Arrest of Italy’s most-wanted mafia boss to be turned into a film
The capture of Italy’s most-wanted mob boss is getting the Hollywood treatment.
Matteo Messina Denaro, a leading figure in the Sicilian underworld, was arrested in January at a medical facility on the island capital of Palermo, where he’d been receiving treatment for cancer under a false identity for over a year.
He had evaded capture for more than three decades, being at one time considered among the ten most powerful criminals in the world.
Now, Italian film producer Marco Belardi has acquired the rights to adapt a book about Messina Denaro, penned by the journalist Lirio Abbate, entitled ‘U Siccu’ (The Skinny One).
A leading figure in the Sicilian mob, or ‘Cosa Nostra’ (Our Thing), since at least 2001, Denaro was born in Sicily in 1962 and allegedly made a reputation for himself at a young age by murdering a rival mob boss and his pregnant girlfriend.
Despite managing to dodge authorities for so long, Messina Denaro was also widely reputed to have extravagant tastes and a penchant for luxury cars, wearing expensive watches and designer clothes.
He was also considered a playboy and a womaniser – something that set him aside from traditional mafia bosses, who generally claim to adhere to traditional family values.
At the height of his powers, his primary sources of income were believed to be extortion and drug trafficking, as well as ostensibly legitimate business interests, which reportedly included supermarket chains and olive groves.
Messina Denaro became a fugitive after the 1992-93 bombings that killed renowned anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
He was later convicted in absentia for masterminding the killings, alongside a string of further terrorist attacks that swiftly escalated into an all-out war between the Cosa Nostra and the Italian state during the 1990s.
Efforts were made by Italian investigators in the late 2000s to seize assets linked to the fugitive mafioso, eventually amounting to billions of euros worth of interests that were taken at the time as an indication of the sheer extent of Messina Denaro’s wealth and influence within the criminal underworld.
His arrest came on January 16 of this year, in an operation that involved more than 100 members of Italy’s armed forces.
He was apprehended in Palermo at a private medical clinic, which he’d reportedly been visiting for chemotherapy treatment, using a fake name, for more than a year.
By that time, his total wealth was estimated to be at least 4 billion euros.
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