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Rome: Italy hailed the arrest of the boss of the Calabrian mafia as a major blow to organised crime, but asked yesterday how someone topping the "most wanted" list for 18 years felt such impunity he didn't even leave his home town.
Investigators believe Pasquale Condello, captured on Monday night in Reggio Calabria on the southern tip of mainland Italy, had directed a bloody feud between clans of the mob, known as the " 'Ndrangheta", in which at least 20 people have died.
The 'Ndrangheta has outgrown its more famous Sicilian rival, the Cosa Nostra, largely thanks to its estimated 30-billion euro (Dh161.5-billion) cocaine trafficking business. It is also involved in widespread extortion and its influence pervades local politics in Calabria.
A clan feud was behind the murder last year of six Italians in Germany, a country where Italian prosecutors say the mob has laundered hundreds of millions of euros since the early 1980s.
Complex code
Known in local dialect as "U Supremu" and described by Italy's Interior Minister Giuliano Amato as "the number one boss of the 'Ndrangheta", 57-year-old Condello has already been given four life sentences for charges including murder.
Police dubbed him "the Provenzano of Calabria", referring to Bernardo Provenzano, the Sicilian "boss of bosses" arrested in 2006 near the town of Corleone - a Mafia stronghold made famous in Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather.
From Corleone, Provenzano ran the business via secret messages on scraps of paper called "pizzini".
Police said pizzini found in Condello's hideout used such a complex code that it "made Provenzano look like an amateur".
Italian politicians congratulated police on Condello's arrest but said the fact that he had not bothered to go further afield than Reggio Calabria, one of Calabria's two biggest cities, suggested he was confident he would not be captured.
"The fact that although Condello was top of the most-wanted list he was hiding in Calabria shows what impunity the mob feels and that there is a secret network allowing mafia bosses to keep running the business as usual," said Calabrian politician Jole Santelli, a member of parliament's anti-mafia commission.
Police found French champagne and expensive clothes in Condello's hideout. Salvatore Boemi, coordinator of the local anti-mafia unit, said Condello was "in great shape, elegant and behaving like a true mafia boss". Although he was armed and flanked by three people including his grandson and son-in-law, he did not try to open fire.
"The 'boss' kept cool and detached and even though he had a gun, he didn't use it," said General Giampolo Ganzer, head of the special unit of 100 police who carried out the arrest.
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