Friday, November 22, 2019

"Secret bunkers and mountain hideouts: hunting Italy's mafia bosses"

The Guardian:
The Cacciatori unit searches the rugged landscape of Calabria for fugitives who have dug themselves deep into the earth

On the slopes of the Aspromonte mountains, Pasquale Marando, a man known as the Pablo Escobar of the Calabrian mafia, the feared ’Ndrangheta, built a secret bunker whose entrance was the mouth of a pizza oven.

...

Before his eventual arrest in 2016, [he] spent 20 years as a fugitive in the Calabrian mountains, where the wanted men of the ’Ndrangheta have for decades planned and built elaborate mirror cities underneath their villages. It is a literal underworld of bunkers located behind sliding staircases, hidden trapdoors and manholes linked by endless tunnels that merge and separate, leading to escape routes among the sewer system or amid the brambles of a dry river bed.