A Clever Agent’: Notes From ‘Watchers’ Of Spy Kim Philby Made Public For First Time

Vanessa Thorpe at the British newspaper the Guardian reports on a new exhibition at the National Archives in London that reveals the extent of the MI5 operation to expose the British double agent and traitor Kim Philby.

Secret surveillance of Britain’s ­notorious double agent, Kim Philby, made public for the first time in archived documents, reveals how keenly the Security Service wanted to confirm or disprove early suspicions of his high-level treachery. 

In daily bulletins submitted to MI5 in November 1951, undercover operatives describe how Philby, codenamed Peach, moved about London.

They said he gave “no outward sign of being either nervous or on the alert, but your well trained man should not do so; every movement is natural – again as it should be”.

The notes, from official ­“watchers” who were tailing Philby and bugging his phone, raise a key question about how the arch-traitor eventually escaped justice: did the British establishment deliberately protect him, or simply hope to avoid a public scandal? Mark Dunton, of the National Archives, believes the ­documents, which go on display in the ­exhibition, “MI5: Official Secrets,” next week at Kew, west London, shed light on one of the most shady ­periods of British ­espionage. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the link below:

‘A clever agent’: notes from ‘watchers’ of spy Kim Philby made public for first time | Kim Philby | The Guardian

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine piece on Kim Philby via the link below:

Paul Davis On Crime: A Look Back At The Notorious British Double Agent And Traitor Kim Philby

'Generous And Reflective’: Letters Show Other Sides To Macho Ernest Hemingway

Dalya Alberge at the British newspaper the Guardian offers a look at The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1934-1936. 

He cultivated a hard-drinking macho image, with a taste for big-game hunting and a love of bullfighting, but Ernest Hemingway had a generous and thoughtful side that is revealed in previously unpublished letters. 

In the decade after he made his name with A Farewell to Arms, his 1929 war novel, his correspondence shows that he repeatedly offered advice and encouragement – as well as insights into his own craft – to aspiring young novelists.

In a letter from 1934, he wrote: “The real secret in writing a novel is to keep inside of your action all the time like a horse. Don’t let the damned horse run away on you when you are going to have to keep racing him forever. And always stop at an interesting place when you still know what is going to happen.

“Then you can go on from there the next day and the next and etc. Never write yourself out in those bursts. It is just like making a 300-mile race a succession of runaways. Do a certain amount every day or every two days and always stop where it is interesting and while you are going good.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

‘Generous and reflective’: letters show other sides to macho Ernest Hemingway | Ernest Hemingway | The Guardian

You can also read my Philadelphia Inquirer review of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1926-1929 below:  

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man By Nicholas Shakespeare Review – The Other International Man Of Mystery

I've always thought that Ian Fleming, sans fist and gun fights, was a more interesting character than his creation, James Bond. 

A naval intelligence officer during WWII and a journalist before and after the war, Fleming led a most interesting life. 

So I look forward to reading Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Ian Fleming and covering it in my Washington Times On Crime column when the book is published in America later this year. 

Anthony Cummins at the British newspaper the Guardian offers a review of Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Ian Fleming: 

Nicholas Shakespeare’s elegant biography of the James Bond author Ian Fleming takes its subtitle from a journalist’s observation, quoted halfway through, that its subject was “for a moment of time, a complete man” while working for British naval intelligence in the second world war.

 

Yet you can’t help read it as a promise to give the reader what was left out of previous biographies such as John Pearson’s crisp, more portable authorized life from 1966. And is there a claim, too, for the alpha male credentials of the man called “Flemingway” by his friend Noël Coward? Journalist, stockbroker, thriller writer and – like his famous creation – a playboy and 70-a-day smoker, who died of a heart attack in 1964 at the age of 56 after a plagiarism row over the origins of Thunderball, the ninth Bond novel.

 

After a dutiful account of how Fleming’s Scottish financier grandfather became a millionaire – later cutting Fleming and his brothers out of his will – Shakespeare gets going with his subject’s troubled boyhood in the shadow of his father’s death in the first world war. Family friends in Switzerland take his education in hand after hasty exits from Eton (hanky-panky with a woman) and Sandhurst (gonorrhea). His exams aren’t good enough for the Foreign Office; an engagement to a Swiss lover ends amid maternal threats to cut off his allowance.

