LONDON – When Dutch police arrested a man last week on suspicion of being a runaway head of the Sicilian mafia, at the request of Italian authorities, the man’s Liverpool accent should have been a dead gift that he had stuck to the wrong person.
The 54-year-old Briton, identified only as Mark L., had traveled to the Netherlands from Liverpool to attend a Formula 1 car race, the Dutch Grand Prix, in Zandvoort on 5 September. He was having dinner with his son at a restaurant in The Hague last Wednesday, when according to various local press reports, armed police officers arrested him on the grounds that he was Matteo Messina Denaro, a mobster on the wanted list. ‘Italy since 1993.
Blindfolded, Mark L. was taken to a maximum security prison, where he remained isolated.
The next day, Leon van Kleef, a Amsterdam criminal defense lawyer, was approached by local police officers, who said that a man they suspected of being the head of the mafia and who had been arrested had specifically asked to be his representative. legal.
A quick internet search of van Kleef’s partner revealed who Messina Denaro was: a Sicilian mobster known to have killed police and prosecutors. They are also looking for him in car bombings that killed dozens of people in the early 1990s.
“I wondered,‘ Why would this guy ask me and how does he know my name? “Said van Kleef.
Intrigued, Mr van Kleef visited the man in prison and recognized him, not as the head of the mob he had seen on the internet, but as a Liverpool man he had met about 15 years ago when he had delivered clothes to a friend who was prosecuted in the Netherlands.
“He’s really Liverpool, and not slightly,” van Kleef said, referring to Mark L.’s strong accent and his deep family roots in Liverpool, not Sicily.
It was not until Saturday that Mr van Kleef received news from police that his client was to be released after it was determined he was not actually an Italian mobster.
“The man arrested at a restaurant in The Hague last Wednesday is not the man looking for Italy,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Saturday.
According to Mr. van Kleef, Mark L.’s lawyer, an Italian police officer had seen a photo of his client and had concluded that it was the fugitive Messina Denaro. The Italian authorities then notified the Dutch authorities, who arrested Mark L. with a European arrest warrant issued by the Italian authorities.
But, he said, “there is no resemblance between the photo known to Denaro’s public sources and my client’s recent photo.” He added: “They don’t even know if Denaro is alive, if he has had face surgery.”
Italian media reports suggested that prosecutors in the northern Italian city of Trento had pursued the case and did not consult investigators in the Sicilian city of Palermo, who have long pursued Messina Denaro.
However, Federico Cafiero De Raho, Italy’s chief anti-mafia prosecutor, defended Trento officials, without going into the details of the case. “They operated the right way,” he said in a statement.
The Trento prosecutor’s office did not respond to any requests for comment.
Known as the “head of all heads”, the identity and whereabouts of Mr Messina Denaro are largely unknown since he disappeared from his hometown in western Sicily in 1993. Researchers believe he no longer lives in Sicily but travels through Europe, where there have been frequent but unfounded sightings of the mobster.
According to Lirio Abbate, a Sicilian journalist who wrote a book about Messina Denaro last year, the mafia boss is still highly respected by his associates, business partners and even his many lovers, many of whom have been imprisoned and frozen goods. by the police but they have not betrayed him.
“He has been persecuted for so long he has heightened his myth,” Abbate said.
The only available images of Mr. Messina Denaro are from a family album and were made in the 1990s. But since he published the book and appeared on a Netflix television series, “World’s Most Wanted,” Abbate said he had received hundreds of unproven images of people believed to have seen Mr. Messina Denaro around the world. , including police officers.
“Most people mean good, but it’s hard even for researchers who have been trying to locate it for decades,” Abbate said. “It simply came to our notice then. He sends letters and communicates without taking any risks. He is a professional in hiding ”.