The sister of Italy’s recently jailed top mobster, known as the “last godfather of the Sicilian Mafia”, has been arrested after police searched his home – pizzini – slips of paper that the boss got his hands on Used to give typed instructions.
According to investigators, Rosalia Messina Denaro, Matteo Messina Denaro’s sister – who was Italy’s most wanted man until his arrest on 16 January – had helped her brother avoid imprisonment for 30 years and acted as “treasurer” on his behalf. Worked as. family”, while also running Pizzini’s broadcast network, thus enabling the mafia boss to maintain ties with his organization during his long period as a fugitive.
Alfredo Montalto, the judge who ordered her arrest, said, “Rosalía Messina was a person of the absolute confidence of the Denaro boss.” “He managed Pizzini’s network through which Denaro gave his orders to other associates.”
Some pizzini found by the Carabinieri in the house of Castelvetrano, the Mafia boss’ hometown in the southwest coast of Sicily, also contained the leader’s outlook on life and his personal beliefs. Denaro, who claimed to be a Sicilian mafia boss, saw himself as a scapegoat, a man persecuted by justice and the state.
“Being accused of being a member of the Mafia, at this point, I consider it an honor,” Matteo Denaro wrote in his own hand on a pizzani found by police in his sister’s house. “We were persecuted like we were scoundrels, treated like we weren’t part of the human race, we became an ethnic group to be wiped out.”
“They buried our ground with this lie. We, the bad, they…the good,” Denaro wrote. “Every time there is a new arrest, more and more people suffer for this land. Every time they arrest someone, more and more people join our community who are unwilling to accept this injustice. This is who we are, and one day, I believe, all of this will be recognized and history will give back to us what they have taken from us in life.
Pizzini, hidden in the cavity of a chair in Denaro’s sister’s house, was addressed to various people, including alleged members of the Mafia, some of whom had nicknames, such as Condor, Cherry, Parmesan, and Apple.
Rosalia Denaro was also hiding Pizzino a detailed note on her brother’s health condition. Matteo Denaro was caught at a private clinic in Palermo, where he periodically received treatment for a tumor under the false name of Andrea Bonafede.
According to mafia informants and prosecutors, Denaro, nicknamed Diabolica – the name of a fictional thief – and U Sikku – “The Skinny One” – held the keys to some of the most heinous crimes committed by the Sicilian Mafia, including the 1992 bombings. which killed anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and became state witness in the 1996 murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo, a mobster’s 12-year-old son who had been strangled and doused in acid.
Denaro is held in a maximum-security prison in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, where he was given an initial session of chemotherapy.
To date, the Carabinieri have found at least three apartments used by the mobster, including a wardrobe full of clothes used to conceal a secret bunker. Inside the hideout, prosecutors found luxury clothing, emeralds, diamonds, a poster for Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Godfather, and some books including biographies of Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler.