Italy: ‘Last godfather’ says old Jewish proverb helped him avoid capture

• Mobster Matteo Messina Denaro reportedly said he was inspired by an “old Jewish saying” to avoid capture.
• Dubbed the “last godfather,” he ate in restaurants and publically played poker in a Sicilian town.
• The cancer-ridden mobster is under police guard in a hospital in Italy after 30 years on the run.

Matteo Messina Denaro, 61, has been described in the Italian media as “Italy’s last godfather” and the “boss of all bosses.” When police raided his apartment, they discovered a poster of Marlon Brando in ‘The Godfather.”

He was one of Italy’s most wanted fugitives until his arrest in January of this year. He had been on the run for 30 years. 

A newly-released transcript of his first questioning by magistrates in February sheds light on his life as a fugitive, The Times reported.

He lived openly under a false name in Campobello di Mazara, a small town near his birthplace in western Sicily. He would eat in restaurants and play poker in the town.

“I followed an old Jewish saying, ‘If you want to hide a tree, plant it in a forest,” Messina Denaro told magistrates, The Times reported.

According to research, there is no evidence that the proverb has Jewish roots. 

Mafia informers and prosecutors allege that the mobster’s mafia career included involvement in the 1992 bomb attacks that killed anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

He was also sentenced for his role in a 12-year-old’s kidnap and murder. Giuseppe Di Matteo, a mafia turncoat’s son, was strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996.

Messina Denaro has been linked to dozens of other mafia-related murders, per CNN. The Guardian reported that Denaro once bragged: “I filled a cemetery all by myself.”

He is the last of Italy’s three most-wanted mafia bosses who eluded capture for decades, per Sky News.

The mobster was transferred from L’Aquila’s maximum-security jail to the city’s San Salvatore hospital for an operation on Tuesday.

Gianmarco Cifaldi, the prisons ombudsman for the region, told the Italian news agency ANSA that the procedure went “very well.”

Since his capture earlier this year, he has been jailed under Italy’s so-called “hard prison regime,” reserved for mafia members and other high-security criminals.

Messina Denaro had been suffering from cancer and underwent surgery for an intestinal obstruction this week. The former mafia boss was surviving on a diet of fruit juices and food supplements, his lawyer Alessandro Cerella told the AGI news agency, per Reuters.

Cerella had told Italian media that his condition was “incompatible” with the prison regime and that his client required “immediate hospitalization.”

Denaro appears to be keeping omertà, the mafia code of silence, until the end. He told magistrates he had no intention of seeking time off his jail sentence by betraying his fellow gangsters and has refused even to admit he was in the Cosa Nostra.

“He will never talk, partly because he is dying and partly because of his total loyalty to Cosa Nostra,” Teresa Principato, a magistrate who took part in the hunt for him, per The Times.