A man of many "pezzini"

As mentioned in an earlier ARCA blog post this week, Matteo Messina Denaro, the former fugutive Cosa Nostra boss, was interrogated on February 13, 2023 for almost two hours at a maximum security prison in Italy.  There, the crime boss fielded many  questions, and sometimes duelled with Palermo prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia and deputy prosecutor Paolo Guido when their questions struck too close to home.   

According to the official transcript of their exchange, which covers 69 printed pages and is marked in several places with the handwritten word “omissis”, (used to mark redactions in the interrogation), the Cosa Nostra boss, curated his words carefully.  In many cases he only only incriminated himself verbally in specific areas where there was already overwhelming evidence of specific and proven actions.  In other instances, he obliquely ignored questions he didn't want to answer, while seemingly going off on tangents, as if he wanted his say on key subjects to be memorialised so that others might read and interpret his statements later. 

Speaking to the two magistrates, Messino Denaro again distanced himself from the murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo.  Repeating what he had previously told investigating Judge Alfredo Montaldo, who had questioned him in relation to another trial in which he is accused of attempted extortion.  The boss admitted to prosecutors De Lucia and Guido that he played a role in the 12 year old's kidnapping on November 23, 1993 and made it clear that seizing the child was a volley designed to coerce the father, Cosa Nostra informant Santino Di Matteo, into retracting statements given to the Anti-Mafia District Directorate (DDA) of Palermo.

Giuseppe was escorted out of horse stables in Villabate by four mafiosi dressed as policemen.  His kidnappers had promised him that they were bringing him to see his father.  Once under their control, the child was held hostage for a total of 779 days in various locations between the provinces of Palermo, Trapani, and Agrigento.  

Ironically, at one point the boy was taken, hooded and locked in the trunk of a car, to a farmhouse in Campobello di Mazara, the same village where Messina Denaro was  found to be hiding at the time of his January 16, 2023 capture.  After years as a hostage, and increasingly becoming a liability to his captors, Giuseppe was strangled to death on January 11, 1996 in the Giambascio countryside outside Palermo. His body was then dissolved in acid. 

Matteo Messina Denaro was involved in the massacres of 1993, including this one in Florence in via Georgofili

In July of this year, the Caltanissetta court of appeal confirmed Matteo Messina Denaro's life sentence for his role in dozens of murders including Giuseppe's.  The others include: 

• The May 23, 1992 bombing which killed anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three officers of their police escort as their cars passed near the small town of Capaci; 
• The July 19, 1992 bombing in Via Mariano D'Amelio (Palermo) which killed Judge Paolo Borsellino and five members of his security detail; 
• The 1993 bombings carried out at art and religious sites in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed 10 people and injured 40 others: 

During his interrogation Matteo Messina Denaro denied being involved in the trafficking in drugs, but openly admitted to prosecutors other things they already knew and had confirmed, such as having regularly passed pizzinu (small piece of paper, containing sometimes coded messages) with convicted Cosa Nostra “boss of bosses” Bernardo Provenzano, who once headed the Mafia's powerful Clan dei Corleonesi. 

In these messages, sent while both men were already fugitives from justice, Messina Denaro admitted that the pair asked one another for favours, but his admission of his relation with Provenzano during this interrogation wasn't revelatory.  Investigators already had undeniable proof of the pair's communication in the form of ten pizzini, sent between 2003 and 2006, which agents had recovered in Provenzano's hideout when he was captured in Montagna dei Cavalli near Corleone on April 11, 2006. 

The Farm Hideout of Bernardo Provenzano

One of those messages is practically a testament of fealty by Messina Denaro to Provenzano and spoke with deference to the crime boss saying:

"Lei è sempre nel mio cuore e nei miei pensieri, se ha bisogno di qualcosa da me è superfluo dire che sono a sua completa disposizione e sempre lo sarò. La prego di stare sempre molto attento, le voglio troppo bene".  

