Pasquale Scotti, a leader of the Camorra syndicate who is wanted for more than two dozen murders, was detained by police while taking his children to school in Recife.
Police believe his Brazilian family were unaware of his identity, which was exposed by Interpol through fingerprint examination.
He had been living under the false name Francisco de Castro Visconti. Reinventing himself as a businessman, he had local identity papers, registered as a voter and partly owned a nightclub and food import business.
Photographs of the 56-year-old suspect in handcuffs show a man very different from the figure seen on Italian wanted posters. The gangster in his twenties with thick hair and dark bushy brows is now a balding middle-aged man with a beard, glasses and a slight paunch.
