Italy Police have finally caught the most-wanted mafia boss. He was on the run for 30 years.

It took 30 years to finally arrest Italy's most wanted 60-year-old criminal, aka mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro. According to Italian media outlets, he is the boss of Sicily's Cosa Nostra mafia.

Cosa Nostra is Italian for 'our thing'.

Matteo Messina Denaro was arrested by armed police at a private hospital in Sicily on Monday (January 16), where the man who has been on the run since 1993 was being treated for cancer.

Denaro, who was sentenced 30 years ago for his involvement in various crimes including the deadly 1993 bomb attacks in Milan, Florence and Rome was arrested while he was receiving treatment. He now has been taken to a secret location by the Carabinieri (the official police force in the country). 

Matteo Messina Denaro and the Cosa Nostra: Messina Denaro comes from the small town of Castelvetrano near Trapani, Italy. He was given the name Diabolik by Italians, a famous functional comic book character, later adapted into a film in 2021. Diabolik, in the comic, was a ruthless master thief. He typically steals from criminals and has no issue with killing them if need be, innocents or the police. 

• He became a fugitive on the most wanted list in 1993, and in 2010 became one of the ten most wanted criminals in the world, according to the Forbes magazine.
• Cosa Nostra, on the other hand, is an Italian mafia-style organised crime syndicate and criminal society originating in Sicily, Italy, which stretches back to the 19th century. Right now it has 5,500 members and its alleged boss is Matteo Messina Denaro. 

• The mafia's core activities are protection racketeering, the arbitration of disputes between criminals, and the organizing and oversight of illegal agreements and transactions. 

Matteo and his atrocious crimes: 

• He was condemned to life in prison in 1992 for his role in the killings of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (which he did not attend, by the way, and ran away for 30 years).
• According to Reuters, he assisted in the kidnapping of a 12-year-old child in 1993, in an attempt to prevent his father, a state witness, from testifying against the mafia. The boy was caged for two years before being strangled to death and later his corpse was dissolved in acid.

• The mafia chief was also in charge of racketeering, illegal garbage disposal, money laundering, and drug trafficking for the renowned Cosa Nostra organised crime syndicate. He was purportedly Tot Riina's protege, the Corleone clan's chief who was nabbed in 1993 after 23 years on the run.

• He also faces life in prison for his part in the 1993 bombings in Florence, Rome, and Milan, which killed ten people.

Despite the fact that Messina Denaro had been a fugitive since 1993, it was believed that he was still sending commands to his subordinates from various covert places.

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