Drug trafficker Raffaele Imperiale arrested in Dubai

On 4 August last, the drug trafficker Raffaele Imperiale, considered one of the most dangerous fugitives and a top-level protagonist of international drug trafficking and money laundering, was arrested in Dubai. The arrest took place as part of investigations coordinated by the Public Prosecutor of Naples and conducted by the Gico of Naples and the Mobile Squad of the Naples Police Headquarters, with the support of the Central Services of the Guardia di Finanza and the State Police. Raffaele Imperiale, the investigators underline, is placed at the top of the list of fugitives of maximum danger of the Central Directorate of the Criminal Police. Born in Castellammare di Stabia on 24 October 1974, initially known as Lello di Ponte Persica, a fraction of the same municipality, he was able to build an impressive network of international traffickers, especially cocaine. The international brokerage activity and the business relationship with Neapolitan organized crime were crystallized in the first decade of 2000, when contacts with Camorra members of the Di Lauro clan of Secondigliano were documented. Over the years there have been numerous arrests and the kidnappings that hit the Imperiale organization: among them the maxi-seizure of 1,330 kg of cocaine which took place in Paris on 20 September 2013, when the loyal Vincenzo Aprea was arrested on the occasion, to whom the task of supervising the importation of the narcotic coming with an Air France scheduled flight from Caracas to Venezuela. The accumulated assets would have allowed him to buy on the black market two paintings by Van Gogh of inestimable value, stolen in 2002 in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and found by the Yellow Flames of the Economic-Financial Police Unit of Naples in an old villa in Castellammare di Stabia in the 2016.