Italian Mobsters Go to Ridiculous Lengths -- Not to Avoid Arrest


Mafia gangsters have been arrested in some pretty far-out ways over the years, as the U.K.'s Telegraph reports.

In August 2009 police arrested an alleged mafia boss who was hiding in an underground bunker equipped with a skateboard to propel himself down a 200 yard secret tunnel only waist high. Giuseppe Bastone planned to make a getaway by lying on the skateboard and pushing himself along.

Police said he had been hiding in the bunker, which had solid steel walls, for nearly a year. It was equipped with a fridge, a plasma screen television and a DVD player.

In August 2010 cops arrested a fugitive alleged mafia don by waiting until he was having a swim in the sea – and therefore would be unarmed. Salvatore Facchineri had evaded capture for six months when he was grabbed and handcuffed by police while taking a dip in a holiday resort on the coast of Calabria.

A convicted hit man who had escaped from jail was recaptured after police found him having a tattoo applied in a beauty parlor. Salvatore d'Avanzo, 48, was in the middle of having the tattoo of a Samurai warrior inscribed on his arm. He had been serving life for multiple murder convictions when he went on the run.

When police burst in on him, he said: "Thank God it's you, I thought you were hit men."
Bernardo Provenzano, the alleged "boss of bosses" of Cosa Nostra in Sicily, was arrested in a run-down shepherd's hut in 2006 after an incredible 43 years on the run. He had been the subject of a huge manhunt but in the end police found him a few miles outside the town of Corleone, long synonymous with the mafia. Provenzano was nicknamed 'The Tractor' because, as one informant put it, "he mows people down."

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