After 20 years, fugitive Italian mafioso finally meets his match: Google Maps

ROME — Ever since he broke out of Rome’s Rebibbia prison 20 years ago where he was facing murder charges, Gioacchino Gammino had managed to evade capture. He fled to Spain, changed his name and cut ties with his family, creating a new life for himself, working as a chef in an Italian restaurant.

But last month, Italian investigators finally tracked down Gammino, 61, in a town northwest of Madrid, thanks in part to an unlikely tool: Google Maps.

“They say that fortune favors the bold,” said Gen. Nicola Altiero, deputy director of Italy’s Antimafia Investigation Department, which carried out the operation with prosecutors in Palermo, explaining how investigators used Google Maps and Street View to help them track down Gammino, a Sicilian who was on Italy’s most dangerous fugitives list.

Altiero explained how investigators used the Google tools to look up a fruit and vegetable store — El Huerto de Manu — they believed could have ties to the fugitive and happened upon an image of a man standing in front of the store.

The man in the image had the same size and build as Gammino, Altiero said, and investigators noticed the store shared the same telephone number as a nearby restaurant — La Cocina de Manu — that had closed some years ago.

But its social media pages remained online, including one with a photograph of the restaurant’s chef standing next to a wood-burning pizza oven.

Investigators applied age-progression technology to an old photo of Gammino and identified the chef as the wanted man, Altiero said.

The Spanish police unit that hunts fugitives arrested Gammino Dec. 17.

Altiero said there had been other breaks in the two-decade investigation but the discovery using the Google tools had been the key one.