PALERMO – The Palermo preliminary hearing judge sentenced Andrea Bonafede, the surveyor from Campobello di Mazara who lent his identity to Matteo Messina Denaro, to 14 years in prison. Bonafede was accused of mafia association and conspiracy to commit forgery. The prosecution was represented by prosecutors Gianluca De Leo and Piero Padova. The role of Bonafede, nephew of the historic boss Leonardo Bonafede, emerged during the investigations that led to the capture of the godfather.
The ROS carabinieri, who discovered that Messina Denaro was being treated for cancer, ascertained that for the treatments he used the identity of the surveyor whose documents he had falsified. Bonafede was arrested a few days after the boss’ capture. And it was ascertained that both the last apartment in which the mafia boss lived in Campobello and the car he used to travel around had been bought with false documents registered in the accused’s name.
During the investigations the position of the surveyor worsened. In fact, from the elements gathered by the magistrates, it emerged that Bonafede was at the mafia boss’s disposal well before his arrest. The Prosecutor’s Office, investigating another figurehead of the former fugitive, the architect Massimo Gentile, who allegedly gave up his identity to the boss to buy a car in 2014, discovered that the vehicle, in 2017, was registered to Bonafede’s mother , a sign that there were already relationships between the surveyor and the godfather. But not only that: the first house in Campobello di Mazara in which Messina Denaro lived was rented in the name of Andrea Bonafede in 2007. With today’s sentence, the number of people close to Messina Denaro convicted has risen to five.
Today the Prosecutor’s Office, in a separate trial, requested a 15-year sentence for the surveyor’s cousin, Laura Bonafede, historical lover of the mafia boss. Bonafede, daughter of the town’s historic boss Leonardo, is accused of mafia association. The trial takes place using the abbreviated procedure. The woman, arrested in April 2023, was initially charged with the crime of aggravated aiding and abetting, which was changed during the investigation to that of mafia association.
According to the Palermo Prosecutor’s Office, the accused was a fundamental piece of the mechanism that protected Messina Denaro’s fugitive status for 30 years. The two, together with the woman’s daughter Martina Gentile, under house arrest for aiding and abetting and failure to comply with the sentence, would have lived together and would have always seen each other. “We were a family,” wrote the mafia boss in a note addressed to Blu, one of the code names used for the teacher. She took care of the boss’s livelihood and safety, she did his shopping during the pandemic in fear that she would get sick and not be able to leave the house, she shared with him encrypted languages, very secret pizzini, deals and information on the gang.
