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Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials

arstechnica.com

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Re: Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials

#2
> the subject of "the biggest mafia trial Italy has seen in decades," the BBC wrote. "There are 355 alleged mobsters and corrupt officials who have been charged

This is pretty similar to the Maxi Trial from back in the 80s. [1]

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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxi_Trial

Re: Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials

#4
The more interesting question, left unaddressed by the article, is exactly how they were able to make the connection in the first place.

Did they parse through millions of YouTube videos cataloging every tattoo and descriptive feature then run it against any outstanding fugitive’s features?

Or was it just a decently popular cooking channel

Re: Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials

#5
Does anyone else not get 100% feel-good vibes from this? It's great that he was caught, but it's no wonder criminals turn to more crime... even simple ways of showing their humanity like sharing their cooking can lead to them getting caught. No solution comes to mind but just wanted to point that out.

Re: Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials

#6
post #5

Does anyone else not get 100% feel-good vibes from this? It's great that he was caught, but it's no wonder criminals turn to more crime... even simple ways of showing their humanity like sharing their cooking can lead to them getting caught. No solution comes to mind but just wanted to point that out.

I honestly don't get what you mean. He's free to show his humanity by collaborating with authorities and getting more people arrested, or by doing his sentence and having a cooking show afterwards.

Anything else is "doing something he likes while avoiding the consequences for all the illegal actions he did in the past", and we're not talking about somebody in poverty stealing food at the supermarket, here.

(This is all assuming he's guilty, of course this has to be demonstrated at the trial)

Re: Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials

#8
post #5

Does anyone else not get 100% feel-good vibes from this? It's great that he was caught, but it's no wonder criminals turn to more crime... even simple ways of showing their humanity like sharing their cooking can lead to them getting caught. No solution comes to mind but just wanted to point that out.

That's funny you really couldn't think of a solution? Don't join the mafia seems like an obvious one.

Re: Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials

#9
post #5

Does anyone else not get 100% feel-good vibes from this? It's great that he was caught, but it's no wonder criminals turn to more crime... even simple ways of showing their humanity like sharing their cooking can lead to them getting caught. No solution comes to mind but just wanted to point that out.

I see what you mean, but I think the problem with a lot of career criminals (i.e. mafioso/drug dealers) is that this is just a part of the pathology.

They rationalize that they are actually good people, that without the mafia the neighborhood would be worse, that that guy had it coming, better they buy drugs from me than some unknown chemicals from the chinese, etc. etc.

Cooking on youtube is just an extension of that. Most people don't consider themselves evil, it's all rationalizations upon rationalizations.

Re: Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials

#10
post #5

Does anyone else not get 100% feel-good vibes from this? It's great that he was caught, but it's no wonder criminals turn to more crime... even simple ways of showing their humanity like sharing their cooking can lead to them getting caught. No solution comes to mind but just wanted to point that out.

I honestly don't get what you mean. He's free to show his humanity by collaborating with authorities and getting more people arrested, or by doing his sentence and having a cooking show afterwards. Anything else is "doing something he likes while avoiding the consequences for all the illegal actions he did in the past", and we're not talking about somebody in poverty stealing food at the supermarket, here. (This is a…

There's an irony in that we want criminals to reform and rejoin society, yet we arrest them for doing so on their own initiative. He could have continued to commit crime, leaving a trail of bodies, and he probably wouldn't have been caught yet. He chose to live a quiet life somewhere out of the way and ended up getting caught for trying to be a normal person.

If he were going to continue living a quiet life there til he died, I have to wonder what we've actually gained here. Yes, he did awful things. I'm not denying that, but nothing we do to him is going to change that. I'm not really convinced that cracking down is going to prevent future crime; it doesn't seem to have stopped the mafia thus far. He's not going to talk, the investigators have called out that they can't make inroads because of their brutal code of silence.

The only thing we get out of this is a sadistic pleasure from punishing a man who seems to have reformed. It's justice porn. Why would anyone on the run from a life sentence bother to try to reform then? You may as well stay in the Mafia; there's nothing for you on the outside.

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