When you say Mala del Brenta, the thought immediately goes to ‘Faccia d’angelo’, Felice Maniero, 72-year-old former boss of Campolongo Maggiore (Venice), knocked out by depression – now living in a nursing home – after a life dedicated to crime and the good life. After the arrests of the historic core and the repentance of ‘Faccia d’angelo’, in 1995, the so-called New Mala del Brenta began to take shape, of which the 82-year-old Sardinian Gianfranco Sedda, arrested Monday by the Rimini Border Police after having escaped house arrest, which he was serving in a residential facility in Adria, in the province of Rovigo.
The previous escape in June 2023
The man, whom the police recall as having an ‘impressive and forty-year criminal record, full of crimes against property and in the field of drug trafficking’, had already escaped in June 2023 from the precautionary custody regime ordered by the Court of Appeal of Trieste. At that time, the Sardinian criminal disappeared without a trace after yet another trial in his life, at the end of which he also received a sentence reduction.
The Mala del Brenta and Sedda’s role
The Venice Prosecutor’s Office over the years has investigated Sedda within the framework of the ‘New Mala del Brenta’ operation, an organization in which he played ‘a role of primary strategic importance’, especially in the international heroin trafficking along the Italy-Bulgaria axis. And it was precisely towards Bulgaria that on the morning of August 4, the man headed aboard a bus, becoming untraceable from the Senior Services Center of Adria.
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The escape interrupted in Rimini: what happened
The escape of the 82-year-old was interrupted in Rimini, where last Monday the flight from Sofia on which he was traveling landed. Sedda did not have time to get off the plane: the agents of the Rimini Border Police, together with colleagues from Scip, boarded and stopped him inside the aircraft. His freedom, in short, lasted roughly a week.
For the 82-year-old, the house arrest regime has been reinstated for the time being. Perhaps for Sedda, who has been at the center of judicial investigations in the prosecutors’ offices of Northern Italy for years, what Filippo Maniero said about the underworld still holds true: “The Mala… has been and still is the only ‘woman’ of my life.” Love never ends. Even at 82 years old.
