The day after the arrest of Cosa Nostra godfather Matteo Messina Denaro in a private clinic in Palermo, prosecutors continued their investigation on Tuesday.

The hiding place where the mafia boss with cancer had last lived was found late Monday evening.

This is an unassuming two-storey house in the town of Campobello di Mazara in the western Sicily province of Trapani, just seven kilometers from Messina Denaro's birthplace of Castelvetrano.

Expensive watches and designer clothing were found in the house, but no weapons and no documents relevant to further investigations were found.

Matthias Rub

Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.

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Matteo Messina Denaro is considered one of the last representatives of the "old school" mafia godfathers.

However, unlike the notorious "bosses of bosses" Bernardo Provenzano and Totò Riina, who died of old age in prison in 2016 and 2017 respectively, he was not married, but had changing partners.

Unlike Provenzano and Riina, who presented themselves as devout or at least practicing Catholics, Messina Denaro describes himself as an atheist.

The 60-year-old mafioso lived in the house in Campobello di Mazara under the false name Andrea Bonafede, under which he had been treated for a liver tumor in Palermo since November 2020.

Messina Denaro had "borrowed" the false name and false identity, including ID card and tax number, from the nephew of former mafia boss Nardo Bonafede.

Nardo Bonafede, who died in prison in 2020 at the age of 88, was the godfather of the Cosa Nostra clan from Campobello, which used to cooperate with the clan from the neighboring town of Castelvetrano led by Francesco Messina Denaro – Matteo Messina Denaro’s father.

Matteo Messina Denaro's mother and sister still live in the family home in Castelvetrano.

The fact that Matteo Messina Denaro was apparently able to live in the immediate vicinity of his birthplace for three decades - and under the assumed name of the nephew of a convicted mafia boss - shows that the clans in question still have great influence in their respective "ancestral homes". feature.

Mafia clan bosses can rely on people inside and outside the "family" to obey Omertà law.

Tapped telephone conversations laid the trail

According to media reports, the investigators found out about Messina Denaro mainly because of his tumor disease.

Prosecutors knew from tapped telephone conversations by family members of the Cosa Nostra boss that Messina Denaro was suffering from a liver tumor.

A screening of the national register of patients with liver cancer and the comparison of their data with the age and origin of Messina Denaro showed that the Sicilian patient named Andrea Bonafede could be the wanted mafia boss.

On the day of the operation of the patient of that name in Palermo in November 2020, there were cell phone signals from the real Andrea Bonafede in Campobello di Mazara.

The evaluation of the surveillance camera recordings from the site finally showed that

that the real Andrea Bonafede at the time of the operation of the man with that (wrong) name in Palermo was walking his dog in Campobello instead.

So far, according to media reports, the real Andrea Bonafede from Campobello has not been determined.