Gaetano Angrisano, 31, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for drug trafficking 18 months ago and was on the interior ministry’s “100 most dangerous fugitives” list, Naples police said.

A powerful member of a clan in the notorious Scampia neighbourhood of the southern Italian city, he had been “a ghost” who “escaped handcuffs for a year and a half”, it said.

But after establishing he would be at a party in a social housing complex last night, some 250 policemen surrounded the block so that “no one could get in or out”.

“They flushed him out. Angrisano, who had been invited to a party, had to leave his friends and relatives just after the cake was cut,” police said.

Meanwhile, in Torvaianica, a coastal town just south of Rome, police nabbed a 52-year-old man who was sentenced in November to over 20 years in prison for mafia association and arms and drugs dealing.

The man, from Lecce in the southeast of Italy, “was spotted in the Lazio region while shopping at a supermarket and was immediately arrested”, police said today.

He had been “a leading organised crime figure in (the southern region of) Salento in the first decade of the 2000s”, it said.