Mafioso turned pizza chef ‘betrayed by his love of cooking’

A MAFIA killer who had his victims dissolved in acid but forged a new life as a pizza maker in France was arrested after being on the run for 17 years.

Edgardo Greco, 63, was captured in the city of Saint-etienne in France, where he had been working as a chef and “pizzaiolo” or pizza maker.

He had adopted the alias Paolo Dimitrio, Italian police said.

He had been a fugitive from justice for nearly two decades but was so confident that he would not be caught that in 2021 he gave an interview to a local newspaper, talking about the Italian dishes his restaurant offered.

“He was betrayed by his passion for cooking,” said Col Agatino Saverio Spoto, a Carabinieri commander involved in the hunt for the fugitive.

“He had worked as a chef in a noted restaurant in Lyon, he managed his own restaurant and more recently he was working as a pizzaiolo.”

Le Progrès, a local newspaper, featured his restaurant, called Caffe Rossini, telling readers that the Italian chef offered customers “all the tastes of the gastronomy of his home country”.

“Paolo Dimitrio opens the restaurant of his dreams” ran the headline.

Greco is wanted for the murder of two brothers, Stefano and Giuseppe Bartolomeo, who were beaten to death with metal bars in a fishmonger’s in the town of Cosenza in Calabria in 1991.

Their corpses were never recovered and investigators believe that they were dissolved in acid.