Sky News Australia published February 4, 2023: Italian mafia boss arrested in France after 16 years.
After 16 years on the run police have finally arrested a convicted Italian mafia boss in France. Edgardo Greco had been living under an alias in the city of Saint-Etienne, where he had been working as a pizza chef.
BBC News published February 3, 2023: Italian mafia killer Edgardo Greco arrested after 16 years on the run.
A convicted Italian mafia killer on the run since 2006 has been caught in France, having hidden in plain sight as a pizza chef for at least three years.
Edgardo Greco was part of the 'Ndrangheta organised crime mob who originate from the Calabria region in Italy's deep south.
Greco, 63, was wanted for the murder of two brothers during a "mafia war" between two gangs in the early 1990s.
He went on to take on a new identity, calling himself Paolo Dimitrio, settling in the French city of Saint-Étienne and taking the job of pizzaiolo in an Italian restaurant.
Since 2019, investigators had traced Greco's support network, which ultimately led them across the Alps to Saint-Étienne.
In the BBC video I shared above, the BBC host asks the guest, "Is it at all linked to the arrest a few weeks ago of the Cosa Nostra boss?" The guest replied, "No. I don't think so. In fact, they belong to two separate mafia's. Mateo Messina Denaro in Sicily was a bigwig in Costra Nostra, the Sicilian mafia and Edgardo Greco was a killer with the Ndrangheta mafia, which is based in Calabria in the toe of Italy. So two separate investigations. I think it's a coincidence their arrests came one after another." (emphasis mine)
New York Post
written by Snejana Farberov
Friday February 3, 2023
Maybe he kneaded the dough.
A reputed Italian Mafia hitman known for dissolving his victims in acid was finally nabbed after 16 years on the lam — slinging pizza pies at a French restaurant.
Interpol and Italian police on Thursday announced the arrest of 63-year-old Edgardo Greco, a convicted murderer with ties to Italy’s most powerful organized crime syndicate, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta.
Italy’s ANSA news agency reported that Greco had been working for the past three years as a pizza maker in the city of Saint Etienne in southeastern France, where he had lived under the assumed name Paolo Dimitrio since 2014.
Investigations by Italian prosecutors in Catanzaro and police in Cosenza — both in southern Italy — led to the fugitive’s arrest, an Interpol statement said.
According to Interpol, Greco — who was known to his French pizzeria patrons as “Rocco” — was convicted in two homicides in 1991 and accused of attempted murder in another case involving a rival mob boss who was stabbed inside a jail.
Italian authorities said the two people brutally murdered on Jan. 5, 1991, were brothers Stefano and Giuseppe Bartolomeo, who were bludgeoned to death with a metal bar in a fish shop in Calabria.
Three years later, Greco reportedly dug up the victims’ remains to dissolve them in acid and cover up the homicides, according to the French newspaper Le Monde.
Interpol, the international police organization based in Lyon, France, said the killings were part of a “mafia war” between the Pino Sena and Perna Pranno clans that raged in Italy in the early 1990s.
Greco vanished in 2006 after a warrant was issued for his arrest as part of a sprawling Mafia trial. He was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life.
After years of living quietly in France — with a life sentence hanging over him in Italy — Greco resurfaced in July 2021 in an article published by the French newspaper Le Progres, in which the chef bragged about his “100% fresh and homemade” Italian dishes.
The article featured a photo of a beaming Greco — by then considered one of Italy’s “super fugitives” — showing off some of his regional specialties and waxing poetic about his Calabrian grandmother and his desire to recreate a little slice of his homeland in his restaurant.
The author of the article rhapsodized that while the pizza chef was Italian by birth, at heart he was a local of Saint Etienne.
“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 following Greco’s capture Thursday.
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.
Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi applauded Greco’s arrest, saying it demonstrated the country’s commitment to fighting all forms of organized crime and locating dangerous fugitives.
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