A poster of Marlon Brando as The
Godfather was found in the first of three hideouts used by
Matteo Messina Denaro, the Mafia superboss caught after 30 years
on the run last Monday, sources said Thursday evening.
Police said the iconic poster was very similar to the official
poster of the movie in which Brando plays Don Vito Corleone.
Messina Denaro aka Diabolik after the comics super criminal
anti-hero, 60, was arrested in a Palermo clinic where he was
being treated for liver cancer under an assumed name.
Police have so far found three hideouts he used in a town not
far from his power base at Trapani, Campobello di Mazara.
In the first they found Cosa Nostra documents, designer items
and viagra, in the second jewelry and other valuables, and in
the last one, found Thursday, virtually nothing as the flat was
empty.
All three were within a few hundred metres of each other at
Campobello, where Messina Denaro is believed to have been
shielded by a Mafia middle class, police said.
Messina Denaro is continuing his chemotherapy at a maximum
security prison at L'Aquila, the capital of the Abruzzo region.
The mobster failed to take part in a court hearing on Thursday
regarding his conviction for being among the mobsters who
ordered the 1992 bombings in which anti-mafia prosecutors
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were among the victims.
He could have taken part in the appeal-trial hearing in
Caltanissetta via video link. Proceedings in the trial were
adjourned to March 9.
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 Falcone and 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 Totò '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 Trapani bus also around Sicily, Italian police
have said.
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