Italian anti-mafia police arrested Michele Zagaria, head of the one of the main organised crime families in the Naples region, the interior ministry said today.
Zagaria (53) is one of the country's most-wanted fugitives and head of the powerful Casalesi clan that controlled a swathe of territory north of Naples.
He had been on the run for 16 years, and was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for murder in 2008. He was captured living in an underground bunker in his home town of Casapesenna, police said.
Zagaria's clan inspired Roberto Saviano's best-selling book Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia, which was made into a graphically violent prize-winning movie.
Saviano lives under police protection.
Raffaele Cantone, a former Naples magistrate who has also lived under police protection since 2003 when it was discovered Zagaria had ordered his assassination, compared the arrest to that of the Sicilian Mafia's "boss of bosses" Bernardo Provenzano in 2006.
"With Zagaria's arrest, the Casalesi clan as we've known it ceases to exist, and we'll have to see what form it will take now," Mr Cantone said. "It's the end of an epoch."
The Casalesi, unlike the fragmented clans within the city of Naples, had consolidated control over a large geographic area, and had used proceeds from drug trafficking and extortion to invest in a range of legitimate investments at home and abroad, from bin collection to construction.
Zagaria, nicknamed capastorta or "twisted head" in a reference to his brutality, had ruled the clan alongside Antonio Iovine, who was arrested last year.
Interior minister Annamaria Cancellieri hailed the arrest as "a huge success by the state, not only against the Casalesi clan but against the entire Camorra organisation".