Sicilian crime boss reveals mafia supplied world’s top museums and galleries with illicit treasures

Gangsters sent ancient artefacts to dealers in Switzerland who sold them on to museums and galleries across the world, Matteo Messina Denaro said.

mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro. Ancient vases have been returned from the US to Italy. Picture: Studio Camera di Lannino/Rex/Shutterstock; Italian carabinieri/AP/The Times

The Sicilian mafia smuggled thousands of pillaged antiquities out of Italy, filling collections in the world’s leading museums, a top godfather has revealed in evidence which has rocked the art world.

Ancient statues, vases and coins dug up by tomb raiders in Sicily were sent by Cosa Nostra gangsters to shady dealers in Switzerland who sold them to museums and galleries in Europe, the Gulf and the US, said Matteo Messina Denaro, a mob boss who was arrested in January after 30 years on the run.

“This is the first time we hear about Cosa Nostra’s role in antiquities trafficking from the horse’s mouth – there were suspicions but never any concrete proof until now,” said the US investigative reporter Jason Felch, co-author of the book Chasing Aphrodite which exposed the role of American museums in the trade.

Messina Denaro was investigated over his role in the 1993 Florence bombings. Picture: Sygma/Getty Images/The Times

After his arrest in a Palermo medical clinic where he was receiving treatment for cancer, Messina Denaro, 61, was grilled by investigators.

They were hoping to find out more about the 50 murders he was convicted of while on the run, including the 1992 killing of anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and his role in bombings in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed 10 people in 1993.

Messina Denaro refused to give up details of his career but did provide a startling insight into how his father Francesco, a senior mafia boss, bought every artefact dug up by locals in the 1970s around Selinunte, a 5th-century BC Greek settlement in Sicily.

“At Selinunte at that time there were 1000 people, even women, who dug at night,” he recalled. “In general my father bought 100 per cent of these things, which were then sold in Switzerland, before they reached Arabia, the UAE, America.

“We saw these items which had passed from my father in American museums,” he said. “We knew these buried artefacts belonged to the state but we couldn’t care less,” he added.

Selinunte was the main site where artefacts were dug up and bought by the mafia. Picture: Alamy

Vases dug up which had no designs or figures painted on them were taken to the Sicilian town of Centuripe where experts would add their own embellishments and then bury them for another four to five years to age them, boosting their sale price from about £1000 to up to £18,000.

In the testimony, given in February but made public this week, he said that in 1978, when he was 16, he was present when a local family handed over a vase they had found with 700 pristine silver coins in it. The proceeds from the sale, he said, went into the coffers of the Messina Denaro crime family.

“There are 30 of us in the family, half in jail, myself on the run, planes, lawyers – there was a need for money,” he said.

Messina Denaro denied committing the murders of which he was convicted and told investigators “I am not a Mafioso”.

Giovanni Falcone, a judge, was killed in a roadside explosion in 1992. Picture: Getty Images

However, when police raided his flat in Campobello di Mazara, near his birthplace in western Sicily, they found a pistol in a secret compartment and a poster of Marlon Brando in the 1972 film The Godfather.

Law enforcers and heritage experts have long suspected that a vast amount of looted Italian art and artefacts is lining the walls of opulent American homes. New York prosecutors have confiscated and returned to Rome this year items worth millions of dollars including bronze busts, warriors’ helmets and amazing Roman frescoes.

“Buyers in the US often didn’t want to know how their antiquities got to them and the mafia’s role is often played down, so this is big news – it might persuade people to look more carefully at their collections,” said Lynda Albertson, the head of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, which tracks illicit antiquities networks.

The Times