The Extortions of Matteo

Everyone is trying to find him. The best investigators of the most highly respected teams in the Italian state police and the Carabinieri, the SCO (Central Operational Service) and the ROS (Special Operational Group). The magistrates of the Prosecutor’s Office of Palermo. But there are also plenty of Mafiosi trying to track him down. “What’s this guy doing? What’s become of him?” whispers a man hidden deep in the belly of Sicily, blithely unaware of the tiny planted microphones that capture his every breath. “They’re arresting your brothers, your sisters, your in-laws. Why don’t you make a move? You’re letting things get out of control…”

Totò Riina, the capo di tutti capi of Cosa Nostra, was looking for him too. Even at the end of his life, when his remaining days were counted, Riina couldn’t stop worrying about him: “If your father were still alive… he gave me this son of his to make of him what only I knew how to do. He spent four or five years with me. He learned his lessons well, but then, fuck, all at once...”. All at once, after fighting ferociously in the atrocious Mafia war against the Italian state, the only heir to the Corleone dynasty still out on the street and free to move as he pleases, suddenly vanishes. To everyone, Matteo Messina Denaro - born in 1962, a native of Castelvetrano in the province of Trapani, officially a fugitive from justice since June 1993, sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for mass murder in the bombings of Florence, Milan, and Rome - becomes a ghost.

Capable of holding at bay the Italian Antimafia, even though the investigators did succeed in creating scorched earth around him: hundreds of confederates and henchmen arrested, millions of euros confiscated, an entire army on his trail. How then, can it be that the last surviving godfather from the season of Mafia mayhem should still be out there, wanted but uncaptured? “I think he must have left the country,” said a chagrined Riina, overheard and recorded while in prison. Riina was enraged with that “protégé” of his who, by this point, seemed entirely indifferent to the fate of Cosa Nostra and concerned exclusively with his own safety and interests.

All that remains of Messina Denaro are a few yellowing photographs dating back to the Seventies and Eighties. Photos taken from the Messina Denaro family album, and which Repubblica is here publishing for the first time, on an exclusive basis. Pictures of Matteo at age 14 with his father Francesco, a respected Mafioso in the province of Trapani, from whom the son inherited both the reins of power and, more importantly, a network of international relations. Matteo in a double-breasted suit, with the inevitable pair of Ray-Bans and a cigarette between his fingers. Matteo raising a toast. Matteo celebrating with his relatives. By age twenty, he was already a professional killer.

And so, the question persists: what makes him so elusive? “Because Messina Denaro was Riina’s cherished jewel. Because he has all the documents that were spirited off from the lair on Via Bernini following the arrest of the capo di tutti capi of Cosa Nostra, Totò Riina,” according to Antonino Giuffrè, man of honor who had a seat on the highest council of the Mafia, the Cupola, before he turned state informant. That’s right, the secrets. So Matteo’s real position of strength has everything to do with his leverage, his willingness to extort. He knows all about the massacres of 1992 and 1993, he knows exactly what transactions were exacted during the still murky background of the negotiations between Italian state and the Mafia.

That is why we need to go back to those long-ago days of 1992 in order to begin our search for Matteo Messina Denaro.

The Attempted Murder of the Commissioner
And an Untouchable Senator

Rino Germanà, now a retired police superintendent, unexpectedly came face to face with him one day in September 1992. “It was around two in the afternoon, and I was driving home when a car pulled up beside me. I saw a man start to shoot, with a rifle pointing out the car window. I slammed on my brakes, I huddled down inside the car, and I managed to avoid being hit. I got out of the car and started returning fire.” This ambush took place along the waterfront of Mazara del Vallo.

There were three men in that car, a Fiat Tipo. At the wheel was none other than Matteo Messina Denaro. The men firing the rifle was Leoluca Bagarella, Totò Riina’s brother-in-law. And with them was Giuseppe Graviano, shouldering a Kalashnikov. “Those three turned around and came back, guns still blazing. Once, then twice. I ran to the beach and managed to reach safety.”

It was September 14^th, the same summer as the murders of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the bloody bombings of Capaci and Via D’Amelio. Totò Riina also wanted to kill that police commissioner, Rino Germanà, who in the mid-1980s had uncovered and shone a bright light on the role played by the Messina Denaro family and the Trapani mob on the larger chessboard of the Mafia.
Germanà had previously served in Mazara del Vallo as the superintendent of the central police station there. But someone in the Ministry of the Interior (which controls the Italian state police) decided to order him back there on June 2, 1992, to resume the position he’d left just a few years previous. It was a decision that felt an awful lot like a punishment.

“I was transferred without warning,” the retired policeman recalls. “And I genuinely had no idea why. It felt like a step backward in terms of career advancement. Especially after I’d been the director of the Trapani mobile squad and the Criminalpol (police central criminal investigations) in Caltagirone, which had jurisdiction over all of central Sicily. However, after the murder of the parliamentarian, Honorable Salvo Lima, MP, in March 1992, Paolo Borsellino had insisted on bringing me back to Palermo.”

Sure enough, a Mafia mystery intertwined with a cabinet-level administrative mystery. Perhaps that transfer and its underlying logic bear closer examination. Exactly what was Commissioner Germanà investigating when the decision was made to send him back to Mazara del Vallo? Between March and June of 1992, Germanà had begun to delve into a very sensitive investigation, handed off to him by the Marsala Prosecutor’s Office: “A notary and a freemason, Pietro Ferraro, had attempted to approach Judge Salvatore Scaduti, presiding over the court of assizes that was conducting the trial of the murderers of Carabinieri Captain Emanuele Basile.”

The notary had told the judge: “The defendants tell me that you’re not behaving yourself.” And then he’d added: “I’m sent by a politician named Enzo, allied with Calogero Mannino, who was screwed in the last elections”. Rino Germanà was able to provide a first and last name for that politician. It was the Palermo politician Vincenzo Inzerillo, a Christian Democrat who had not been able to run as a candidate in the regional elections of 1991, but had then gone on to become a senator.

And the very same day he presented his report to the magistrature, the then-chief of the central criminal prosecutor’s office, Luigi Rossi, summoned Germanà to Rome, to the Palazzo del Viminale, seat of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of the Interior. “He wanted to know if there was any mention of the Minister Mannino in my report,” Germanà recalls. A short time later he’d be transferred to the central police station of Mazara. And after the September attack, that same senator’s name cropped up in a number of investigations: Vincenzo Inzerillo. A name that the reader should make a note of because - as we shall see - it comes up again at the finale of this story.

Video - Rino Germanà: “This is how Messina Denaro, Bagarella, and Graviano tried to kill me"

Rino Germanà: "Così Messina Denaro, Bagarella e Graviano provarono a uccidermi"

“A car registered to Senator Inzerillo,” Germanà goes on to tell us, “went to pick up a lawyer at Punta Raisi airport who was there to help the Mafiosi of Mazara del Vallo put together a fish importing deal with Malta to the tune of some 1.5 trillion lire.” (A little over a billion dollars, not adjusted for inflation - translator’s note). Could that have been a mere coincidence? Or was it something more?

