Messina Denaro loyalists arrested for money laundering
Police in Sicily on Tuesday arrested 11 people allegedly close to late Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro in relation to a probe into money laundering.
The suspects, six of who were taken to jail, with the others being put under house arrest, allegedly laundered huge amounts of money for Palermo's mafia clans with the help compliant entrepreneurs and financial experts.
The investigation was conduct by the Palermo DDA anti-mafia department and Carabinieri police in the province of Trapani.
The suspects are also thought to have formed a clans of Calabria's 'Ndrangheta mafia.
Messina Denaro was caught in mid-January last year after 30 years on the run while leaving a clinic where he was being treated for cancer in Palermo.
He died in a hospital in L'Aquila on September 25 aged 62.
Messina Denaro had been convicted for his involvement in dozens of murders, including the 1992 Cosa Nostra bombings that killed anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
In addition to the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations, he was convicted of the killing of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a mobster-turned-State witness who was strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996, and bombings at art and religious sites in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed 10 people and hurt 40 more in 1993.
