The story of Italy’s most-wanted Mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, whose latest arrest by police in Palermo after 30 years on the run made international headlines, is ready to turn out to be a big-budget movie.
Rome-based producer Marco Belardi (“Perfect Strangers”) has acquired rights to ace anti-Mafia journalist Lirio Abbate’s e book concerning the Cosa Nostra boss. The e book is titled “U Siccu,” which is Sicilian dialect that interprets as “The Skinny One.”
Messina Denaro was arrested in mid-January by dozens of cops exterior an upscale medical facility in Palermo the place he had been present process most cancers remedy for a yr underneath false id.
Belardi’s firm Bamboo Productions has introduced plans for the story of this elusive high mafioso, convicted of masterminding a few of Italy’s most heinous slayings – together with the killings of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and the grisly homicide of a Mafia turncoat’s younger son, who was strangled earlier than his physique was dissolved in a vat of acid – to turn out to be “a significant movement image” directed by a nonetheless unspecified high Italian helmer, it stated in an announcement.
Abbate’s e book, which is revealed by Rizzoli and has bought properly in Italy, is a portrait of Messina Denaro that delves into varied points of his life and character together with his love of luxurious from an early age; his womanizing amid Palermo’s nightlife; and his being a ruthless killer who rose up the ranks to turn out to be the operative who applied Cosa Nostra’s choice within the Nineteen Nineties to kill the nation’s high anti-Mafia prosecutors with consecutive bombings in 1992 in addition to dozens of different murders. It additionally covers his function as father and his potential as a fugitive and as a businessman who cast ties with politics, the monetary world, and Italy’s Freemasonry.
Bamboo Production was launched final yr by Belardi, who previously headed movie and TV firm Lotus Production, which in addition to producing globally tailored megahit “Perfect Strangers,” additionally spawned a gentle stream of different hits equivalent to Gabriele Muccino’s “There Is No Place Like Home,” which in 2018 pulled in additional than $10 million regionally, and has been spun off not too long ago right into a profitable TV sequence for Sky.
