Another hideout used by Italy’s most wanted mobster Matteo Messina Denaro has been discovered with a sliding base in the back of a wardrobe.
Italian police say jewelry, precious stones and silverware have been found in the hidden room.
Empty boxes of paper were also found, suggesting potentially incriminating documents were purged after Messina Dinaro’s arrest on Monday.
He was attending a chemotherapy session at a private clinic in Sicily.
Shortly after his capture, the mafia boss was taken to a prison in L’Aquila in the central Italian region of Abruzzo, where he will reportedly continue his cancer treatment.
On Thursday, Messina Denaro refused to appear via video link at a hearing on the 1992 murders of judges Paolo Falcone and Giovanni Borsellino.
The killings are just two of the crimes for which Messina Denaro – the former boss of the powerful Cosa Nostra organized crime group – has been convicted.
Italian media reported that there were signs the other shelter – a small chamber barely big enough for one person – had been inhabited “recently”.
The bunker is in a house about 300 meters from the Mafia boss’s former hideout in the Sicilian town of Campobello di Mazara.
Car keys were found in the bag at the time of Messina Denaro’s arrest, which led investigators to that first location. Police raided the location on Monday afternoon and found a 60 square meter ground floor flat, described as “comfortable”.
Italian media say luxury perfumes, expensive furniture and designer clothes, as well as two mobile phones and Viagra pills were found at the scene.
Police had been hunting the mafia boss for three decades when he was caught on Monday. He had made an appointment at the clinic under a false name.
The alias, Andrea Bonafide, raised the suspicions of the police when they learned it was the name of the nephew of slain mafia boss Leonardo Bonafide.
Phone mapping showed that the real Bonafide’s mobile was not in Palermo in 2020 and 2021 when a man using that name had surgery in the city.
While at the top of the Cosa Nostra organized crime syndicate, Messina Dinaro oversaw racketeering, illegal waste dumping, money laundering and drug trafficking.
