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He looked like any other senior citizen with a prostate condition.
Wearing a sheepskin coat, winter cap and sunglasses, Andrea Bonafede arrived on Monday morning for bloodwork at a medical clinic in Palermo, Italy. He was being treated for a cancerous tumor.
But the police knew there was much more to this man — including his real identity, Matteo Messina Denaro: the most wanted fugitive in Italy.
“[Authorities] worked for a long time on the trail that led them to Matteo Messina Denaro,” author Giacomo Di Girolamo told The Post of the 60-year-old mob boss who had been on the lam since 1993. “They discovered he was ill and compiled a list of patients in Italy with colon cancer. When the name of the person due to visit the Palermo clinic did not match, they understood that it could be Denaro.”
Paramilitary police officers staked out the medical facility. At 8:30 a.m. on January 16, they saw the man whose face matched their digitally updated photo and pounced. Upon spotting the officers, Denaro reportedly appeared to consider bolting.
Then, realizing he was covered from all angles, Denaro — who once bragged about having “killed enough people to fill a cemetery” — decided to go easy. Asked his name, he replied truthfully.
“He did not even need to be handcuffed,” said Di Girolamo, who wrote a Denaro biography, “L’Invisible.”
According to multiple reports, when a crowd in the street recognized the notorious mobster in custody, they broke into applause and raised fists toward the sky.
“I thought he would never be caught,” Cyprien d’Haese, who directed “The World’s Most Wanted,” a Netflix documentary about Denaro, told The Post. “Seeing him between two policemen, it was like a dream.”
Taking no chances, police transferred Denaro to a secret location from which he’ll be shipped to a maximum-security prison outside of Sicily.
The three-decade hunt was so intense that even Italy’s journalists did what they could. One reporter created a photo depiction of Denaro as a woman. Di Girolamo called it “a journalistic provocation” that could have rattled Denaro and smoked him out.
At one point, police followed a lead that took them to New York City. “A few years ago, Denaro was searched for in a luxury hotel [there]. But it was a false lead,” said Di Girolamo. Although the Sicilian mafia “has always had great relations with New York,” there is no proof that Denaro was actually in the Big Apple.
A lifelong criminal and the son of a mafia boss in the province of Trapani in Sicily, Denaro is said to have committed his first murder on behalf of the mob at 14.
