Feared mafia boss

Messina Denaro’s sister must serve 14 years in prison

A police picture showing the ageing of the mafia boss

(Bild: AP)

The eldest sister of the deceased Sicilian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has now been sentenced to 14 years in prison for intensive mafia connections and receiving stolen goods. Messina Denaro was known for his great brutality - he is even said to have dissolved one of his victims in acid.

Messina Denaro was Italy's most wanted criminal until his arrest in January 2023. He was on the run for three decades. He died of cancer in hospital last September.

His sister Rosalia was arrested and put on trial in March 2023. The public prosecutor's office accused her of covering for her fugitive brother, managing his finances and helping him to make contact with the outside world. The 69-year-old woman was convicted in a first-instance verdict in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, according to the Sicilian judiciary. Under Italian law, the verdict can be appealed twice before it becomes final.

Rosalia Denaro:

Responsible for dozens of murders
After a full 30 years on the run, notorious mafia boss Messina Denaro was caught in January 2023. This was achieved when he left a clinic where he was being treated for cancer in Palermo. He died on September 25 at the age of 62 in a hospital in the city of L'Aquila. Denaro had been convicted for his involvement in dozens of murders, including the 1992 Cosa Nostra bombings that killed anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

In addition to the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, Messina Denaro was convicted of the murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo - the twelve-year-old son of a mafioso who became a key witness. He was strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996. He was also convicted of bomb attacks on art and religious sites in Milan, Florence and Rome, in which ten people were killed and 40 others injured in 1993.