Italy’s ‘Last Godfather’ Dies in Prison After 30-Year Reign of Terror

The Sicilian mob boss behind the 1992 assassinations of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the deadly terror bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan, and the kidnapping and murder of a witness' 12-year-old son, died peacefully of colon cancer at an Italian prison hospital, reports said.

Matteo Messina Denaro was 61. 

"You shouldn't deny prayers to anyone, but I can't say I am sorry," Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, said Monday on Instagram.

Messina Denaro was arrested January 16 outside a private clinic in Palermo after 30 years on the run. He was transferred in recent weeks from a maximum security prison to hospital facilities in L'Aquila in central Italy and fell into a coma on Friday. 

Dubbed "the last Godfather" by the Italian press, Messina Denaro apparently remained a hard man to the end. “I will never regret it,” the gangster told cops as handcuffs were snapped around his wrists. 

Messina Denaro was born in the Sicilian town of Castelvetrano in 1962 and followed his father into the mob. His first murder came at age 18.

The Castelvetrano clan was allied with the Corleonesi, led by Salvatore "the Beast" Riina, then the undisputed "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.

Nicknamed "U Siccu," the Skinny One, Messina Denaro became Riina’s apt pupil, picking up 20 life sentences in trials held in absentia for his reign of terror in Sicily and on the Italian mainland. 

"You always need to respect death, because unlike mafiosi, we respect life until death," Enzo Alfano, the mayor of Castelvetrano, told the Adnkronos news agency.

"But we cannot forget who Messina Denaro was: A murderer, a mass murderer who hurt his land."

Funeral arrangements were unclear. 

“I have never had any doubts, this is how mafiosi go out: They die in prison,” Giuseppe Cimarosa, a distant cousin of the mafia boss, told La Repubblica.

Cimarosa in 2016 convinced his father, a businessman working for Messina Denaro, to cooperate with investigators. 

“I convinced my father to speak to the magistrates,” he said. 

“And today I can say we won.”