HE'S NOT A RAT

Since his capture earlier this year, he has been jailed under Italy's "hard prison regime," reserved for mafia members and other high-security criminals.

Messina Denaro has cancer and underwent surgery for an intestinal obstruction this week. The former mafia boss was surviving on a diet of fruit juices and food supplements, his lawyer, Alessandro Cerella, told the AGI, or Italian Journalistic Agency, Reuters reported.

Cerella had told Italian media that his condition was "incompatible" with the prison regime and that his client required "immediate hospitalization."

Messina Denaro appears to be keeping "omertà," the mafia code of silence, until the end. He told magistrates he had no intention of seeking time off his jail sentence by betraying his fellow mafiosos and has refused to even admit he was in the Cosa Nostra — the Sicilian Mafia.

"He will never talk, partly because he is dying and partly because of his total loyalty to Cosa Nostra," Teresa Principato, a special anti-mafia magistrate who has long taken part in the hunt for Messina Denaro, said, The Times reported.