How Italy caught the mafia's last godfather
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After 30 years on the run, Italy's most-wanted mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, was finally caught in January. A prolific murderer, Denaro once boasted he’d ‘filled a cemetery’. His organisation inspired Hollywood films, but who was Italy's last godfather and how was he finally found?
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Guest: Tom Kington, Italy Correspondent, The Times.
Host: David Aaronovitch.
Producer: Olivia Case.
Clips: La Repubblica, SKY, NBC, Channel 4, CBS, BBC, The Guardian, MOBFAX, Mob News, France 24, Speak Softly Love (Rota Nino), Scarface (Brian De Palma / Universal Pictures).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to hear the voice of one of Italy's last Godfathers. |
| 0:06.7 | Until very recently, it's a voice that hadn't been heard in public for 30 years. |
| 0:20.6 | He's stuck in traffic, but he doesn't seem to be bothered. |
| 0:24.2 | In fact, he's in a jovial mood chatting about his mum. |
| 0:28.0 | He's been demanding he make sure a specific song is played at her funeral. |
| 0:43.1 | My mother is capricious, he says. |
| 0:45.6 | Maybe I got that from her. |
| 0:48.6 | It's one of the last messages Mateo, Messina, Denaro sent as a free man. |
| 1:03.0 | The 60-year-old boss of the Western Sicilian mafia have been hiding for three decades. |
| 1:10.1 | But last month. |
| 1:13.2 | Italy's most wanted mafia boss has finally been captured, ending one of Europe's longest |
| 1:20.0 | manhunts. |
| 1:21.0 | There were a hundred officers waiting for him. |
| 1:23.9 | Denaro has been on the run since the mid-1990s, when the Sicilian Mafia stepped up their |
| 1:30.0 | bombing and murder campaign. |
| 1:31.6 | The elderly man in the beanie cap, Denaro's arrest may be the final blow for the Sicilian |
| 1:36.3 | Mafia. |
| 1:39.8 | This capture finally brings the curtain down on an almost unbelievably brutal drama played |
| 1:45.7 | out in the 1990s, one in which judges were blown up, museums were bombed, and the son |
| 1:52.6 | of an informer, a 12-year-old boy was kidnapped, then killed, and his body dissolved in acid. |
| 1:59.4 | Messina Denaro was nicknamed Diabolic, believed to be responsible for killing or ordering |
| 2:05.2 | the murders of dozens of people. |
... |
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