 

He falls on his feet at Reuters – it was that kind of life – further honing his knack for a scoop at the Sunday Times, a handy source of contacts for his war work.

Shakespeare goes to great lengths – not least tracking down a 94-year-old veteran, the last surviving member of a covert commando unit that Fleming organized – to dispel the idea that Fleming’s service, occluded by state-sanctioned secrecy, was just “in-trays, out-trays and ashtrays”. 

The book’s first half puts the future author at the heart of military and journalistic history – a search for German weapons of mass destruction; the race to get an inside scoop on the Cambridge spies – as well as the bedroom shenanigans of the English well-to-do.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare review – the other international man of mystery | Biography books | The Guardian 

Note: Below is a photo of Commander Ian Fleming during WWII:

Corleone: The Sicilian Town Trying To Break Free Of Its Mobster Past

As I’ve noted here before, back in 1975 I was a student of crime, an aspiring crime writer and a sailor stationed on a U.S. Navy tugboat at the American nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland. 

Undecided if I wanted to go home to the USA or stay in the Navy and get stationed in Italy, I visited Naples, Italy and Palermo, Sicily before I made my decision. 

Being half-Italian on my mother's side, I wanted to see where the Guardino clan came from in Sicily. And having read Mario Puzo's The Godfather several times and having seen Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and The Godfather, Part Two films several times, I simply had to visit the Sicilian town of Corleone. 

I spent a day in Corleone, a quaint and quiet town that belies its' rich history of blood, murder and organized crime. Corleone is the town where The Godfather’s fictional Vito Corleone came from, and Corleone was also the town where true-life Cosa Nostra bosses, such as Salvatore "Toto" Riina, also came from. 

I enjoyed my time in Naples, Palermo and Corleone, but I decided to leave the Navy and go home. 

Lorenzo Tondo at the Guardian offers a piece on modern-day Corleone and how the Sicilian town is trying to break free of it mobster past.

If it weren’t called Corleone, this small, quaint town would appear to visitors as one of many others of the Sicilian hinterland: groups of elderly people strolling in a semi-deserted square, rows of low sand-coloured houses and a 16th-century church on the highest hill. 

It would be difficult to imagine that for almost half a century it was the stronghold of the mafia’s bloodiest and most powerful clan, and the fiefdom of Italy’s most feared mobster, Totò Riina. Immortalised in cinema and literature by The Godfather, it became synonymous with organised crime, even if the bosses who once governed it – Riina, Luciano Leggio and Bernardo Provenzano – are now dead.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

Corleone: the Sicilian town trying to break free of its mobster past | Mafia | The Guardian 

Alleged Sicilian Cosa Nostra Members Among 91 Jailed In Italy Over EU Subsidies Fraud

The British newspaper the Guardian offers a piece on Sicilian Cosa Nostra members receiving prison sentences for subsidies fraud.

Judges in Italy have handed down prison sentences to 91 people, including alleged mafia members, after a large-scale EU agricultural subsidies fraud.

According to magistrates in the Sicilian city of Messina, mobsters fraudulently received more than €5m (£4.3m) in subsidies between 2010 and 2017, including funds for thousands of hectares of “ghost” farmland in the east of the island that was either nonexistent, stolen from farmers or owned by the Italian state or regional government.

The sentences ranged from two years to 30. Among the charges that resulted in convictions were extortion, fraud against the EU and mafia association.

Prosecutors said the Batanesi mafia clan – one of the oldest crime families on the island, operating in the Nebrodi regional park, a hilly region popular for grazing – was believed to be at the centre of the fraud, which allegedly involved more than 150 companies.

Annual EU agricultural subsidies of up to €1,000 a hectare provide an incentive to organised crime. A magistrate wrote in the investigation file that it was often the case that one phone call from an organised crime boss was enough to prompt a farmer to give up his land out of fear of retaliation. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

Alleged mafia members among 91 jailed in Italy over EU subsidies fraud | Italy | The Guardian   

'The Serpent': A Fascinating True Crime Series Now Streaming On Netflix

Last night my wife and I finished watching The Serpent, a true crime limited series that is now streaming on Netflix.  We enjoyed the grim but fascinating crime series. 

