A member of the Italian mafia on the run for seven years is finally caught. The irony is it is all because of his YouTube cooking channel. Wanted for alleged cocaine trafficking, the 53-year-old man was a member of the ‘Ndrangheta’ crime syndicate – one of the most feared in Europe. The group is based on the Calabria region at the toe of southern Italy’s boot-shaped peninsula.
He was arrested in his hideout in Boca Chica, Dominican Republic recently. He managed to hide from the authorities for almost a decade until he started his YouTube channel with his wife.
In his videos, he carefully hid his face. But the blunder comes from his body tattoos which the police immediately recognize. Armed with the knowledge of the Italian mafia’s previous job at an Italian restaurant and his body tattoos, the police managed to track him down.
In the Caribbean, he kept a low profile, and where he went by simply “Marc”. Lt. Col. Massimiliano Galasso, a Reggio-Calabria police official said that authorities had never stopped searching for the man and had recently turned to open source intelligence.