Maybe There is Such Thing as Bad Publiclity

Food and culture are inextricably linked. We all have to eat, and as a result, food becomes part of many of the customs we grow up with and the milestones along the way. We associate specific foods with specific holidays, celebrate things like “Taco Tuesday,” and have “comfort foods” that help us through a bad day. But on the other hand, food that doesn’t quite meet the moment can be a huge disappointment — when you want your grandmother’s chicken soup, for example, the condensed stuff from the can just won’t do.

That’s probably why Paolo Dimitrio, an Italian man living in France (pictured above), opened up his own pizza place about fifteen or twenty years ago.

And it’s also why he may be going back to Italy against his will.

Dimitrio was born in 1959 or 1960 and grew up in the Calabria region of Italy. (Here’s a map.) He lived there for most of his life but in or around 2006, he relocated to Lyon, and ultimately took a job as a pizzaiolo — a pizza maker. Because of his roots, he was insistent that his food reflect the recipes he grew up with, and in June 2021, he opened up his own restaurant, called Caffe Rossini Ristorante, in nearby Saint-Étienne. To launch the eatery, as the BBC reported, Dimitrio “appeared in a local newspaper feature, boasting of his restaurant’s ‘regional and home-made recipes’ such as ravioli, risotto and tagliatelle.” It didn’t do all that well — per the Guardian, he only ran in until November 2021, and it shut down at some point thereafter. Suffice it to say that the local press that Dimitrio and the restaurant received didn’t attract a lot of attention, at least not from would-be customers.

But it did capture the eyes of another audience: the cops. Specifically, Italian police recognized the picture of Dimitrio, but they knew him under a different name: Edgardo Greco, a member of the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate — and a man wanted for murder. As CBS News explained, “Greco escaped from temporary police custody in 2006 after an arrest warrant was issued following the killing of brothers Stefano and Giuseppe Bartolomeo, who were beaten to death at a fish market in the town of Cosenza in January 1991, and whose bodies were believed to have been dissolved in acid, according to Italy’s national Carabinieri police force.” Greco had vanished from that point on, but authorities never gave up looking.

By 2021, Greco, then living as Dimitrio the restaurateur, was still very much under the radar, and no one had associated his new name with his former identity — he likely thought that the Italian authorities had given up on his case, or in the very least, weren’t going to read the small-town paper that featured him. But they did and began an investigation into Dimitrio’s history. They learned that Dimitrio was, indeed, the man they had been looking for for more than 16 years, and in February 2023, he was arrested as part of an INTERPOL-organized operation, per the international crime agency. All because he wanted to sell more authentic Italian food to people in the south of France.

Greco is not in an Italian prison yet, though. In 2024, a French court blocked his extradition to Italy, citing procedural flaws in his case. Apparently, the prosecutors put pineapple on their pizza, or whatever the legal equivalent of that faux pas is.

Bonus fact: In most places, pizza is hardly considered a fancy meal — sure, there are upscale places that offer pricy pies, but you wouldn’t expect it to be served at a state dinner. But, as is true in many other cases, North Korea is a notable exception. In the 1990s, North Korea’s dictatorial ruler Kim Jong Il brought a pizzaiolo named Ermanno Furlani to teach the North Korean army how to make pizzas, and since then, the food has become a staple of the rich and powerful in the nation. According to Vice, as of 2018, there are five Italian restaurants in the capital city of Pyongyang, which is more than the number of Chinese places there. But don’t expect to see a lot of people buying pizza (or anything else) at those places. Per Atlas Obscura, “At around $5-10 each, pizza is still astronomically expensive for many locals. (In 2016, North Korea’s per capita gross national income was estimated to be around 1.5 million won, or $1,342 a year.) So only a small elite in the North Korean capital, as well as diplomats and wealthy foreigners, can afford to enjoy the growing pizza scene.”

From the Archives: The Man Behind the Can: Chef Boyardee isn’t what you’d call top-shelf Italian cooking, but it actually was once served at a White House state dinner. Kind of.