Matteo Messina Denaro Diaries with new photos

[Dr031718]

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The secret diaries of Matteo Messina Denaro, discovered during a search after his arrest, bring to light a unique document of its kind, of extraordinary importance, in which notes and thoughts noted by the boss between 2003 and 2016 are collected, which can now be browsed and read.
We are talking about thirteen years of memories and reflections entrusted to two notebooks, both with hard cover and illustrated by prints of works by Vincent van Gogh, which reveal not only the intimate and personal side of one of the most important Corleonese godfathers in the history of Cosa nostra, but also document his formidable manipulative skills.




Messina Denaro's handwriting is extremely neat, in a clear, readable hand. The issues he addresses are personal and intimate, therefore far from the events that in the years of the hisship have not always been investigated by judicial investigations. The intent, as the author declares by introducing his notes, is to tell himself - through a subtle and manipulative method - to his daughter, Lorenza, whom he had never met for 27 years. Showing her her father's life, her intimacy, her truth.
A sort of long and tumultuous monologue, with the style of the flow of consciousness from which you learn never-known backstories. So, not just a diary.
There is no guiding theme, but only a few fixed points around which all the reasoning, reflections, thoughts revolve whirly. One more than others: the relationship he never had with his daughter Lorenza. What he would have liked to have, but on his terms and rules. Retrograde and patriarchal, as he himself writes.
To Lorenza, father Matteo therefore explains that he will not be able to escape what is inscribed in the family DNA and its "genes", defined as "defective toys". In short, you have to look at these diaries, which "u Siccu" called "the little books", like a river. Quotes, catchphrases - all that rhetorical gear that oscillates between narcissism and suburban bully braggery - are the banks that contain and delimit the riverbed. The current that drives him is the relationship with his daughter Lorenza, whom he recognized at the registry office only a few weeks before she died, thus giving her the family surname.

Water, after all, is the world that the boss sees around him. In its flow, the river leaves on the bottom pets, debris, if you are lucky every now and then a few nuggets. And just like in small, sparkling nuggets, it sometimes happens in the pages of the diaries to come across some true sentence. Also because every time Messina Denaro's pen writes her daughter's name, every time her thoughts return to that wound that never heals, the tone changes, as well as the atmosphere, the mood. We don't know if Messina Denaro wants to hide emotions and substance of his thoughts. We know, by reading, that when he sweeps between very different topics he appears measured, perfectly aware of what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. But when the reflection stumbles on the daughter Lorenza then that composure jumps.
The roles are reversed. The "father judge" becomes the defendant. Yes, because even if he doesn't write it explicitly, in the pages of the diary in Messina Denaro snakes the doubt of having made a mistake. That same doubt that, on the contrary, has never assaulted him in his long criminal career, dotted with horrible and striking blood facts. "U Siccu" claims with satisfaction, in the diary, what he has done in his life, without any repentance.
In short, Lorenza is the variable that puts the equation in crisis. Because the daughter is the woman who managed to get there where - according to what the boss writes - an entire state has failed. Somehow, Lorenza managed to bend her father. To impose his rules on him. Of course, even on her Matteo Messina Denaro tried to exert his sinister charm, to entangle her with that sort of spell that allowed him to obtain loyalty, respect, self-denial from all those around him. But with her he failed. The man who has always bent his court of pigeons and customers, the man who boasted that "it took a State" to destroy it because "ordinary people, anyone, would never be able to scale, an entire State took to annihilate me", he added: "Despite everything I was not afraid to challenge him. Remember him to understand who your father was».

There are hundreds of reflections, thoughts, messages in the bottle that Messina Denaro addresses to the girl. And here the mafia leader reveals his idea of life: as a patriarch, as a sexual predator, as a manipulator. It illuminates a mafia mentality soaked in arrogance. He penetrates his reserve to describe himself to his daughter, to narrate the relationship he never had and that he would have liked to have with the firstborn. And impose oneself in the girl's life. All for Lorenza, who for 27 years refused to meet him. In short, a long-distance relationship, incubated only in the head of the father and the godfather. Before the meeting. Which will only happen after his arrest. In jail. The last war fought by Matteo Messina Denaro is therefore against his own blood. «Only I could tell her the truth about my life, naked and raw as it was, because only I know my life and not the others who have always abused talking about me and about me. I thought I owed it (to Lorenza, nda)», he notes in the diary.
In many passages, what the boss outlines is a parallel reality, upside down. Artfully created. Because if there is one skill in which Messina Denaro excels, it is precisely that of knowing how to confuse the waters, of mixing the false with the truth until they are almost indistinguishable. His oratory art, however crude, shines with a natural, primitive force. Of those, if ever the boss had not been a mafia leader but a frequent visitor to television salons, who would have made him a dangerous polemicist, an audience charmer.
Thanks to an exhibited simplicity of his reasoning, which in reality were very well studied, and much more complex than they appeared. Able to lead the interlocutor on misleading paths with words. The irregular course of the diary, in which one continuously jumps from one topic to another, without the reader ever being given the opportunity to orient himself, is functional to the overall effect. The boss refuses to argue in a logical, consequential way. Perhaps because he knows, by instinct, that his sentences would have had more strength proposed like this: like an uninterrupted list of individual statements. He preferred to dispense what he considered pearls of wisdom to appear more authoritative. After all, Matteo Messina Denaro was not looking for consistency. And it must be recognized that he was not even looking for the truth. Also because, after all, he was convinced that there was no single truth. His truth existed, for sure. And it was the one he wanted to introduce to his daughter, and to himself.

