DAVID JONES: The Mafia’s last Godfather who boasted he ‘filled a graveyard all by myself’… He dissolved one child victim in acid but also loved women and high culture. Now he’s died after 30 years on the run

Matteo Messina Denaro, the last all-powerful godfather of the mafia, was suffering from incurable colon cancer and realized that there were few days left. He scribbled his funeral instructions on a piece of paper.

Because he had been in hiding for thirty years and had never used telephones or computers, he had planned to smuggle the note through one of his couriers to his accomplices (including the five-year-old daughter of a local hijacker, whom he rewarded with ice cream). .

However, along with his stash of Viagra pills, condoms and video games, the crumpled message was among the many intriguing items that Italian special forces found after they finally arrested him and searched his lair last January.

As they read Denaro’s funeral orders, the officers undoubtedly allowed themselves a wry smile. The hubris and hypocrisy of the legendarily elusive Cosa Nostra boss, who died in a prison hospital this weekend at the age of 61, was beyond belief.

For almost 200 years, its leaders had sworn allegiance to the Vatican. From Lucky Luciano to Bernardo Provenzano, all had demanded – and received – elaborate Roman Catholic funerals.

Yet Denaro was determined to break this tradition. Why? Because the man who, in his own words, had committed so many murders that he “filled a cemetery all by himself” found the Catholic Church too evil to perform his service.

“I reject any religious celebration because it (the Church) consists of unclean men living in hatred and sin,” he wrote, perhaps forgetting that his shovel hands had strangled dozens of victims, including the pregnant girlfriend of a mafia rival, and the 13-year-old son of another enemy whose body he dissolved in acid.

These self-proclaimed “soldiers of God” should not be allowed to decide the “fate of my lifeless body.”

If this grandiose decree cemented Denaro as the first atheist mafia chief, it was not the only way he broke the mold.

For as I discovered when I ventured to his power base in Sicily shortly after his arrest, he was in many ways a unique godfather. By the antediluvian standards of Cosa Nostra, we could almost describe him as awake!

Take, for example, his business interests, which are said to have amassed up to £5 billion, much of which is said to be stored in offshore bank accounts and underground money dumps that have yet to be found.

Denaro, the country’s most wanted mafia boss, is escorted out of a Carabinieri police station after being arrested in Palermo, Italy on January 16, 2023

While old-fashioned bosses made fortunes through extortion, money laundering and narcotics, Denaro preferred to invest in ventures that could fly under the authorities’ radar, such as green energy. Assets seized in which he had interests include a £1.3 billion wind turbine project near his home town of Castelvetrano, a £600 million shopping center and construction companies worth £475 million. All this, of course, required the conspiracy of apparently sincere associates outside the mafia.

Then there was his exotic love life. Under the paradoxically strict moral code to which former bosses adhered, marriage was compulsory and family life sacred. Although mistresses were commonplace, they were an unspoken privilege; Having children out of wedlock was unthinkable. The last godfather, a confirmed bachelor, was libidinous even in his last months and turned his nose up at these traditions.

His only known child – a daughter Lorenza, now 27 – is the product of an affair with the daughter of a regional mafia boss. Denaro was born on the run and never bothered to meet her until he was caught. However, they were reconciled while he was in prison, and she has now adopted his surname.

Former police officer Carlo Pulici placed Denaro’s lovers under surveillance during the many years he tried to track him down, forming the opinion that the don considered himself a “romantic Latin lover.” Pulici spied a seaside villa and saw a procession of female visitors coming and going. They were ‘young, handsome and of high class, because he was very generous to his lovers’. They weren’t just brought to him for sex. He would have relationships with them.”

A mugshot made available by Italy’s Carabinieri shows mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, Italy’s most wanted man, after his arrest in Palermo in January

The path led to Bologna, on the Italian mainland, where Denaro’s cousin ran a luxury jewelry store. One day a £25,000 diamond ring disappeared from the display case.

Then it was seen on the finger of a woman who could barely afford it on the salary of her modest math teacher: a statuesque blonde in her thirties, who had fallen for the charms of the godfather. It was unclear whether she knew he was one of the most wanted fugitives in the world.

However, since his capture, other lovers claim they have been cheated on. According to Laura Bonafede, another glamorous teacher with whom he had a long-term affair, he claimed to be a retired doctor.

Now in jail for harboring Denaro, she told police how they met in a supermarket near the last of his many hideouts, a flat in the small town of Campobello di Mazara. ‘He knew how to listen to me. He made me feel important,” she said.

When she and Denaro talked, they used code words, replacing the names of people and places with those of characters and locations from his favorite books.

He would name her daughter Martina (of whom he was very fond) Tanya, a character from Charles Bukowski’s novel Women. They named Campobello di Mazara Macondo, the idyllic village featured in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. The godfather’s choice of code names reveals another side of his character that set him apart from his predecessors. For all their enormous power and wealth, the mafia bosses of old were poorly educated dimwits who lived simple, pastoral lives.

Denaro was considered the boss of the infamous Cosa Nostra mafia and was on the run for 30 years before he was arrested in January.

However, Denaro took pride in his knowledge of literature, classical music and art. Although reluctantly, the police chief responsible for his arrest even described him to me as “civilized.”

Yet this was the same man who, during the mafia’s attack on the Italian establishment in the late 1990s, thought nothing of destroying priceless paintings by Rubens and Giotto by planting a bomb in an art gallery in Florence.

A man of contradictions. The son of a mid-level Mafia capo, Denaro was initiated into the clan at the age of 14 and quickly gained a reputation for his ruthlessness.

When a hotel manager tried to end the teenage mafioso’s romance with a receptionist – because he felt Denaro’s constant loitering in the lobby was bad for business – the manager was summarily executed. The same fate awaited others who encountered him.

His penchant for murder brought him to the attention of Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, then the boss of the bosses of the Sicilian mafia.

He became Riina’s closest confidante and helped mastermind and orchestrate the terror campaign on the mainland, which saw the assassination of an anti-mafia judge and two prosecutors, before taking over his mantle when he died in 2017.

By then he had been on the run for almost a quarter of a century, apparently protected by a cabal of powerful politicians and business magnates. Perhaps also police and judicial officials.

A woman shows a photo that became iconic in Italy – showing key anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone (left) and Paolo Borsellino – during a demonstration in Palermo in January

His dramatic arrest last January – at a cancer clinic outside Palermo – came after police intercepted a phone call to his sister.

The more cynical version of events holds that he engineered his capture because he knew his end was near and that he would receive first-class treatment in an Italian prison hospital.

Whatever the truth, his death will mean more restful nights for anonymous figures in Italy’s corridors of power. “Some believe he left a file with the names of his high-ranking associates, and that it could be found. But keeping records is not the style of the mafia,” Giacomo di Girolamo, author of Denaro’s biography, The Invisible, told me yesterday.

“I believe his dark secrets were in his head, and since he adhered to mafia code by refusing to talk to prosecutors, we can assume he will take them to his grave.”

That grave will be in the family crypt in his hometown. Since the Italian police will videotape the entire ceremony, it remains to be seen how many of his subordinates will have the courage to attend.

But if they lower the last godfather, we can be sure that there will be no priest in sight.