In another, writing as his nephew "Alessio," Messina Denaro wrote to his Uncle Bernardo saying:

"I know the rules and I respect them, the proof that I know the rules and that I'm respecting lies precisely in the fact that I'm turning to you to fix this unpleasant affair, this for me is respecting the rules.  You tells me that money in life isn't everything and that there are good things that money doesn't can buy. I totally agree with you, because I have always thought that one can be a man without a lira and one can be full of money and be mud." 

Offering both a mundane and fascinating image of himself on the lam, a substantial part of the Corleonese godfather's interrogation statements focus on the time period in his life immediately leading up to his capture.  Perhaps because by this period he understood that the clock was ticking and understanding that a) he couldn't hide forever and b) he needed help from others given his declining health.  

Some of his statements appear to be attempts to exonerate some of those individuals, who have been arrested on suspicion of having helped the Cosa Nostra boss during his illness, including statements in defence of Doctor Alfonso Tumbarello, whom Messina Denaro told the magistrates: 

"knows nothing."

Other individuals close to the boos faired less well during the Messina Denaro's ramblings.  

When speaking about undergoing medical care in Palermo under the false name of Andrea Bonafede, as an outpatient at the multi-specilaity hospital La Maddalena, Messina Denaro described several of the steps he needed in order to obtain false identity documents, knowing that he could not undergo chemotherapy and medical treatment in the state's medical institution directly under his own name. 

In this part of the interview Messina Denaro stated:

"I had a friendship with Andrea Bonafede, but a remote friendship because his father worked for us, for my father and then my father was a friend of his uncle, he had a another uncle suspected mafia convicted of mafia".

Investigators contend that in addition to lending his name, Bonafede received 20,000 euros from the Matteo Messina Denaro to buy a house in western Sicily that would serve as one of the fugitive's hideouts.

Messina Denaro also told the magistrates about a second assumed identity, used in the city of Campobello di Mazara, the Sicilian town that sheltered him.  Here he was known under the pseudonym “Francesco”, a Palermitan man who purportedly relocated from the city to the smaller town while caring for his ailing mother and two elderly aunts.  

Living dual identities while hiding in plain site within the Campobello community, Messina Denaro also admitted that in addition to travelling back and forth to the Palermo hospital for treatment, either alone or with an escort, he had openly visited Campobello's bakeries, greengrocers, and supermarkets.  He also played poker and eat in  local restaurants. Again, nothing extremely revelatory, as receipts and objects found in his hiding places confirm some of the his admitted activities. 

What is more of interest to readers of ARCA's Art Crime blog were the from-the-horse's-mouth affirmations made during this hour and forty minute interrogation that confirm directly from the source that Matteo Messina Denaro's family, and that of his father, Francesco Messina Denaro, capo mandamento in Castelvetrano and head of the mafia commission of the Trapani region, sustained their livelihoods, to some extent, by the proceeds of antiquities crimes.

Messina Denaro's verbal admissions concretise a written statement previously attributed to him, which was already mentioned in an article published in 2009 by Rino Giacalone for Antimafia Duemila.  In that article, the journalist refers to an intercepted "pizzini" written by Messina Denaro where the crime boss wrote almost word for word, what he admitted to during this interrogation.  

"With the trafficking of works of art we support our family."

Francesco Messina Denaro as readers of ARCA's blog may recall was already believed to have been behind the theft of the famous Efebo of Selinunte, a 5th century BCE statue of Dionysius Iachos, stolen on October 30, 1962 and recovered in 1968 through the help of Rodolfo Siviero. 

Matteo Messina Denaro was verbose when speaking to his dead father's and the family's involvement in the illicit antiquities trade.  He also mentions that his family bought from everyone and laundered antiquities illegally removed from Sicily via Switzerland, in an enterprise which supporting some 30 members of his family, including some who were incarcerated and others like himself who were on the run.  But the boss was far more laconic when asked directly if he knew Castelvetrano ancient art dealer Gianfranco Becchina.  In response to the PM's query in this regard, he answered: 

"lo conosco perché è un paesano mio, a prescindere, anche senza i beni... i pezzi archeologici, lo conosco lo stesso,  perché siamo paesani."

