Mafia bosses who spent longest time on the run in Italy 2023
Matteo Messina Denaro, a Mafia boss convicted of organizing a slew of reprehensible crimes, was arrested in January 2023 after spending almost 30 years on the lam and becoming one of the most wanted people in Europe. A chief of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra family, 60-year-old Messina Denaro was detained by police while receiving treatment in a private clinic in Palermo. The criminal was convicted in absentia of dozens of Mafia-related murders, including his involvement in the 1992 assassinations of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The Mafia chief was awarded his most recent life sentence in 2020 for his role in deadly bombings that beset Milan, Florence, and Rome in 1993, as well as for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of the 12-year-old son of an enemy who testified against Cosa Nostra.
Messina Denaro's arrest came almost 30 years to the day since police detained Cosa Nostra's "boss of bosses" Salvatore "Totò" Riina, who was nabbed in a Palermo apartment after spending 23 years on the run. Riina eventually died in prison in 2017, having never repented.
The Cosa Nostra boss who set the record for the longest time on the run was Bernardo Provenzano, who spent 38 years as a fugitive before being caught in a farmhouse near Sicily's Corleone in 2006. Provenzano died in jail in 2016, and similarly to Riina, never chose to collaborate with investigators.
The decline of Cosa Nostra and the rise of the Calabrian Mafia
With the clampdown that began against Cosa Nostra in the 1990s, the Sicilian Mafia began to lose its dominance in Italy, amid the rise of other organized crime syndicates on the mainland. The 'Ndrangheta syndicate, based in the southern region of Calabria, has since then surpassed Cosa Nostra in both reach and influence. The 'Ndrangheta has supplanted Cosa Nostra in the drugs trade and has become one of the leading cocaine traffickers in the world. The Calabrian crime syndicate is estimated to rake in as much as 60 billion U.S. dollars per year – more than the GDP of countries such as Lebanon and Uruguay – and has a tight clan-like structure that is more difficult to penetrate than that of Cosa Nostra.
Organized crime: controlling one-tenth of Italy's economy
Organized crime has been reported to be the biggest business in Italy, controlling an estimated nine percent of the country's economy. The value of assets seized from mafia organizations in Italy between 2020 and 2021 amounted to almost two billion euros. In addition to the 'Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra, the mafia groups of Camorra and Sacra Corona Unita – based in the southern regions of Campania and Puglia, respectively – complete the top four of Italy's main crime syndicates.
