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Messina Denaro, an economic empire built on 60 crimes: he didn't count the money, but weighed it

As a young man he said: “I have killed enough people to fill a cemetery”. On his massacres he built his power, on the strategy of silence his enormous economic empire

Messina Denaro, an economic empire built on 60 crimes: he didn't count the money, but weighed it

From the massacre season to business mafia. In between beyond 60 murders and building a business empire difficult to quantify and locate. Thus can be summed up the 30 years on the run of Matthew Messina Money, arrested on January 16 in a clinic specializing in oncological treatments in the center of Palermo. During the night, the carabinieri del Ros and the Palermo prosecutor's office managed to locate his hideout in the town of Campobello di Mazara, in the Trapani area, not far from Castelvetrano, the boss's town of origin. 

From massacres to mafia entrepreneurship

Always well dressed, designer clothes, luxury watches. In Matteo Messina Denaro's life, appearance was a fundamental component. Although his inaction forced him to keep a low profile, he has never given up on anything. He liked to appear elegant, to flaunt his wealth and his power through expensive and refined objects. As a young man he loved to brag about everything. Including murders. “I've killed enough people to fill a cemetery,” he said with a touch of pride. How many people he actually killed we may never know, but according to the numerous convictions against him, Messina Denaro would have participated as instigator or executor in about sixty crimes. Including those of the judges Falcone and Borsellino and of the little one Joseph DiMatteo, the son of the repentant whom he himself ordered to be strangled and dissolved in acid after almost two years of imprisonment. And then the bombing Maurizio Costanzo in Rome, the massacre of Via dei Georgofili in Florence and that of Via Palestro in Milan. At the time Messina Denaro was only 30 years old, but the trail of death behind him was already very long. 

With the arrest of Totò Riina and the rise of Bernardo Provenzano, the mafia decided on a first big change of pace. The massacres made too much noise, the killed killed pushed the state to react with strength and vehemence. At the turn of the eighties and nineties, Cosa Nostra, to the sound of life sentences, lost pieces too important for its survival. Already in December 1987, with the first instance sentence of Maxiprocess, 19 life sentences arrived and sentences of 2665 years of imprisonment (almost all confirmed five years later in the Cassation) divided among 460 defendants. Having become head of the Cosa Nostra, Provenzano therefore understood that it was necessary to change his strategy, passing from the massacre din of Riina and Bagarella, in which he himself had played a leading role, to the mafia submersion strategy. In silence, the mafia would have had a much wider leeway. And so it was. 

Meanwhile Messina Denaro continued his mafia work hidden in the shadows. It is to him that we owe it the second great turning point of the Sicilian mafia. Cosa Nostra becomes an entrepreneur. He continues to guarantee the loyalty of the small fish thanks to blood ties, he replaces the state by giving work to those who don't have one. Switch from protection money and extortion to business, to one active participation in the national economy. Using front names and trusted men, the Trapani boss builds a billionaire empire. 

The billionaire empire of Matteo Messina Denaro

As Lirio Abbate recounts on Republic, in the first years of his hiding Messina Denaro made so much money that he was no longer able to count it, he had to weigh it.

The mugshot of Matteo Messina Denaro released by the Carabinieri – Imagoeconomica

There is no economic sector in which he has not invested, captain of a mafia industry that has taken his dirty money everywhere, cleaning it up and putting the "good suit" on men of honor.

Construction, tourism, catering, large-scale distribution, gaming halls, healthcare these are just some of the businesses that brought wealth to Messina Denaro and Cosa Nostra. He never lacked a flair for business: he was also one of the first in Sicily to understand the potential and put money on renewable and clean energy. But it would be an unforgivable mistake to believe that he limited his business within the borders of the Trinacria. The arms of his empire extend throughout Italy, branch out in half of Europe and reach as far as Central and South America. 

Between accounts in tax havens, front names, illicit penetrations in apparently mirrored activities, quantify the amount of his estate it's practically impossible. Nobody knows how much money he actually handled and how many activities are attributable to him. As the journalist Roberto Galullo explains on Sun 24 Hours however, one can try to follow another path, by searching the money that the state managed to steal from him During the years. Between confiscations and seizures awaiting definitive ablation, during his inaction, the State tracked down and stole from the boss movable and immovable property for at least 4 billion euros. In recent months alone, around 150 million have been seized by the various police forces. 

The article in the Milanese economic newspaper also mentions a report by National Anti-Mafia Directorate, which reads that "The most important innovations concerned the most qualifying aspect of the Cosa Nostra in Trapani, i.e. the economic-entrepreneurial profile, highlighting the diversification of the interests of the mafia organization, which it has been able to identify more innovative and highly profitable fields of the legal economy (such as the special waste treatment sector, tourism, transport, large-scale food distribution, the production of alternative energies to which the purchase of land to apply for community funding is closely connected, but also the penetration public auctions to recover the seized assets and, lastly, online games and bets) in which to invest resources and towards which to direct criminal attention".

Il mafia businessman it had no limits. His wealth, nourished by silence, has continued to grow over the decades and perhaps only now, after his arrest, the investigators will be able to reconstruct it in full. What is certain is that, if already at the beginning of the nineties, Messina Denaro needed a scale to count how much money he possessed, today he would probably need an industrial one, the kind that counts tons. Too bad that in the maximum security prison in which he will be locked up it will be difficult to get her there. 

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