, had enriched itself by quietly infiltrating and investing in legitimate businesses. Messina Denaro put his dirty money into clean energy, using an unknown electrician as a front to build a wind-power empire worth €1.5bn. He created a €700m chain of 83 shops through another frontman.
But the man himself remained elusive. Investigators didn’t even know what he looked like. There was only a photograph from 1993 which had been artificially aged. The operation to locate him was called, named after a poem written by the nine-year-old Nadia who had been killed in Florence. The breakthrough came when wiretaps of his relatives revealed Messina Denaro had colon cancer.
“He was hiding in plain sight,” says Federico Varese, a professor of criminology at the University of Oxford, and author of. “It is extraordinary and disconcerting that it took 30 years to arrest this man and that speaks to one fact: there was no help from local informants because of a deep mistrust of people in this part of Italy towards institutions of the state.” Another former fugitive,, or silence, of the local community, many investigators spoke last week about active collusion.