Italian ‘mafia boss’ detained

A REPUTED mafia boss, on Italy’s list of the 10 most wanted fugitives, was arrested yesterday in the Naples region, in a crackdown that also nabbed two of his brothers accused of organised crime, police said.

Pasquale Russo, 62, was “the big boss of the [mafia] clan and has been on the most-wanted list for 16 years“, a spokesman for Italy’s paramilitary carabinieri police in the southern city said.

The Russo clan controlled “all the illicit activities in a vast area” comprising some 40 towns in the Naples region, police said on Saturday.

The Russo brothers had reorganised the structure of Naples’ Camorra mafia in the early 1990s.