Its Europol file is unequivocal.
Marco Raduano is “dangerous”, he is a “ruthless killer”.
This 40-year-old Italian, considered the “boss” of “Società Foggiana”, one of the most important mafias on the peninsula, was arrested Thursday in Aléria, in Plaine Orientale, in Upper Corsica.
On the run since February 2023, after his escape from Nuoro prison, in Sardinia, where he had been incarcerated following his sentence to 24 years in prison for his criminal activities, Marco Raduano had since been the subject of a warrant for European judgment.
The forty-year-old, father of one child, was in a restaurant in Aleria, in the east of the Isle of Beauty, and was dining with a young woman when he was picked up “gently” by the gendarmes of the research section of Corsica, in support of the Carabinieri del Ros, the same unit which arrested Matteo Messina Denaro in January 2023. Despite his false papers and his car with falsified plates, the fugitive was first spotted in Lucciana, a town south of Bastia.
The Italian Marco Raduano (here in the hands of the gendarmes in Bastia) was handed over to the Carabinieri.
AFP.
The man lived “quite frugally,” investigators note.
Far from the lifestyle that seemed to characterize someone who loved beautiful cars, especially the fastest ones, notes Corriere de la Sera.
Nicknamed "Pallone" (balloon, in Italian) because he liked to inflate his chest "by strutting in front of the weakest", Marco Raduano is described as a ladies' man, hated by jealous husbands who did not dare to confront this "man of little of words, who loves crime", "cold, almost icy".
In a few years, the criminal managed to carve out a place among the big names of the Italian mafia, having nothing more to prove to the three other important Italian criminal organizations: the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra of Naples.
Based in Vieste, in the Puglia region, Marco Raduano is, according to Europol, the “promoter, organizer and ruthless killer”, behind several murders, drug trafficking and racketeering.
He is considered to be behind two assassinations in 2017, and a failed attack on another man.
These stunts were probably instigated within the framework of rivalries between criminal clans.
A “massacre” in 2017
On October 31, 2023, he was sentenced for a “massacre”, according to the Italian press, perpetrated in August 2017 in San Marco in Lamis in Puglia: the head of the Manfredonia clan, his driver, his brother-in-law and two brothers, farmers, witnesses of the scene, had been shot dead.
Which earned him incarceration in a high security section of the Sardinian prison of Nuoro.
But Marco Raduano does not stay locked up for long.
In February 2023, under the eyes of surveillance cameras, the inmate deploys a rope made from knotted sheets along the buttresses of the prison and escapes.
Gianluigi Troiano, Raduano's right-hand man, was arrested in Spain.
AFP.
The arrest in Corsica of Marco Raduano is not the only one the Italian police are boasting about.
His right-hand man Gianluigi Trojano, on the run since December 2021 while he was serving a prison sentence under house arrest of nine years and two months, was arrested on Tuesday near Granada, Spain.
“The arrest abroad of two dangerous fugitives, the boss Marco Raduano and his right-hand man Gianluigi Troiano (…) represents a new blow to crime,” the Italian Minister of Defense said on X. Interior, Matteo Piantedosi.