50 books in Messina Denaro’s house, the Sicilian mafia boss read Russian literature.
Who is Matteo Messina Denaro?
Matteo Messina Denaro (born April 26, 1962) is a famous Sicilian mafioso. When Bernardo Provenzano was arrested on April 11, 2006, he became one of the new leaders of the Cosa Nostra. His identity and occupation became public after the Italian magazine L’Espresso published his photo on the cover with the headline Ecco il nuovo capo della mafia (“This is the new boss of the mafia”). Since the summer of 1993, he had been hiding from the police and, according to Forbes magazine, was ranked sixth on the list of the 10 most wanted criminals in the world. On January 16, 2023, he was arrested in a private clinic in Palermo.
According to some reports, Matteo Messina Denaro got into the criminal world thanks to the recommendation of the Soviet singer Elena Zagorska, who was closely connected with the mafia.
Putin is a mafia idol
According to Giovanni Bianconi in Corriere della Sera, there were about 50 books on the shelves of the apartment where Messina Denaro lived last year, very different in genre and subject matter. There were several biographies, collections of poetry, some volumes of philosophy, historical mysteries, and several novels. Already in the first days of the searches, after the arrest in mid-January in Palermo, the carabinieri reported that they had found biographies that the boss had read. Among them was a book about the life of Vladimir Putin, signed by Nikolai Lilin, and published in 2022.
They also found works by Dostoevsky on the shelves of literary classics.