The series, which originally aired on the BBC in the United Kingdom, covers the horrific story of Charles Sobhraj (played by Tahar Rahim), a sociopathic conman and murderer who drugged, robbed and killed perhaps 24 or more young hippie travelers in the 1970s as they passed through Thailand and other countries.

With a stellar cast unknown to most Americans (I only recognized one British actor in the series) and exotic locales, the series is compelling. 

After watching the series, I went to AbeBooks.com and purchased a copy of the book the series was based on, On the Trail of the Serpent: The Epic Hunt for the Bikini Killer, by Richard Neville and Julie Clark (seen in the below photo). I look forward to learning more about this unrepentant murderer and thief. 

Richard Neville died, but his wife and co-author Julie Clark offers a piece at the Guardian on how they came to write the book. 

It was 1977 and my boyfriend and I were working as journalists in New York. I was 23 and Richard Neville, who later became my husband, was 33. Richard, who had already achieved notoriety in the UK with his anti-establishment Oz magazine, was offered a contract to write a book about Charles Sobhraj, a young French Vietnamese man who had just been arrested for murder after an international manhunt.

 Forever enterprising, the first thing Sobhraj had done after his arrest was sell the rights to his life story to a Bangkok businessman, who sold them on to Random House, who asked Richard to immediately get to Delhi. The case would become a sensation, involving trickery, drugs, gems, gun running, corruption, dramatic prison escapes and a glamorous female accomplice who was photographed wearing big sunglasses and holding a fluffy dog. “Death Stalks the Hippy trail!” read one headline. 

It was our connection with the so called hippy trail that had landed Richard the contract; the fact that crime reporting, and indeed the world of crime, was alien to us had seemed of no consequence. We bundled ourselves off to Delhi and landed ourselves in a moral quagmire.

In our hotel room we met with scarfaced crims bringing messages from Sobhraj in Tihar prison. Richard speedily learned the arts of bribery and corruption and arranged regular access to interview him. The first time we met Sobhraj he was chained to a guard and shackled, but he welcomed us graciously. (Did we really have to shake hands with him? Those hands had snapped necks.) And so began our immersion in his psychopathic world.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

On the Trail of The Serpent: the story behind the true crime classic | How I wrote | The Guardian

Note: I visited Southeast Asia in 1970-1971 while serving on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. Sobhraj didn’t try to victimize American soldiers or sailors for two reasons. One, a missing American serviceman would bring heat, and two, an American serviceman, even drugged, would have kicked his ass.

Unseen Spoof By Raymond Chandler Shows Writer's 'Human Side'

 Alison Flood at the Guardian offers a piece on the publishing of a humorous letter by the late, great crime novelist Raymond Chandler.

Best known for his hardboiled stories starring private detective Philip Marlowe, a more playful side of Raymond Chandler is set to be revealed in a previously unpublished spoof of corporate culture, which was discovered in the Bodleian library in Oxford.

Chandler’s Advice to an Employer, which was found with several of the author’s papers, is being published in the Strand magazine this month for the first time. Short and comic, it sees the author doling out tongue-in-cheek advice such as, “Always tell your secretary you have nothing to dictate until it is time for dinner. Then rattle off a lot of letters you have left since domesday.”

In a series of “personal requests we have heard from time to time, from employees to employer”, Chandler also advises: “Please do not go to sleep in the middle of the day”, “Please do not fall on your employee or their animals”, and “No working while drinking.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/05/unseen-spoof-by-raymond-chandler-shows-writers-human-side

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Raymond Chandler via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/11/on-raymond-chandlers-influence-on-crime.html 

Ian Fleming Would Agree: Sean Connery Voted Best James Bond, With Timothy Dalton Coming In Second

To me, having seen Sean Connery portray James Bond in the early 1960s when I was a kid, the great Scot actor will always be the ideal actor to have portrayed Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond.

