After 14 years in hiding, mobster arrested by Italian police as he tucks into pasta dinner
ITALIAN police have arrested one of the country’s most wanted mobster fugitives after 14 years in hiding.
Rumours that Marco Di Lauro, 38, the angel-faced mafioso, was living a gilded life in Dubai were put to rest on Saturday when police showed up as he was tucking into a plate of pasta at the modest apartment on the gritty outskirts of northern Naples where he lived with his wife and two cats.
More than 150 officers were involved in the operation. Di Lauro has been wanted since an international arrest warrant was issued in 2006 after he narrowly escaped a 2004 police swoop known as “night of the handcuffs”.
According to Italian reports, he did not put up any resistance and was allowed to hug his wife and freshen up before being taken away by police.
He was known as F4 (quarto figlio), as he was the fourth of 10 sons of Paolo Di Lauro, once a Camorra boss. Marco Di Lauro was number two on Italy’s mostwanted list, just after Sicilian mobster Matteo Messina Denaro, who has been on the run since 1993.
Paolo Di Lauro was head of a powerful Camorra clan, which controls drug trafficking in the Naples neighbourhoods of Scampia and Secondigliano, not far from the apartment where his son was living. He was caught in 2005.
His family was involved in a bloody power struggle in 2004 known as the Scampia feud, in which at least 60 people were murdered.