A wanted Mafia killer who pretended to be blind has escaped arrest by using a secret tunnel at his hideout to disappear into sewers beneath Caserta, near Naples.

Police said Giuseppe Setola, 38, who features in Roberto Saviano's bestselling expose of the Mafia in Naples, Gomorra, and is one of Italy's 30 most wanted criminals, had eluded them in a dawn raid by 50 anti-Mafia officers by escaping through a trapdoor beneath his bed into a tunnel leading to the sewers.

He had run "at a crouch" through the foul water and stench of the sewer for a kilometre and a half, or just over a mile, using a miner's helmet with a lamp to see his way, before emerging from a manhole. He then commandeered a car from a passing female motorist, threatening her with a pistol.

The car, an Alfa 145, was later found abandoned with the miner's helmet in it. Setola's wife Stefania, who is under arrest, kept police talking while her husband made his escape beneath their feet. They later found the trapdoor and gave chase, but it was too late. Police said they believed Setola's two Mafia bodyguards had escaped with him.

Setola, a leading member of the Casalesi clan of the Camorra, is alleged to have led an armed gang which gunned down six African immigrants in the nearby seaside town of Castelvolturno last September during a Mafia turf war over drugs trafficking. The murders led to a crackdown on the Camorra by the centre Right government of Silvio Berlusconi, which sent troops and additional police to Caserta, Castelvolturno and Naples. Roberto Maroni, the Interior Minister, said Mafia defiance of the state in the Naples area amounted to a "civil war".

Described by Il Messaggero, the Rome daily, as the Mafia's "Scarlet Pimpernel", Setola has long eluded the police. Last November police arrested a Carabinieri officer accused of secretly tipping him off about police operations. Last Spring he was arrested, but incredibly was released from prison into house arrest on the strength of a doctor's certificate claiming he was nearly blind. Prosecutors have opened an inquiry into the incident.

Setola even sent a photograph of himself to a Naples newspaper in dark glasses and an an eye bandage to maintain the fiction that he could not see. Investigators found eye salve in his cramped hideout, a 50-square metre ground floor flat in the Caserta suburb of Trentola Ducenta.

However he "could certainly see well enough to read", police said, since he had well thumbed copies of a memoir by the late Pope John Paul II entitled Arise, Let Us Go and a book on the Camorra by Rosaria Capacchione, a Naples journalist who like Mr Saviano is under police protection. Police also found arms, ammunition, Cartier scent and a wardrobe full of high fashion clothes by designers such as Armani.

The film version of Gomorra, directed by Matteo Garrone, is in line for an Oscar nomination later this month for best foreign language film. Mr Saviano last month said he would leave Italy because of death threats but has not yet done so.

Police in Rome meanwhile claimed a major success against the Mafia after arresting Candeloro Parrello, 55, a member of the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia, wanted on charges of international drugs trafficking and listed as one of the 100 most dangerous men in Italy. He had been on the run for 10 years.

Parrello had invested 'Ndrangheta drugs money in restaurants, property and businesses in Rome, police said, evading capture for a decade by hiding with "trusted associates" in the capital or in the Castelli Romani, the wine-producing hill towns south of Rome.

He had been sentenced to 18 years in jail in absentia for trafficking drugs between Europe and South America, above all Colombia. Police said they had confiscated property worth 100 million Euros belonging to Parrello as well as a yacht and a fleet of 21 luxury cars, including a Ferrari and a Porsche.

Four other alleged 'Ndrangheta drugs traffickers were arrested in the same raid, police said. Parrello himself, who was arrested on the street in the Montesacro district of Rome, had at first made a run for it but had then given himself up, raising his hands in the air and shouting to police officers "I am Parrello, don't shoot".

A total of 30 anti-Mafia police took part in the swoop, which followed months of surveillance including intercepted mobile phone calls and coded messages. Parrello took over an 'Ndrangheta clan after his father Gaetano, a Calabrian Mafia boss known as "The Wolf of the Night", was gunned down in 1986 in a Mafia gang feud.

Times Recommends

• Robert McNamara dies aged 93
• German soldiers earn new ‘Iron Cross’
• Great Barrier Reef 'gone within 20 years'