'Scarface' bust in home of Italian mafia drugs suspect

A life-size bust of Al Pacino in one of his most celebrated film roles has been found in the home of an alleged mafia drug lord during a raid by Italian police.

The bust, which depicts Pacino as Tony Montana, the fictional Cuban drug dealer in the 1983 film Scarface, was found in the home of Carlo Padovani. The 34-year-old was arrested on suspicion of running a large drug dealing operation at Boscoreale, a grimy urban area on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, outside Naples.

More than 30 others were also arrested, including eight women, on suspicion of selling drugs in the area. Police said children as young as six were employed by the drug pushers to act as lookouts and were paid around €200 (£167) a week.

Adult drug dealers, some of them housewives with husbands in jail for mafia-related convictions, earned €400 a week, plus 10% of the value of the transaction.

They were allegedly connected to three clans from the Camorra mafia, which has its heartland in the region surrounding Naples. The cocaine dealing operation was organised on "an industrial scale" and provided employment for entire families, said Rosario Cantelmo, a senior prosecutor.

While novels and films are often inspired by real-life mafia activities, criminals in turn draw inspiration from their Hollywood counterparts. In the most extreme case, a Naples mafia chief spent €2 million building a replica of the villa featured in Scarface.

A member of the powerful Casalesi clan, Walter Schiavone handed a copy of the film to an architect and ordered him to copy to the last detail the neo-classical villa owned by Montana, a Cuban exile who become a drug cartel kingpin in Miami in the 1980s.

Schiavone had little time to enjoy his creation.

He was arrested in 1999 on murder charges and the villa was converted into a physiotherapy centre for the disabled in 2008.

Scarface was the nickname adopted by mafia mobster Pasquale Manfredi who was wanted for killing a rival godfather by blowing him up with a rocket launcher. He was arrested in 2010 after police uncovered his whereabouts through his use of Facebook.