Messina Denaro sister arrested

(ANSA) - ROME, MAR 3 - The sister of Matteo Messina Denaro, the Mafia boss caught in a Palermo cancer clinic in mid-January after 30 years on the run, was arrested Friday on suspicion of helping him run his operations while a fugitive.
    The Carabinieri of the ROS special unit arrested Rosalia Messina Denaro on charges of mafia association.
    According to investigators, the woman helped her brother evade capture for 30 years and acted on his behalf as the 'cashier' of the 'family', while also running the transmission network of the 'pizzini' (boss' orders and instructions), thus enabling the mafia boss to maintain relations with his men during his long period as a fugitive from justice.
    It was in fact a detailed note on Messina Denaro's health condition, written by Rosalia and hidden by her in the cavity of a chair, that gave investigators the input that led to the mafia leader's arrest on 16 January, according to the probe led by Palermo Prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia and Deputy Prosecutor Paolo Guido.
    The pizzino was discovered by the ROS special branch Carabinieri on 6 December while they were bugging the woman's home.
    A Palermo Preliminary Investigations Judge (GIP) said the two siblings met on a regular basis during Messina Denaro's 30-year flight from justice.
    She started seeing him more often after he told her he had cancer, the GIP said.
    Messina Denaro, 60, is now being treated for cancer in a special chemotherapy facility that has been set up in a maxium-security prison at L'Aquila in Abruzzo.
    The Trapani superboss has been condemned to life in prison in absentia 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.
    The mobster was seen by some experts as the boss of bosses within the Mafia after the deaths of Bernardo 'The Tractor' Provenzano in 2016 and Toto' 'The Beast' Riina in 2017, although other experts said he was not at the very summit of Mafia power, without being able to say who occupies that post, possibly because it is vacant.
    Reportedly idolised by Cosa Nostra's younger troops because of his ruthlessness and playboy-like charisma, Messina Denaro sealed a reputation for brutality by murdering a rival Trapani boss and strangling his three-months-pregnant girlfriend.
    The boss, who reportedly enjoyed orgies with Palermo women while on the run, once said he could have filled a cemetery with those he had killed.
    He was reportedly helped dodge police by a "middle class Mafia", not only around his fief at Trapani but also around Sicily, Italian police have said. (ANSA).