, in the words of the public prosecutor, eating canned food in dirty conditions.
In contrast, Corleone’s boss, Toto Reina, nicknamed “The Beast” for his fierceness, lived in the center of Palermo until his arrest in 1993 in a “villa-bunker” that now houses a Carabinieri barracks.
“The most wanted man in the world needs security and money,” said Anna Sergi, professor of criminology at Britain’s University of Essex.
According to the Italian media, the assets of Messina Denaro have been estimated in millions of euros.
The Cosa Nostra has been significantly weakened by the state following the murders of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, for which Messina Denaro was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in 2020.
But in addition to family and operatives, the mafia in Italy has long benefited from support at the highest levels of the state and collusion between the police, the judiciary, businesses or the Catholic Church.
This is still the case, at least locally.
“He has connections everywhere, so he is informed when there are police operations, but above all an area that helps him to hide,” author Roberto Saviano told AFP.
Sergi said that they “can count on a group of people who, either because they are well paid, or because they blackmail, can avoid being discovered.”