Salvatore d'Avanzo was serving life for multiple murders when he went on the run earlier this year from home leave.

Salvatore d'Avanzo, 46, was serving life for multiple murders when he went on the run earlier this year from home leave.He was held after police received an anonymous tip-off as he was having a tattoo of a Samurai warrior done on his arm in an attempt to change his appearance.D'Avanzo was jailed in 1989, and while behind bars his hair had turned grey, he wore glasses, piled on the pounds and had a pasty complexion. However, when he was found at the beauty parlour – which is a 15-minute drive from Milan's Opera prison where he was being held – he had dyed his hair black, changed to contact lenses, got a tan and lost 33lb
Francesco Zio, the officer who arrested him, said: "The change was amazing. You would not have recognised him from the man who had gone on the run six months ago."When police burst in on him at the beauty parlour, he told them: "Thank God it's you, I thought you were hitmen."
D'Avanzo was the favoured hitman of the Vitale Mafia clan based in Palermo on Sicily and was convicted of murdering Diego Bonura, a member of a rival mob.
His body was not discovered until ten years later after a Mafia supergrass told police where to find the corpse, and d'Avanzo is suspected of other hits.
D'Avanzo earned day parole in 2001 for good behaviour. But in April he failed to return to the prison from his day job, faking his own death by abandoning his car near the prison with the lights on, the doors open and the keys in the ignition.
D'Avanzo, who had 1,400 in cash and fake identification papers in his pockets when he was caught, spent his time as a fugitive between Lombardy and Liguria, frequently visiting the San Remo casinos.His girlfriend is under investigation as an accomplice to d'Avanzo's prison break, but she claims she knew nothing of her lover's criminal past.Yesterday, when he appeared in court, d'Avanzo apologised to the judge, Elisabetta Meyer, for going on the run.
He said: "While I was out on leave I had a car crash and I was worried. I panicked and just ran away and didn't come back to prison."When caught, d'Avanzo had a fake ID card on him bearing the name Luciano Domizio, and his place of birth was wrongly given as Naples.Officer Zio added: "What he wanted to do was just go and live with his girlfriend."He made it look as if he had been kidnapped and killed by abandoning the car after the accident. He was in the process of completely changing his identity, but we had received good information which led to us catching up with him and arresting him."