Matteo Messina Denaro, a most-wanted Italian mafia leader, has died after a cancer battle and being in a coma since Friday. The 61-year-old was caught by police this year after avoiding arrest for 31 years.
Denaro was involved in dozens of murders and was given six life sentences. Pierluigi Biondi, a mayor in Italy, said Denaro’s death “puts the end to a story of violence and blood.”
His arrest came 30 years and a day after the January 15, 1993, capture of the Mafia’s “boss of bosses,’’ Salvatore “Toto” Riina in a Palermo apartment, also after decades in hiding. Messina Denaro himself went into hiding later that year.
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While a fugitive, Messina Denaro was tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, including helping to plan, along with other Cosa Nostra bosses, a pair of 1992 bombings that killed Italy’s leading anti-Mafia prosecutors — Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
(With AP inputs)