After two decades on the run, a mafioso sentenced to life imprisonment caught investigators near Madrid. As reported by Italian media, the Italian mafia hunters accidentally recognized the 61-year-old boss of the Sicilian Stidda clan from Agrigento, Gioacchino Gammino, in a photo on Google Maps. The street view photo published by the newspaper “La Repubblica” on Wednesday shows two men chatting in front of the vegetable shop “El huerto de Manu” in the city of Galapagar, northwest of Madrid. Investigators from Palermo were able to identify the mafia boss by means of a striking scar on the left side of the chin. Through recent photos that Gammino himself had published on social media, the Italian investigators, together with the Spanish police, succeeded inTrack down Gammino and arrest him on December 17th.
Matthias Rüb
Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta, based in Rome.
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Gammino was part of a squad that mistakenly shot and killed a passerby on August 29, 1989 in Campobello di Licata, Sicily. The killers believed the man belonged to a rival clan. Gammino first managed to escape to Spain in early 1998. In March 1998 he was arrested in Barcelona, transferred to Italy and sentenced there. Gammino managed to escape a second time when he mingled with the extras on June 26, 2002 during a film shoot in the maximum security prison Rebibbia in Rome and left the prison through the main entrance at the end of a day of shooting.
Gammino did not resist when he was arrested. He asked the police: “How could you find me? I haven't spoken to my family on the phone for ten years. ”In fact, Gammino's trail was lost soon after his second escape. The investigators assumed, however, that the mafia boss had fled to Spain again. In Galapagar, Gammino tried his hand at a fruit and vegetable dealer and later as a cook named Manuel in his restaurant “La cocina de Manu”. Gammino is expected to be shipped from Spain to Italy soon. The legendary anti-mafia public prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, who was murdered in a bomb attack by the Cosa Nostra in May 1992 near Palermo, was also involved in the investigation against the Stidda clan and its boss Gammino.