Matteo Messina Denaro was the head of the Cosa Nostra clan of Castelvetrano, in the Trapani province of western Sicily, and for about thirty years the most wanted fugitive in Italy. He went into hiding in the summer of 1993 and was arrested in Palermo on January 16, 2023. Italian courts had by then sentenced him to life imprisonment several times, always in his absence. In October 2020 the Assize Court in Caltanissetta found him to be one of the instigators of the May and July 1992 attacks that killed the magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, together with Falcone's wife and members of both men's escorts. He had earlier received life sentences for the 1993 attacks in Florence, Milan and Rome, in which ten people died, and for the 1996 murder of a child, a case that was tried with other charges.
The 1992 sentence was upheld on appeal on July 19, 2023, the anniversary of the second attack. He died in custody in L'Aquila on September 25, 2023, aged 61, two months after that ruling. Prosecutors had long doubted that he was the single "boss of bosses" he was said to be; they considered him more likely the head of Cosa Nostra in western Sicily. The courts that sentenced him did not need that title. They found that he sat among the men who decided, in the winter of 1991 and the months that followed, to answer a final conviction of the organization's leaders with a campaign against the state.
Messina Denaro was born on April 26, 1962 in Castelvetrano, a town in the province of Trapani in the south-west of Sicily. He grew up inside the local Cosa Nostra clan and, as its head, allied it with the Corleonesi, the faction led by Salvatore "Totò" Riina that dominated the organization from the early 1980s.
His first recorded contact with the authorities came in 1989, when he was reported for mafia association. By then he was acting for the Trapani district of Cosa Nostra, taking over its running. He was Riina's protégé. Prosecutors later described him as a member of the regional commission of Cosa Nostra, the body on which the leaders of the provinces sat.
In the trials held in his absence he was convicted of murders in the Trapani area between 1989 and 1992, in the towns of Alcamo, Marsala and Castellammare, in the proceedings known as the Omega and Arca trials. In 2000 the court that heard the Omega trial in Trapani sentenced him to life imprisonment, in absentia, among a large group of defendants. These were the first of the life sentences that accumulated while he was in hiding, and they date from years in which the authorities had no photograph of him later than the early 1990s.
The attacks of 1992 and 1993 cannot be understood without the trial that preceded them. Between 1986 and 1992 a court in Palermo heard the Maxi Trial, in which 474 defendants were sent to trial on the work of a small group of investigating magistrates that included Falcone and Borsellino. On January 30, 1992 the Court of Cassation, the highest court in Italy, confirmed the convictions. The Caltanissetta court later found that Cosa Nostra, after that ruling, adopted a common plan ("disegno comune") to kill the two men.
The judges' reasons, published in July 2023, describe a small group around Riina, sometimes called the "Super Cosa," that planned the attacks from meetings in October 1991. They place the first summit at which the strategy was decided in Castelvetrano, at the end of 1991. The prosecution described him as the first to take part in the attempts on both magistrates and as a man who gave his consent to Riina's wider strategy. The court did not find that he took part physically in the attacks. It found him an instigator, a "mandante," who decided with other regional leaders.
On May 23, 1992 an attack near Capaci, in the municipality of Isola delle Femmine a few kilometres from Palermo, killed Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo, and Antonio Montinaro, Vito Schifani and Rocco Dicillo, three members of his escort. Others were injured.
Falcone had spent years working against Cosa Nostra and had led the Maxi Trial together with Borsellino and the team of magistrates gathered around Antonino Caponnetto. The Caltanissetta court found that the attack was carried out on Riina's direct orders. The Supreme Court had confirmed the responsibility of Riina and other leaders in earlier proceedings.
Paolo Borsellino was killed on July 19, 1992 in Palermo, 57 days after Falcone, together with five members of his escort. The court that sentenced Messina Denaro treated the two attacks as parts of one decision. The prosecutor in the 2020 trial, Gabriele Paci, told the court that he was "one of the instigators, one of the protagonists of that whole dramatic season," and that he sat "well placed at the center of a strategy of massacres."
