During the British period and right up to the present, Malta continued to serve as a sanctuary to several personalities who were being pursued by the authorities for various reasons.

One of the most significant crimes of the 19th century was the assassination of US President Abraham Lincoln by the actor John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. General Lee had surrendered five days earlier, the Civil War was finally ended and Washington was celebrating.

Although it was Good Friday, the President and his wife decided to spend the evening watching a frivolous comedy entitled Our American Cousin at the Ford’s Theatre. Booth, who was familiar with the theatre’s layout, having performed there several times, entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the head at point blank range.

In order to muffle the sound of the shot, Booth chose the precise moment when the packed audience burst into laughter at one of the funniest lines of the play, which he knew well. The President was grieviously wounded and succumbed to his wounds the following day. The assassin made good his escape armed with a knife which he used to stab those who attempted to stop him.

This was the first successful assassination of a US President, preceding the murder of Presidents James Garfield, William McKinley and John Kennedy, although unsuccessful attempts were made against no less than 16 US leaders.

Booth was not acting alone, but was part of a conspiracy involving several others. Assassination was not the original aim of the conspirators: it was the kidnapping of the President. The decision to end his life was taken following the defeat of the Confederate Army.

One of the conspirators was John Surratt Jnr, who, together with his mother Ann Surratt, provided logistical support to the plotters. Ann Surrat’s boarding house in Washington was the meeting place where the conspirators hatched their plot. Ann Surrat was apprehended and later tried and found guilty. She was hanged, together with four other conspirators, on July 7, 1865, the first woman to be executed by the US government. Booth himself remained at large and provoked a huge manhunt which ended when he was fatally shot by his pursuers at Garret’s Farm, Virginia.

It is Ann Surratt’s son John we are concerned with here. John Surratt was a Confederate spy and friend of Booth. Although he was one of the conspirators, he was not directly involved in the murder as he was in New York when it happened. When he was informed of Lincoln’s assassination, he managed to cross the border into Canada and from there secured a passage, in disguise and under an assumed name, across the Atlantic to Liverpool. He then made his way to Rome where he joined the Papal Army, known as the Zouaves, posing as a Canadian citizen by the name of John Watson.

Unfortunately for him he was recognised by another American Zouave and acquaintance, Henri Beaumont de Sainte-Marie. He was arrested in Veroli by the Papal authorities but managed to escape as he was being escorted to Rome by jumping into a ravine. He eventually made his way to Naples, assumed the name of Walters, and on November 17, 1866, embarked on the steamer Tripoli, bound for Alexandria, which was scheduled to stop at Malta to take on coal. Surrat, alias Watson, alias Walters, was still wearing the Zouave uniform.

The American consul in Naples immediately telegraphed his counterpart in Malta, William Winthrop, and asked that the fugitive be apprehended as soon as he set foot on the island following quarantine. Quarantine lasted 15 days, during which time Winthrop found it difficult to communicate with the ship. He eventually learnt that the person in Zouave uniform was travelling as “John Agostini”.

Winthrop was not in a position to arrest him as the British authorities in Malta were being difficult and did not support such an arrest; they informed Winthrop that “without some evidence… connecting him with the murder of Mr Lincoln as an accomplice, that man, if apprehended, would within a very short time be discharged, and might then bring an action of damages for unlawful arrest, for which you would be responsible”.

Thus warned, Winthrop thought it more expedient to allow Surratt to proceed to Alexandria where the American consul had greater powers to act and was not hampered by legal quibbles. In fact, at the end of the quarantine period the Tripoli sailed to Alexandria with Surratt still on board in his Zouave uniform.

He was duly arrested in Alexandria and transported to the US where he was to stand trial. He was eventually acquitted as the jury was divided on his guilt. After a varied career, John Surrat Jnr died of pneumonia at the age of 72 on April 21, 1916.

After World War I, Italy was taken over by the Fascists led by ‘Il Duce’ Benito Mussolini. Among those who opposed fascism was the editor of Il Popolo, Giuseppe Donati. The latter had been instrumental in the revelation of the identity of the Fascist thugs who had murdered the prelate Don Giovanni Minzoni, and more famously, the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti.

Following these revelations, Donati himself would become the target of Fascist violence and the regime forced him into exile in order to prevent him becoming a third martyr in the struggle against Mussolini’s policies. Donati did not flee to Italy but to France, where he spent five years.

With the assistance of two other anti-Fascists, Luigi Sturzio and Angelo Crespi, who were living in exile in London, Donati was appointed teacher of Italian at St Edward’s College, Cottonera, which had been founded in January 1929 by Baroness Margaret Strickland. He took up his post in September 1930, and less than a year later, in early July 1931, he left Malta for Paris suffering from tuberculosis. He died there six weeks later on August 16.

A number of bosses of Italian organised crime opted to flee to Malta. The fast sea link via catamaran facilitated such escapes

Although an exile who had lived for some time in Malta, he did not originally intend to escape to Malta but found employment here after some years in France, so he cannot properly be termed a ‘fugitive to Malta’. The same can be said of his successor as teacher of Italian at St Edward’s – Umberto Calosso. He was also an anti-Fascist, but he was not in exile when he was recruited while on a visit to London in 1931 by the college headmaster, again on the recommendation of Sturzio and Crispi.

