Italian police announced Friday the arrest in Colombia of a dangerous fugitive accused of being a middleman between the Latin American country’s drug cartels and Naples’ mafia.
Luigi Belvedere has been sentenced to almost 19 years in prison for international drug trafficking, but has been on the run since December 2020.
He was captured overnight in the Colombian city of Medellin.
Announcing his arrest, Italian police released a photo of Belvedere visiting the grave Pablo Escobar, the founder and boss of the Medellin cartel, who was killed by police in 1993.
Polizia di Stato
Belvedere, a broker from Caserta, north of Naples, “specialized in the illegal import of cocaine (and) acted as an intermediary between Colombian cartels and some Casalesi clans,” the Italian Interior Ministry said in a statement.
The Casalesi are a notorious branch of the Camorra mafia. Naples has been the traditional base for the mafia-like Camorra syndicate, an umbrella for many different clans.
Investigators found him in Columbia, where he said he was “active in the organization of drug shipments from South America to Europe” in part because of his use of a “well-known messaging system,” police said.
Belvedere, believed to be around 32 years old and who was on the Italian Interior Ministry’s list of dangerous fugitives, was tracked down with the support of Colombian investigators and the European Union’s police body, Europol.
The arrest comes about three months after a Norwegian man accused of heading a crime gang that smuggled cocaine from South America to Europe on sailboats was arrested. captured in Colombia. Pazooki Farhad – dubbed “The Professor” – was held at El Dorado Airport, while his alleged right-hand man and compatriot Bernsten Bjarte was captured in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla, police said.
