A Mafia fugitive who had been on the run for 17 years after being accused of beating two brothers to death has been found working in a pizzeria in France.
Edgardo Greco, 63, was caught by Interpol after he bragged about his authentic Italian recipes in a Saint-Etienne newspaper.
The ‘Ndrangheta gangster, known as the ‘prison killer’ had lived in the French town since 2014 after fleeing an arrest warrant in 2006 over the murder of two brothers in Calabria.
Stefano and Giuseppe Bartolomeo were lured into the back of a fishmongers in 1991 and viciously beaten to death with iron bars before their bodies were dissolved in acid.
Interpol, the international police organization based in Lyon, France, said the killings were ‘part of a ‘mafia war… that marked the early 1990s’ in Italy.
Edgardo Greco, who had been on the run for 16 years, has been arrested in France where he worked as a pizza chef
His Perna-Pranno clan was linked to a string of murders as it fought for supremacy in Calabria in the 1990s.
Greco, who was jailed for bank robbery, earned his moniker after trying to stab an enemy in jail in the 1980s.
But he vanished after being accused of the double murder before appearing in France under the name Paolo Dimitrio.
He initially started working as a chef in Lyons and opened his own restaurant before moving to Saint-Etienne in 2014.
Investigators kept tabs on him via his accomplices but Greco was oblivious to their probe.
He even gave an interview about his pizza-making expertise to local newspaper Le Progres.
Italian carabinieri and anti-‘Ndrangheta police officers talk at the Interpol headquarters in Lyon
An Interpol statement said French police, with help from Italian colleagues, arrested Edgardo Greco in Saint-Etienne
Investigators kept tabs on him via his accomplices but Greco was oblivious to their probe
The article read: ‘A little corner of Italy has just taken up residence at 19 rue Pointe-Cadet.
‘This is where Paolo Dimitrio chose to make his dream come true: “to create elaborate Italian cuisine, using only fresh and homemade ingredients.”‘
Agatino Saverio Spoto, an Italian Carabinieri police official, said: ‘His passion for cooking was one of the elements that betrayed him.’
The ‘Ndrangheta, based in the ‘toe’ of the Italian peninsula, is one of the world´s most powerful cocaine traffickers and is seen as the largest threat among organized crime syndicates.
In recent years, ‘Ndrangheta mobsters have been arrested around Europe and even in Brazil.
‘No matter how hard fugitives try to slip into a quiet life abroad, they cannot evade justice forever,’ Interpol chief Jurgen Stock was quoted as saying in the statement.
Last year, one of Italy’s most wanted mobsters, Giocchino Gammino, was caught after 30 years on the run when he was spotted on Google Street View in Spain.
An Italian mafia fugitive was caught after 20 years on the run after detectives spotted him on Google Maps in Spain (pictured right, by his grocery store)
The gangster, who had been convicted of murder, fled from a prison in Rome in 2002 and was living under the radar in Galapagar, a town north of Madrid.
The 60-year-old had changed his name, worked as a chef and opened a fruit and vegetable shop.
Nearby, they found a listing for a restaurant named Cocina de Manu which had been closed for some time.
But its Facebook page was still visible online, showing Gammino posing in his chef’s whites, and the menu had a specialty of Sicilian supper, with a design similar to the icon black and white poster for The Godfather film.
But instead of the puppeteer holding the strings behind Don Corleone, a pair of hands were holding a fork and spoon with spaghetti dangling down.
And earlier this month, Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro was caught after 30 years evading justice.
Italy’s most-wanted mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro (centre), was arrested at a private hospital after 30 years on the run
The head of the notorious Cosa Nostra gang who was nicknamed ‘The Devil’ following a string of brutal murders was captured when armed police swarmed a private medical facility in Palermo, Sicily, where he was undergoing treatment.
The 60-year-old had tried to outrun the police officers on foot and pushed his way through a series of hospital doors – but he only made it as far as a bar that was part of the same building where he had been seeing doctors for colon cancer checks.
As the officers cornered the now frail mafia boss, Messina Denaro meekly gave them his name before they bundled him into a waiting black minivan in front of shocked patients and medical staff.
Messina Denaro, who had a 12-year-old boy strangled and his body dissolved in acid, was taken to a secret location by police immediately after he was detained.
A trigger man who once reportedly boasted he could ‘fill a cemetery’ with his victims, Messina Denaro was a leading figure in Cosa Nostra, the real-life Sicilian crime syndicate depicted in the Godfather movies.