A Mafia fugitive Edgardo Greco, 63, who had been on the run for 17 years after being accused of beating two brothers to death, has been arrested after he bragged about his authentic Italian recipes in a Saint-Etienne newspaper in France.
The mafia boss who was working undercover as a pizza maker had lived in the French town since 2014 after fleeing an arrest warrant in 2006 over the murder of two brothers in Calabria.
The anti-mafia police said 63-year-old Edgardo Greco was caught working as a pizzaiolo in Saint-Etienne last week.
Greco was part of the ‘Ndrangheta’ (Calabria mafia) and sentenced in absentia for the murder of two brothers from a rival clan in the 1990s.
The men are presumed to have been dissolved in acid based on the testimony of turncoats – Stefano and Giuseppe Bartolomeo were lured into the back of a fishmongers in 1991 and viciously beaten to death with iron bars before their bodies were dissolved in acid.
The anti-mafia police said Greco was convicted for the murder of brothers Stefano and Giuseppe Bartolomeo. Interpol, the international police organization based in Lyon, France, said the killings were ‘part of a ‘mafia war… that marked the early 1990s’ in Italy.
Greco, who was jailed for bank robbery, earned his moniker after trying to stab an enemy in jail in the 1980s.
But he vanished after being accused of the double murder before appearing in France under the name Paolo Dimitrio.
While in France, Greco had adopted a new identity, Paolo Dimitrio, despite being on Italy’s most wanted list since 2006.
The Italian press reported Greco was even featured in a local French paper as ‘an authentic Italian pizza maker.’
Authorities said he was arrested on an Interpol arrest warrant and will likely be extradited to Italy.
And earlier this month, Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro was caught after 30 years evading justice.
The head of the notorious Cosa Nostra gang who was nicknamed ‘The Devil’ following a string of brutal murders was captured when armed police swarmed a private medical facility in Palermo, Sicily, where he was undergoing treatment.
The 60-year-old had tried to outrun the police officers on foot and pushed his way through a series of hospital doors – but he only made it as far as a bar that was part of the same building where he had been seeing doctors for colon cancer checks.
As the officers cornered the now frail mafia boss, Messina Denaro meekly gave them his name before they bundled him into a waiting black minivan in front of shocked patients and medical staff.
