Blitz in Mazara del Vallo and a Messina Denaro hideout appears in Tunisia
PALERMO – The request was explicit. A hideout was needed for Matteo Messina Denaro. Not around the corner, but in Tunisia . There is also this story in the raid by the Carabinieri of the ROS and the provincial command of Trapani which this morning led three people to prison in Mazara del Vallo. They are the Mazarese entrepreneur Giovanni Vassallo , 71 years old, who was under house arrest, Emilio Alario, 61 years old from Palermo , and Giuseppe Lodato , 32 years old from Mazara.
The African trail In the reconstruction of the life and affairs of the godfather who died last September, the Palermo prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia and the deputy Paolo Guido would have identified an old African lead . It would have been Domenico Scimonelli who took action to find a safe refuge for the then fugitive . Until his arrest, Scimonelli was an unsuspected wine entrepreneur at the helm of a consortium and capable of obtaining important recognition at specialized fairs. Then his dark soul as a supporter of Matteo Messina Denaro and even instigator of a murder committed in 2009 came out. He had business between Rome and Milan, but also in Switzerland, in Lugano.
The Tunisian presence of Castelvetrano's godfather has been investigated in the past. Ever since 2010 the African country was referenced in one of the many anonymous reports received during the years of hiding. There was talk of the boss's life "in the warm warmth of the Mazarese domestic hearths" but also of the "shuttle between Torretta and Tunisia with the bread-shaped dinghy".
The investigative leads are much more serious and concrete. There are traces of the fugitive in a foreign land. Don Ciccio Messina Denaro, Matteo's father, also went to Tunisia by dinghy. A few years ago the ROS carabinieri moved to the African country following the business in the fish processing sector of the family of the Brancaccio boss, Giuseppe Guttadauro . Giuseppe Guttadauro's brother Filippo, is Messina Denaro's brother-in-law (he married her sister Rosalia) and is serving a white life sentence . Maria Mesi, one of the fugitive's old flames, worked for the Guttadauros.
Mafia life
Vassallo, former partner of Giuseppe Grigoli, an entrepreneur who, thanks to his relationships with the godfather of Castelvetrano, built an empire in the food distribution sector from a small shopkeeper, would have been part of the network of loyalists who managed Messina Denaro's communications and would have contributed to financing his inaction.
Not just the godfather's escape. The blitz reconstructs contacts between those arrested with leading figures in the Mazara del Vallo district: Vito Mangiarracina, Vito Gondola, Antonino Cuttone, Giovan Battista Agate, Luca Burzotta, Dario Messina. And then there are the common affairs of Cosa Nostra: from intermediation in the purchase and sale of an agricultural land, with a commission set at 2% to the interest in hiring manpower in a company that had been awarded work for the Campobello purification plant in Mazara, from intervention in a judicial procedure to take over land from a bankrupt company to intervention to settle a debt in favor of a mafia protectee.
