ROME – Daughter of the former lover of the deceased Cosa Nostra boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, has been sentenced to a prison term of four years and eight months as she was allegedly a part of the ‘magical circle’ that protected Messina Denaro during his many years in hiding, the Palermo Prosecutor's Office has found. 

 On Wednesday, Martina Gentile, the daughter of teacher Laura Bonafede, a historic lover of the boss of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, was sentenced by the G.U.P. to four years and eight months and a year of probation. Sig.ra Gentile was considered a fundamental pawn in the fugitive assistance and communication network and has been accused of aiding and abetting the evasion of law enforcement. She was arrested in December 2023.

 According to legal proceedings Martina, who for years lived with her mother and boss, while he was in hiding, managed the exchange of Messina Denaro’s various correspondences. As for the mother, the prosecutor of the Palermo D.D.A. Gianluca De Leo had recommended 8 years of imprisonment. In the dozens of notes found in the hideouts of the former mafia boss, the investigators had been able to ascertain that Gentile was raised by Matteo Messina Denaro, as his daughter.

 Gentile's own father is serving two life sentences for many murders commissioned by the mafia boss. The mother, Laura Bonafede, was handed down a summary judgement of 11 years and 4 months for mafia association, last November. 

‘She joined [the mafia] without any reservations’, the judges wrote in their justification of the sentence.

  Messina Denaro had written about his ‘admiration’ of Gentile in some documents addressed to his sisters, saying that he had read the obituary that Gentile, the granddaughter of the mafia boss Leonardo Bonafede, had written a year after the death of her grandfather. ‘Leonardo Bonafede was a friend of our father; I knew him too. He died a few years ago. The Martina who signed it ... is his granddaughter.’

  According to what was reconstructed by the investigators, in reality, for years the boss used to live with Laura Bonafede and her daughter sharing a family ménage. 

 When questioned by the investigating judge after her arrest, Gentile had chosen not to answer, but made various spontaneous statements, saying that she was fond of the mafia boss when she was a child, but that she now understood that he was not deserving of that affection.

  Gentile claimed that she only saw the true face of the boss and the truth of his relationship with her mother, recently. This is was then why she tried to distance herself from the environment in which she grew up, by going to teach in Pantelleria, leaving her home town of Campobello di Mazara and starting a path of legality through interviews with social workers and anti-mafia associations.

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