June 20, 2024, 6.20pm
3 min read
PALERMO – Two doctors, the first diagnosed Matteo Messina Denaro’s tumor and the second operated on him. Their reports were filed at the trial in which another doctor, Alfonso Tumbarello, is accused of external complicity in a mafia association.
For months Tumbarello allegedly wrote prescriptions and prescribed tests for the fugitive cancer patient, knowing exactly, according to prosecutors, who he was.
The test that revealed the disease
The Trapani mafia boss knew he had the tumor that killed him with a colonoscopy carried out on November 3, 2020 in the medical office of Dr. Francesco Bavettagastroenterologist and endoscopist in Marsala.
Giacomo Urso, on the other hand, is the surgeon who operated on the godfather who was admitted to the Mazara del Vallo hospital on 5 November 2020, entered the operating room on the 9th and discharged on the 13th. The statements of the two professionals are being examined by the prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia, the deputy Paolo Guido and the deputies Piero Padova and Gianluca De Leo.
“We didn’t know it was him”
They couldn’t deny having visited him, but both claimed to have learned only after his arrest that the patient was actually Matteo Messina Denaro.
“He introduced himself to us as Andrea Bonafede”, said two doctors from Trapani questioned by Palermo magistrates who are trying to reconstruct the boss’s fugitive status. Andrea Bonafede is the surveyor who lent his identity to the godfather.
The Castelevetrano mafia boss himself had spoken of both in his reports after the arrest. “If I remember correctly, his name was Bavetta in Marsala, but I only know his surname,” Messina Denaro said during the interrogation.
After that “since I knew there was a good one in Mazara, Urso Giacomo, I don’t remember, I went to him. He saw the colonoscopy, he says: ‘But here we have to operate immediately, because otherwise we’ll never go anywhere’”.
Crossroad of cell phones
The medical process is one of the hot topics of the ongoing investigations. On November 3, 2020, the boss learned that he was ill. The next day Andrea Bonafede, municipal worker and cousin of the surveyor’s namesake, has activated a Sim card and inserted it into an old cell phone previously used by his mother-in-law and mother. And it was Sim who put the ROS carabinieri on the right path.
They mapped the cell phone who on November 5th hooked up the cell in which the Mazara del Vallo hospital is located. The same thing happens with the phone card used by the surveyor Bonafede.
On November 6, the two cell phones were once again close together. It is the day Andrea Bonafede performed a hospital visit. In reality it was Messina Denaro. There were several incoming and outgoing calls between the two cell phones.
From November 9th the contacts stop. On 13 November Messina Denaro underwent surgery for the first time at the Abele Ajello hospital, two months before the second operation at the La Maddalena clinic in Palermo.
On November 14th a new user was activated, still registered to Bonafede, the worker, which on 18 November hooks up the same cell as the one registered to the surveyor Bonafede. He went to collect the recipes from Tumbarello in Campobello di Mazara.
The driver
After the surgery Messina Denaro underwent chemotherapy at the La Maddalena clinic in Palermo where he was arrested in January 2024. At his side was Giovanni Luppino who had a note on him with the name of Bavetta, a doctor to whom the boss’s driver had turned in 2019 for some of his health problems. He was one of the most trusted men of the fugitive who led a normal life for years.
The two, according to what emerges from the investigations, they had known each other for years and had been neighbors in Campobello di Mazara since 2007.
Published on
June 20, 2024, 6.20pm