Riina may have known something about the deal, considering that, recorded by eavesdropping devices in prison in 2013, after mentioning the investigations conducted by the magistrates of Palermo into the larger negotiations between the Italian state and the Mafia and ordering the murder of prosecutor Nino Di Matteo (“If it was possible to kill him, an execution the way we did back in the old days in Palermo”), he then added: “Who did they think they could scare anyway? No one. After all, they didn’t scare a soul, because he ran for the water… They should have gunned Germanà down right then and there, but he ran for the water. But why he ran for the water is what I’d like to know… That son of a bitch managed to get out alive.”

Video - Riina to the mob boss inside the prison: Let’s start with Di Matteo

Riina al boss in carcere: incominciamo da Di Matteo

Why did the mob boss, in his conversations in prison, leap so naturally from the topic of the negotiations with the state to the name of Rino Germanà? And what did Totò Riina mean with that phrase, “after all, they didn’t scare a soul”? What had the commissioner of Mazara del Vallo discovered when he investigated the city of Trapani and the dealings of the Messina Denaro family?
 

Inside the Godfather’s Head
The Pursuit

Matteo’s story might have ended one day in May 1997, four years after the massacres of Florence, Milan, and Rome, blood that had been shed at his insistence along with the “hawks” of Cosa Nostra. Commissioner Carmelo Marranca and the investigators of what was then the Criminalpol caught a whiff of him, a whiff of his “presence”, in the lair where he was hiding. They saw his girlfriend leaving hastily. He was there, in the narrow streets of the seaside village of Aspra, just aside the city of Palermo. Via Milwaukee 40, a third-floor apartment. He was right there. “And then, all at once, he vanished and we just sat there, continuing to wonder what on earth had just happened,” Commissioner Marranca recalls.

In the apartment’s refrigerator, the policemen found a container of caviar. In the pantry, jars of Austrian sauces, Nutella, and two bottles of liquor. He must have been in a tremendous rush when he left. On the table there was a large jigsaw puzzle and a Nintendo videogame. In a drawer, there was a carton of Merit cigarettes, a woman’s scarf and bracelet purchased in a very exclusive Palermo jewelry shop. “How did he know we were on his trail?”

That apartment on Via Milwaukee is the only lair used by Messina Denaro that has ever been uncovered. “It all started the day that Deputy Prosecutor Gigi Croce called us to say: «The Carabinieri have confiscated a number of handwritten notes (pizzini) at a road block, found in the pockets of Giuseppe Cataldo. Why don’t you take a look at them, too?» So we got down to reading.” Carmelo Marranca is the repository of the historical memory of “antimafia” investigations in Trapani: “When I arrived on the mobile squad, in 1984, I immediately realized that I was now working in a place rife with mysteries.

Photographs of an Absence: from Matteo Messina Denaro’s hideout
The important Mafiosi regularly met with respected professionals, public administrators, and freemasons.” In one of those handwritten notes that were confiscated, a woman named Meri wrote to Assunta. Who were those women? “After the attempted murder of Rino Germanà, we’d done a fair amount of work on the phone records for several cell phones. One was registered to a retired railway worker, but we knew that Messina Denaro used it to talk to a woman. Namely, Maria Mesi, nicknamed Meri.” Assunta, on the other hand, was a borrowed name: the mother-in-law of Anna Ventimiglia, the owner of the lair.

“Where we hadn’t yet arrived, actually. All we knew was that Mesi would vanish on weekends. We started keeping an eye on those narrow streets in Aspra and the ways out of town, by no means an easy thing to do.” The big break came on the evening of May 4^th, when the policemen saw Meri come out of a narrow lane.

“At 11:30 pm, she was walking along, in an obvious disguise,” Detectives Carmelo Marranca and Marcello Russo would later write in their report. “She wore a hat, glasses, and a cape, all of which she got rid of the minute she turned the corner.” Marranca continues his account: “The squad cars that were keeping an eye on the ways out of town noticed no vehicle with that woman aboard. At that point, we realized that she must have left a house in the center of town.”

Video - Detective Marranca’s account: In the handwritten notes we found the clues that led us to the fugitive

Il racconto del commissario Marranca, nei pizzini le tracce per arrivare al latitante

“Ventimiglia and her husband had requested a subsidy from the township, but in the meantime they’d also rented another apartment, on the floor above theirs. Really a curious twist: it was clear that someone was living there. But that video camera didn’t do us a bit of good,” Marranca recalls. From that day on, Matteo Messina Denaro stopped going to Via Milwaukee 40, a street that the fishermen of Aspra had named in honor of their relatives who had emigrated to America.

All that was found in the lair was a letter that Maria Mesi had written to the company that made the jigsaw puzzle. The woman was interested in receiving a “missing piece.” But the real missing piece of the puzzle was and remained none other than him, Matteo. “For all these years, we kept chasing after him. We kept trying to get inside his head, and he kept spreading misinformation, we’re pretty sure of it, to lead us off track and gauge the extent to which we were still willing to pursue him.”
 

The Game Was Rigged

There have been days when Prosecutor Teresa Principato felt besieged in her office, on the third floor of the Hall of Justice in Palermo. “Every time we felt we were getting closer to the fugitive,” she says, “something always seemed to happen. There were leaks, newspaper articles, that seemed to pop up one way or another. Too many strange things kept happening to our investigation. I realized that the way things were going, we’d never manage to arrest him. So I started investigating a mole in the Court. But I never found that mole.”

Teresa Principato is the deputy prosecutor of Palermo and for ten years, right up until the beginning of 2017, she was in charge of the investigations for Matteo Messina Denaro’s capture. “We’re dealing with a major Mafia fugitive who has a powerful relationship with the freemasons and the political powers that be. And that’s the real reason he hasn’t yet been arrested.”

The magistrate, who now works as a deputy prosecutor at the DNA, or Direzione Nazionale Antimafia (National Anti-Mafia Directorate), recalls: “I was disconcerted to learn that Messina Denaro’s father, Don Ciccio, had been a campiere, or field guard, for the D’Alì, an influential family in the province of Trapani, major landowners, bankers... one of the heirs, Antonino D’Alì, would later also become a senator for Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and undersecretary of the Interior.”

The investigations discovered quite a bit more. “Matteo had trusted men deep inside a great many different administrations: from police HQs to the Secret Services. And so, I’m fully convinced, he was able to learn in real time about the progress of our investigations. And he invariably managed to escape.” That’s why it was and continues to be a rigged game. What did Messina Denaro actually learn about the investigations that concerned him? Most important of all, who did he learn it from?

Teresa Principato recalls: “At first, he came and went frequently from and to Trapani. Then, when the investigation into his fugitive status became more tightly focused, with the arrest of his family members, he stopped coming. I think that was in 2015. But that didn’t stop us. With my colleagues Paolo Guido and Marzia Sabella, we issued warrants for the arrest of a hundred or so people in his closest circles and confiscated property to the tune of millions of euros: it was a scorched-earth strategy.” But he was already long gone.

