Morabito and three other inmates “escaped through a hole in the roof” of a police detention centre in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo late on Sunday, before breaking into a neighbouring apartment and exiting onto the street, Uruguay’s interior ministry announced.
The 52-year-old ’Ndrangheta boss was arrested in Uruguay in 2017 after decades on the run and was awaiting extradition for “international drug trafficking”.
The ’Ndrangheta mafia comes from the southern Italian region of Calabria, and is thought to control as much as 80 per cent of Europe’s cocaine trade.
Known as the “cocaine king of Milan”, Morabito has been one of Italy’s most wanted fugitives since 1995.
“It is disconcerting and serious that a criminal like Rocco Morabito, head of the ’Ndrangheta, has managed to escape from a prison in Uruguay while waiting to be extradited to Italy,” Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said in a brief statement.
“I make two commitments, first to shed full light on how he escaped, asking for an immediate explanation from the Montevideo government
“Then we will continue the hunt for Morabito, wherever he is.”
Morabito was arrested in September 2017 while staying in a hotel in Montevideo, but had been living in a luxury villa near the resort town of Punta del Este, east of the capital.
Them mobster moved to Milan from his hometown of Africo, in Calabria, at the age of 23, and quickly carved out a reputation within the world of organised crime.
He soon came to the attention of Italian anti-mafia investigators and they regularly tracked him delivering suitcases filled with millions of lira to Colombian drug traffickers in a Milan piazza.
Police finally moved in on his birthday as he made what would be his last delivery, in October 1994, but Morabito managed to escape.
The following year he was sentenced in absentia to 28 years in prison for mafia association and drug trafficking.
The sentence was later extended to 30 years.
