“I’m always on the right side. I have accepted with reservation the appointment of Massimo Gentile as his defender provided that he is able to give convincing explanations with respect to the apparently indisputable facts that objectively accuse him”. This was reiterated by Antonio Ingroia, chosen as the defense lawyer of the architect arrested on charges of mafia association for having lent his identity to the boss Matteo Messina Denaro.
Ingroia, a former magistrate who in the past was on the front line in the fight against the mafia in Palermo, also underlined: “I will defend him only if my intervention can help ascertain the truth about the cover-ups of the years of hiding enjoyed by the massacre Matteo Messina Money. With the same spirit years ago I publicly and provocatively offered my defense to Matteo Messina Denaro”.
“I will evaluate in the next few days”
And he adds: “I am abroad and therefore I have not so far been able to speak to Gentile personally, but indirectly, through his co-counsel Michele Melchiorre, I learned from him and his family that he will be able to provide the explanations that will exonerate him . The duty of a lawyer is to defend his client in any case, but consistency with my history and my ideas requires me to only defend positions that I consider defensible. So I reiterate that in the next few days I will evaluate whether to confirm with conviction or renounce the appointment on the basis of the explanations that Gentile can give and the consequent checks that I will carry out with the help of my collaborators”.
Who is Massimo Gentile, the architect accused of covering up for the boss
Massimo Gentile, the Sicilian architect resident in Limbiate, in the province of Monza, arrested on Wednesday for mafia association, managed dozens of projects financed with the Pnrr. He would have lent his identity to Messina Denaro to obtain false documents allowing him to purchase a car and a motorbike. A relative of the husband of the boss’s historical lover, Laura Bonafede, Gentile worked in the municipality’s technical office.
According to what was ascertained by the Carabinieri, Gentile, arrested by the Carabinieri in the operation, would have given up his identity to the Messina Denaro boss “in order to have him purchase a car and a motorcycle, take out the relevant insurance policies, carry out banking operations and evade the checks of the police forces” thus ensuring him “the possibility of moving around the territory in a state of fugitives and contributing to directing the association”.
The investigation was coordinated by the Palermo prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia, the deputy Paolo Guido and the prosecutors Gianluca De Leo and Piero Padova. Since the capture of the boss on January 16, 2023, 14 people accused of helping the wanted mafia boss have ended up in handcuffs. Four have already been convicted.
In November 2014, when he was the most wanted fugitive in the country, Matteo Messina Denaro personally went first to a car dealership in Palermo to buy a Fiat 500 and then to the bank to collect the check to be delivered to the dealer.
The telephone number of the person with a clean criminal record
The boss used a false identity card in the name of the architect Massimo Gentile, now arrested for mafia association, and indicated as the reference telephone number for any communications that of Leonardo Gulotta, who ended up in prison for external complicity in mafia association. The facts, which show once again how the mafia boss led an almost normal life for years, emerge from the latest investigation by the ROS carabinieri coordinated by the Palermo DDA.
The input to the investigation comes from a note with the writing “10 thousand + 500 for Margot” found in the boss’s house after the capture. Margot was the pseudonym that Messina Denaro used to indicate his cars in pizzini or documents. The search for the vehicle led the carabinieri to a dealership in Palermo where they found the document for the purchase of the car with the documents delivered by the buyer, including the photocopy of the identity card in the name of Gentile on which it had been pasted the photo of Messina Denaro, proof that the boss had gone in person to buy the Fiat.
The fake identity card
The document, which bore the godfather’s signature, contained some data corresponding to that of Gentile and other false ones: such as the residence address indicated in “via Bono”, not corresponding to the architect’s real one, and the expiry date. For the purchase, the mafia boss paid 1,000 euros in cash and 9,000 through a bank draft issued by the Palermo branch of Unicredit in Corso Calatafimi.
At the counter, to obtain the check, he showed the false document, paid 9,000 euros in cash and declared that the money was the result of his activity as a clothing dealer. As a telephone number for communications, the boss once again left Gulotta’s cell phone “a very trustworthy person who was perfectly informed of what was happening, since otherwise anyone else unaware of the sale would have, at the first telephone contact, alarmed the dealership and probably put the identification of the fugitive is at serious risk”, write the prosecutors.
The car, for the entire period of use – three years – was insured in the name of Gentile and in at least a year the policies, as shown by the graphic comparisons, bore the signature of Messina Denaro. The investigations also revealed that in 2007 the architect purchased a BMW motorbike on behalf of the boss, which Gentile himself would later demolish in a workshop referred to in a small piece hidden in a chair, found in the woman’s house. Messina Denaro’s sister, Rosalia, after her godfather’s arrest.
The vehicle, according to the prosecutors, used by the godfather from 2007 to 2015, was regularly inspected and insured in the name of Gentile, who in one of the procedures indicated the false residence in via Bono and always gave Gulotta’s number as his address. Finally, in 2016, motorbike and car taxes were paid within 40 seconds of each other in a tobacco shop in Campobello di Mazara where, seven years later, a few days before the arrest, the mafia boss had gone to make purchases , as demonstrated by a receipt found by Ros.
