The last super godfather takes these secrets to the grave. There will be presidential elections in Egypt in December

“Without my cancer and chemotherapy you would never have caught me,” Messina Denaro defiantly told prosecutors after his arrest.

In fact, investigators had gotten wind of the fact that the top mafioso they were looking for was due to undergo a check-up at a private clinic in Palermo – and special Carabinieri units checked him out in front of the hospital in January this year. The 61-year-old had been suffering from colon cancer for a long time.

A few days ago he was transferred from the maximum security wing of the prison in L’Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, to the prison ward of the local hospital. At the end of last week, authorities reported that the Sicilian super godfather had fallen into an irreversible coma and was not receiving further treatment or artificial nutrition at his own request. He died on the night of yesterday Monday.

Matteo Messina Denaro, from a powerful mafia family in the western Sicilian province of Trapani, was a stone-cold killer – and boasted that the victims he killed could ‘fill an entire cemetery’. During the assassination attempts of the mafia hunters Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in the early 1990s, Messina Denaro, then only thirty years old, was already part of the inner leadership circle of Cosa Nostra.

He was also involved in the bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in the summer of 1993, which killed ten people and injured more than a hundred. In total, Messina himself is said to have committed or had carried out more than fifty murders. As a result, he was sentenced in absentia to several life sentences.

Not far from his birthplace for decades

After his arrest in January, Messina Denaro remained steadfastly silent in the old mafia style. “I have never betrayed anyone, and I will not do so now,” he told investigators. And so the boss of Cosa Nostra takes many secrets to the grave.

For example: How was it possible that the most wanted mafioso in Italy could live an almost normal life for thirty years, not far from his hometown of Castelvetrano, even though hundreds of anti-mafia agents were hot on his trail? How is it possible that ‘Diabolik’, as Messina Denaro was called because of his cruelty, was able to invest extensively in the legal economy at this time and amass a fortune estimated at 4 to 5 billion euros? Which politicians and which entrepreneurs helped him – and where is this money now?

Another equally disturbing secret: has Messina Denaro actually come into possession of Toto Riina’s Cosa Nostra archive, and if so, where has he hidden it? Riina, the capo of ‘Corleonesi’ who also died in captivity in 2017, was the absolute boss of Cosa Nostra from 1982 until his arrest in 1993 and had ordered the murders of Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, as well as bombings of the mainland.

During this time, secret negotiations were said to have taken place between the Cosa Nostra and the government in Rome to put an end to the bloodshed. What did Messina Denaro know about this, what does Riina’s missing archive contain about this – and above all: which high-ranking politicians in Rome, if any, were involved in these negotiations? Prosecutors tried to reveal all these secrets during their interrogations with Messina Denaro over the past eight months – to no avail.