Freemasonry right arm of the mafia: Messina Denaro's plan

In thirty years on the run, Matteo Messina Denaro sought greater relations with politics. The loggia would have protected him even outside the Trapani area

U Siccu had a grandiose idea in mind: that the mafia would take over politics. How? By creating covered Masonic lodges "where only characters of a certain rank are affiliated and where the violent component of the mafia becomes its armed wing", wrote the parliamentarians of the Anti-Mafia Commission five years ago in their final report.

It had been the same goal as another long-sighted godfather: Stefano Bontate, the «Prince of Villagrazia», an early Freemason and monarch of the old mafia, killed by the Corleonesi in 1981. Like him, also Matteo Messina Denaro he thought big.

After the massacres he had steered his Cosa Nostra towards business, he had immersed it in the "big game" of which Falcone spoke, relations in New York and Venezuela, Spain and England, wind power, construction, supermarkets, clinics, tourist villages, small for everyone, a tour estimated by Libera at around four billion, less blood and many hidden ties, to the point of making, according to some repentant, a secret lodge of his own, La Sicilia.

Freemasonry is a cement that binds people and even physically makes them stay in a single room, of compensation, where they can pursue their interests that are not always lawful", Michele Prestipino explained to the Antimafia when he was assistant prosecutor of Reggio Calabria, another land where many men of honor wear and wore aprons, starting with don Paolino De Stefano, the most holy mother who gave shoes to half the city ("so who walk on my shoes").

In the mid-eighties, the case of the Isis 2 secret lodge broke out in Trapani, under the banner of the Scontrino club, where men from the institutions and bosses such as Mariano Agate meet, «to compose mafia, political and business interests including those attributable to the Messina Denaro".

In Castelvetrano alone, the Bindi Commission reports six of the nineteen lodges active in the province of Trapani and linked to four "obediences". The Municipality, dissolved at the time due to mafia infiltration, had come to have half of its councilors and assessors affiliated with some of them. "It seems like an oxymoron, but Freemasonry was a place of concealment in the light of the sun", smiles sadly Claudio Fava, who as vice president signed the Anti-Mafia report of December 2017.