Messages for No. 1 Mafioso hidden in Sicilian soil

He used a farm in Mazara del Vallo to communicate with his henchmen via the age-old method of “pizzini”. The messages were ordered destroyed after being read.

Police said numerous messages used to alert fellow criminals that a new “pizzini” was ready referred to sheep. By leaving scraps of paper on a farm in western Sicily, Denaro transmitted messages to his followers such as, “the sheep need shearing”, or “the hay is ready”, or “I’ve put the ricotta cheese aside for you, will you come by later?”

Messina Denaro, who has boasted he has single-handedly filled a whole cemetery with his enemies, has been avoiding authorities and prosecution for at least 50 murders and is seen as the last of the “old school” Mafia leaders still operating.

Screen shot of a video from Italian police surveillance cameras.

Those arrested today were believed to be the middle aged couriers of the don, close associates working to keep coded messages between him and his lieutenants moving and his empire going.

The only known photos of Denaro date back to the early 1990s.

Across the Sicilian provinces of Palermo and Trapani, heavily armed police swooped on several homes to arrest 15 people linked to the last of the great fugitive Mafia godfathers Matteo Messina Denaro.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi praised the police operation on his Facebook page.

“The state wins, the Mafia loses”, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said on Twitter. In the 1970s he belonged to a gang used by the Mafia to carry out kidnappings, according to Italian media reports.

Denaro heads “Cosa Nostra” (Our Thing), which was Italy’s most powerful and organized criminal group in the 1980s and 90s but its power has diminished since the start of the new century following mass arrests of its members.

It also faces fierce underworld competition from the increasingly powerful Naples-based Camorra and Calabria’s ‘Ndrangheta.