“We investigated outside the country as well. We believed that he had close relations to certain individuals in Great Britain, and that they were likely to arrange for him to have the use of a house there. We managed to dive much deeper into that lead thanks to the excellent cooperation offered by the British authorities, but there, too, the results were less than we’d hoped for.” In 2015, Teresa Principato decided that the time had come to radically accelerate the hunt: “With both Carabinieri and state police we signed a protocol to focus on a single objective: to work in concert, eliminating all previous jealousies and rivalries.”

This immediately triggered a new level of teamwork on the search. “Comparison and sharing of information among the finest police and Carabinieri investigators led to a massive leap forward in our investigation. But that didn’t last long. Little by little, someone in Rome started working against the group. Until it was finally dissolved. A huge opportunity lost, because I believe that bringing together the knowledge and investigative methods of the two police forces would eventually have led to his capture.”

As in all Italian stories, there was no shortage of surprises. “The biggest stumbling blocks all came from my prosecutor, Francesco Messineo. He ordered a police raid in the area around Agrigento, for a shake-down racket, even though I’d asked him to hold off on it, because the Carabinieri ROS (Special Operational Group) had wiretapped and photographed the Mafia boss of Sambuca, Leo Sutera, while he was reading an important handwritten note. Within days there was likely to be a meeting which would probably include Messina Denaro and a number of other Palermo Mafiosi. Sutera was the middleman. My prosecutor asked me: “Are you sure of this?”

He also wanted to hear the tape recordings. “Of course I’m sure of it,” I told him again and again. But the police arrested Sutera and the meeting was scrapped. An episode that wound up under investigation by the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura (CSM, or High Council of the Judiciary), which then absolved Messineo on all charges. But this remained a very bitter pill for me to swallow. In part because Sutera was the Mafioso who years earlier had requested information on the route I took from Trapani to Caltanissetta, according to the report of an informant and cooperating witness. They were planning to put together a hit on me.”

Moles, suspicions, and poisons. A manhunt, undermined for far too many years. In spite of the “scorched earth” strategy. “And he benefited from all this. Because he analyzes developments. He stores up his secrets. He’s an educated person, he writes well, he reads extensively, he gathers documentation.

Above all, he’s a monster of cold calculation. We arrested his nearest and dearest family members, but he continues to take careful steps to protect his hideouts and security. Many Mafiosi even criticize him for his remote indifference. One thing is certain, he’s learned a great deal from the years spent on the run with his father, but he also uses modern methods. I’m convinced he used social media to communicate with his sister Anna Patrizia and his nephew Francesco Guttadauro, who were fundamental hubs in his interactions with the territory under his control.”

The question, then, comes back around, still the same persistent question: so where is Matteo now? The prosecutor Principato is certain of one thing: “He knows that the Italian state has a special consideration for him, and that is why he must be far, far away. Hiding out, who knows where. Maybe he’s living a completely ordinary life. Waiting for the interest of the investigators to die down. And, knowing him, he’s already planning for the moment when he’ll be able to come home.”
 

Dear “Svetonio”
The Ghost Tells His Story

Everyone talks about Matteo, everyone knows something about Matteo, everyone has a story to tell about Matteo. But, one day, it’s Matteo himself who decides to tell his story, offering an unprecedented self-portrait in a number of highly private letters that will, inexplicably, become extremely public. He mentions the Latin poet Horace, cites the Aeneid, waxes lyrical about Jorge Amado, writes critically about Toni Negri, and reveals boundless admiration for the Socialist politician Bettino Craxi. And, in weary resignation, admits that “he has become the Benjamin Malaussène of everyone and everything,” identifying deeply with that character, a professional scapegoat, fruit of Daniel Pennac’s imagination.

It is a deeply weird correspondence. He signs his letters “Alessio” while his correspondent signs his “Svetonio,” Italian for Suetonius. It’s an intense exchange of letters between 2004 and 2006, in which Matteo looks at himself in the mirror.
Absolutely extravagant (to say the least), for that matter, were the circumstances of this epistolary exchange between Matteo-Alessio and Svetonio-Suetonius, who turned out to be a former mayor of Castelvetrano, arrested and found guilty of narcotics trafficking.

The former mayor’s name is Antonio “Tonino” Vaccarino, owner of the city’s sole movie theater, a passion he inherited from his grandfather who—after meeting the Frères Lumière in Paris—opened Sicily’s first movie theater in 1898. Though Tonino loved the movies, he also loved running risks: he works for the Italian intelligence services. And he enters into contact with Matteo—we don’t know exactly how or when—under the guidance of the men who report to General Mario Mori. “I’ve always been a loyal servant of the state,” Svetonio has gone on repeating for all these years.

Whatever it is that happened, one sure thing is that Matteo the fugitive wasn’t just engaging in idle chit-chat with Svetonio, and in fact he entrusted him with personal confidences.
The first few letters wind up slowly, with quotations from Amado suitable to his persona: “There’s nothing lower than justice when it walks arm-in-arm with politics.” He issues political considerations: “Craxi was the only thoroughbred politician.” In so doing, Matteo introduces us to Matteo. At times, he seems almost resigned: “By now, I live outside of the world, and I prefer it because I no longer recognize myself in this hypocritical society... I can’t seem to judge myself, I can only say that I’ve always been welcoming and open to one and all, I don’t think I’m better than anyone else, in medio stat virtus (“virtue lies in the middle”), as Horace tells us.”

At other moments, he uses a dismissive tone: “As for individual artists, musically speaking, I must sadly confess that they’re a virtually extinct breed by this point, all we hear around us are squalid little would- be musicians…”
He’s disconcerted, ill at ease: “I don’t love life... I’ve been less than happy on this earth… my life has been a tangle of suffering, disappointments, and failures.” He has the highest possible opinion of himself: “There will be a great deal still to be said about me.” And he is sibylline: “There are pages of my story that are yet to be written.”

The investigators in charge of anti-Mafia and counterterrorism cases who have been pursuing Matteo Messina Denaro for years now
And then he offers a revelation that makes Matteo Messina Denaro something absolutely unique among the highly religious bosses of Cosa Nostra, who live surrounded by saint cards and crucifixes, statues of Padre Pio and breviaries: “There was a time when I still possessed faith. Then, all at once, I realized that something inside me had broken, I realized I had lost my faith, but I have done nothing to regain it. Deep down, I live perfectly well like this. I’m convinced that, after life ends, there is nothing, and I am living for the way that fate destined me to love.” A profession of atheism.

For someone who, by his own admission, attended little or no school, his letters reveal a level of “culture” and a sensibility, to say the least, different from those Mafiosi who, in their messages, talk about nothing but money, business, and murder.

Did he really write those letters, or were they composed under the dictation of some friend who offered to give a learned form to his innermost thoughts? After the correspondence became part of the public domain, the former mayor Vaccarino one day received a letter that was anything but reassuring: “You’ve tossed your family into a world of hell. Your illustrious person is already securely situated in my last will and testament. Once I am gone, there is someone who will come to collect the debt you now owe me. Signed, M. Messina Denaro.” A death sentence.