The campaign continued on the mainland in 1993. On May 14 an attack in Rome injured 24 people and killed no one. In the night of 26 to May 27 an attack in Florence killed five people, among them children, and injured about 40. On July 27 an attack in Milan killed five people. In Rome, on 27 and July 28, two further attacks injured 22 people. In all, ten people died in the 1993 attacks. Two further attempts followed in 1994. The Florence prosecutors took over the investigations in 1994.
Italian courts treated the campaign as a message to the state. The attacks were believed to have been ordered by Cosa Nostra to press the authorities to ease the strict prison regime known as 41-bis, which applied to convicted mafia leaders. President Giorgio Napolitano, testifying in 2014 in a separate trial in Palermo, described the attacks as pressure "aimed at destabilizing the entire system" and, according to those present, as an ultimatum on 41-bis.
On May 6, 2002 the Court of Cassation made 15 life sentences final in the Florence proceedings, Messina Denaro among those sentenced to life. Italian courts have regarded him as an instigator ("mandante") of the 1993 attacks.
Messina Denaro disappeared from public view in the summer of 1993, in June by most accounts. From then he was a fugitive, sought on accusations that included mafia association, murder and theft. For years there were only rumors about where he was. In September 2022 the police said that he was still issuing orders from hiding. Prosecutors attributed to him a business empire in waste, wind energy and retail.
After the deaths of Provenzano in 2016 and Riina in 2017, some analysts saw him as the new boss of bosses, while others said he was never at the top of the organization's power.
In January 1996 a child was murdered in Sicily, in a case tried as murder, with other charges. Italian courts found that the leaders of Cosa Nostra, among them Messina Denaro, had ordered the crime. In 2012 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the case while he was still a fugitive. On March 18, 2013 the appeal court in Palermo upheld five life sentences, among them his, and on February 25, 2014 the Court of Cassation confirmed the life sentences of two of the other defendants. He did not appeal to the Court of Cassation.
The Italian procedure allowed him to be tried without being present, and over thirty years he accumulated 20 life sentences for his part in a series of murders. They included the Omega and Arca proceedings in the Trapani area, the Florence proceedings on the 1993 attacks, and the 1996 case. A sentence of 30 years on a further mafia conviction was ordered to run on top of the earlier ones.
The trial that carried the highest profile was that for the 1992 attacks. In January 2017 a preliminary hearings judge in Caltanissetta sent him to trial for being among those who ordered the 1992 murders of the two magistrates. The trial ran for about three years before the Assize Court in Caltanissetta, presided over by Roberta Serio, with Gabriele Paci as prosecutor. The court deliberated for more than 13 hours and on October 21, 2020 sentenced him to life imprisonment, as the prosecutors had asked. The court ordered compensation of 500,000 euros for the relatives of each victim and 100,000 euros for each of three survivors. At the time of the verdict he was 58 and had been in hiding for 27 years.
The appeal was heard after his arrest. Prosecutors Antonino Patti, Fabiola Furnari and Gaetano Bono asked the Assize Court of Appeal in Caltanissetta to uphold the sentence and to pass "fine pena mai," a sentence of never being released. Messina Denaro did not attend any hearing and did not use the offer to follow them remotely. His court-appointed lawyer, Adriana Vella, asked for an acquittal, arguing that he had not been among the Trapani leadership when the strategy of 1992 was decided and that there was no serious, precise and consistent evidence that he took part in the meetings at which it was agreed.
The court, presided over by Maria Carmela Giannazzo, deliberated for about six hours. On July 19, 2023, the 31st anniversary of the second attack, it confirmed the life sentence, finding him one of the instigators of the 1992 attacks. Vella said that the ruling had to be respected and that the defense was ready to appeal once the reasons were read. A lawyer for the civil parties said that the verdict "definitively closes the season of the Corleonesi." The reasons published later in July described him as one of the strategists and masterminds of the 1992 attacks. The case did not reach the Court of Cassation before his death.
On Monday, January 16, 2023, carabinieri of the special operations group, the ROS, arrested Messina Denaro in Palermo. He was 60. The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, called the arrest "a great victory for the State" and thanked the Carabinieri, the National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor's Office and the Palermo prosecutors. The arrest came the day after the thirtieth anniversary of Riina's own arrest in Palermo in 1993.
