16 Jan 2023

“He [Matteo Messina Denaro] was the youngest member of a leadership group within the Sicilian mafia that took control of the Sicilian mafia in the early 1980s, essentially by massacring all their rivals, and then mounted a major attack on the Italian state. All of this was aimed at trying to get the state to back down from a major onslaught against organised crime that had been gaining momentum … [but] that onslaught has continued and Messina Denaro was the last of that leadership group still at large. [His arrest] is a very important symbolic gesture which shows that ultimately the state will win, and the state is winning in the case of the Sicilian mafia.”

www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/16/itali...
Type of Source: News

John Dickie

   Professor

Professor of Italian studies at University College London and an expert on the mafia

Contexts (to suggest a new Context click here)

The arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro leader within Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia