Leonardo Gesualdo, 39, who is suspected of leading one of the most brutal organised crime families in Italy, was arrested by the Italian Carabinieri
Italian police have seized a top mafia boss in a daring dawn raid this morning.
The Italian Carabinieri arrested mafia chief, Leonardo Gesualdo, 39, who was listed among the country’s most-dangerous fugitives. Armed officers entered the residence on the outskirts of Foggia in a surprise raid as they took the 39-year-old, who is the head of the Foggia Society, a mafia-type organisation considered one of the most brutal out of all of Italy’s organised crime groups.
The group has been linked to a murder a week, one robbery a day and extortion attempts every two days in the region. Gesualdo has been wanted since 2020 and had been tried in absentia and sentenced to 12 years for mafia association, local reports say.
Heart-stopping footage shows the moment the armed officers broke down the door and entered the property in southern Italy.
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Officials said officers “caught him by surprise”, but that he went with them without disturbance. During the arrest, cops found a pistol with an erased serial number in his possession.
In February this year, mafia bosses in Sicily were heard moaning about lousy new recruits and wishing their lives were more like “The Godfather” in fascinating new wiretaps shared by police.
Giancarlo Romano, a notorious Mafia figure in Sicily’s capital, Palermo, was heard moaning along with other real-life godfathers about how new members are too quick to snitch, breaking the Mafia’s historic code of omertà — which forbids them to cooperate with the police or legal authorities.
They were then captured wishing their lives were more like “The Godfather” — the 1972 hit movie starring Marlon Brando as a well-connected Mafia boss, Don Corleone. “The calibre these days is low, a miserable level,” Cosa Nostra don Giancarlo Romano said after Sicilian police captured and detained nearly 150 alleged mafia members in dawn raids Tuesday.
“If you watch ‘The Godfather,’ the connections he had… he was very influential because of the power that he built at a political level. But us — what can we do? We’re on our knees, guys. We think we do business, but these days it’s others who do it”, Romano said in one of the intercepted calls.
“We used to be number one, now it’s others,” he continued. We’re just gypsies.” In a separate phone recording, the alleged mafia boss was heard telling a young recruit to “go to school” instead, and mingle with “doctors, lawyers, the people who run Italy, Europe.” The wiretaps also uncovered the nicknames godfathers use to refer to each other — including Spider-Man, Bear, Nephew, and Robert De Niro, another star from The Godfather franchise.