In a dramatic dawn raid today Italian police and soldiers arrested the boss of a Calabrian Mafia clan whose feud with a rival Mafia family led to the deaths a year ago of six Italians at a pizzeria at Duisburg in Germany.

Paolo Nirta, 31, was caught in a joint police-military operation as he tried to escape by vaulting over the balcony of his house into the lane below at the rural hilltown of San Luca in the Aspromonte mountains of Calabria, after officers had smashed their way through the front door. A hundred police and troops with helicopters were used in the operation. Nirta was unarmed.

San Luca is a stronghold of the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia, which together with the Camorra, the Naples Mafia, is now considered by the Italian authorities to be more dangerous and powerful than the Sicilian Mafia, known as the Cosa Nostra.

The six men shot dead at Duisburg last year were members of the Pelle-Vottari clan, the rivals of the Nirta-Strangio clan. The origins of the feud are obscure but are said to lie in an incident at the San Luca carnival in 1991 in which eggs were thrown as an insult.

Two years ago Nirta's sister-in-law, Maria Strangio, was gunned down on her own doorstep in San Luca at Christmas, an act which led to the latest round of tit-for-tat killings. Nirta's father and brother were arrested after the Duisburg killings, making him acting head of the clan. His brother-in-law, Giovanni Strangio, who is on the run, is believed by police to have taken a leading part in the Duisburg murders to avenge the death of his wife.

Although the Sicilian Mafia continues to exercise a hold on imaginations because of its depiction in books and films, anti-Mafia prosecutors say that in reality the 'Ndrangheta has acquired a global reach beyond that of Cosa Nostra, controlling much of the world cocaine market.

It is also reported to have infiltrated the Italian economy, buying outwardly respectable businesses in Milan and northern Italy to use as fronts for money laundering. Prosecutors say that it is difficult to track because it operates in family-based cells rather than as a hierarchical organisation such as the Sicilian Mafia, which has a Godfather or "boss of bosses" at the apex.

According to estimates by the Italian Parliament's anti-Mafia commission, the 'Ndrangheta's annual income, largely derived from drugs trafficking and links with Colombian cartels, is up to $70 billion (£35 billion) , equivalent to 3 per cent of Italian GDP. Apart from drugs it is also active in the building industry, protection rackets, prostitution and the waste-disposal business, including toxic waste.

Investigators say that the 'Ndrangheta, which is thought to have about 10,000 members, benefits from a wide network of Calabrian émigrés, or descendants of émigrés, in the United States, Canada and Latin America, including Mexico.

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