In October 2018, following a formal request by the Deputy Prosecutor for the District Anti-Mafia Directorate Carlo Marzella, preliminary reexamination judge of of the Court of Palermo, Antonella Consiglio, dismissed the charge of mafia association against Becchina citing in her decision that the accusations used for the basis of the charge, made originally via testimonies given by verbose mafia defector Vincenzo Calcara, had been deemed "unreliable". 

Back in 1992, Calcara, and now deceased former drug dealer Rosario Spatola,  incriminated Gianfranco Becchina for alleged association with the Campobello di Mazara and Castelvetrano clans, implying that there was a gang affiliate active in Switzerland whose role it was to sell ancient artefacts originating from the mab's black market.  At the time of his testimony, much of Calcara's information was discounted as many were skeptical that he had actual knowledge of the facts he represented or whether he invented things for his own benefit.

Matteo Messina Denaro's statements during his February interrogation however confirm that a network of criminals funnelled numerous illicit antiquities from Sicily through the art market in Switzerland, which flowed onward, into world museums.  But the mafia boss stopped short however, on confirming, by name, whose hands, these works of ancient art passed through. 

Like Provenzano before him, Matteo Messina Denaro, at least for now, seems to be determined to be his own custodian of many secrets, especially those which might openly implicate living individuals, who have direct or indirect relationships with the Cosa boss and result in their arrest and/or convictions.  Facing a terminal illness, Messina Denaro's statements are well-guarded, and for the most part his scant confessions during the interrogation seem wholly performative.  

Like so many mobsters before him, it seems that he plans to carry most of the Cosa Nostra's bloody business dealings with him to his grave. 

By:  Lynda Albertson

Filed by the Court's yesterday, the kingpin's first formal judicial interrogation after his arrest took place on February 13, 2023.  In the official transcript of this exchange, which covers 69 pages, some heavily marked with redactions, we learn interesting details regarding some of the 62 year old mafioso's conversations and admissions, both given and made during his hour and forty minute interrogation with the Court's magistrates last winter. 

In some of his documented statements, Matteo Messina Denaro appears to have been extremely blunt about what he was willing to admit to and what he was not, regarding critical aspects of his criminal life and life on the run, stating:

"Listen, there will be things I don't answer, things I answer and I'll explain why I'm answering, and things I'll explain why I don't want to answer ” , while “ if I'm lying and it's obvious that I'm lying, let me pass, it means that I do not want to answer."

During his interrogation, the crime boss, denied to prosecutors that he had ever profited from drug trafficking or that he had any involvement in the more than 50 murders of which he has already been convicted.  This despite the fact that in 2012, while still a fugitive at large, Matteo Messina Denaro was one of five people sentenced to life imprisonment, in part, for his role in the kidnap, torture, and murder of 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo. 

Di Matteo was the son of a mafia turncoat.  Held in captivity for 25 months before his murder,  according to Messina Denaro's reconstruction, he was just the instigator of the kidnapping of the child, and not responsible for his murder, though he admitted. "Listen, I'm not a saint..."

Denying that he was a Made Man, (a fully initiated member of the Mafia) Messina Denaro stated: "I feel like a man of honour but not as a mafioso. I know Cosa Nostra from the newspapers".   He also told the magistrates that he had evaded capture until January, in part by steering clear of technology because he saw its usage as a vulnerability, though this would become part of his undoing as his health worsened and he required the use of a mobile phone to stay in contact with the medical community. 

When discussing his life as a fugitive, using the name of Andrea Bonafede while hiding in plane sight in Campobello di Mazara, Massino Denaro told his judicial  interrogators that they had only captured him because he had been struck down with liver cancer and that this health related crisis required him to undergoing medical treatment at La Maddalena clinic.  Describing how he had been able to stay under the radar, he rationalised: 

"I followed an old Jewish saying, 'If you want to hide a tree, plant it in a forest."

