An Italian mafia fugitive on the run for 20 years was apprehended by police in Spain after being identified on Google Street View.
Gioacchino Gammino, 61, one of Italy’s most notorious fugitives, was photographed by a Google Street View truck conversing with another guy in front of the grocery store he ran in Galapagar, outside Madrid, after 20 years on the run.
After being discovered on Google Maps’ Street View feature, Gioacchino Gammino was discovered to be living under a false name in Galapagar.
Italy’s interior ministry had labelled the 61-year-old former mafia boss from Sicily as a dangerous fugitive.
Gammino worked as a greengrocer and cook in a Spanish town near Madrid, according to national media. After a two-year collaborative operation between Italian and Spanish authorities, he was apprehended.
A Google photograph from July 2018 purports to show a man who resembles Gammino outside a fruit shop in Galapagar.
Gammino is said to have asked police, “Can you help me?” after he was arrested in December “How did you come across me? For the past ten years, I haven’t even called my family.”
In the late 1990s, the fugitive was arrested in Barcelona on charges of murder and drug trafficking, but he suddenly escaped from a Rome prison in 2002. Next month, he is anticipated to be extradited to Italy.
A member of an Italian mafia cell was also apprehended in the Dominican Republic in March of last year after his tattoos were recognised in a YouTube cookery video.
Google Maps and Street View were able to corroborate a lead on Gammino’s position almost immediately, according to Palermo prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi, but this did not lead to his finding.
“It’s not like we spend our days looking for fugitives on Google Maps,” he explained. “We arrived in Spain after numerous earlier and lengthy studies. We were on the right track, with Google Maps confirming our findings.”
Gammino was accused of murdering a rival member of Sicily’s La Cosa Nostra mafia in a local gang struggle in 1984, but he escaped arrest until 1998, when he was captured in Barcelona and sentenced to life in prison in Italy. He escaped from the prison in 2002 while producing a film there and lived for the next two decades before being captured last month.
Domenico Paviglianiti, 60, a former “boss of bosses” of the ‘Ndrangheta, the world’s most powerful mafia clan based in Calabria, was also apprehended in Madrid last August, two years after being wrongfully released from an Italian prison.
