DOWNFALL OF THE 'DIABOLICAL' GODFATHER

After three decades at large, and, dozens of murders, Italy's most notorious mafioso was finally captured at a private clinic where he was being treated for cancer...

- James Murray and Mark Reynolds

THE thin, frail man in an unprepossessing brown and white woolly hat and sheepskin jacket had arrived for his medical appointment in the Sicilian capital Palermo yesterday hoping for good news about his colon cancer. But rather than meeting his consultant, he was surrounded in minutes by 100 heavily armed men intent on his capture.

Thus, after an astonishing 33 years at large, was mafia godfather Matteo Messina Denaro - nicknamed Diabolik - finally taken into custody. Not without a final attempt to escape, however. As police stormed the building, the 60-year-old made one final dash for freedom...only to be captured in a cafe attached to the private clinic.

Away from his phalanx of bodyguards, he looked bewildered as he was seized by Carabinieri police at La Maddalena hospital - where he had arrived for a check-up having apparently undergone a cancer operation a year ago and bundled into a black van.

Italy's most wanted mafia boss, said to have ordered the killing of enough enemies to fill a cemetery, would have felt own fear as his reign of the Cosa Nostra ended after more bloody decades.

his than three On Palermo's streets, locals shook the hands of the elite police officers in balaclavas who had snared the mobster as they recalled the wave of terror unleashed on their island and across Italy with a series of bombings in the early 1990s.

Etched in the hearts of many law-abiding Italians is the date of May 23, 1992, when the charismatic anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, 53, an icon of hope, was driving with his wife along the A29 motorway near Capaci, a town lying between Palermo and the nearby airport.

A bomb containing 300lb of explosives sent the judge's White Fiat Croma spinning through the air and killed not only Falcone and his wife, Francesca, but three escorting police officers.