In recent years, Italians of a quite different ilk have found or attempted to find refuge in Malta. I refer to a number of bosses of Italian organised crime who were wanted in their home country and opted to flee to Malta. The existence of a fast sea link via catamaran between Sicily and Malta has facilitated such escapes.

In 2014, Sebastiano Brunno, one of the most influential Mafia bosses, was arrested in Malta. Fifty-six-year-old Brunno was the head of the Cosa Nostra Nardo clan, which operated mainly in Syracuse and Catania. He had been on the run since March 2009 and was wanted by the Italian police for his Mafia associations and his involvement in the murder of Nicolò Agnello in 1992 during a bloody feud between the Nardo and Di Salvo clans.

Brunno had already been sentenced to life imprisonment for these crimes. After weeks of joint investigation between the Italian and Maltese police, Brunno was identified and arrested while on this way to lunch in a Buġibba restaurant on October 2, 2014. He was carrying a false identity document in the name of a citizen of Palermo and had been living in a comfortable apartment from which a computer and €1,500 were seized. Brunno was held in custody in Malta and was eventually extradited to Italy on January 11, 2016, after serving a three-month sentence for falsifying an identity card. He is now serving out his life sentence in a Catania jail.

Another boss on the run attempted to escape to Malta in August 2014 but was arrested as he was boarding the catamaran at Pozzallo. Aldo Gionta, who was accompanied by a man and two women, was apprehended by plain clothes policemen as his ticket was being checked. He was carrying a false identity card and €1,000 in cash.

Gionta was one of the leading Camorra bosses and was linked to the powerful clan set up by his father in the Naples comune of Torre Annunziata; he had been on the wanted list since June 2013. Known as ‘Il Poeta’, Gionta had notoriously escaped capture by resorting to disguise, including cross-dressing, although he was not heavily disguised when arrested.

He was associated with the classic neapolitan singer Tony Marciano, who was himself arrested for drug dealing and criminal association. Marciano had recorded a song which was critical of Mafia turncoats (pentiti) whom he accused of losing their omertà. Following their capture, Gionta and his travelling companions were imprisoned in Ragusa.

Last year, another boss of Italian organised crime, Vincenzo Locorotondo, was arrested at Pozzallo, but in this instance he had just disembarked from the catamarn which had earlier departed from Malta. Locorotondo had been on the run since the end of June when the anti-Mafia police in Bari had issued an arrest warrant and detention order against him. He was associated with the Mafia organisation Striscuglio in Bari.

The most recent fugitive to Malta, where he was arrested on February 17, 2016, is the perpetrator of one of the grisliest murders ever com­mitted in Poland – Kajetan Poznanski. The 27-year-old Warsaw librarian was on the run after he had been listed in the ‘most wanted fugitives’ section of the Europol website.

Poznanski was a seemingly quiet librarian with a hidden fascination for Hannibal Lecter, the ghoulish anti-hero of the Thomas Harris series of novels. The description of his gruesome crime as carried in European newspapers is quite horrific and could easily have come straight out of Silence of the Lambs.

After meeting a young Italian teacher, (identified only as Katarzyna), he convinced her to give him Italian language lessons. During one of these lessons on February 3, he decapitated her with a Samurai sword (of which he had a collection) and then proceeded to dismember her body and set fire to his apartment in order to destroy the evidence. He fled to Germany by train and later to Italy. When the charred remains of his victim were discovered an international arrest warrant was immediately issued.

On February 15, the Polish police requested the assistance of the Maltese authorities as it was believed Poznanski had crossed over to Malta on the Sicily ferry on February 9. Following intense investigations by Maltese and Polish police officers, he was identified and tracked to City Gate, Valletta, where he was over­come and arrested on February 17.

Poznanski had been living for the previous four days in a guest house in St Ursula Street, Valletta, under an assumed name. The owner of the guest house said she never imagined that her guest, who told her his name was Charles, could be a criminal. She described him as “a nice, quiet, tranquil man” who “behaved very calmly”.

Following his capture, Poznanski was extradited to Poland, where he arrived on February 26. When he appeared before the Warsaw prose­cutor he admitted to the charges of the macabre murder and was remanded in custody. On May 23, while he was undergoing psycho­logical tests, he attacked the psycho­logist and tried to throttle her, and also injured a police officer who tried to restrain him. He is still in a Warsaw prison while court proceedings against him are still ongoing.

On October 3, 2016, Italian drug dealer Fabio Vespa was arrested at the Naxxar police station. In a bizarre twist, Vespa, who had been residing in Naxxar with his wife, was arrested when he went to the police station to file a report on damage sustained by his car.

He had been jailed for two years in Italy for drug-related offences in 2012, a sentence that was confirmed on appeal in January 2016. He was subsequently released on parole but later absconded to Malta.

He is currently being held in custody pending the result of extradition proceedings, in which he pleaded that he had come to Malta to be by his wife’s side after she had suffered a miscarriage, and that he was fulfilling the conditions of his parole locally.

(Concluded)