Rome — Giuseppe Setola, the Naples Mafia boss who eluded a police raid earlier this week by escaping through a trapdoor in his hideout into the sewers, has been arrested after two days on the run.

Setola, 38, one of Italy’s 30 most wanted men, was captured at Mignano Monte Lungo, not far from his home at Caserta near Naples. Police said that he was about to leave a Mafia safe house where he had taken refuge to go to a clinic for treatment to a fractured wrist, an injury apparently sustained during his flight through the sewers.

When police arrived to arrest him he tried to flee across the rooftops but was caught. “You have won,” he is said to have told police as he surrendered. Setola is wanted for a number of murders, police said, including the killing of African immigrants at Castelvolturno last year in a gangland turf war over drugs trafficking.

Roberto Maroni, the Interior Minister, said that the capture of Setola was a severe blow to the Camorra, the Naples Mafia. Setola’s two bodyguards were also arrested.

Mafia boss Giuseppe Setola who escaped through sewer is caught – Richard Owen – From Times Online – January 14, 2009 – This story was found at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5520153.ece

Stereotypes become stereotypes because nine times out of 10 they are true. Hear the words “Mafia boss” and you think: olive-skinned with dark, slightly bloodshot eyes and a sharp suit.

Louis Ferrante fulfils some of those preconceptions. He is New York Italian, powerfully built, and was wearing a black shirt when interviewed for HARDtalk by Sarah Montague.

He worked for John Gotti of the infamous Gambino crime family, which pulled off some of the most lucrative heists in American history.

But he is younger than you would think, given that he ran his own “crew” and did nine years in jail before deciding to change his life and become a writer.

Ferrante’s moment of truth came when a prison guard at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center described him and his kind as “animals”.

Two months in solitary forced him to ponder the question: was he an animal? If so, why was he one?

“I thought about the people I’d victimised… and I realised I did deserve to be in a zoo,” he recalls.

For the first time in his life he started reading books, looking deeper into himself and searching for some answers.

He set himself the challenge to read the entire prison library.

“Prison was the greatest thing that happened to me, because it gave me time to look inside myself, the solitude that I needed to take a closer look at everything around me; to analyse myself.”

He educated himself and converted to Judaism.

Burgers and fries
Given his experience behind bars, Ferrante believes the prison services should be about giving inmates the opportunity to change their lives.

But before his own transformation, Ferrante’s “greatest aspiration” was always to be a member of the Mafia.

A kid with big balls and no brains can go from flat broke to fat pockets with one good stick-up. It’s the quickest money on the street
Louis Ferrante

Video: Louis Ferrante on HARDtalk

He started off as a kid, sawing the tops of meters to get the coins, and hijacked his first truck as a teenager, using a gun.

“I was 17 years old. I liked girls. I liked to drive fast cars. I liked hamburgers and French fries.

“And I’d just realised that I liked to hijack trucks”.

A common misconception about the Mafia is that you have to have a genetic link to a “family” in order to be a member.

Not so, says Ferrante. The most famous Mob bosses were not born into “the Life”.

Lucky Luciano, Thomas Lucchese, Carlos Marcello and Vito Genovese all started out as petty thieves, graduating to bigger crimes as the years passed. So did John Gotti and so did Ferrante.

Career criminal
Whether he is accurately described as a “boss” is debatable.

His memoir, Tough Guy, more modestly describes him as a “Mafia insider”.

But he was on the list being passed around the five Mafia families and was on the verge of being “made” when he was arrested for racketeering.

“I had a dozen good men under me… I was already equal to a made man, since I answered directly to the heads of my family.”

In a legitimate business he would be considered middle management.

At the height of his criminal career Ferrante had the trappings of wealth.

“I’d drop $10,000 at the tables in Atlantic City, pick up a $500 tab at a steakhouse, and hand out hundreds to anyone with a story.”

He made his money robbing trucks, selling on bent goods bought with fake credit cards made from stolen numbers, dealing with anything from high quality white goods to government bonds.