I think Ian Fleming would agree.

“The man they have chosen for Bond, Sean Connery, is a real charmer – fairly unknown but a good actor with the right looks and physique,” Ian Fleming stated in a letter to a friend as Dr No was being filmed.

In my view, Timothy Dalton (seen in the below photo), having appeared as James Bond in two films, is the second-best Bond.

Catherine Shoard at the Guardian notes that the readers of the Radio Times agree with me.

She offers a piece at the Guardian on the Radio Times survey that voted Sean Connery as the greatest James Bond actor, with Timothy Dalton in second place.

Sean Connery has swept to victory in a new survey seeking to find the best ever James Bond, with actors assumed to be strong contenders sidelined in favour of dark sheep.

Connery took 56% of the vote in the first round of the Radio Times poll; as befits the gravity of the issue at hand, a complicated multi-knockout round system was employed.

In the final reckoning, Timothy Dalton was the surprise runner-up, taking 32% of the votes in the climactic round, with Connery on 44% and Pierce Brosnan on 23%.

Trailing behind were Roger Moore – often assumed to be a firm fan favourite – incumbent Bond Daniel Craig, and George Lazenby.

Connery, 89, is often felt to be the definitive 007 not simply because he was the first actor to take the part, in 1962’s Dr No, but because of his facility with a quip and an eyebrow.

Ian Fleming, on whose books the Bond series is based, initially favoured Cary Grant for the part, but warmed up to Connery after he proved a critical and commercial hit. Connery’s tenure lasted a total of seven movies.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/aug/10/sean-connery-voted-best-bond-with-timothy-dalton-and-pierce-brosnan-runners-up?fbclid=IwAR3gee5zD7

Note: Yes, Ian Fleming was not immediately taken with working class and rugged Sean Connery as James Bond, and yes, he wanted Cary Grant or some other established British actor to land the part, but as I noted above, Ian Fleming was won over by Sean Connery as they were filming Dr. No.

And people liked Connery for his rugged looks and fine acting ability, rather than just his facility with a quip. And Roger Moore, not Sean Connery, was the actor whose favored acting technique was the raised eyebrow.

Puglia Crimewave Points To Emergence Of 'Fifth' Italian Mafia

Lorenzo Tondo at the Guardian offers a piece on an emerging fifth organized crime group in Italy.

Alongside Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Camorra in Naples and the Sacra Corona Unita, investigators have identified an emerging Puglia-based crime organisation that has remained under their radar for several years.

Judicial investigations had suggested mafia activity in northern Puglia, but confirmation from government authorities came after three car bombings in Foggia in January and the year’s first murder, when gunmen on a scooter shot a 50-year-old man in his car. The violence in Foggia prompted the interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese, to send a team of anti-mafia investigators to Puglia.

Signs of the criminal clan’s activities predated these incidents. There was an average of one murder a week, one robbery a day and an extortion attempt every 48 hours in Foggia province in 2017 and 2018.

“The Foggia mafia is relatively young,” the head prosecutor for the city, Ludovico Vaccaro, said. “The clans that make up this organisation have been embedded in this territory for at least 30 years. We cannot compare them to the historical Italian mafia groups like Cosa Nostra and ’Ndrangheta, but it is a mafia characterised by a high degree of aggression and violence. It is what I call a primitive mafia, one that feeds cadavers to pigs so as not to leave a trace. An unrefined mafia in its actions, and for this reason dangerous.” 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/19/puglia-crimewave-points-to-emergence-of-fifth-italian-mafia 

Get Shorty at 30: Dennis Lehane on Elmore Leonard's Hollywood satire

The late, great Elmore "Dutch" Leonard is one of my favorite writers and Get Shorty is one of his best crime novels.


The Guardian offers Dennis Lehane's fine introduction to the Folio Society Edition of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty on the novel’s 30^th anniversary. 

