Leonardo "Narduzzo" Messina (born San Cataldo, September 22, 1955) is a Sicilian former mafioso who became a government informant or "pentito" in 1992.
Messina has implicated several politicians and government officials with ties to Sicilian Mafia, in particular Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister for Italy.
In April 1982 after serving four years for armed robbery he eventually became a "man of honour" in the local Mafia family of San Cataldo.
Messina became a close friend of Giuseppe Madonia, the boss of Vallelunga – one of the most important Mafia families in the province of Caltanissetta and an ally of the Corleonesi.
He was the first mafioso to start collaborating after the Capaci massacre in which judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three men of his police escort were killed.
[3][4] Messina started to collaborate on June 30, 1992 and was a goldmine of information to Falcone’s colleague Paolo Borsellino, especially about the workings of the Mafia in central and southern Sicily.
[6] He revealed the identity of Totò Riina's "minister of public works" Angelo Siino – a businessman who oversaw the Mafia’s public-sector contracts, collected the bribes, met the entrepreneurs and politicians, made the threats and, if necessary, ordered the killings.
He was the first pentito to name Giulio Andreotti as the ultimate point of reference of a chain of political exchanges that should have adjusted the sentence of the Maxi Trial that had established Cosa Nostra a single hierarchical organisation ruled by a Commission and that its leaders could be held responsible for criminal acts that were committed to benefit the organisation (the so-called Buscetta theorem).
According to Messina, there was widespread resentment within Cosa Nostra toward the Andreotti faction of the Christian Democracy and the Craxi group of the Italian Socialist Party.
In their opinion they had failed to block the confirmation of the sentence of the Maxi Trial by the Italian Supreme Court in January 1992, which upheld the Buscetta theorem.
The knowledge about the inner workings of the top echelon of Cosa Nostra, he obtained from Giuseppe Madonia – considered to be the number two of the Mafia around 1990.