Edgardo Greco: Italian mob fugitive arrested after working as pizza maker in France

Edgardo Greco is a convicted murderer linked to Italy's most powerful organised crime group. Credit: Interpol via AP

Police in France have arrested a convicted murderer who had been on the run for more than a decade and had been reportedly working for the past three years as a pizza-maker.

An Interpol statement said French police, with help from Italian colleagues, arrested Edgardo Greco in Saint-Etienne, south-eastern France. He was wanted for two murders in 2006 and accused of attempted murder in another case.

Italy’s ANSA news agency reported that the 63-year-old had been working for the past three years as a pizza-maker in Saint Etienne, where he had lived since 2014.

Italian authorities said the two people killed in 2006 were brothers who were beaten to death with a metal bar in a fish shop in Calabria. Interpol, the international police organisation based in Lyon, France, said the killings were “part of a ‘mafia war’ ... that marked the early 1990s” in Italy.

Investigations by Italian prosecutors in Catanzaro and police in Cosenza - both in southern Italy - led to the arrest, the Interpol statement said. “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.

Italian carabinieri and anti-Ndrangheta police officers talk at the Interpol headquarters in Lyon. Credit: Interpol via AP

Greco has been linked to Italy’s most powerful organised crime group, the ’ndrangheta, one of the world’s most powerful cocaine traffickers, based in the ‘toe’ of the Italian peninsula.

Edgardo Greco's capture is the second high-profile mafia arrest by Italian authorities in recent weeks. In January, convicted mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro was arrested at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, after 30 years on the run.

The 60-year-old was captured at the clinic where he was receiving treatment for an undisclosed medical condition, according to Carabinieri General Pasquale Angelosanto - who heads the police force’s special operations squad.

Denaro, who had a power base in the port city of Trapani, in western Sicily, was considered the region's Cosa Nostra top boss even while a fugitive.

He had previously been tried in absentia and convicted of dozens of murders, and is now expected to face multiple life sentences.

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