Legendary mafia leader's "vast fortune" seized by police

Crime "Vast fortune" belonging to legendary Mafia boss seized by police in Italy May 28, 2026 / 7:28 AM EDT / CBS/AFP Add CBS News on Google Italy said Thursday it was seizing more than 200 million euros ($232 million) in assets belonging to late Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro derived from drug trafficking and reinvested in Europe and beyond.The "vast fortune" of the ruthless Cosa Nostra boss — a legendary figure finally captured in 2023 in Palermo after three decades on the run — had been amassed since the 1980s, Italy's financial police said in a statement.Messina Denaro, the head of Sicily's Castelvetrano clan, who had six life sentences to his name, died in prison a few months after his arrest at age 61.The investigation by the Guardia di Finanza uncovered "vast sums of money derived from drug trafficking reinvested in numerous European and non-European countries," police said.  Assets were being seized in Andorra, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Monaco, Spain and Switzerland, as well as Italy, police said.Drug money was "reintroduced into the legal economy" through a wide range of assets, including luxury vacation resorts on Spain's Costa del Sol, bank accounts, securities portfolios and corporate holding companies, they said.Three people have been arrested in the probe. Italy's top anti-Mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Melillo, hailed the operation as of "great strategic importance.""It is not simply a matter of identifying and seizing a significant portion of the illicit wealth accumulated over decades of related trafficking and parasitic exploitation of the territory — Sicily in particular — from an organization as powerful as the Cosa Nostra," Melillo said Thursday during a press conference in Palermo.But the operation also managed to "delay and hinder" Cosa Nostra's attempt to rebuild its structure after the death of the powerful Messina Denaro, he said.Police used planes, drones and thermal scanners in the inve...