From: Dow Jones News via ADFN.com
SAO PAULO;A former Italian mafia boss convicted of murdering more than 20 people was arrested in Brazil on Tuesday shortly after dropping off his two young children at school, more than 30 years after his escape through the window of an hospital room in Italy.
Pasquale Scotti, 56 years old, was a leader of the New Camorra criminal organization and “a very dangerous fugitive,” an Italian police official said. He escaped from a hospital near Naples in 1984 and then vanished. Found guilty in absentia in Italy in 2005, Mr. Scotti was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, including organizing the killing of a rival’s girlfriend, along with extortion and other crimes.
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The New Camorra dominated Naples and most of the Campania region in the 1980s, according to Italy’s anti-mafia investigators. The organization reached its height in the early part of that decade, when it had about 7,000 members. Its activities included cigarette smuggling, extortion and drug trafficking, and it made a fortune speculating on reconstruction after the big earthquake that struck Campania in 1980, authorities said.