But with worsening health, planting himself in the heart of the town while undergoing cancer therapies made the boss more visible. When asked about those who helped him remain hidden and with whom he had interacted while hiding in the Sicilian town, Denaro added "if you have to arrest all the people who had something to do with me in Campobello, I think you have to arrest two to three thousand people: that's what it's all about".

But while the Cosa Nostra boss denied his violent and drug-related crimes, during his interrogation he openly claimed that the Messino Denaro family supported itself through the buying and selling illicit artefacts, many of which were plundered from Selinunte, the rich and extensive ancient Greek city of Magna Graecia located in the territory of his home town of Castelvetrano, in southwest Sicily.

He told prosecutors that his father, Francesco Messina Denaro was an art dealer.  When asked if his father was a man of honor in the mafia sense he told the magistrates that he never asked him that question, then underscored "I hope that he had been, at least his life would have had meaning". 

Known as "Don Ciccio," Matteo Messina Denaro's father died as a fugitive, having been identified as the mafia boss who headed the Castelvetrano family from 1981 until 1998.  His father was a close ally to the Corleone faction loyalists led by Salvatore "Totò" Riina and Bernardo Provenzano.

Speaking further about his father's illicit ancient art involvement Messina Denaro was documented as admitting:

"My father didn't go digging in Selinunte though. At that time there were a thousand people and all of them, even the women, they dug at night. Those who didn't dig at night, dug during the day with the Superintendency of the State, but what else did they do (now maybe it can't be done anymore), that when with the axe they saw something coming out with their foot they covered it up and then at night they went back to it take it. 

In general, my father bought 100% of these things which were then sold in Switzerland and then arrived from Switzerland everywhere in Arabia in the United Arab Emirates, in America. We used to see things that passed through my father's in American museums, I don't know how they got there in museums but then it all started from Switzerland"

The crime boss also spoke knowledgeably about workshops of counterfeiters in Sicily, involved in the enhancement of Greek polychrome vases dug up by tomb-robbers who plundered the Hellenistic necropolis of Centuripe.  He explained to the Court's prosecutors that looters working in and around the province of Enna were known to add forged figural imagery to undecorated ancient vases, reburying them for several years in order to age their augmentation so that the terracotta vases brought higher prices when sold onward on the black market.  

Using a lekythos (a type of ancient Greek vessel used for storing oil) as his example, the Mafia boss stated that an ancient vase without a figure might be worth 2 to 3 million lire, while the object's value rose to 20-30 million or 40 million when the artefact depicted embellished imagery that passed as part of the original vase maker's artistry.   Messina Denaro also told the magistrates that in 1978 he found an ancient vase full of coins and spoke in a semi-informed way about how looters discovered and sold some of the ancient material in circulation via the Messino Denaro clan. 

He told the magistrates that silver coins could be found using metal detectors when coins were scattered on the ground but that finding vases required grave-robbers.  He also added that these graves also on occasion contained hoards of coins, often in excellent condition, having been buried with the tomb's occupants. 

He told the magistrates that his father had purchased seven such hoards, while an 8th was traded directly to dealers in Switzerland by the hoard's finder.  Messina Denaro admitted that in one such case, his father paid for one hoard of silver coins in instalments, as he didn't have the 800 million lire in his pocket that the finder was asking for the haul.  To obtain this grouping of coins, Francesco Messina Denaro wrote the seller a check for the entire amount, which was held as a guarantee by the finder and then torn up once the negotiated asking price had been paid in full. He stated that his father then broke up the hoard, selling it off piecemeal. 

While portions of Matteo Messina Denaro's interview imply that his life on the lam was financed by his father's illicit antiquities trade, rather than his own more serious and violent crimes, the unredacted portion of the interrogation does not appear to identify the Swiss-based receiver of the Cosa Nostra's looted ancient material which was laundered via Switzerland before ending up in museums.

Readers of ARCA's blog can make an educated guess who at least one of those traffickers might be, but we will have to wait to see what other reports come out in the days, weeks, and years to come.  One thing is for sure, the crime boss has ruled out repenting and in agreeing to answer questions, only admitted to what he could not deny. 