In an early mistake he robbed a truck load of cheap underwear.

“I was stuck with 500 boxes of brassieres I couldn’t sell as slingshots”.

But mostly his jobs were highly lucrative.

Money collector
His book enables you to check what you think you know about the New York Italian underworld with reality.

You have to be Italian to be “made”? True.

Under no circumstances do you take your beef with another gangster to his home, involving his family. Also true.

He consorted with characters like Bert the Zip, Tony the Twitch and Barry the Brokester, who always maintained he could not pay you because he was broke.

Bobby Butterballs he leaves us to work out for ourselves.

He maintains that there is honour amongst thieves:

“Jimmy and I had no contract, no lawyers, no bill of sale; a handshake sealed the deal. Try that in the straight world”.

And he would have you believe that he was a nice cuddly gangster. He maintains he never murdered anyone.

But that was perhaps more by luck than judgement.

Ferrante glosses over quite how much he injured people, and he admits in his book that he beat someone up and left him not knowing whether he was alive or dead.

Collecting money, he says, was easy for him. “I collected $20,000 from a guy who owned a dress company in a garment centre. I threatened to hang him out the window. He paid, even though his office was on the first floor.”

When HARDtalk presenter Sarah Montague asked him how he asserted himself in prison he used elliptical phrases like: I would have to “declare myself” or “express myself”.

Writing his life story cannot have been an easy decision. The Mafia are not keen on insiders discussing their modus operandi.

He has changed the names to protect the innocent and conceal the guilty, and says as a matter of honour he has never ratted on his former associates.

HARDtalk’s interview with Louis Ferrante is broadcast on Wednesday 3 September.

On BBC News TV channel at 04:30 BST & 23:30 BST

How books changed Mafia man’s life – By Bridget Osborne – BBC HARDtalk – Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/7588537.stm – Published: 2008/09/03 03:48:57 GMT

Sicilian police have launched a manhunt for one of America’s ten most-wanted criminals after apparently spotting him in Taormina.

James “Whitey” Bulger, 78, has been on the run for 12 years after being convicted on 18 counts of murder and several other charges of running a Mafia operation. There is a bounty of $1 million on his head.

Bulger was the inspiration for the villain played by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s film The Departed.

The last known sighting of the Irish-American former leader of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang was in Piccadilly Circus in London in 2002.

He fled the United States after being tipped off about his imminent arrest, and is known to have stashed cash in safety deposit boxes in Florida, Canada, Ireland and the UK.

The new pictures, released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on its website, show a man resembling Bulger walking with a woman who is thought to be his 56-year-old girlfriend, Catherine Greig.

The pictures, and a video, were shot by a member of the US enforcement agency while he was on holiday on the island in April.

“We worked hard to find him all through the summer after the FBI officials came to us with the photo,” said Santino Giuffrè, the head of police in Messina.

Undercover agents, armed with hidden cameras, have patrolled all of the island’s tourist sites since the sighting.

Teams were also dispatched to scour the bars, hotels and restaurants of Italy’s other tourist cities.

Mr Giuffrè said: “We have not been able to track him down. But our search is continuing.

“We think Bulger came to Taormina just on holiday and that he left the tourist area in Spring. But we are probing his contacts in Sicily.”

Several New York crime bosses have been spotted this year in Palermo, where they are thought to be working with local mafiosi.

The FBI has appealed for anyone on holiday in Sicily between March and May who spotted the couple to come forward.

Officials said they had not conclusively proved that the photograph is of Bulger. Warren Bamford, who heads the FBI’s office in Boston, said: “It is a very good look-a-like, probably the best we have seen in a very long time.”

Howie Carr, a journalist with the Boston Herald who Bulger once tried to kill, said that he thought it was him, and remarked on “a certain menace in his gait”.

According to his FBI profile, Bulger is an “avid reader with an interest in history and is known to frequent libraries and historic sites”.

