'Didn't Even Have To Use Handcuffs': Top Italian Mafia Boss Arrested After 30 Years

The 60-year-old mobster was arrested just outside a private clinic in Palermo along with an accomplice, reported news agency Reuters.

Italian mafia leader Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the most wanted mafia bosses (R), is seen after he was arrested by Italian security forces in Palermo

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Deteriorating health, more than anything else, made it possible for the police to apprehend Italy’s most wanted mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro. The 60-year-old mobster was arrested just outside a private clinic in Palermo along with an accomplice on Monday, reported news agency Reuters. Judicial sources said Denaro was visiting the clinic regularly after his cancer surgery last year.

Illness "is one of the events in the life of a (fugitive) individual that forces them to come out into the open", the report quoted Palermo Prosecutor Paolo Guido as saying. Based on a tip-off, the police cautiously tracked Denaro among other potential suspects of a similar age and condition, partly by checking the database of the national health system.

It is only at the end, the mafia known as 'U Siccu' (the skinny one) or 'Diabolik' (an Italian comics character), showed no resistance and did not try to escape, Palermo Chief Prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia said.

"We caught a very dangerous fugitive without having to use violence, we didn't even have to use handcuffs," he said.

The police found a well-groomed man, who was apparently in good health wearing a luxury watch worth 35,000 euros ($37,840). In police pictures, Messina Denaro was found in a brown fur-lined jacket, glasses and a brown and white woolly hat.

Even though the police and magistrates were not aware of his latest appearance other than the computer-generated images based on decades-old photographs, it was immediately clear that they arrested the right man.

"Looking at him, there was little that needed to be confirmed, he was who we were expecting to find," said Colonel Lucio Arcidiacono, another special forces chief of the Carabinieri police.

The investigation was "unrelenting, constant and incremental", said General Pasquale Angelosanto of the Carabinieri police ROS special forces.

He noted that in the past several years the Carabinieri police had targeted more than 100 alleged accomplices of Messina Denaro including his sister and other family members and seized assets worth around 150 million euros ($162 million). The police action undermined his support network.

The fugitive had been handed out a life term, in absentia, for his role in the murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. He faces another life sentence for his role in the 1993 bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan that left 10 people dead.

Chief Prosecutor de Lucia said Messina Denaro spent his life hiding in various parts of Italy, but most recently stayed in his home province of Trapani, in western Sicily, and in the island's regional capital Palermo.