[imagesource: EFA]

It should be evident to criminals that posting videos of oneself on social media isn’t going to end well.

And yet, it hasn’t stopped folks like Hamilton Ndlovu from flaunting his ill-earned wealth on Twitter.

As for Marc Feren Claude Biart, an alleged member of the ‘Ndrangheta mob, he wasn’t flaunting anything, except maybe his cooking skills.

And, to his credit, he tried his best to hide his face but didn’t cover all of his bases – or tattoos, as is the case in this story of social media assisting the authorities in tracking someone down.

Per BBC, Italian police, having identified him by his ink, found him in the Dominican Republic last Wednesday and he has now been extradited back to Italy.

He was wanted by police for allegedly trafficking cocaine into the Netherlands on behalf of the Cacciola clan of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia, and has been on the lamb since 2014.

The Netherlands has been cropping up in quite a few stories about drug trafficking lately.

Biart was busted on YouTube after posting a cooking video with his wife. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find it, but I’m sure it was delightful.

Here he is, off to face the law, in another YouTube video:

I guess he got the views he was angling for, just not the ones he wanted.

The New York Post notes that up until he was arrested, he had lived “like a ghost” among the large Italian community in Boca Chica, with locals knowing him as “Marc”.

His arrest was a victory for the specialist operation dubbed I-CAN, for INTERPOL Cooperation Against ‘Ndrangheta’ – one of the world’s most powerful crime syndicates due to its control of most of the cocaine entering Europe.

Back to the BBC, who say that the crime syndicate is now facing justice in the biggest mafia trial Italy has seen in decades.

In a pre-trial hearing, it took more than three hours to read the names of the 355 defendants, including mob boss Luigi Mancuso, who is also known as “The Wolf”, “Fatty”, and “Blondie”.

The trial opened in January and should be ongoing for around two years, with 900 witnesses ready to step forward.

While we’re on the topic of mobsters caught by chance, let’s take a minute for the capture of Francesco Pelle, another Italian mobster, who had been convicted for the revenge killing of another mobster’s wife, Maria Strangio, at her home in Calabria on Christmas Day 2006.

According to Sky News, before his sentence could be upheld in 2019, he vanished and has been missing for two years. He was recently arrested in a Lisbon hospital where he was being treated for COVID-19.

The revenge killings didn’t end with Strangio – read all about that fiasco, straight out of a movie, here.

[sources:bbc&nypost&skynews]