a doorless windowless citadel with tunnels and natural caverns capable of providing emergency escape routes but also an apartment with modern comforts this was Sandokan’s hideout which he shared with his wife and children in Casale di Principe near Caserta a surreal setting illuminated by neon and with white majolica tiles an apartment about a thousand square feet with a hallway a kitchen an entry hall a dining room a bedroom and a bathroom the bunker had two doorways covered by cement blocks on two levels a sophisticated system for blocking access sliding blocks of cement on rails that couldn’t be identified from outside even the DIA after a year and seven months had to give up trying to figure it out and break though the wall with an electric cement saw and it was not until after Sandokan surrendered that it became possible to identify the main entrance in a storehouse in a villa in the Via Salerno

the capture of Sandokan was the result of an investigation that combined high technology and the old and somewhat unfashionable methods of tailing stakeouts shoe leather seven months when all was said and done with a sharp and intense acceleration in the last week the secret component that allowed the culminating raid was in orbiting satellites and the cunning and skill of the agent who managed to place a tiny GPS homing device the latest model superpowerful and invisible under the Range Rover that Giuseppina Natta drove from that moment on they could track the car on a video monitor a tiny dot would blink marking every move the godfather’s wife made a week ago five DIA investigators masquerading as repairmen traveled around Casale di Principe keeping tabs on the Via Salerno on that villa and then on Friday evening the GPS device the patient detective work the stakeouts all came together the police were sure that the boss was back from Val di Fassa in northern Trentino two dark vans pulled up packed with forty DIA agents some of them carrying machineguns others with Beretta pistols they waited for the signal among them were investigators from a special DIA squad Acchiappafantasmi the Ghostbusters the ones who hunt down fugitives

in the end the one who snapped the handcuffs around Sandokan’s wrists was the deputy chief of police Sergio Sellitto the young official who over the past year had commanded the Yanez squad seven determined men following the tracks of the boss and since they were chasing someone who had taken the name Sandokan a figure from fiction chose a name out of the same nineteenth century adventure stories by Emilio Salgari the ferocious organized crime boss was a worried father with only one request commander can I kiss my children goodbye they agree he can give them one last kiss and one to his wife who had spent the past five years misleading the investigators if for instance she had to go up north she would make the trip in two or three different stages stop in two or three different cities change vehicles drivers schedules she was skillful and canny she managed to elude her pursuers but she couldn’t elude the eye of the satellite that recorded the meeting on Friday that captured the boss on the run from the law they found him there where he had been the whole time where he returned unfailingly from a flight that appears to have been largely to the north of Italy he would come back at least twice a week to Casale di Principe in the province of Caserta the blitz by the men of the DIA that was unleashed two days earlier in the Via Salerno just a short distance away from his official address