Italian mob suspect Edgardo Greco found working as pizza chef after 16 years on run
A convicted killer believed to belong to one of Italy’s most powerful mafia organisations has been discovered working as a pizza chef and arrested after nearly 17 years on the run.
Edgardo Greco, 63, is suspected of belonging to the notorious ’Ndrangheta, a mafia organisation in Calabria, southern Italy. Interpol said he was arrested on Thursday in the French city of Saint-Etienne, where he had at one point run an Italian restaurant under an alias, according to French prosecutors.
Described as a “dangerous fugitive”, Greco was wanted in Italy to serve a life sentence for the murders of Stefano and Giuseppe Bartolomeo, Interpol said on Thursday.
He was also accused there of the attempted murder of Emiliano Mosciaro “as part of a mafia war between the Pino Sena and Perna Pranno gangs that marked the early 1990s”.
The Bartolomeo brothers were beaten to death with iron bars in a fish warehouse in January 1991, Italian police said. Their bodies were never found and are believed to have been dissolved in acid. Rival clans had ordered their killing because, according to gang leaders, the brothers were trying to expand their businesses by interfering with those of other crime families.
In Saint-Etienne in June 2021, Greco became the owner of an Italian restaurant called Caffe Rossini Ristorante, running it until November 2021, French prosecutors said. According to documents seen by Agence France-Presse, he used the name Paolo Dimitrio and also worked in other Italian restaurants in the city.
A Facebook account for the Caffe Rossini Ristorante, which appears to have been closed down, showed local press covered its opening in 2021. “Paolo Dimitrio opens the restaurant of his dreams,” said the headline of the article in the local newspaper Le Progres. Greco also worked evenings in a pizza restaurant under his assumed name, according to Italian media.
After his arrest in the early hours of Thursday morning, he appeared before an investigating magistrate in Lyon who formally notified him of Italy’s arrest warrant, prosecutors said. He was then placed in detention.
The Cooperation Against ’Ndrangheta project run by Interpol, which facilitates police cooperation between its 195 member states, aided in Greco’s arrest.
While still in Italy, Greco managed to avoid prison after he produced false documents attesting to a fake illness, treatment for which supposedly meant he could not be detained.
The Italian interior minister, Matteo Piantedosi, was quoted in Interpol’s statement as saying the arrests demonstrated his country’s commitment to “fighting all forms of organised crime and locating dangerous fugitives”.
The murder of the Bartolomeo brothers marked a turning point for the ’Ndrangheta. Many Calabrian mafia bosses turned informers and helped authorities arrest dozens of their confederates. ’Ndrangheta clans are characterised by deep blood relations, a trait that once made this organisation virtually impenetrable. But now many of these brothers, nephews and even children of the bosses have decided to appear as witnesses against their own relatives.
The ’Ndrangheta is considered Italy’s most extensive and powerful mafia group, Interpol said, operating worldwide and with strong ties to the trade in cocaine bound for Europe from South America.
Greco’s arrest came a week after Italian police said it had dismantled an ’Ndrangheta mafia ring dominating a large area of southern Calabria and seized assets exceeding €250m ($270m). Fifty-six people, many already in prison, were put under criminal investigation for a series of crimes including mafia-related conspiracy, extortion, kidnapping, bribery and possession of weapons, police and prosecutors said.
Last month, Italian police arrested Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the most notorious bosses of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra mafia, who had been on the run for 30 years. The 60-year-old was arrested after visiting a health clinic in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, where he was being treated.