Early Tuesday morning, in Campobello di Mazara, the Carabinieri and Palermo prosecutors found the house where Matteo Messina Denaro, the Cosa Nostra capo who had been on the run for 30 years, had spent the past few months. It was strange that it was an apartment exposed to the outside (it was a bass) and without surveillance. The objects found showed an ordinary house in which the capo lived like any other neighbor. However, this Wednesday the carabinieri have discovered a second apartment, this time fully armored, where they hope to find much more evidence and information that will allow them to rebuild the organization that has covered the gangster in recent years and to pursue.
In the new apartment, just 400 meters from the first, the agents found a kind of double wall that hid one of Messina Denaro’s suspected bunkers. The Carabinieri continue to search the place where they hope to find some of the money he used to pay for his escape, accompanied by Palermo Deputy Prosecutor Paolo Guido. So far, Campobello di Mazara remains focused on the investigation; Also residing in this parish were Andrea Bonafede, the person who gave the capo his identity and address, and Giovanni Luppino, the gangster’s driver and bodyguard, who was also arrested on Monday.
This town is just nine kilometers from Castelvetrano, a Sicilian town where Denaro’s family always lived and where he was born and raised. Like the big bosses on the run, Messina Denaro never wanted to leave his territory. And he made it through living what seemed like a normal life. The house didn’t look like a makeshift hideout for a man on the run, but more like a commoner’s apartment. Among other things, perfumes, luxury watches, sneakers, a refrigerator full of groceries and restaurant receipts were found in it. Also found were pills for sexual impotence and condoms. “He didn’t exactly live the life of a monk like, for example, Bernardo Provenzano did,” said the assistant prosecutor.
The Carabinieri and Palermo prosecutors discovered this first hiding place, where he had spent at least the last year, shortly after he was arrested at the clinic where he was being treated for cancer. The role of the attending physician is also examined and whether he facilitated the capo being treated for cancer in a private clinic in the Sicilian capital. In fact, there is a question in the air how, in a small town where everyone knows each other, nobody noticed that Matteo Messina Denaro lived there.
“If a stranger arrives and sees him having dinner at a restaurant three nights in a row, it takes a short time for him to figure out who he is,” police sources said. The answer to this question has to do with the omertà, or law of silence, of a province where the Messina-Denaro clan has ruled without cracks for the last few decades. In the supermarket around the corner, for example, where he or his bodyguards are said to have shopped, none of the employees interviewed had ever seen him. “Besides, he is very old. How should we recognize him?” one of the cashiers asked.
Two phones and an agenda were confiscated during the operation. Elements with which the Magistracy wishes to draw a clearer sketch of its surroundings. The discovery of the new property this Wednesday is another step in that direction.
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Now Messina Denaro remains in his maximum security cell in L’Aquila prison, one of the prisons that allows the isolation of prisoners of the 41 Bis regime, a modality used for all those convicted of crimes related to the mafia. According to some Italian media, the capo arrived at the prison around half past midnight on Tuesday. He did it at his best, joking with officials: “Background? None yet!”
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