Of all the things you could list that YouTube would help in, catching a mafia fugitive shouldn’t be on that list but it is. Seven years on the run, Marc Feren Claude Biart had almost escaped but his love for cooking was his downfall. The YouTube channel he had started with his wife helped the police track him down and capture him.
The gangster’s love for Italian cuisine led him and his wife to start a cooking show. Though he was careful to hide his face in the videos, in the end, what gave him away was his body tattoos. Mafia members usually have a lot of ink on their bodies with a unique style that is sometimes dead giveaways to their identity.
The police reported that they believe Biart is part of a nefarious mafia group called the “Ndrangheta crime syndicate” which is rumored to be the most powerful and feared syndicate in Europe. Biart, now 52 years old, had been hiding out in the Dominican Republic for the past five years after being wanted for trafficking cocaine from the Netherlands since 2014. To the locals in the republic, he was simply known as Marc while he kept his distance from the Italian community in the area.
The police had never stopped searching for him and only recently opted to try out open source information as well. They came across his wife’s YouTube activity and looking at his tattoos they suspected that they had caught him. Biart was known to have previously worked in an Italian restaurant to had something to go on. He was arrested last week.
This isn’t the first man they have caught from the same mafia group. Francesco Pelle, another member, was on the run for 14 years was in Lisbon where he was getting treated for COVID-19. Haha got ’em.
Looking at the arrests of Biart and Pelle, Italian authorities have opened up that the mafia’s activities not only threaten Italy but also the rest of the world.