A mafia boss who escaped from a maximum security prison in Italy last year by using bed sheets has been captured in France, authorities in both countries said Friday. Marco Raduano was arrested on Thursday evening while dining at a restaurant with a woman on the French island of Corsica. Raduano, listed as “dangerous” on Europol’s most wanted criminals list, had escaped from a heavily secured prison in Nuoro, Sardinia, in February 2023 by using sheets to scale down the walls. The escape was captured on surveillance footage and shared widely on social media. In the video, Raduano can be seen dangling from the sheets before jumping to the ground and running away. He was the boss of the rural Gargano clan, which operates within a young and little-known organized crime syndicate in Foggia, in the southern Italian region of Puglia, known as the Fourth Mafia. Raduano, 40, had been serving a 24-year prison sentence for membership of a criminal organization, drug trafficking, holding illegal weapons, and other crimes, according to Europol. His “right-hand man,” Gianluigi Troiano, was also picked up near Granada in Spain, Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said, in what he described as “another major blow against organized crime.” Raduano’s capture comes about a year after authorities arrested Italy’s most-wanted fugitive, taking mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro into custody after a 30-year manhunt. In September, Messina Denaro died in a hospital prison ward.
