Matteo Messina Denaro owned nothing on paper when he was caught after 30 years on the run, and gave his surname to his daughter weeks before he died

Matteo Messina Denaro, son of a Mafia boss from Castelvetrano in Sicily, headed the town's Cosa Nostra clan. He played a role in the 1993 bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed 10 people. He spent 30 years on the run. On 16 January 2023 he was arrested outside La Maddalena clinic in Palermo, where he was being treated for colon cancer. Officially he owned nothing. His daughter, Lorenza Alagna, was born on 17 December 1996, while he was a fugitive, to Franca Alagna, and was named after his mother. She left the family home with her mother at 18. After his arrest she said she did not want to know what happened to him. In prison in L'Aquila he at first refused to see her, saying he had waited 26 years. A notebook found in his hideout asked why Lorenza did not want to see him. They met on 26 April 2023, and she later brought her small son. On 7 August 2023 he signed a document before a registrar recognising her, and a court authorised her to replace her surname with his. He died in hospital in L'Aquila in September 2023, aged 61, and was buried in Castelvetrano on 27 September. On 28 May 2026 Italy's finance police said they had seized more than 200 million euros in assets linked to laundering of drug profits tied to him, traced through Andorra, Spain, Gibraltar and the Cayman Islands.