One-time top Mafia fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro, caught after 30 years on the run in a Palermo cancer clinic in mid-January, died in a hospital in L'Aquila on Monday aged 61.
He had been in hospital with advanced colon cancer for over a month and on Friday he suffered significant bleeding and shortly after went into an irreversible coma.
Doctors then suspended his nutrition.
Before losing consciousness Messina Denaro is reported to have met with family members, including the daughter Lorenza Alagna had in 1996 while on the run and never recognised.
She was at his deathbed together with one of his sisters and his niece Lorenza Guttadauro, who was also his defence lawyer.
The Cosa Nostra superboss has been convicted for his involvement in dozens of murders, including the 1992 bombings that killed anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
In addition to the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations, he has been condemned for 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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