On this day‬ in 2002 Messina Denaro, a Sicilian mobster who became one of the new leaders after the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano in 2006, received a life-time sentence (in absentia) for his role in the terrorist attacks of 1993 which killed 10 people and injured nearly 100 more. This came one year after the bombings of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

He has been a fugitive since 1993 and is among the ten most wanted criminals in the world.

On this day in 2002, Matteo Messina Denaro — one of the most feared and elusive figures in the history of the Sicilian Mafia — was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for his central role in the devastating Georgofili bombings of 1993. The verdict, handed down by an Italian court, confirmed what law enforcement across Europe had long suspected: that Messina Denaro was not merely a foot soldier carrying out orders, but a principal architect of one of the most audacious and bloody terrorist campaigns ever orchestrated by Cosa Nostra.

The 1993 bombings were a calculated declaration of war by the Sicilian Mafia against the Italian state. On the 27th of May 1993, a car bomb exploded near the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, in the Via dei Georgofili, killing five people including two young children and causing irreparable damage to priceless Renaissance art. Further bombings followed in Rome and Milan, leaving five more dead and nearly one hundred people injured. The attacks were Cosa Nostra's furious response to the Italian government's tough anti-Mafia policies and the crackdown that followed the assassinations of magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino the previous year — murders in which Messina Denaro was also deeply implicated.

Born in Castelvetrano, Sicily, in 1962, Messina Denaro rose through the ranks of the Trapani Mafia under the tutelage of his father, Francesco "Don Ciccio" Messina Denaro, a powerful local boss. By the time the 1993 bombings were carried out, he had already earned a fearsome reputation for violence and had become a trusted lieutenant of Totò Riina, the supreme boss of Cosa Nostra whose own brutal reign drew comparisons to the iron-fisted governance of American Mafia legends such as Lucky Luciano and the Chicago Outfit's Al Capone. Where Capone had used violence as a business tool and Luciano had built criminal empires through ruthless organisation, Riina and Messina Denaro weaponised terror on a near-political scale.

Messina Denaro went into hiding in 1993 and remained one of the world's most wanted fugitives for nearly three decades, evading capture even after the 2006 arrest of Bernardo Provenzano elevated him to the pinnacle of Sicilian organised crime. He was finally arrested in January 2023 at a private clinic in Palermo, ending a thirty-year manhunt. His capture closed a dark chapter in Mafia history, though the carnage and cultural destruction he helped unleash on Italy in 1993 remains a permanent and painful scar on the nation's collective memory.