Efficient healthcare for Messina Denaro: rapid exams, cancer treatment within 8 days

Last Updated: March 27, 2024

Sanità super efficiente per Messina Denaro: esami in tempi record, intervento a 8 giorni dalla diagnosi di cancro

Exams carried out in record time, a very fast oncological visit, hospitalization and surgery just eight days after being diagnosed with colon cancer in November 2020: Matteo Messina Denaro was able to benefit from a very efficient healthcare system. A suspicious promptness was reserved for the boss who at the time was using false documents, a focus of the current investigators.

Today, a radiology technician at the Mazara del Vallo hospital, Cosimo Leone, has been arrested, suspected by investigators of being part of a series of unsuspected pawns in the world of healthcare who helped the boss during his illness. Leone, the brother-in-law of architect Massimo Gentile, who was also arrested today, allegedly arranged for an urgent CT scan for the mafia boss (CT scans, as shown in medical records, were expedited several times). On the day of the exam, the technician also requested a shift change to coincide with his presence at the hospital during the diagnostic tests that the boss had to undergo.

According to investigators, Leone constantly informed another accomplice, Andrea Bonafede, cousin and namesake of the surveyor who lent his identity to the boss for treatment, about the patient’s condition. There were dozens of phone calls between the two on the days when the mafia boss was at the Mazara hospital, as discovered by the carabinieri. Through meticulous work on telephone records, investigators reconstructed the calls and, using cell tower data, the movements of the technician and Bonafede during the crucial days of the diagnosis and colon surgery undergone by Messina Denaro.

From the analysis, it is evident that Bonafede provided the boss with a cell phone while he was hospitalized. In the midst of the Covid pandemic and the ban on hospital visits, the technician was crucial as a means of communication with the mafia boss. Therefore, on November 14, at 1.30 pm, Bonafede departed from Campobello and arrived in Mazara del Vallo near the hospital about 15 minutes later. At 1:48 pm, he informed Leone, who was present that morning at the hospital, and handed over the new phone. After 15 minutes (around 2:00 pm), the technician gave the phone to the fugitive, who immediately called Bonafede on his old number. The mission was completed thanks to Leone, who was authorized to move around the hospital wards, the only contact that Bonafede could reach at that moment. The device, further evidence that Messina Denaro was using it and that someone inside the hospital had clandestinely handed it over to him, remained in the hospital for all 4 days of the boss’s hospital stay.