Suffering from cancer, Matteo Messina Denaro has remained under treatment in an Italian penitentiary since the day of his arrest where a room for chemotherapy has been set up for his required cancer treatment.  Several hours before a scheduled surgery, on August 8th he was transferred from prison to the San Salvatore hospital in L’Aquila, amidst tight security measures related to the 41bis regime where he was operated on for an obstruction “not closely related to cancer.”  According to the guarantor of prisoners in Abruzzo, Gianmarco Cifaldi the mafia boss is currently in intensive care as a standard precaution. 

Messina Denaro's defense council recently argued that his health conditions are not compatible with Italian law, Article 41-bis of the Prison Administration Act, also known as carcere duro ("hard prison regime"), arguing that he requires medical assistance 24 hours a day.  Cifaldi, however, reiterated that the right to health is already guaranteed through the use of qualified medical personnel, and that all state agencies are operating in compliance with the Italian Constitution.

Currently Article 41-bis of the Prison Administration Act is applied to people imprisoned for crimes such as mafia-type association under 416-bis (Associazione di tipo mafioso), drug trafficking, homicide, aggravated robbery and extortion, kidnapping, terrorism, and attempting to subvert the constitutional system. It is suspended only when a prisoner co-operates with the authorities, when a court annuls it, or when a prisoner dies.

By:  Lynda Albertson

DIA Seizing Gianfranco Becchina assets in 2017

While the DIA's announcement didn't name the, now, 83 year old dealer living in Castelvetrano, the regional newspapers in Sicily, and the national newspaper in Rome, did. 

For decades the Trapani branch of the Cosa Nostra is believed to have accumulated at least some portions of its wealth through the proceeds of illicit archaeological finds.  Some of which, according to Italy's DIA may have been procured through grave robbers working at the isolated Archaeological Park of Selinunte, one of Sicily's great ancient Greek cities, located near Castelvetrano probably in the service of the Cosa Nostra.  This archaeological site covers some 40 hectares and includes Greek temples, ancient town walls, and the ruins of residential and commercial buildings from Italy's past.  Given its remote location, much of the site has not been formally excavated, and it has been prey to opportunistic looters for decades.

To further dismantle the mafia's operational funding in and around Trapani, in November 2017 Italy's Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate, through the Court of Trapani's penal and preventive measures section, filed an initial seizure order for all movable assets, including real estate and corporate enterprises attributable to Gianfranco Becchina on the basis of an order issued from the District Attorney of Palermo based upon investigations conducted by the DIA, under the coordination of the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office on the basis that much of Becchina's accumulated wealth was generated through the proceeds of trafficked antiquities. 

Palazzo dei Principi Tagliavia-Aragona-Pignatelli

Giovanni Franco Becchina (b. 1939) was born in Sicily. In the 1970s, he established a business, Palladion Antike Kunst, in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife Ursula.  For almost forty years Becchina headed one of Italy's most notorious “cordata” (a trafficking cell) in a lucrative criminal enterprise that used gangs of tombaroli to loot carefully chosen and insufficiently guarded archaeological sites throughout southern Italy.

It is well-documented that Becchina and other traffickers like him, laundered their looted antiquities through exhibitions at museums and in private collections with manufactured provenance, providing a thin veneer of respectability to material removed from Italy and laundered through the ancient art market. 

In 2001, Becchina was arrested in Italy and charged with receiving stolen goods, illegally exporting goods, and conspiring to traffic goods. In May 2002, the Swiss and Italian authorities raided Palladion Antike Kunst and three of Becchina’s located storage facilities.  A fourth was raided in 2005. 

In 2011, Judge Rosalba Liso dismissed the charges of receiving stolen goods, illegally exporting goods, and conspiring to traffic goods, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.  However, the Judge in the case confirmed the seizure order for the 5,919 antiquities Becchina had in stock at the time the 2002 and 2005 search warrants were executed.  Material evidence obtained during these seizures confirmed that Becchina bought antiquities directly from tombaroli. Over 90% came from a single source: convicted tombarolo (and later a capo squadra in his own right) Raffaele Monticelli.