Matteo Messina Denaro: The White Whale of Cosa Nostra
Matteo Messina Denaro, the last great Sicilian mafioso, has been on the run for 27 years. Considered the boss of bosses, he is the great obsession of magistrates and the police in Italy.
Client
El Pais
Year
2020
The last known photograph of Matteo Messina Denaro, the top Cosa Nostra boss on the run since 1993.
Giuseppe Cimarosa was born into a Mafia family. He is a relative of Matteo Messina Denaro, Italy’s most wanted Cosa Nostra godfather. Furthermore, investigators have long believed that Giuseppe’s father, Lorenzo, occasionally provided “support” for the fugitive godfather. “My mother is a first cousin of Matteo Messina Denaro and my father was arrested as part of the Eden investigation [involving Messina Denaro]. I live in Castelvetrano [Messina Denaro’s home town in Sicily, near Trapani] and I’m having a hard time . . .”, Mr Cimarosa said.
When the police came to arrest his father in 2013, Giuseppe was furious. There and then he wanted to again leave Sicily and return to Rome where he had lived and worked with horses for eight years in his 20s. He was disgusted that his father had again fallen into the clutches of their powerful relative. It was only when he went to visit his father in prison, immediately after his arrest, that Giuseppe changed his mind. In tears, his father told him that he was going to collaborate with the investigators, which he subsequently did. Realising how much his father was now risking, he opted not just to stay in Castelvetrano but also, in a certain sense, to fight back against the Mafia. What is more, he does so, not with a false identity as part of a witness protection programme, but rather by staying in his home town. His father, Lorenzo Cimarosa, died of cancer in 2017.
The wedding album of Giuseppe Cimarosa's parents, Lorenzo and Rosa (center), posing for a group picture with mafia boss and fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro (right) in Castelvetrano.
Giuseppe Cimarosa walks towards his father's tomb in the cemetery in Castelvetrano
The tomb of Lorenzo Cimarosa, Giuseppe Cimarosa's father
The home in which Cosa Nostra's top boss Matteo Messina Denaro grew up, as well as his mother's current residence, in Castelvetrano
Enzo Alfano, mayor of Castelvetrano
A man parks his Porsche car at the side entrance of the Belicittà shopping center, confiscated from the entrepreneur Giuseppe Grigoli, accused of being a front man for the mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, in Castelvetrano
A wind farm is seen near Trapani. Mafia top boss Matteo Messina Denaro's closest men have managed to infiltrate the construction of the largest wind farms in western Sicily.
Federico Cafiero De Raho, the Italian national Anti-Mafia and Counter-Terrorism Public Prosecutor, in his Rome office. “The hunt for Messina Denaro is a priority for Italy. A State that can arrest such a fugitive is a reliable State”, he said.