 
You can read the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/26/pitch-perfect-get-shorty-at-30-elmore-leonard-dennis-lehane 

   You can also read my Crime Beat column on Elmore Leonard via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/05/return-to-elmoreland-elmore-leonards.html 

And you can read my friend and former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer Frank Wilson's piece on Elmore Leonard via the below link:

 https://www.inquirer.com/philly/entertainment/20121111_Crime_paid_this_writer__in_dollars_
and_honors.html

Sicilian Cosa Nostra Clans Hit In Dawn Raids Over EU Farm Subsidies Fraud

Lorenzo Tondo at the Guardian offers a piece on the arrest of Cosa Nostra members in Sicily.

Police in Sicily have arrested 94 people, including alleged mafia members, in dawn raids, following large-scale EU agricultural subsidies fraud.

The raids have been described as one of the largest operations focused on the Sicilian mafia, or Cosa Nostra.

Prosecutors claimed Sicilian mobsters had fraudulently received more than €10m in agricultural aid since 2010, including funds for thousands of hectares of “ghost” farmland in the east of the island – land that was either non-existent or owned by the Italian state or regional government.

Two Mafia clans, the Batanesi and Bontempo Scavo families, are believed to be at the centre of the alleged fraud, according to investigators. The two had been in conflict with each other for years but recently decided to end their turf wars and instead team up in their illicit activities.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/15/sicilian-police-launch-dawn-raids-in-eu-subsidies-sting

The Cacciatori: Secret Bunkers And Mountain Hideouts: Hunting Italy's Mafia Bosses

Lorenzo Tondo at the Guardian offers a piece on an Italian special military unit that hunts organized crime fugitives. 

On the slopes of the Aspromonte mountains, Pasquale Marando, a man known as the Pablo Escobar of the Calabrian mafia, the feared ’Ndrangheta, built a secret bunker whose entrance was the mouth of a pizza oven.

Less than 10 miles away, Ernesto Fazzalari, who allegedly enjoyed trap shooting with the heads of his decapitated victims, lived in a 10 square-metre hideout in the formidable southern Italian range. 

When authorities came for him in 2004, Fazzalari, then the second most-wanted mafia boss after Matteo Messina Denaro of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, had already escaped through a secret tunnel under the kitchen sink.

Before his eventual arrest in 2016, Fazzalari spent 20 years as a fugitive in the Calabrian mountains, where the wanted men of the ’Ndrangheta have for decades planned and built elaborate mirror cities underneath their villages. It is a literal underworld of bunkers located behind sliding staircases, hidden trapdoors and manholes linked by endless tunnels that merge and separate, leading to escape routes among the sewer system or amid the brambles of a dry river bed.

To smoke them out of their holes the Italian authorities formed a special military unit composed of elite and highly trained soldiers known as the Carabinieri Heliborne Squadron, or the Cacciatori, literally: the hunters.

The Cacciatori have in the last 25 years arrested almost 300 fugitives, whose mugshots are now displayed like trophies on a large bulletin board in a room in their headquarters. They have also uncovered over 400 bunkers, described by investigators as “works of superior engineering”.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/22/calabria-cacciatori-hunting-italy-underground-mafia-bosses-ndrangheta

'Extraordinary' Letters Between Ian Fleming And Wife To Be Sold

Mark Brown at the Guardian offers a piece on the sale of the late, great thriller writer Ian Fleming's letters to his late wife Ann.

An extraordinary stash of letters that shine a light on the tangled relationship between the James Bond creator Ian Fleming and his wife, Ann, from their intense and secret affair to the bitter end of their marriage, are to appear at auction.

Sotheby’s is selling more than 160 letters between the couple, written over 20 years. Gabriel Heaton, a specialist in books and manuscripts at the auction house, said the letters in their scope and scale provided what “must surely be an unmatchable record of the life of the author as his fortunes changed”.

They also provide insight into the rise of Bond. Heaton said it was no coincidence that Fleming wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in the year of his marriage.

… Heaton said the letters were packed with stories of high society, travel, love of nature and gossip.

“They are quite something, it has been a real treat,” he said. “They are an extraordinary read because Ian Fleming is pretty much incapable of writing a dull sentence.” 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/11/extraordinary-letters-between-ian-fleming-and-wife-to-be-sold 

Confession of British Spy And Traitor Kim Philby Made Public For First Time

Haroon Siddique at the Guardian offers a piece on the release of British spy and traitor Kim Philby’s confession.