Police said they did not believe he had given them any information.
Messina Denaro died in custody in L'Aquila on September 25, 2023. The mayor of L'Aquila, Pierluigi Biondi, said his death "puts the end to a story of violence and blood."
Informers and prosecutors had long said that he held key information about some of the Sicilian mafia's worst killings, among them the 1992 attacks.
Italian criminal cases of this size pass through three stages. A court of assizes (Corte d'assise) hears the case at first instance. An assize court of appeal (Corte d'assise d'appello) reviews the verdict. The Court of Cassation, the highest court, makes a sentence final. A defendant who cannot be found may be tried in his absence, which is how Messina Denaro came to receive his sentences. The life sentence, the "ergastolo," is the heaviest penalty in Italian law. In the 1992 proceedings both the first-instance court and the appeal court sat in Caltanissetta.
The attacks of 1992 followed the Maxi Trial, in which 474 defendants were sent to trial and which the Court of Cassation brought to a close on January 30, 1992. The Caltanissetta court recognized a common plan of Cosa Nostra, developed after that ruling, to kill the two magistrates, and found the attacks to have been ordered by Riina. Borsellino was killed 57 days after Falcone. The events of 1993 on the mainland were then read by the courts as a continuation: a campaign against the state meant to push the authorities into relaxing the 41-bis regime, under which convicted mafia leaders were held in strict isolation. President Napolitano's testimony in 2014 called the attacks an ultimatum. The Florence prosecutors held that the leadership of the organization under Riina and Provenzano directed the campaign. In total the Court of Cassation confirmed 19 life sentences for leaders and foot soldiers as masterminds and perpetrators in the Florence proceedings.
Messina Denaro belonged to the generation of bosses who rose under Riina. When Riina was arrested in Palermo in January 1993 the organization's attacks on the mainland were still ahead, and it was in the months after that arrest that Messina Denaro went into hiding. Riina had been on the run for 23 years before that arrest, and Provenzano was captured in 2006 after 38 years as a fugitive.
His rank is the first open question. After 2017 he was called the "last godfather" and a candidate for boss of bosses, but prosecutors doubted this, and some experts said that he was never at the top of the organization. The court in Caltanissetta did not need to settle the question: it found that he took part in the decisions of 1991 and 1992 as one of the regional leaders.
His role in the 1992 attacks was contested by his defense. His court-appointed lawyer argued at the appeal that he was not among the Trapani leadership when the strategy was decided, that his actual role in the Trapani organization was uncertain, citing witnesses who had left Cosa Nostra and earlier final rulings, and that there was no serious, precise and consistent evidence that he attended the meetings at which the attacks were agreed. The two courts that heard the case rejected the argument.
Investigations by the Florence prosecutors into outside parties who may have had a part in the 1993 attacks remained open, and no outside party has been convicted.
April 26, 1962: Matteo Messina Denaro is born in Castelvetrano, Sicily.
1989: He is first reported to the authorities for mafia association.
January 30, 1992: The Court of Cassation confirms the convictions in the Maxi Trial.
May 23, 1992: Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo and three members of his escort are killed near Capaci.
July 19, 1992: Paolo Borsellino and five members of his escort are killed in Palermo.
May 14 to July 28, 1993: Attacks in Rome, Florence and Milan kill ten people.
June 1993: Messina Denaro goes into hiding.
2000: Sentenced to life in absentia after the Omega trial in Trapani.
May 6, 2002: The Court of Cassation makes 15 life sentences final in the Florence proceedings on the 1993 attacks.
2012: Sentenced to life in absentia in the 1996 case.
March 18, 2013: The appeal court in Palermo upholds five life sentences in the 1996 case, among them his.
January 2017: A preliminary hearings judge in Caltanissetta sends him to trial over the 1992 murders.
October 21, 2020: The Assize Court in Caltanissetta sentences him in absentia to life imprisonment as one of the instigators of the 1992 attacks.
January 16, 2023: Arrested in Palermo by the Carabinieri special operations group.
July 19, 2023: The Assize Court of Appeal in Caltanissetta upholds the life sentence.
September 25, 2023: He dies in custody in L'Aquila, aged 61.