Mafia Boss Finally Apprehended After 30 years on the Lam

I’ve always found the Italian mafia fascinating. I loved “The Sopranos”, and generally will watch any mafia documentary I can get my hands on (“Fear City: New York vs The Mafia” is a great pick, if you’re interested).

A while back my husband and I watched the Netflix documentary series “World’s Most Wanted” which features the baddest of the bad around the globe. One of the criminals featured was Matteo Messina, or as Netflix dubbed him, “Cosa Nostra’s Last Godfather.”

To put it lightly, this dude is super violent and SUCKSSSSS.

Okay, so he didn’t kill 16 Czechoslovakians, but he has been convicted of a buttload of other murders (buttload, as a unit of measurement in this scenario, equates to dozens). He has also been on the run for 30 FREAKING YEARS.

Now, from what I’ve gathered, Italian American mobsters have a slightly different code than the Sicilian mob. For example, in the American mafia, if you rat, the mob kills you. But in the Sicilian mob, if you rat, they kill you, your wife, your kids and your hamster.

Messina was the latter.

Just to give you a general idea of some of his most notable moments: Messina strangled the 12-year-old son of an informant, and “the partner of a rival Mafia boss, who was pregnant at the time of her death,” Time reported.  

So yeah, guy be evil.

After being on the run for so long, you can imagine my surprise when I saw this week that THEY FINALLY CAUGHT HIM.

“Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, a Mafia boss convicted of helping to mastermind some of the nation’s most heinous slayings, was arrested Monday when he sought treatment at a private clinic in Sicily after three decades on the run,” AP reported. “Authorities did not say what he was being treated for, but he was captured at La Maddalena clinic in Palermo, an upscale medical facility with a reputation for treating cancer patients, and Italian media said he was undergoing treatment for a year.”

He got caught and he probably has cancer. Two things I’m more than okay with.

One less dirtbag is out there running free in the world. It’s a good week.