On the Facebook page of this Italian restaurant in the Loire, there is a video of pasta flambéed directly in the cheese wheel. But since 2021, no more publications. The officials also shared the photos of press articles which relayed the opening of this table of Calabrian specialties, the region of origin of the leader.
The boss is Edgardo Greco, now 63, who calls himself “Paolo Dimitrio”, an alleged member of the biggest Italian mafia, the Ndrangheta. He was arrested this Thursday in Saint-Étienne (Loire) after 16 years on the run, Interpol announced.
What do we blame him for?
Edgardo Greco, sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006 in Italy for homicides, moved to France the same year, according to the general prosecutor’s office. According to the Italian carabinieri, Edgardo Greco has been the subject of a European arrest warrant from the Catanzaro public prosecutor’s office (Calabria, southern Italy) since 2014, after his life sentence for two murders committed in January 1991 and a attempted murder in July 1991.
The fugitive, described as “dangerous” by Interpol, had escaped while in police custody. He was part of the Perna-Pranno clan at the time, which was the most important in the city of Cosenza, where he lived. “He is considered jointly responsible for the ambush of January 5, 1991 which cost the lives of the brothers Stefano and Giuseppe B. who wanted greater autonomy and consideration in the middle of the clans of Cosenza”, explain the Italian carabinieri in a communicated.
The victims had been killed “with iron bars in a fish warehouse (…) and their bodies disappeared and were never found”, according to the same source. They would have been dug up and destroyed in acid. Many other facts could be attributed to Edgardo Greco, such as thefts from banks and money transfer vans, according to Le Monde. He would then, in the 1980s, inherited the nickname “prison killer” for an attempted knife attack during a walk in a prison yard.
How was he arrested?
The arrest took place Thursday around 1:40 am, in a street of Saint-Étienne. Le Monde specifies that he was arrested by the local judicial police, investigators from the Central Office for the Fight against Organized Crime (OCLCO) and carabinieri who came specially from Cosenza, in southern Italy.
This sexagenarian was arrested by the French police thanks to information from the Italian carabinieri shared between the two partner countries thanks to the I-Can project (Interpol cooperation against the Ndrangheta).
The man would have put the investigators on his tracks following a huge error. Indeed, in July 2021, an article in Le Progrès is dedicated to him on the occasion of the opening of his establishment. He poses all smiles in the photo, and uses a false name, that of a fugitive delinquent from Puglia…
Edgardo Greco was presented Thursday afternoon to a magistrate from the general prosecutor’s office in Lyon who officially notified him of the arrest warrant issued by the Italian authorities. He expressed his refusal to be handed over to Italian justice and was placed in detention, according to the general prosecutor’s office.
What was he doing in Saint-Etienne?
Edgardo Greco became the owner and manager of Caffé Rossini Ristorante, from June to November 2021, according to the same source. Defining himself as a Stéphanois at heart for 14 years, the one who is nicknamed Rocco, then wants to “create an elaborate Italian cuisine, only with fresh and homemade”. A cuisine that he would take from his Calabrian grandmother, he says.
According to the assistant prosecutor at the general prosecutor’s office of Catanzaro, questioned by our colleagues from Le Monde, “he had already worked in the field of catering in his youth. Resuming cooking in France could have been a way for him to find a situation of “pseudo-normality” (…) he was no longer involved in criminal activities”. According to testimonies and documents consulted by AFP, he had been employed in several Italian restaurants in Saint-Étienne.