The handwritten notes that Matteo Messina Denaro send to the former mayor of Castelvetrano, Antonino Vaccarino, AKA “Svetonio,” who at that point was a double agent for the Italian intelligence agencies
Actually, though, Tonino Vaccarino has continued living in perfect peace in Castelvetrano. He continues to socialize with friends of the fugitive mob boss, he has even conveyed top secret information apprised from a colonel of the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA, or Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate) who was investigating none other than Matteo. Vaccarino was arrested once again: “I work for the state,” was all he would say, over and over. But those claims must have rung hollow, because he was given a six-year sentence. A mystery wrapped in a mystery, this character who chose to take the name of Suetonius, the secretary to the Roman emperor Hadrian—a Latin writer whose life spanned the first and second centuries A.D.—in order to trick a major mob boss. Or, perhaps, Suetonius is nothing more than masterful double agent.
 

The Mysteries of Trapani and Its Province
Where “Mamma” Lives

Every city in the province of Trapani is a Mafia capital. Toward the north of the province, if we are absolutely determined to stop relying on that one word - Mafia - we could say that it’s a place of “tradition.” Toward the south, there are mysteries, ancient and modern. And in the middle, extending unspeakably into the sea, there is Trapani itself.

It may be a coincidence, but its piazzas and streets were chosen—instead of the more famous and international Palermo—as the setting for the first film version of La Piovra, directed by Damiano Damiani. It was 1984 and Inspector Cattani (played by a magnificent Michele Placido) took on the Mafia, all by himself, keeping a television audience of 15 million breathless.

A few months earlier, the Mafia had murdered Deputy Prosecutor Giangiacomo Ciaccio Montalto in Valderice, because he had discovered corrupt magistrates in his own Hall of Justice. A few months later, a car bomb in Pizzolungo came dangerously close to killing Judge Carlo Palermo, but did blow up a mother with her two children. Then came the murder of Mauro Rostagno, a journalist who had figured out everything about Trapani, its Mafia clans, and its Masonic lodges.

Those are the deepest roots. In Sicily, very few know that the philosopher Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, but everyone knows that it was at Castelvetrano that the Mafia (with its usual friends), on July 5, 1950, laid out the dead body of Salvatore Giuliano, the bandit who had written to President Harry S. Truman in order to convince him to make Sicily another star on the flag of the United States of America.

A short distance north of Castelvetrano, on the coast, is Marsala. When Paolo Borsellino was the city’s chief prosecutor, he told us, at Repubblica: “Here there are landings comparable to the ones in Normandy, and nobody lifts a finger.” Landings of narcotics.

If we continue inward, delving deeper into the countryside of the province of Trapani, we come to Salemi and its chalk mountains. Salemi, the birthplace of the cousins Nino and Ignazio Salvo, men of honor and tax collectors for an empire that was, for at least a quarter century, the financial lungs of the politicians most corrupt and compromised with Cosa Nostra: Stefano Bontate, Giulio Andreotti, Salvatore Inzerillo, all of them names that loom large on the pages of the dark Sicilian novel.

And then there’s the other half of the province, the northern portion. First comes Alcamo, and then Castellammare del Golfo. Alcamo was the domain of the Rimi brothers, Filippo and Natale, blood relations with Don Tano Badalamenti of Cinisi and considered, in the Sixties and Seventies, the “crème de la crème” of the Sicilian Mafia. Just a few miles further on, a steep descent rolls us toward Castellammare, a city that contains the Mafia aristocracy that made Cosa Nostra great even in America.

The Galantes, the Playas, the Maggaddinos, the Buccellatos, and the Bonannos. All of them emigrated in 1925 across the Atlantic and in time scaled their way to the summit of the “five families” of New York.

In order to truly know the “high Mafia,” old-time Sicilians used to say, you need to set out from Castellammare del Golfo and cross the island until you reach the Mediterranean, “and there, at the end of the Valle del Belice, you’ll find the Mamma, the mother of them all.” The “Mamma” is the origin of everything, and at the far end of the Valle del Belice lies Castelvetrano, home to Matteo Messina Denaro. And, it’s no accident that Matteo’s own men have a very specific name for him. In fact, they call him the “Headwaters”.
 

Roman Holiday

If we want to truly understand what secrets Messina Denaro holds tight, we now need to go back to a day in February 1992. The appointment is for 3 in the afternoon, at the Trevi Fountain. Mingling with the tourists, Matteo is there a little ahead of time. He’s wearing his Ray-Bans, a scarf, and the inevitable Merit cigarette perched between his fingers.

He’s window shopping in the displays of a clothing store: he loves designer jackets and shirts. He was only able to pack a small assortment in the light luggage he brought with him for the long drive from Palermo. He arrived in Rome that very same morning, in a sky-blue diesel Fiat Uno driven by Renzino Tinnirello, one of the most trusted Mafiosi of the Graviano family, from the Brancaccio quarter of the city.

Also present at the Trevi Fountain is Giuseppe Graviano, another one of the “youngsters” with a special place in Totò Riina’s heart, he too born into the business, just 29 years old but already with a lengthy resume as a professional killer. Giuseppe, known to his own men as “Mother Nature,” is already a wanted man. Matteo, in contrast, is practically a nobody at this point. Giuseppe Graviano took a train to Rome, along with his right-hand man Fifetto Cannella.

“Amunì,” Matteo says to him. “Let’s go.” It’s already 3 in the afternoon, and they have a lot of work ahead of them. But they still have to wait for two more young men, late for the appointment, and also just in from Palermo. They flew in and rented a car to drive from Fiumicino airport, a white Autobianchi Y10. They are Vincenzo Sinacori and Francesco Geraci.

Messina Denaro vouched for them, assuring Riina that these are two men he can rely upon with the utmost confidence. The former is a hitman by profession, the latter a respected wholesaler of jewelry working Castelvetrano, Matteo’s home town. The jeweler, Geraci, was having problems with armed robberies, and so he’d reached out to Matteo’s family for protection. Which meant of course that he was now at Matteo’s service. In a show of gratitude.

Geraci accompanied Matteo whenever he needed to go out and kill someone. In Rome, they brought him along because he had an American Express credit card in his wallet. That meant he could rent a car without problems.
One day, Messina Denaro had said to him: “Francè, a friend of mine want to give his girlfriend a hundred-million-lire parure,” a set of matching jewelry. “Take care of him right away, and then I’ll give you the money.”

The jeweler in fact had given Matteo the matched set in a matter of days. It was a gift from Giuseppe Graviano to his girl, Bibbiana Galdi. A few days later the Palermo boss had given the money to Matteo Messina Denaro, but he’d refused to accept payment. “You and I are inseparable friends,” he’d muttered brusquely.
And now the “inseparables” have a mission to carry out in Rome. A few days earlier, they had all gathered in Palermo, at the home of Salvatore Biondino, a heavyweight Mafioso in San Lorenzo. Joining them was u’ zu Totò, Salvatore Riina, who reiterated the jobs that were to be done. Things that had already begun to unfold in a meeting the previous October, in a villa deep in the countryside near Castelvetrano. Things that would later be disclosed to the police by Geraci and Sinacori when, after being arrested, they became informants, working with the police and the courts.
They were in Rome to tail and murder Giovanni Falcone, who had been working for the past several months at the Ministry of Justice as the Director of Criminal Affairs.
That’s the job they were there to do.

