Reputed Mafia Fugitive Busted in Caribbean After Police Find His Italian Cooking YouTube Channel
(The AEGIS Alliance) – Authorities have located and apprehended Marc Feren Claude Biart, age 53, a former member of the Italian mafia, in the Dominican Republic after years on the run due to the fact that he revealed his distinct tattoos in YouTube cooking videos.
Biart belonged to the Cacciola clan of the ‘Ndrangheta, the Mafia-like organized crime syndicate focused out of Italy’s Calabria area and also is apparently the nation’s most powerful ahead of the Sicily- based Cosa Nostra and the Campania- based Camorra. Biart thwarted capture in 2014 when Italian prosecutors ordered his apprehension over a claimed Netherlands cocaine trafficking operation, the Guardian reported.
The former ‘Ndrangheta participant in some way made it to the Dominican Republic and also remained hidden from authorities, with the exception of one blazing exception. Calabria News reports that authorities stated that Biart and his partner were considered “foreigners” by various other Italian ex-pats in the area, with Biart himself a “ghost” known simply as Marc. But the duo’s joint YouTube channel devoted to their shared love of Italian food preparation was evidently not kept a secret.
Authorities informed the Guardian that while Biart took care to leave his face out of any kind of cooking videos, he had not been nearly as cautious with the rest of his person, he evidently had distinct tattoos that made it very easy for authorities to recognize him from the YouTube videos. (What precisely those tattoos are had not been instantly noticeable; a clip of Biart’s apprehension published by Calabria News only revealed the mobster from behind.)
A variety of other reputed ‘Ndrangheta mobsters has been busted just recently, according to the Guardian, consisting of notorious former Pelle ‘ndrina clan member Francesco Pelle, who authorities captured in Portugal on Monday. Pelle was on the run for 14 years and was involved in the rivalry between the Pelle-Romeo and Nirta-Strangio gangs that in 2007 culminated in the mass killing of six men outside an Italian restaurant in the western German city of Duisberg. Authorities have accused Pelle of a failed assassination plot against rival boss Giovanni Nirta during which Nirta’ s partner Maria Strangio was killed along with 4 others who were wounded.
It’s hardly brand-new for foolhardy posts on social networks to land wrongdoers some direct engagement with police officers, be it a United Kingdom automobile theft gang busted in 2019 for posting images of swiped cars and trucks to Instagram or that Mexican drug lord that was apprehended in late 2013, perhaps partly due to the fact that he tweeted pictures of guns, a tiger apparently kept as a family pet and his personal jet.
Police have consistently made use of social networks to crackdown on protesters in the U.S., as well as hundreds of departments that have authorized contracts with questionable facial-recognition companies like Clearview AI, which makes use of posts scraped from the internet as fuel for an enormous biometrics database that can help with mass surveillance. Just one more factor to be cautious of regarding what you post on the internet, even if you’re not a ‘Ndrangheta attempting to avert Italian police officers.
Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
