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A notorious Italian drug trafficker, dubbed the “van Gogh” boss, has donated an island off the coast of Dubai to the Italian state in the hope of having his prison sentence reduced.
Italian drug smuggler and Mafia defector Raffaele Imperiale, known as the “van Gogh” boss, received his new title in 2016. At the time, he had returned two stolen paintings by the expressionist painter van Gogh to the Italian state as a show of goodwill.
Now the former mafioso is instead donating an entire island – certainly an artificial one – to the Italian authorities in the hope of getting his prison sentence reduced, writes La Repubblica.
The statement was made by Imperiale’s lawyer during an ongoing trial in Naples, where the former mobster risks being sentenced to more than 14 years in prison.
The island is part of a group of man-made islands off the coast of Dubai, and is estimated to be worth up to €70 million. It goes by the name “Taiwan”.
Raffaele Imperiale was one of the Neapolitan mafia Camorra’s most notorious drug smugglers. He was arrested in 2021 in Dubai after being on the run for five years.
He also became a household name after Italian police in 2016 found two paintings by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in his bedroom at his villa in the town of Castellammare di Sabia outside Naples.
The paintings, “Sea view in Scheveningen” from 1882 and “The congregation leaves the Reformed church in Nuenen” from 1884, had been stolen from a museum in Amsterdam in 2002 and then bought on the black market by Imperiale.
After his arrest, the defected mobster donated the paintings to the Italian authorities, who then returned them to the museum.