“The time has come,” Totò Riina had decreed. First Judge Falcone. And then the journalist Maurizio Costanzo, who had dared to state that the godfathers serving their time in the hospital were actually in the best of health, and were therefore complete impostors. Totò Riina, in those first few months of 1992, seemed unwilling to halt his headlong race forward: “Wait, so they want to start a Super Prosecutor’s Office? Then we’ll start a Super Cosa Nostra.” He entrusted himself with blind assurance to Giuseppe Graviano and Matteo Messina Denaro.

Relatives and close collaborators with whom Matteo Messina Denaro has maintained ties
And that’s why these two men are now in Rome, standing in front of the Trevi Fountain. They’re packing brand new pistols, .357 Magnums. A truck carrying more weapons and explosives set out from Mazara del Vallo a couple of days earlier, after picking up yet another cargo concealed in Rome, in the cellar of an apartment house at Via Alzavole, 20, in the Casilino neighborhood. That is the address of an old friend of Matteo’s, Antonio Scarano. The Trapani mob boss ordered Geraci to give him 20 million lire in order to rent an apartment in the Parioli section of the city, though in the end, instead, the group set themselves up on the outskirts of Rome, at Via Martorelli, 41, in Torremaura.

Messina Denaro and Scarano arranged to meet at the “Le Torri” shopping center on Via Parasacchi, in Tor Bella Monaca, to go over the final details. In front of the Trevi Fountain, Matteo Messina Denaro and Giuseppe Graviano know that they’re going to have to work fast. A group of those Sicilians newly arrived in Rome—working on information provided directly by Totò Riina—went to the Prati quarter, to Via dei Gracchi. And the Sicilians staked out the neighborhood, to study the territory, directly across from the restaurant Il Matriciano. According to information provided by Zio Totò, this is a restaurant that Judge Falcone frequents habitually. But in fact the tip is inaccurate. Someone somewhere got the two most traditional dishes of Roman cuisine confused: Judge Falcone frequently liked to dine at La Carbonara on Campo De’ Fiori, not at Il Matriciano.

They decide to stake out Sora Lella, too, as long as they’re at it: a restaurant on the Tiber Island. And for good measure, the Bar Doney on Via Veneto. They pretend to be tourists.
Armed and ready, they wait for Judge Falcone.
 

The Rebellious Mafia Boss
Adn a “Necessary” Execution

The time in Rome ended quickly. “Just ten days,” the deputy prosecutor of Caltanissetta Gabriele Paci would later reconstruct. Paci would go on to indict Matteo Messina Denaro for the Falcone and Borsellino massacres. Not even enough time to do a little shopping and spend evenings in the most fashionable clubs, between tailing one prospective victim and the next. Because, all of a sudden, new orders arrived from Totò Riina: “You need to get back down here, we have bigger fish to fry in Palermo.” There was Capaci.

There was the bloodbath triggered by a bomb that Giovanni Brusca and his team of hitmen were going to unleash on May 23rd. In Palermo, the leaders of Cosa Nostra raised toasts to the death of Falcone. In the heart of the province of Trapani, in the domain of Messina Denaro, on the other hand, there were sore feelings. And there was a mob boss of considerable charisma who had no misgivings about expressing his doubts concerning the massacre strategy, the frontal attack on the state. That boss was named Vincenzo Milazzo, he was from Alcamo, and he was the young godfather of a dynasty of the old Mafia, at least as old as the Messina Denaro clan.

“He really had a powerful personality,” as the turncoat informant Gioacchino La Barbera, one of the hitmen hired to kill Milazzo, would later recall. They invited him out to a farmhouse for a “banquet” and then they shot him in the head. But that wasn’t all. On the night between July 14^th and 15^th, just a few days prior to the bombing that killed Judge Paolo Borsellino, they also strangled Milazzo’s girlfriend, Antonella Bonomo.

She had nothing at all to do with the Mafia. She was 23 years old, she was a schoolteacher, and she was three months pregnant. The Corleone mob sentenced her to death, spreading the word that she was well informed concerning all of Milazzo’s secrets—literally all of them. And that moreover she had a relative in the Italian intelligence agencies: a big gun, a general. A story that becomes even more mysterious when, in 1998, Milazzo’s driver is arrested.

His name is Armando Palmeri and this is how he recalls the last few months in the life of his Mafia boss: “One day he asked me to come with him to a series of meetings with two individuals that he identified as members of the intelligence agencies. Three meetings that took place in 1992, each of them a month apart. The last meeting, if I’m not mistaken, took place about ten days before he was killed.” He added: “I feel certain that these were people he’d already known for some time. The first two meetings took place in the early afternoon hours, while the third was in the evening. I watched them from a distance through a pair of binoculars.”

Milazzo had confided a great many things to his driver: “He was asked to work to destabilize the Italian state: a goal to be pursued by terrorist attacks to be carried out outside of Sicily. But Milazzo was opposed to those projects. He said that they would be of no use or advantage to Cosa Nostra. In fact, they would have led to a harsh reaction from the government.”

In search of evidence that might allow them to identify these men, the magistrates of Caltanissetta investigated to determine whether Antonella Bonomo actually did have a relative in the intelligence agencies. And sure enough, they found one. He was a Carabinieri general, who then held a position in the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica (SISDE, or Intelligence and Democratic Security Service). Summoned to testify before the prosecutors, the general denied ever having had any interactions with the young woman and her Mafioso boyfriend.

In that case, what was really the reason behind the execution of the mob boss Milazzo, organized in such a rush? There are those who claim that the secret of the killing of the boss of Alcamo is just another of the many secrets that, after nearly thirty years, has ensured the safe clandestine existence of Matteo Messina Denaro.
 

Negotiations to the Tune of Bombs

There’s yet another date which can help us to understand why Matteo Messina Denaro became the mob boss we know today: and that is the day of the capture of his godfather, Salvatore Riina. On the morning of January 15, 1993 Matteo Messina Denaro arrived in Palermo early, accompanied by his trusted Vincenzo Sinacori, to take part in an important meeting with the other faithful henchman of the capo di tutti capi. As always, Matteo was the only one to arrive from outside of the province of Palermo. But by now he was a fundamental part of the “Super Cosa Nostra,” with which Riina had decided to wage war against the Italian state.

In 1993, breaking news still didn’t come in over the internet. You had to watch television to get the latest, and so it was for Riina’s arrest. Salvatore Biondo alerted Giovanni Brusca and Gioacchino La Barbera. “Something bad has happened,” he whispered over the phone. Brusca hurried to seek concealment in the repair shop of Michele Traina, in the Falsomiele district. In the meantime, Leoluca Bagarella, Riina’s brother-in-law, talked to his men and blurted out: “It’s a good thing they didn’t follow him. Otherwise they would have arrested Messina Denaro, Graviano, Biondo, and all the others, as well.”

