The most wanted mobster of Italy was heading towards cafe placed outside a private Sicilian clinic that's when a policeman approached him and asked about his name.
He could have lied but he decided not to.
He merely looked up and said: "You know who I am. I am Matteo Messina Denaro."
Till that moment, the armed forces could not be sure the man really was the Mafia "boss of all bosses", who had been in their search list for almost three decades.
He was checking in for an appointment at the clinic by the false identity of Andrea Bonafede.
But after years of painstaking research, with the help of only a computerised image to go on, Italy's Carabinieri military police were confident enough he was 0the man they were looking for.
Italy's most-wanted Mafia boss arrested in Sicily
During his time at the top of the Cosa Nostra organised crime syndicate, Messina Denaro oversaw racketeering, illegal waste dumping, money-laundering and drug-trafficking. He was convicted in absentia in 2002 of a string of murders.
He was reportedly the protege of Totò Riina, head of the Corleone clan, who was arrested in 1993 after 23 years on the run.
That was also the year that Messina Denaro vanished. For 30 years investigators could rely only on a facial composite and short snippets of voice recordings to identify him.
However, in the end his hiding and depicting false personality failed when he was found in the centre of a busy city: hardly a hidden spot. After 30 years of searching, what was written in his destiny as he was spotted at such a random spot?
