Billiards Passion Leads to Arrest of Camorra Boss Gustavo Nocella

It was the passion for billiards that betrayed the Camorra boss Gustavo Nocella, arrested today in Medellin, Colombia, after years on the run, thanks to a coordinated operation between the Colombian National Police (Pnc), Interpol, Europol, the Carabinieri, and the UK police. Investigators, according to a Pnc statement, followed this lead to locate yet another apartment rented in Medellin by the boss considered the main intermediary between the Camorra clans of North and East Naples - the Rinaldi-Formicola, the Amato-Pagano, and the De Micco - and the local drug cartels. Billiard tables were indeed the common denominator in all the residences previously occupied by Nocella, who for precaution moved every three months but evidently could not give up playing billiards in moments when he was not busy organizing shipments of tons of cocaine to the Netherlands. Betrayed by Billiards And it was precisely by following the trail of the purchase of a luxurious table with red felt made at the Europa factory in Bogotá that investigators managed to trace the last luxurious apartment rented by the boss in the elegant El Poblado neighborhood of Medellin, surrounded by shops and shopping centers. The 58-year-old Nocella was responsible for coordinating the logistics of cocaine shipments on ships and yachts bound for the port of Amsterdam. The drug, investigators reconstruct, was then sent to Naples by land, aboard trucks, cars, and sometimes counterfeit official vehicles. The Operation "This operation is the result of smooth international cooperation that has allowed us to capture more than 40 drug traffickers," said today the general director of the Colombian National Police, General William René Salamanca Ramírez. "The capture of Nocella, one of the most wanted mafia bosses in the world," he added, "is a deadly blow to these criminal clans." According to Salamanca, today's arrest "affects the connections of international drug trafficking by directly hitting the ability to coordinate the procurement, transport, storage, and export of cocaine."