One of Italy’s most wanted mafia bosses has been convicted in a southeastern French court for holding fake identity papers, judicial officials said.
Luigi Facchineri (36) was sentenced on Monday to eight months in prison by a criminal court in the town of Grasse, near the Italian border, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Facchineri, a boss in the southern Italian town of Cittanova, and an accomplice were arrested by Italian and French police in Cannes, France on August 31. They were found with various firearms and large sums of money.
The accomplice, Roberto Peregalli, was also convicted. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for possessing illegal weapons and false identity papers.
Facchineri was a local head of the ‘ndrangheta, the Calabrian version of the Sicilian Mafia, and was listed as one of Italy’s 30 most-wanted mafiosos, Italian officials have said. An Italian request for Facchineri’s extradition is pending. The Facchineri family and a rival clan, the Raso-Albanese family, started a deadly feud in 1963 that has claimed dozens of lives in and around Cittanova.
Rivalries flared again in 1987, when five members of the Raso-Albanese family were shot to death within minutes of one another, allegedly by the Facchineris.
Police attributed the slayings to turf battles between the clans for control over heroin trafficking routes and extortion and kidnapping rackets for ransom and government contracts. – Sapa-AP