That’s right, because that morning they were supposed to hold a meeting of the Provincial Commission, the Cupola of Palermo. And most likely, the bosses had been planning to discuss and plan other terror attacks, after the murders of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. In any case, Riina’s capture constituted an earthquake for Cosa Nostra. Messina Denaro left Palermo in great haste. The Sicilian Mafia began to be consumed by weighty, toxic suspicions: Who had betrayed Zio Totuccio? And now who would take his place? Who was plotting against the strategy of the organization’s “hawks”?
The “hawks” were Leoluca Bagarella, Giuseppe Graviano, Matteo Messina Denaro, and Giovanni Brusca. The massacre branch of the operation, in other words. Bernardo Provenzano, Riina’s longtime right-hand man, invited everyone “to take a moment to think.” And that earned him the suspicion that he might somehow have been the “mastermind” behind Riina’s arrest.

Supporting Provenzano’s “moderate” positions were Pietro Aglieri from Santa Maria di Gesù, and Benedetto Spera and Nino Giuffrè who were bosses in the province of Palermo. Then there was a third alignment, the branch of the wait-and-see position: Salvatore Cancemi from Porta Nuova, Raffaele Ganci from the Noce neighborhood; Michelangelo La Barbera from Boccadifalco. Inside Cosa Nostra, a “debate” began.

Bagarella, in any case, given his illustrious blood ties with Riina, felt he’d already been anointed his successor. He planned new massacres and also pondered the possibility of finally achieving the dream that had always been Cosa Nostra’s most passionate ambition: to separate Sicily from the rest of Italy in order to achieve annexation to the United States. Bagarella talked to Messina Denaro about this even as an old-school Sicilian-American man of honor, Rosario Naimo, was hiding in the province of Trapani.

Matteo needed to know whether the American Cosa Nostra was in agreement. “But the answer wasn’t a good one,” remembered Sinacori, who is now an informant collaborating with the investigators. “Naimo said that the project was a ‘thing of the past’...” Bagarella still tried to start up his own personal independence movement, which he named “Sicilia Libera.”

Even though the real objective was quite a different matter. On April 1, 1993, the “hawks” held a meeting. This was not the highest council, the Cupola, because only Riina could gather the “capi mandamento” around a table. It was, however, still a very high-level meeting. In a small villa outside Bagheria, not far from the Hotel Zagarella, Matteo Messina Denaro and Giuseppe Graviano arrived.

Old man Provenzano, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen. The clearest possible indication that he did not want more bombs. Still, the decision was made. The strategy of massacres would be pursued. And someone - it’s still not clear exactly who - suggested the chosen targets. “In mid May, Matteo showed me a book with pictures of the Uffizi,” Sinacori would later tell the police.

On May 14^th, the professional killers from Palermo were in Rome and made an attempt to kill Maurizio Costanzo, with the explosives that Matteo Messina Denaro had arranged to bring to the Eternal City in the spring of 1992. On May 27^th, the bomb went off and tore through the heart of Florence, killing Fabrizio Nencioni, inspector of the city traffic police, as well as his wife Angela Fiume, a custodian at the Accademia dei Georgofili, along with their daughters.

Nadia was nine years old, and Caterina not yet two months old. The blaze set off by the explosion also killed a university student named Dario Capolicchio, just twenty-two. The death squad had arrived from Sicily. Even today, however, we don’t really know everything there is to know about that massacre.

Just a few months ago, the identikit of a mysterious woman reemerged from a Carabinieri archive in Florence. Also, the account of an eyewitness that has already opened a new line of inquiry in the investigations on the accomplices of the Mafiosi in the massacres of 1993. “Age about 25, skinny physique, dark, short, smooth hair, height roughly 5 feet 7 inches.”

Three days after the bombing that devastated a wing of the Uffizi, the doorman in an apartment building in the center of Florence told the police that he had been awakened by the voices of two young men who were trying to break the front door of the building down by slamming their shoulders against it. They’d lost something: a yellow envelope.

Looking out the window, the doorman saw the two young men and a car: a woman then got out of the car, wearing a dark skirt suit. A short distance away, a white Fiat Fiorino van, like the one that later blew up on Via dei Georgofili. “The woman cursed and then said to the two young men, who were carrying a duffle bag: ‘Are we going to get going or not?’”

That report, with an attached identikit, was discovered in a Carabinieri barracks in Florence by a consultant to the parliamentary Antimafia Commission, a magistrate named Gianfranco Donadio, now a prosecutor in Lagonegro. In the previous years, Donadio, as assistant prosecutor to the national Antimafia Office, has delved into the mysteries of massacres. At the time, the identikit of the woman had immediately been sent to the Florence prosecutor’s office, but it was never circulated.

Nor was the witness ever interviewed. “It always struck me as odd,” he said, now in his seventies, when he was summoned to testify before the Antimafia Commission, holding special hearings in Florence.
In those first few months of 1993, in the meantime, Matteo was, officially, so to speak, a fugitive in Palermo.
 

The Accomplices

The secrets of those days back in 1993 accustomed Matteo Messina Denaro to a zealous caution in his his relationships, increasingly confidential, increasingly directed toward lucrative business dealings. Because in the Second Italian Republic founded after the bombings, it was business, much more than politics, that constituted the real meeting ground. And Matteo Messina Denaro, who had by now become a phantom, always had plenty of powerful businessmen (who had often leapt to prominence out of nowhere) looking after his interests.

The last manager that police and Carabinieri followed is named Mimmo Scimonelli and he’s 53 years old. When he’s not busy traveling around tumbledown farmhouses and vineyards outside of Mazara del Vallo to hide the latest handwritten note from the superfugitive, his day job is to manage three Despar supermarkets between the towns of Partanna and Gibellina. But more often than not, he’s on the road: traveling to Rome, Bologna, Milan, and Switzerland. Scimonelli has an abiding love for wine.

His vineyard, the Occhio di Sole, in Partanna, can proudly boast a number of major awards at the Vinitaly wine fair, for his Cataratto Chardonnay “Il Gattopardo-La Luna” 2009 and for his Syrah “Zu’ Terzio” 2008. Until he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment for ordering a murderer.

And yet, from the day of his arrest, in the summer of 2015, he never uttered a word. For fear of Matteo Messina Denaro. Who had, in the meantime, become a successful brand.
Over the previous five years, his personal worth had risen to almost 6 billion euros, because that was the amount of the judicial confiscations of property attributable to him, either directly or indirectly. Both in his own territory, in the province of Trapani. And outside of Sicily.

That is why the internationalization of business along the Mafia border also tends to lead the search for Messina Denaro far afield. A few years ago, the magistrates of the Palermo prosecutor's office and the investigators of the DIA followed the trail of the godfather to one of the companies based in Luxembourg and run by Vito Nicastri, the electrician from Alcamo who, in the course of the last twenty years, has become the “king” of wind power.

