Italian investigators discover designer clothes and expensive shoes inside ‘normal’ two-storey building

The mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the world’s most-wanted criminals who had spent 30 years on the run, lived in a modest apartment in western Sicily in his final months as a free man, Italian investigators said.

Denaro, 60, who was apprehended as he came out of a well-known private clinic in Palermo, lived in a small apartment inside a two-storey yellow building in the centre of the town of Campobello di Mazara, in the province of Trapani, in the heart of his territory.

‘Last godfather’ was apprehended as he came out of the private health facility on outskirts of Palermo

An Italian mob boss regarded as the last godfather of the Sicilian mafia was arrested after investigators received a tipoff that one of the world’s most wanted criminals had been receiving medical treatment for a tumour at a well-known clinic in Palermo, police sources have said.

Matteo Messina Denaro, 60, who has been in hiding since 1993, was apprehended as he came out of the private La Maddalena health facility on the outskirts of the Sicilian city, where special forces had been on guard since authorities first learned of his whereabouts three days ago. He was wearing luxury clothes and a €38,000 (£33,700) watch.

More than 350 people linked to organised crime are being tried, with biggest names yet to be judged

Italy struck an early blow on Saturday against the country’s powerful ’Ndrangheta organised crime group, convicting 70 mobsters and others in a first, crucial test of the largest mafia trial in more than three decades.

Judge Claudio Paris read out verdicts and sentences against 91 defendants in the massive courtroom in the Calabrian city of Lamezia Terme.

Alessandra Clemente’s plan to end the cycle of violence relies on winning over the mothers and wives of the Camorra mobsters

On 11 June 1997, a 10-year-old girl named Alessandra Clemente heard 41 gunshots from an open window at her home in Naples, as she was waiting for her mother to return for lunch. When the shooting stopped, she ran to the window and saw her mother, Silvia, lying in a pool of blood. Alessandra’s little brother stood next to their mother, wailing. Silvia Clemente was not the assassin’s target, but, at age thirty nine, she had been killed by a stray bullet. Until that day, Alessandra had never heard of the organisation that had ended her mother’s life, and would now begin to shape the rest of hers: the Camorra—the Napolitan mafia.

Twenty-four years later, Alessandra Clemente, now a 34-year-old woman, is running to become the next mayor of Naples. Her campaign includes other relatives of Mafia victims and the son of a top Camorra mobster. At each election rally, Clemente recalls the occasion of her mother’s death.

Prosecutors allege Maria Licciardi, 70, ran extortion rackets as head of Naples-based Camorra crime syndicate

A reputed top Naples crime syndicate boss was arrested as she was about to board a flight to Spain, Italian authorities said.

The interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese, praised the arrest of Maria Licciardi, 70, by Carabinieri officers on the orders of Naples prosecutors.