Italy busts money-laundering ring linked to mafia boss

Italian authorities have seized assets and businesses worth more than €200 million as they tighten the net around money allegedly laundered from drug trafficking tied to a notorious mafia boss.

Matteo Messina Denaro, arrested in 2023 after three decades as a fugitive, had long been one of the defining figures of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra’s violent campaign against the Italian state in the 1980s and 1990s, a period that included the murder of prosecutor Giovanni Falcone.

Known as “U Siccu,” or “the skinny one,” Messina Denaro died of cancer just months after his capture, leaving investigators to pursue a different target: the wealth built by his criminal network and the people suspected of helping shield him for years.

Police said the latest operation marked the culmination of a complex inquiry that uncovered a vast store of assets allegedly created through the reinvestment of drug trafficking profits amassed since the 1980s in several European and non-European countries.

The son of a mafia boss, Messina Denaro hailed from Castelvetrano in western Sicily, near Trapani, and rose to lead the local Cosa Nostra clan.

He was closely associated with powerful mafia chief Salvatore “Toto” Riina and was involved in the 1993 bombings in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed 10 people. Authorities also believed he was behind numerous murders during the 1990s.

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Three people were arrested as part of the investigation, which stretched across locations including Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, though investigators said the principality of Andorra in the Pyrenees was at the heart of the network.

According to police, investigators traced money to a woman from Campobello di Mazara, the Sicilian town where Messina Denaro spent his final period in hiding. She had been married to a man with a record of drug-related offences.

“Based on these findings, investigators came to suspect that the funds in Andorra were linked to drug trafficking,” a statement said.

Prosecutors said they identified eight companies connected to the alleged laundering operation — five in Spain, two in Gibraltar and one in the Cayman Islands.

The network held what police described as a “very significant” stake in a Lebanese bank, along with gold and high-end property.

Italy’s national anti-mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Melillo, said striking at mafia wealth remained essential.

“(It) means continuing the dismantling process needed to prevent the emergence of structures once again capable of projecting, on a global scale, Cosa Nostra’s full intimidating power and economic influence.”