Rosalia Messina Denaro, the sister of a recently arrested mafia boss, was arrested on Friday on charges of having ties to a mafia organization, Italian police announced, Reuters reported.

Matteo Messina Denaro was Italy’s most wanted man until his arrest on January 16, after evading law enforcement for 30 years.

He received several life sentences after being found guilty of a long list of murders and other crimes.

The arrest of the mafia leader’s sister is the result of an investigation that led to the arrest of his brother, the carabinieri announced.

Investigators have long suspected that Matteo Messina Denaro was able to hide from the authorities because of the help of family members and strong loyalty to the organization he led.

How they caught the terrible “Diabolik”.

Messina Denaro, 60, was caught outside a private clinic in Palermo with an accomplice. Judicial sources said in January, at the time of Denaro’s arrest, that he had been a regular visitor to the clinic since undergoing cancer surgery last year. Illness “is one of the events in a person’s (fugitive’s) life that forces them to come forward,” Palermo prosecutor Paolo Guido said at a press conference.

After receiving a tip that he was ill, police zeroed in on Messina Denaro after eliminating other potential suspects of a similar age and illness, in part by checking the National Health System database.

In the end, the man known as “U Siccu” (the skinny one) or “Diabolik” (an Italian comic book character) did not resist and did not try to escape, Palermo’s chief prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia said.

“We caught a very dangerous fugitive without violence, we didn’t even have to use handcuffs,” he said.

Officers found a well-groomed man who appeared to be in good condition with a luxury watch worth €35,000. Messina’s police records showed Denaro wearing a brown fur-lined jacket, glasses and a brown and white wool hat.

Even though police and magistrates didn’t know what Messina-Denaro looked like, other than computer images based on photos from a decade ago, it was immediately clear they had arrested the right person.

“Looking at him, there was nothing to confirm, he was the one we expected to find,” said Colonel Lucio Arcidiacono, another head of the special unit of the Carabinieri police.

Who is Messina Denaro?

Chief prosecutor de Lucia said Messina Denaro had spent his life in hiding in various parts of Italy but had recently remained in his home province of Trapani in western Sicily and the island’s regional capital, Palermo.

Denaro was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for his role in the 1992 murder of prominent mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

He also faces life in prison for his role in the following year’s attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan that killed 10 people.

Last September, Italian police said Denaro was still giving orders for mafia activity in the western Sicilian city of Trapani, an area still considered its regional “bastille” despite his long absence from the public sphere.

Denaro, known by the nickname “Diabolik”, gained a reputation as a brutal killer after killing a rival mob boss in Trapani and strangling his girlfriend, who was three months pregnant.

He led Cosa Nostra after the capture of Bernardo Provenzano in April 2006 and Salvatore Lo Piccolo in November 2007.