A Sicilian man got 14 years in jail
Tuesday for providing Matteo Messina Denaro with his own
identity during the late Mafia superboss's 30 years on the run
from justice.
Andrea Bonafede, a surveyor from the fugitive boss's home town
of Campobello di Mazara, was found guilty of mafia association
and complicity in fraud for loaning Messina Denaro his identity.
In a separate proceedings, prosecutors on Tuesday requested a
15-year term for the surveyor's cousin Laura Bonafede, the
boss's long-time lower.
Messina Denaro was caught in mid-January last year after 30
years on the run while leaving a clinic where he was being
treated for cancer in Palermo.
He died in a hospital in L'Aquila on September 25 aged 62.
Messina Denaro had been convicted for his involvement in dozens
of murders, including the 1992 Cosa Nostra bombings that killed
anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
He was also convicted of the killing of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the
12-year-old son of a mobster-turned-State witness who was
strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996, and bombings at art and
religious sites in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed 10
people and hurt 40 more in 1993.
Long idolised by younger mafiosi for his ruthlessness and
playboy-like charisma,, Messina Denaro sealed a reputation for
brutality by murdering a rival Trapani boss and strangling his
three-months-pregnant girlfriend.
The boss, who reportedly enjoyed orgies with Palermo women while
on the run, once said he could have filled a cemetery with those
he had killed.
He was reportedly helped dodge police by a "middle class Mafia",
not only around his fief at Trapani but also around Sicily,
Italian police have said.
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