Rome, Italy. Italy’s finance police said on Thursday that they had seized assets and companies worth more than €200 million in an investigation into the laundering of drug trafficking proceeds linked to late mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro. The operation followed a complex probe tracing investments across multiple countries.
Investigation
Police said the investigation traced a vast pool of assets generated by the reinvestment of drug trafficking proceeds accumulated since the 1980s across several European and non-European countries. Palermo chief prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia said investigators believed they had identified a significant portion of the mafia’s investments, including those abroad.
Background
Messina Denaro was arrested in 2023 after spending 30 years on the run for his role in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra mafia’s war against the state between the 1980s and 1990s, including the killing of top prosecutor Giovanni Falcone. He died of cancer a few months after his arrest, leaving prosecutors to pursue the proceeds of his criminal empire and those who helped him evade justice.
The son of a mafia boss, Messina Denaro came from Castelvetrano, near Trapani, in western Sicily, and led the local Cosa Nostra clan. Closely linked to boss Salvatore “Toto” Riina, he played a role in bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed ten people in 1993 and was believed to have been responsible for numerous murders in the 1990s.
Arrests and locations
Three people were arrested in the investigation, which involved locations including Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, but centred on Andorra. Police said they tracked funds there to a woman from Campobello di Mazara, the Sicilian town where Messina Denaro had his final hideout, who had been married to a man with a history of drug offences.
Based on those findings, investigators suspected that the funds in Andorra were linked to drug trafficking, according to the police statement.
