By Andrew Steven Harris

Staff Writer

In 1992 Mafioso Santino Di Matteo helped carry out the murder of Italian judge Giovanni Falcone, the anti-mob crusader of the celebrated "maxi-trials" that sent hundreds of hard-core criminals to prison. Assassins planted bombs in the motorway from Palermo International Airport and then detonated them as Falcone drove past, killing the judge, his wife and three policemen. It was a devastating revenge blow against Italy's campaign to crush the Cosa Nostra.

Then police arrested Di Matteo. And he began to talk.

Intent on silencing the turncoat, Sicilian organized-crime boss Luigi Putrone kidnapped Di Matteo's 11-year-old son Giuseppe. Putrone had the boy kept alive 18 months, his captors regularly torturing him and sending photos of the gruesome injuries to his father.

Di Matteo emerged from hiding in a desperate gambit to negotiate his son's release, but Putrone eventually ordered his gangsters to strangle the boy, then 13, and dump his body into a vat of acid.

So when Czech police converged on a 44-year-old Italian man coming out of a bakery in Ústí nad Labem, they knew they had one of the Mafia's most brutal, notorious killers in their sights.

Despite Putrone's history as a stone-cold killer, police say that he put up only a minor struggle when, working from wiretaps in conjunction with the Sicilian authorities, they collared him to end a six-year international manhunt. "He was so surprised at the arrest that he gave in like a little lamb," said Jirí Ráz, the officer in charge of arresting Putrone, at a joint press conference given by the Czech and Italian authorities in Prague. "He did not expect anyone to find him."

Putrone had reason to be surprised. He had lived for years in quiet obscurity in the industrial border town in north Bohemia, using a stolen Italian passport, under the name Umberto Bonfiglio — a surname meaning "good son." In fact, it was his stolen passport that tipped off authorities when they later discovered that he had used it to register an Ustí-based business in October 1999.

Living with his Czech girlfriend, Nikola Horvátová, who worked until last week at a Bata department store just off the town's main square, Putrone led a low-key, austere Czech existence in sharp contrast to his life as a ruling Mafia kingpin.

At his girlfriend's apartment in a run-down communist-era eight-story panelák, or concrete prefab apartment, tucked away at the top of a narrow, nondescript street, overgrown grass and cracked pavement surrounds the mass-produced housing. Old, abandoned mattresses lay next to the garbage out front, with rusted railings leading up to the paint-chipped front door.

On one of the broken, weather-beaten benches lining the front of the building, two elderly Czech women talked Aug. 19 about the man they thought had been utterly ordinary. They were unable to imagine him a fugitive crime boss and convicted mass murderer.

"It would have never crossed my mind," said one of them, requesting anonymity. "He used to walk his dog right here like anybody else. He had a fine tan and was always nicely dressed — he wore this nice blue sweatsuit. I think that's what they arrested him in."

Others who knew him echoed the sentiments, describing a man who did nothing to make himself noticed. "He seemed ordinary enough to me," said Jaroslav Novák, a cab driver whose taxi stand sits near one of the shuttered kebab stalls that Putrone once operated on the town's main square until this past Christmas. He had even given Putrone a ride home a few times. "He seemed like one of those people that come by the dozens," Novák said.

At Pizza Rosa, a nearby Italian restaurant, waiters said Putrone would exchange pleasantries with the boss, usually in Italian, or with other patrons from the old country, but little more. At the bakery he regularly visited around the corner from his flat, where a masked strike team converged on him as he exited the parking lot while running errands, workers didn't even know what had happened at the time: With the exit leading onto a curved main road, the arrest occurred out of view of everyone except passing motorists.

Even the local police had little to no background on Putrone; the Mafia don had no criminal arrests there, appeared to be a local businessman and gave them little reason to take interest. The arrest itself was conducted by state authorities, without the direct involvement of local police.

However, even in hiding, Putrone could not shed all traces of his criminal past. Italian prosecutors still regarded Putrone as the de facto head of the feared Porto Empedocle crime family from the Agrigento province of Italy, apprehending him after tapping phone calls he had made to Sicily. And Putrone's business partner, René Slepcík, in the trading company René & Umberto, also carries a notorious surname in Ústí: His brother, Elemír, is a convicted cocaine trafficker, currently serving time in prison.

Czech authorities will now investigate whether any of Putrone's Czech associates knew of his criminal background or intentionally assisted him in evading authorities. All have denied involvement, but they shun media inquiries.

At Horvátová's apartment, where Putrone lived, she watched from her fifth-floor window as reporters spoke with neighbors, then closed the window and refused to answer her buzzer after one of them pointed her out. At Slepcík's home, with several windows and the back door open, and where a blue Mercedes SEC 500 with tinted windows and a leather steering wheel remained parked out front, no one answered the front doorbell.

"I am no goody-goody, but if I had known what he was, I would not have established a company with him after all," René Slepcík told the Ústí paper Deníky Bohemia, in perhaps his only statement to the media. "He did not want to go out with me very often, maybe over my name."

Czech police said their investigation continues.

"If we have people here who cover up for such Mafia members, then we are interested in who they are," Milan Vondrus, a Czech police investigator, told reporters during the joint briefing. "They are definitely not clean."

Authorities must now negotiate the complex extradition proceedings that will send Putrone from his Litomerice holding cell in north Bohemia to a prison in Italy, where he has been sentenced in absentia to life without parole.

"He passed in an instant from the serenity of a life built on blood, violence and shady dealings to the certainty of a life in prison," the Italian police said in a statement to the press.

Putrone's attorney, Jirí Nedvedicky´, has already lodged a protest against his client's incarceration with the regional court that will hear the case and said he plans to fight extradition.

"My client agrees neither with the custody nor with his extradition to Italy," Nedvedicky´ told the Czech News Agency (CTK). Because of the particulars of the extradition arrangements between the two countries, Justice Minister Pavel Nemec will make the final decision on Putrone's fate, Nedvedicky´ said.

Putrone, meanwhile, has kept his silence during his initial interrogation, according to authorities.

"He behaved jovially, very calmly," Ráz told CTK, referencing the Cosa Nostra code of silence. "He showed us what omerta is like."