A notorious mafia boss who escaped from a high-security prison in Italy last year using bedsheets has been recaptured in France, according to authorities in both countries.
Marco Raduano, recognized as dangerous on Europol’s list of most wanted criminals, was captured in Bastia on the French island of Corsica, authorities said on Friday.
The 40-year-old from the Adriatic seaside town of Vieste had in February 2023 managed to break out of the high-security wing of Nuoro, in Sardinia, using the traditional method of knotted bedsheets to scale down the walls in a significant embarrassment for Italian authorities.
Matteo Piantedosi, the Italian interior minister, also declared that Raduano’s accomplice, Gianluigi Troiano, had been detained near Granada in Spain, marking “another significant blow to organised crime”.
Raduano is the head of the Gargano clan, operating within the ““fifth mafia”, a relatively unknown criminal syndicate based in Foggia, a southern province in Italy’s Puglia. He was serving a 24-year prison sentence for various crimes, including involvement in a criminal organisation, drug trafficking and illegal weapons possession, Europol reported.
Europol said he was the top figure in the group and a ruthless killer, responsible for carrying out murders, drug trafficking and extortion.
Alongside Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Camorra in Naples and the Sacra Corona Unita, investigators have in recent years identified the Puglia-based crime organisation, which had been operating largely under the radar, as a fifth mafia.
According to prosecutors, it is a group characterised by a high degree of aggression and violence, “one that feeds cadavers to pigs so as not to leave a trace. An unrefined mafia in its actions, and for this reason dangerous,” authorities said.
The mafia in Foggia province emerged in the late 1970s, when the head of the Neapolitan mafia and founder of the New Organised Camorra, Raffaele Cutolo, met a delegation of local criminals in Puglia with the goal of “hiring” them and extending his influence into the contraband trade in cigarettes in the Balkans.
However, Cutolo’s plan failed after an internal struggle from which one clan emerged victorious and gradually began infiltrating other areas of Puglia.
The Foggia mafia is believed to have killed over 360 people in the Gargano area alone, 80% of which remain unsolved.
