Facebook chatter betrays alleged Mafia hitman
One of Italy's most wanted criminals is captured after he can't help himself chatting with his associates on Facebook.
Italy's godfathers might well be holding emergency meetings this weekend, after one of their remarkably obedient godsons was snared due to an especially pernicious habit. Yes, chatting on Facebook.
Pasquale Manfredi is reputed not to be the most affable of our human brethren. According to CNN, he is wanted for, among other acts of charmlessness, availing himself of a rocket launcher to send a rival Mafia family member to another life.
While in some Mafia movies, like "Goodfellas," Mafiosi wouldn't even use a phone, now, with the advent, perhaps, of pre-paid, they have come to embrace technology as if it were their own bambino.
Manfredi, however, seems to have allowed his enthusiasm to exceed his intellectual capacity, as he apparently chatted happily with some of his more than 200 Facebook friends.
Italian police reportedly used some rather sophisticated technology of their own in order to locate Manfredi and to make sure that they could capture him with his fingers still tingling from a heave dose of social networking.
I know you will be keen to discover what technology he was using to access the Web. Well, according to reports, he was using a pre-paid (yes, really) pen drive.
Manfredi, clearly a fan of old school movies, apparently liked to refer to himself as Scarface. The inordinately useful Mafia News Today suggested that he even had a picture of the movie character on his Facebook page and that he used the Internet name "Georgie."
Here, it seems, was a man who just wanted to be loved and couldn't live without his friends. One can only imagine who his Facebook friends might be, where they might be hanging out right now, and whether they have their rocket launchers at the ready.