On Monday, an ailing man in his 80s, was approached by a policeman near a private clinic at Sicily in Italy. The official asked for his name, to which the man replied: "You know who I am. I am Matteo Messina Denaro."
The arrest of Italy's most brutal and infamous Mafia "boss of all bosses" Matteo Messina Denaro was that uneventful. The man, who was on the run from law enforcement for three decades, didn't bother to lie or even hide his identity.
But, the arrest of Messina Denaro, the boss of the notorious Cosa Nostra Mafia of Sicily, hogged the limelight as the brutal criminal boss was the brain of the organised crime syndicate in Italy, overseeing racketeering, illegal waste dumping, money-laundering and drug-trafficking.
Over 100 members of the armed forces were involved in Messina Denaro's arrest, which was hailed by Italians who lined the streets to applaud the police.
The breakthrough happened after police received a tip off that Messina Denaro checked into an clinic under the name of Andrea Bonafede for cancer treatment. Until then, the police had little clue about the man.
All they had of him was a facial composite and short snippets of voice recordings. Though there were reported sightings of Messina Denaro from Venezuela to the Netherlands, the Mafia boss managed to evade arrest, possibly because he was protected by the crime syndicate.
"It took so long to arrest him because, as it happened with other Mafia bosses, he was protected by a very dense network of complicities, deeply-rooted and extremely powerful in Sicily and beyond," Italian journalist Andrea Purgatori told the BBC.
And, it would be the same people themselves who betrayed him at last. Many like Purgatoi believe Messina Denaro's associates tipped off the police because they decided the ailing boss was no longer useful to them.
"After all, for a long time Italy's most-wanted mafioso had felt protected enough to walk freely in the streets of Palermo, the moral capital of Cosa Nostra," said Purgatori. And, when he ended up in police net, it was in the centre of a busy city.
From acid vat to bomb blasts
Messina Denaro is believed to be involved in many brutal crimes, including the 1992 killing of anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the deadly 1993 bomb attacks in Milan, Florence and Rome. Messina Denaro was also sentenced in absentia to a life term for his role in the 1992 murders of the crime.
He was also alleged to be the man behind the kidnapping, torture and killing of the 11-year-old son of a mafioso-turned-state witness, whose body he then dissolved in a acid vat.
It is said that Messina Denaro once boasted he could "fill a cemetery" with his victims. Multiple reports claim that he first used a gun at the age of 14 and allegedly killed at 18.
Though he was ailing and cancer-striken and deemed useless for the mafia anymore, Messina Denaro lived a life of luxury. As per reports, he had no weapons in the hideout, but stacked luxury perfumes, expensive furniture and designer clothes.
According to the police, far from looking like a "destroyed man", he seemed like "a well-groomed man in a good economic condition" and was reportedly wearing a watch worth €35,000.
Police added that it was unlikely the boss himself ever used technology because of the risk of leaving digital traces.