The “poles,” as they call wind turbines, are another strategic sector of the Messina Denaro holding company. Practically an obsession, as Riina said on one of the surveillance recordings from prison: “This Signor Messina, this fugitive on the run, never thinks about anything but the poles (the poles holding up the wind turbines—editor’s note). He thinks about poles because he wants to make money, but he never thinks about us.”

Totò Riina wanted a more aggressive and less entrepreneurial successor. But the Messina Denaro brand was already a presence on the market. He’d become an incredible machine, producing a powerful stream of cash. Entrusted to the care of the umpteenth self-made man, Giuseppe Grigoli, the “king” of the Despar supermarkets of western Sicily. His personal “paesano mio,” as he always called him in his handwritten notes. Whom he protected. The same way he protected everyone one of his “front men,” his true source of wealth.
 

Love

By a bizarre coincidence of events (and rumors), we’ve never known so much, in the long history of Cosa Nostra, about the love life of a Mafia boss. It may in part be part of the legend, or as part of the “epic” memories that certain of his fellow townsfolk still cherish of him when—vain, all too vain—he went around Castelvetrano as a young man, dressed up like a tailor’s mannequin, but the fact remains that Matteo has always enjoyed a reputation as quite the lady-killer.

There is no shortage of stories. And in all likelihood, truth and fiction mingle so freely that they become indistinguishable. Still, there is evidence that takes the mob boss decidedly outside the usual model of the Mafioso—wife, children, a single family, and no lovers “because that’s immoral.” The evidence exists, and it’s also documented by the judicial investigations.

If there is one woman that Matteo lost his head over, that would be “Asi,” Andrea Haslehner, an Austrian woman who every year, as the summer began to heat up, would come south from Vienna to Sicily, to work as a receptionist at the Paradise Beach Hotel in Selinunte. She was beautiful, well educated (she would later specialize in German and Romance studies), and she spoke English, French, Russian, Spanish, and of course, Italian.

“She was blonde and blue-eyed, about 5 feet 7 inches tall, and was twenty years old,” Francesco Geraci recalls, a member of Matteo’s circle who later turned state’s witness. Matteo’s relationship with “Asi” began around 1988 and ended in 1993. Summers at the beaches of Marina di Selinunte, winters in Austria with the mob boss who would go to Vienna to see her. There was however another man who fell for the young woman: Nicola Consales, the deputy manager of the Paradise Beach Hotal. And that weakness sealed his fate: Matteo’s henchmen shot him to death on the evening of February 21, 1991.

In those years, “Asi” wasn’t the only one. Because the mob boss’s other love affairs were documented in the “pizzini,” or handwritten notes, found in the various lairs where he hid out.
And on the eve of being forced to go on the run, in fact, he wrote to Sonia M., a young woman from Mazara del Vallo: “I have to go away, and I can’t explain to you the reasons for this decision. Right now, things are looking bad for me. I’m fighting for a cause that nowadays can’t be understood. But one day it will be clear that I had right on my side...”

Between 1995 and 1996, in the first couple of years of his time on the run, there were two women who loomed large in his life. One was Franca Alagna, who gave birth to a healthy baby girl on December 17, 1995. Matteo’s daughter. A daughter, however, who bore her mother’s surname, even though Franca went to live with her daughter in the home of Lorenza Santangelo, the mob boss’s mother. The baby girl, however, was named after her grandmother: Lorenza. There’s a very troubled relationship between father and daughter. One day Matteo wrote to his usual friend, “Svetonio”: “Let me confide something personal to you, I’m telling you this with all the fondness of a son; you see, I don’t really know my daughter, I’ve never seen her, destiny chose for things to go this way...”

Cohabitation in the grandmother’s house became uneasy and complicated and so Franca Alagna moved out. There are those who claim that Lorenzina has renounced her father entirely. But that’s not the case. It’s actually a problem with “communication,” as the grandmother informed Salvatore, Matteo’s brother—in a chat recorded by the investigators:
“You need to tell your brother that he has a daughter who turned eleven in December and that the time has come for him to write her a letter, at least, because the little girl is starting to ask questions about her father, she’s starting to figure things out, and he can’t just continue to ignore her, the way he’s always done.” Pragmatic as ever, Salvatore replies: “Clearly, in the place he’s in, he can’t write, he can’t send letters.”

For that matter, just a year after Lorenzina was born, the mob boss already had another girlfriend. Namely, Maria Mesi. She was three years younger than him, but she looked even younger. And she was head over heels in love with him. She bought him presents. Bottles of cologne and the latest generation of videogames, the ones that would eventually be found in the lair in Aspra. Maria worked for a small company that marketed seafood, property of the Guttadauro family (Mafia bosses with blood ties to Matteo). She would send him love texts: “I wish I could always be with you, I’ve thought a great deal about the reason you don’t want me to live with you, and I think I’ve finally figured it out... I love you and I will love you for the rest of our lives, Yours forever, Mari…”

Video - Detective Marranca’s account: in Messina Denaro’s hideout, after he’d already fled

Il racconto del commissario Marranca: nel covo di Messina Denaro, ma lui era già fuggito

From the documentation gathered year after year and investigation after investigation by the pool of judges hunting down the superfugitive, another Francesca emerges. Not much is known about this Francesca: certainly, her time with Matteo was brief. We know that she hadn’t seen him again since May 1993 (a month before the mob boss officially went on the run from the law). And that around 1995 she had received a written message from him, delivered to her by a certain Giovanni Agate.

Women, lots and lots of women. The most recent of these women, she too of course very beautiful, was sighted on an unspecified day of an unspecified year in Valencia, in Venezuela. She was with Matteo, on the far side of the globe. True or false?

It’s all mixed up with the romanzo nero, the black saga of Matteo Messina Denaro. Even the alleged presence of a son. Every so often someone mentions this son, in the conversations recorded by hidden tiny microphones in the houses scattered between Castelvetrano and Partanna, between Campobello di Mazara and Trapani. This son is alleged to have been born sometime between 2004 and 2005, of an unknown mother. One guess that we feel safe venturing is this: if this son really exists, he’s probably named Francesco. As tradition demands: like his grandfather.
 

Castelvetrano, the Family
and 30,893 Inhabitants, Minus One

The last time we entered the Badìa, the section of Castelvetrano where the Messina Denaro family live, we counted nineteen nuclear families with that surname. All of them living on a single street bearing the name of a hero of the Italian Risorgimento, Alberto Mario, where Matteo hadn’t (officially) set foot since June 1993.
In fact, a couple of years ago, on the occasion of the most recent census, at his only known official residence—Via Alberto Mario, 51/5, in fact—the city officials conducting the census in fact eliminated a name from the list of residents: one “Messina Denaro, Matteo, son of the late Francesco, born on April 26, 1962.”

Castelvetrano, then, has 30,893 inhabitants, minus one: Matteo Messina Denaro. Or at least so it would appear, given that they’ve been unable to find him, despite a quarter century of attempts.
On Via Alberto Mario, there are no longer even several other members of his family who have instead, for many years now, been guests of the Italian prison system. There are other residents who bear the Messina Denaro surname but insist on making it clear that “they’re good people.”