Taormina boasts an Ancient Greek amphitheatre, as well as a smaller playhouse built by the Roman Emperor Augustus.

Salvatore Cilona, the head of the Taormina’s tourism department, said Mr Bulger’s appearance would boost the city.

“Excuse me for my cynicism,” he said. “But it will be good for tourism and promote Taormina across the world.

“We have always had famous criminals here, like Lucky Luciano,” he added.

Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who masterminded the international expansion of the heroin trade, visited Taormina in 1962 to stay with a friend.

Most-wanted mafia killer ‘spotted’ in Sicily – By Malcolm Moore, Rome Correspondent – Last Updated: 2:29am BST 17/09/2007 – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/16/wfbi116.xml

The head of Italy’s anti-Mafia task force has said that the criminal gang behind the deaths of six men in Germany is now the most powerful crime syndicate in Europe.

Video: New Mafia murder theory

The ‘Ndrangheta, or Calabrian Mafia, is blamed for Wednesday’s murder of six Italians in Duisburg.

Pietro Grasso, Italy’s anti-Mafia commissioner, said the killings demonstrated that it was now operating globally. Other experts warned that the ‘Ndrangheta was also active in Britain, where it controlled the flow of Colombian cocaine.

Mr Grasso said it was clear that the ‘Ndrangheta, which for years has been relatively unknown compared with the much more famous Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, “has now assumed major economic power, especially in international drug dealing”.

The ‘Ndrangheta is thought to control almost all of Colombia’s cocaine exports to Europe, which flow through the port town of Gioia di Tauro in Calabria, southern Italy.

“This organisation is now all over Europe and even has a hand in politics,” said Mr Grasso. He added that “no country in the world” would stop it, until the international banking system became less opaque. “We can find the drugs and the people, but we cannot track the money. There is no doubt that money is moving to Colombia, so why can we not see it?” he asked.

“We have increased the number of our raids and checks enormously, but the strategy is absolutely useless. The people who traffic drugs make sure they do not violate the banking norms over the transfer of capital, and they act openly and with the help of major financial experts.”

There are thought to be 73 clans within the ‘Ndrangheta, which is pronounced “en-drang-ay-ta”.

The latest report from Italy’s secret services show that it has become the country’s largest criminal organisation, with an estimated 10,000 men compared with the three to four thousand in Cosa Nostra. The report also said the syndicate has “uncontested” control over the drug market.

Antonio Nicaso, the author of Blood Brothers, a book on the ‘Ndrangheta, said it was the only truly global Italian crime syndicate.

“The ‘Ndrangheta has been very adept at modernising itself. It uses the internet to recycle the money from its activities and holds a monopoly on Colombian cocaine into Europe. They have direct links with the Colombians and with terrorist organisations. It is almost certainly involved in the UK as well,” he said.

Unlike the Sicilian Mafia, which is organised into families, the ‘Ndrangheta uses a system of arranged marriages to enmesh its members into a tight set of relationships.

The second ‘Ndrangheta war from 1985-91 claimed 700 lives and several blood feuds are still running today.

Calabrian Mafia is ‘Europe’s top crime gang’ – By Malcolm Moore in Rome – Last Updated: 4:00am BST 20/08/2007 – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/17/wmafia117.xml

The report, part of the Parlamento series, was produced to coincide with the debate in the parliament in November on a report from MEP Giusto Catania (GUE/NGL, IT).

His report, recommending that the EU accedes to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), now has been adopted by the parliament.

The programme includes comments from Catania; Francesco Galante of ‘Addiopizzo’; Sicilian MP Rita Borsellino; Fausto Amato of SOS Impresa; and Lucio Guarino of the ‘Development & Legality’ group.

Duration: 8’27”
Language: English

To watch the programme now, click on the link below. It also is part of the 24/7 schedule on EUX.TV, the Europe channel, throughout the day.

» Program on air: Parlamento: Fighting Corruption in Sicily (EP, 8’04″)

BRUSSELS, 3 Jan, (EUX.TV) http://www.eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=2061