ROME -  The daughter of Matteo Messina Denaro, the last great boss of Cosa Nostra, has warned publishing house Rizzoli and the Repubblica journalist, Lirio Abbate, author of The Diary of the Boss: Words, Secrets and Omissions of Matteo Messina Denaro, against the publication of her father’s diaries, according to Fatto Quotidiano.

 The book, which was in stores from Jan. 21 contains large excerpts from the diaries of the final so-called ‘superboss’ of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia. 

 Messina Denaro, who was arrested Jan. 16 2023, after nearly 30 years of being on the run, died from a colon tumour after nine months of imprisonment. 

 During searches carried out in his last ‘den’, the Procura of Palermo found what Messina Denaro referred to as his ‘little books’, the two exercise books in which he wrote his notes for thirteen years. 

 The diaries were written from the period 2003 - 2026 and were given to his only daughter Lorenza, who was born from the union of the mafia boss and Franca Alagna Dec. 17 1996, when Messina Denaro had already been on the run for three years. 

 Lorenza, had not met her father until his arrest and even then, it was in a maximum-security detention centre in L’Aquila. 

 In September of 2023 she chose to assume the surname ‘Messina Denaro’.

Lorenza, with her new surname, then decided to issue a warning to Rizzoli and Abbate, with the assistance of her lawyer Franco Lo Sciuto, claiming that the diaries would ‘damage the privacy, honour and reputation’ of her deceased father. 

 Abbate confirmed there was indeed a judicial act brought forward, explaining that the matter is in the hands of his legal team and the publishing house. 

 Abbate, the chief editor of Repubblica and former director of L’Espresso, had dedicated previous books to the character of Messina Denaro. 

 The Mafia boss wrote of his daughter that ‘only I could tell her the truth about my life, as naked and raw as it has been, because only I know my life and not the others who have always talked about me and on me. I thought I owed it to her.’ 

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