Matteo Messina Denaro, the drone flying over the cemetery where the mafia boss will be buried


Two years after the arrest in Palermo (January 16, 2023) his notes therefore bring us inside his relationships with the family of origin and with his father (also a deceased mafia leader), with lovers, escorts, sex and friends; with justice, trials, journalists, honor, religion, violence, revenge and the use of weapons. Life, death, personal beliefs, reference figures.
Messina Denaro exposes her intimacy. And his notes talk about women and the women in his life: in addition to his daughter, he talks about the girl's mother, mother-in-law, sisters, granddaughter, lovers, lover's daughter, escorts and foreign girls with whom he entertained. «I knew true friendship, inside there was everything, affection, respect, honor, pride», he writes.

Messina Denaro, the lover Maria Mesi filmed in 1997 while leaving home in Aspra



Never before had a mafia leader of this level been so hard to reveal his intimate in his own way. The idea we have of Matteo Messina Denaro is inevitably linked to his escape, to the arrest carried out by the carabinieri coordinated by the prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia and by the added Paolo Guido, or to one of the bloody crimes he committed. We see him with his glasses and his mocking expression in one of the identikits that investigators had spread in the past and now through the diaries we know that he complained about it. His narcissism made him say that they had not understood anything, that he was not as old and ugly as he was drawn, he was much more beautiful, and to prove it he had also added to the little books a series of unpublished and close-ups photos that depicted him posing in front of the Verona Arena.



Those photos bear the date of May 20, 2006, when he is on vacation in the city of Juliet and Romeo. The boss wears branded clothes, designer shoes. Wear an asson on the finger of your left hand. You know, he was a vain man, and he cared a lot about his physical appearance. He considered himself endowed with a magnetic charm, which even made women tremble and could not accept the idea that his daughter really believed that her father was like that, as the identikits of the police painted him. He didn't want Lorenza, who he thought he would never meet again in his life, to have that image of him made by the police.



And in fact he was not entirely right, because there were very few similarities between the reconstructions of the face drawn by the investigators in the years of the hissession and the real Messina Denaro. Only one thing those identikits had hit the top: the half sarcastic smile that marked his expression.



A smile very similar to that of his other iconic image, the photo after the arrest, when he was still wearing the fur-edged sheep.
"Do you remember when I sent you dresses, swimsuits, white pants with a blue and white striped shirt, sailor style. There were roller skates and there were also Bulgarian scarves, not for you. Well, I personally bought all those things the day I took those photos in that same city. In fact they were of good taste. You were almost ten years old and you were my myth, then. And believe me, I had never had myths, and I still don't have any, not anymore". So the boss writes to his daughter.
We know almost nothing about long stretches of the period in which it was sought. Reposing it is therefore an undertaking bordering on the impossible. A job that the Palermo prosecutor's office has undertaken and still far from considering itself closed. Because 30 years of hiding is an infinite time. Of the "sweetened" vision he wants to present to his daughter, of his presence in Verona we can only now have confirmation because there are the photos that the boss had printed and attached to the diary. The date imprinted on the back of those images - May 20, 2006, as mentioned - is hand-marked. Forty days before Bernardo Provenzano had been arrested.



But on the same day that "u Siccu" poses and has the photos taken in Verona by someone who accompanied him, in Palermo - when coincidences are said - the then president of the Region Salvatore Cuffaro, then on trial for aiding and abetting the mafia, declares during the presentation of a book at Villa Igiea: "I am worried about the fact that they are trying to build in the common imagination another great boss, as it could be Messina Denaro". As if to say, Provenzano has been taken, now don't create other monsters or mafia, because there are none. He was wrong.



WORDS, SECRETS AND OMISSIONS OF MATTEO MESSINA MONEYLirio Abbate is the author of the book "The boss's diaries - words, secrets and omissions by Matteo Messina Denaro",
Publisher Rizzoli, from January 21st in bookstores and online stores,
Where you can already pre-order it.An exclusive story that also shows the reproduction of the pages of the diary and other unpublished images of the godfather of the massacres and reveals, of course by reflex, the person who was hiding behind the dark myth of the boss who was
Alongside Riina in the last bloody season of the bombs that killed Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and that then hit Milan, Florence and Rome.

[Dr031718]

[OmarSantista]

Wow that's really something, I have to grab this book

[Dr031718]

[OmarSantista]

If anyone has read this or is currently reading, I'd love to hear about it as there is no english version yet and I cannot read Italian nor can I copy and paste words off of kindle reader into a translator.