- Matteo Messina Denaro reportedly said he was inspired by an "old Jewish saying" to avoid capture.
- Dubbed the "last godfather,'' he openly ate in restaurants and played poker in a Sicilian town.
Matteo Messina Denaro, 61, has been described in the Italian media as "Italy's last godfather" and the "boss of all bosses." When police raided his apartment, they discovered a poster of Marlon Brando in "The Godfather."
He was one of Italy's most-wanted fugitives until his arrest in January. He had been on the run for 30 years.
A new transcript of Messina Denaro's first questioning by magistrates in February shed light on his life as a fugitive, The Times reported.
He lived openly under a false name in Campobello di Mazara, a small town near his birthplace of Castelvetrano in southwestern Sicily. He would openly eat in restaurants and play poker in the town.
"I followed an old Jewish saying, 'If you want to hide a tree, plant it in a forest," Messina Denaro told magistrates, The Times reported.
It's unclear if the saying has Jewish roots.
Informers and prosecutors have alleged that Messina Denaro's mafia career included involvement in the 1992 bomb attacks — the Capaci bombing and the Via D'Amelio bombing — that killed two anti-mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, respectively.
He was also sentenced for his role in a 12-year-old's kidnapping, torture, and murder. Giuseppe Di Matteo, a mafia informant's son, was tortured for over two years before being strangled and dissolved in acid in 1996.
Messina Denaro has been linked to dozens of other mafia-related murders, CNN reported. The Guardian reported that Denaro once bragged: "I filled a cemetery all by myself."
He is the last of Italy's three most-wanted mafia bosses who eluded capture for decades, Sky News said.
Messina Denaro was transferred from L'Aquila's maximum-security jail to the city's San Salvatore hospital for surgery on Tuesday.
Gianmarco Cifaldi, the prisons ombudsman for the region, told the Italian news agency ANSA that the procedure went "very well."
Since his capture earlier this year, he has been jailed under Italy's "hard prison regime," reserved for mafia members and other high-security criminals.
Messina Denaro has cancer and underwent surgery for an intestinal obstruction this week. The former mafia boss was surviving on a diet of fruit juices and food supplements, his lawyer, Alessandro Cerella, told the AGI, or Italian Journalistic Agency, Reuters reported.
Cerella had told Italian media that his condition was "incompatible" with the prison regime and that his client required "immediate hospitalization."
Messina Denaro appears to be keeping "omertà," the mafia code of silence, until the end. He told magistrates he had no intention of seeking time off his jail sentence by betraying his fellow mafiosos and has refused to admit he was in the Cosa Nostra — the Sicilian Mafia.
"He will never talk, partly because he is dying and partly because of his total loyalty to Cosa Nostra," Teresa Principato, a special anti-mafia magistrate who has long taken part in the hunt for Messina Denaro, said, The Times reported.