Italian killer on the run for 20 years is finally found by Google Maps

Accused of murder, Gioacchino Gammino, 61, escaped from Rebibbia prison in Rome 20 years ago and has been living as a fugitive ever since. He fled to Spain, changed his name and severed ties with his family, creating a new life and at one time working as a chef in an Italian restaurant.

But last month Italian investigators were finally able to locate it in a town northwest of Madrid, thanks in part to an unexpected tool: Google Maps.

“They say that luck favors the bold,” said General Nicola Altiero, deputy director of the Italian Anti-Mafia Investigations Department, which carried out the operation in conjunction with prosecutors in Palermo. He explained that investigators used Google Maps and Google Street View to track down Gammino, a Sicilian whose name was on Italy’s most dangerous fugitives list.

Investigators in Palermo declined to comment on how they tracked Gammino to Galapagar, a town near Madrid, saying some aspects of the case were still part of an ongoing investigation.

But Altiero did not hesitate to reveal more. He explained that investigators used Google tools to look for a grocery store, El Huerto de Manu, which they believed might have links to the fugitive. And they found by chance the image of a man in front of the store.

The man in the image was the same height, weight and build as Gammino, Altiero said, and investigators noted that the phone number for the grocery store was the same as a nearby restaurant, La Cocina de Manu, which had closed its doors a few years earlier. .

But their social media pages were still online. One of them featured a photo of the restaurant’s chef next to a wood-fired oven used to bake pizzas.

Investigators applied age progression technology to an old photo of Gammino to get an idea of ​​what the fugitive would look like after 20 years and identified the chef as the wanted man.

Italian investigators contacted Spanish police hunting fugitives, and Gammino was arrested on December 17 as he was walking down the street. Altiero said other clues were found in the two-decade investigation, but that the discovery made with Google’s tools was key to Gammino’s quick arrest.

“Running over the image on Google Maps was a stroke of luck, but we already had other evidence that would have led us to it eventually,” Altiero said. “Google Maps got us there faster.”

Gammino got into trouble with the law in the 1980s, when he was investigated for drug trafficking. Detectives think he was a member of a “stidda” clan based in Campobello di Licata, a town east of Agrigento, Sicily.

The stidda (star, in the Sicilian dialect) attracted members of the ranks of mafiosi who in the 1980s began to rebel against the leaders of the Sicilian Mafia, the Cosa Nestra. A turf war between the stidda and Cosa Nostra reportedly left around 200 dead, according to a statement issued by the Anti-Mafia Investigations Department announcing Gammino’s arrest in Spain.

Gammino was arrested in 1999, charged with murder. On June 26, 2002, while he was being held in Rebibbia prison in Rome awaiting trial, he allegedly walked out of the prison’s front door, taking advantage of the agitation created by crews filming a scene from a television series. During his years as a fugitive, he was convicted in absentia of intentional manslaughter, and in 2014 a European arrest warrant was issued against him.

A prosecutor in Palermo declined to say whether Gammino was involved in illegal activities in Spain. According to investigators, he is expected to be extradited to Italy in the coming weeks to serve a life sentence.