There was half the province rooting for Matteo. They had turned him into a myth and—paradoxically—in his own family they fought and split about him. In reality, though, matters appear somewhat more complicated. The family, which in Mafia communities is usually a boss’s strongest bulwark, has instead proved to be a weak point for Matteo. Perhaps that’s why Matteo Messina Denaro has no longer been seen at Via Alberto Mario, 51/5. Because that wouldn’t exactly be a safe house for him.

In the meantime, he had brothers-in-law who never stopped causing him headaches. One was Gaspare Como. The other was Rosario Allegra. Both of them had the regrettable habit of uttering his name in vain. In the interests of their own business opportunities. Let’s start with Gaspare Como, husband to Bice, one of the fugitive’s sisters (the second sister is named Patrizia, the third is Giovanna, and the fourth sister is Rosetta, the eldest). Gaspare is a businessman in the garment trade, who left Castelvetrano not long ago, moving to Caltanissetta. Probably, to lick his wounds and try to recover.

Sometime previous to his departure from Castelvetrano, Gaspare was given a beating that left him bruised and bloody. Naturally, he said nothing about the beating to either Carabinieri or police, and naturally he did not go to the emergency room for treatment. But rumors circulate in Castelvetrano. And they move with particular speed when they’re rumors about the Messina Denaro family.
Who would dare to give Matteo’s brother-in-law such a brutal beating? And why? The investigators didn’t take long to reach a clear and unequivocal conclusion: “Only Matteo could have done it, no one else, unless they were clinically insane.”

The other brother-in-law, Rosario Saro Allegra—Giovanna’s husband and likewise in the garment trade, and who died last year—really pulled a fast one on Matteo. He promised the brother of a woman running for office in the regional elections that he could procure votes, in exchange for 60,000 euros. The Carabinieri’s planted microphones recorded it all. Including the attendant fraud. Allegra took the dirty payment, but he never lifted a finger to get votes for the woman. The middleman on the transaction, at that point, went to Palermo to see the Guttadauros, protesting loudly to Matteo’s beloved nephew, Francesco.

The Carabinieri recordings of the conversations are significant: “We took Saro Allegra, we put him in a car, and we drove him out to the countryside.” At that point, Francesco Guttadauro started asking questions: “What’s going on with this whole thing with payments and the votes you were supposed to provide?” And he then berated Saro: “You represent the face of our family, and here we wind up looking like clowns in Castelvetrano... Now you give them back the money.” Matteo wasn’t happy.
To have men in your family who break their promises means a loss of prestige and power. Everybody knows how fights start in a family, but you never know how they’re going to end. The fights in the Messina Denaro family might sooner or later really get out of hand.

And then there was the “question” of Matteo’s daughter, Lorenza. For some time now, there in the Badìa neighborhood, there had been a steady stream of scooters and high school boys making a ruckus outside Matteo’s home. All of them there to see Lorenzina. Parties, boyfriends, rides in the countryside, miniskirts. In short, a “scandal.” With Lorenzina, just seventeen, a rebellious daughter attending Science High School and becoming increasingly willful and out of control. One day she goes so far as to say that “that man”—her father—had no say over her life and what she did, because she’d never even glimpsed his face.

Nonna Lorenza and Zia Patrizia, respectively her grandmother and aunt, let the girl know exactly what they thought. And Lorenzina and her mother moved away from Via Alberto Mario, finding a place to stay with the mother’s parents. But there’s never been peace in the family, because there has also been the everlasting “shame” of a pentito, an insider who turned informant. It happened in 2013, with the husband of one of Matteo’s cousins: Lorenzo Cimarosa, a farm owner. It was a genuine earthquake. Cimarosa, who died in 2017, also told the magistrates a few details about Matteo’s friends and his business. A very bad sign.

The only ones to maintain ties of absolute loyalty to Matteo were his four sisters and his brother Salvatore. And, of course, his mother who, on the wall of her living room at home, hung a large painting. A one-off. An oversized portrait of her son in the finest Andy Warhol style.
 

The Summer of Massacres

Matteo Messina Denaro always felt so safe that he even went on vacation all over Italy, even as the bombs were exploding. After the five killed in Florence, on May 27^th, five more dead in Milan, on Via Palestro, on July 27^th. The next day, explosions in Rome, at St. John Lateran and San Giorgio in Velabro.

While the men of Cosa Nostra carried out their orders, the masterminds behind that campaign of death enjoyed themselves at Forte dei Marmi. Matteo Messina Denaro was with Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano, girlfriends beside them. At the time, Matteo was in a relationship with an Austrian woman named Andrea Haslnher. For July and August, the merry company had rented a villa on Via Salvatore Allende, just half a mile from the water.

Matteo told everyone his name was Paolo. Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano were Filippo and Tommaso Militello, a pair of fun-loving Sicilians who even had time to order a couple of bicycles shipped north from Palermo by express. Then the third Graviano brother, Benedetto, showed up with his girlfriend, his sister, and his girlfriend’s female cousin. Lovely, relaxing holidays, while the rest of Italy had been plunged back into sheer terror. One morning, they took a drive to Milan, to do some shopping at Versace.

They also spent a few days at Abano Terme. A few more days in Rimini. Graviano and Messina Denaro really had become inseparable. They shared past, present, and even imagined a future. “Because the bombs are a useful way of finding someone to negotiate with,” they reasoned. The “hawks” of Cosa Nostra, at any rate, were convinced that that was the way forward.

Upon their return to Palermo, there was a meeting in a vacation village not far from Cefalù. Sitting around a table were Matteo Messina Denaro, Leoluca Bagarella, and Giuseppe Graviano. They talked about ordering a hit on a cooperating witness. Then, without warning, a politician who was friends with the Gravianos showed up, the Christian Democratic Senator Vincenzo Inzerillo. You remember him, the senator that Commissioner Germanà had been investigating? Well, here he was now, at a meeting with the “massacre” arm of Cosa Nostra.

“Matteo gestured to me to leave the room,” Sinacori would later recall. “And on the way back to Trapani he told me that that was Senator Inzerillo. He insisted that the massacres weren’t going to do a bit of good, and that we needed to take a different approach.” He suggested “establishing a new political party.” There was already discussion of “Sicilia Libera,” an idea that Bagarella liked.

But the Gravianos were insisting on another terror attack, against a tour bus full of Carabinieri. Those were the days when Giuseppe Graviano told his trusted Spatuzza, at the Bar Doney on Via Veneto, in Rome: “We have the country in the palm of our hands,” with specific reference to Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri. The age of the Gravianos, however, was already drawing to a close. In January 1994, the Graviano brothers were arrested in Milan.

In June 1995, the next one to face handcuffs was Leoluca Bagarella. The following year, it was Giovanni Brusca’s turn, and he decided to become a cooperating witness. Only Matteo and his secrets about the massacres remain buried. Only Matteo remains a phantom.

translated into English by Antony Shugaar