PALERMO, Italy—Italy’s most wanted mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested on Jan. 16 by armed police at a private hospital in Sicily, where the man who has been on the run since 1993 was being treated for cancer.
Nicknamed “Diabolik” and “'U Siccu” (The Skinny One), Messina Denaro had been sentenced in absentia to a life term for his role in the 1992 murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, crimes that shocked the nation and sparked a clampdown on Cosa Nostra.
