Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials | Hacker News Reader

Police say they found mafia fugitive on YouTube, posting cooking tutorials

arstechnica.com

19 pointssjav13 comments

Does anyone else not get 100% feel-good vibes from this? It's great that he was caught, but it's no wonder criminals turn to more crime... even simple ways of showing their humanity like sharing their cooking can lead to them getting caught. No solution comes to mind but just wanted to point that out.

I honestly don't get what you mean. He's free to show his humanity by collaborating with authorities and getting more people arrested, or by doing his sentence and having a cooking show afterwards.

Anything else is "doing something he likes while avoiding the consequences for all the illegal actions he did in the past", and we're not talking about somebody in poverty stealing food at the supermarket, here.

(This is all assuming he's guilty, of course this has to be demonstrated at the trial)

There's an irony in that we want criminals to reform and rejoin society, yet we arrest them for doing so on their own initiative. He could have continued to commit crime, leaving a trail of bodies, and he probably wouldn't have been caught yet. He chose to live a quiet life somewhere out of the way and ended up getting caught for trying to be a normal person.

If he were going to continue living a quiet life there til he died, I have to wonder what we've actually gained here. Yes, he did awful things. I'm not denying that, but nothing we do to him is going to change that. I'm not really convinced that cracking down is going to prevent future crime; it doesn't seem to have stopped the mafia thus far. He's not going to talk, the investigators have called out that they can't make inroads because of their brutal code of silence.

The only thing we get out of this is a sadistic pleasure from punishing a man who seems to have reformed. It's justice porn. Why would anyone on the run from a life sentence bother to try to reform then? You may as well stay in the Mafia; there's nothing for you on the outside.

Are you saying that one is free to commit any crime as long as one day they stop and no longer commit crimes? And no punishment or retribution is required?

Punishment is required.

However, because we want people to come clean of their own agency (both to make crime-solving take up less public resources, and to make it such that criminals don't have to wait to get caught before becoming productive and non-harmful members of society), we should adjust incentives such that the punishment for coming clean of one's own accord is a little less, and the punishment for getting caught for the same crime is a little more.

Maybe it could be implemented as adding an extra punishment for concealing a crime?

I agree, keep in mind this criminal did not come clean on his own accord. There is no indication he would have ever come clean. All we know is that he did non-criminal activities on youtube.

For all we know he could have been operating a human-smuggling operation from his current local.

Either way he knowingly and purposefully avoided prosecution.

I agree. I think we should incentivize more people like this to come clean rather than spending our own resources having to go out and search for them. I think this will result in more people like him getting the punishment they deserve, and also makes it so that we turn more of these people back into contributing members of society.

That's funny you really couldn't think of a solution? Don't join the mafia seems like an obvious one.

If it seems obvious and yet people are still joining the mafia, then there's probably something we're not understanding about the dynamics at play. People don't wake up and decide they want to join the mafia.

I see what you mean, but I think the problem with a lot of career criminals (i.e. mafioso/drug dealers) is that this is just a part of the pathology.

They rationalize that they are actually good people, that without the mafia the neighborhood would be worse, that that guy had it coming, better they buy drugs from me than some unknown chemicals from the chinese, etc. etc.

Cooking on youtube is just an extension of that. Most people don't consider themselves evil, it's all rationalizations upon rationalizations.

The more interesting question, left unaddressed by the article, is exactly how they were able to make the connection in the first place.

Did they parse through millions of YouTube videos cataloging every tattoo and descriptive feature then run it against any outstanding fugitive’s features?

Or was it just a decently popular cooking channel

> the subject of "the biggest mafia trial Italy has seen in decades," the BBC wrote. "There are 355 alleged mobsters and corrupt officials who have been charged

This is pretty similar to the Maxi Trial from back in the 80s. [1]

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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxi_Trial

Humanity needs the source of this youtube channel. Italian cuisine depends on this. This is a very serious matter.

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