You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/24/confession-of-british-spy-for-the-soviets-kim-philby-made-public-for-first-time

You can also read a review of Ben Macintyre’s outstanding book on Kim Philby via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/03/ben-macintyres-spy-among-friends-kim.html 

FBI and Italian Police Arrest 19 People In Sicily And US In Mafia Investigation

Angela Giuffrida at the Guardian offers a piece on an FBI and Italian police takedown of suspected Cosa Nostra organized crime members in Sicily and America.

Italian and US police have launched a coordinated crackdown on a Sicilian mafia family that was seeking to rebuild its power base after years of exile in the United States, Italian investigators said on Wednesday.

More than 200 police, including officers from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), arrested 18 people in Sicily as part of their investigation into the Inzerillo clan in the island’s capital Palermo and the allied New York-based Gambino family.

A 19th suspect was arrested in the United States.

Sicily’s organised crime group, known as Cosa Nostra (Our Thing), has been in a state of flux since 2017, when its boss of bosses Salvatore “Totò” Riina died in prison, where he had spent almost a quarter of a century.

Riina launched a ferocious mafia war on the Mediterranean island in the 1980s, chasing the Inzerillo family out of their stronghold in the Palermo suburb of Passo di Rigano and into self-imposed US exile.

But Riina’s death gave the Inzerillo family a chance to attempt to reclaim its old territory, with the help of allies in New York, said police.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/17/fbi-mafia-arrests-us-italy-inzerillo-gambino 

The Traitor Review – The Real Goodfellas: Cosa Nostra On Trial

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian offers a review of Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor, a film about the 1986 maxi of Sicilian Cosa Nostra members and Tommaso Buscetta, a Cosa Nostra boss who testified against them.

Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor is a big, handsomely shot, true-crime gangster movie, ranging over 30 years from the early 1970s to the late 90s, scripted by Bellocchio with screenwriters Valia Santella, Ludovica Rampoldi and Francesco Piccolo. The film has the authoritative air of official history: sometimes brash, sometimes stolid, sometimes with flashes of inspiration and sometimes with long stretches of courtroom dialogue. It is in these sections where Bellocchio is perhaps self-consciously concerned, as a major Italian film-maker, to be seen delivering a definitive cinematic account of an important period of modern Italian life. Well, it was certainly a sound instinct to show the courtroom scenes at some length, because however bizarre and chaotic it could be, the court of law is the moral centre of these events.

His subject is Italy’s sensational anti-mafia Maxi trial of 1986, in which hundreds of Sicilian mobsters were convicted, on the testimony of a tiny number of high-up pentiti, or informers, of which the most important was Tommaso Buscetta, a bulkily intimidating, charismatic presence portrayed here by Italian character actor Pierfrancesco Favino. 

He was the important Cosa Nostra guy who astonished everyone by committing the ultimate sin: treason. He snitched to the cops. 

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/23/the-traitor-review-the-real-goodfellas-cosa-nostra-on-trial

'Super Fugitive' Camorra Boss Arrested In Naples After 14 Years On The Run

The Guardian offers a piece on the rest of a top Camorra organized crime boss in Naples, Italy.

An Italian mafia “super fugitive”, Marco Di Lauro, has been arrested in Naples after over 14 years on the run.

Di Lauro, 38, was arrested without a fight on Saturday at a modest apartment where he lived with his wife in the city’s Chiaiano district, police said. He was sitting with his two cats and eating pasta when police arrested him in an operation involving around 150 officers. 

Naples police chief, Antonio De Iesu, told a press conference “unusual activity” had led police to the suspect, previously convicted of criminal association. Police found no weapons and a small sum of money in the flat.

An international arrest warrant was issued for Di Lauro in 2006, and he was one of Italy’s four most-wanted criminals, according to the interior ministry website. He is the fourth son of Paolo Di Lauro, the former boss of a clan of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia.

Italian media said Marco Di Lauro was considered the second-most dangerous man in Italy, after the Sicilian mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/03/super-fugitive-mafia-boss-arrested-after-14-years-on-the-run