Next time you pop into the newsagent for a Snickers or go for lunch at your local sandwich shop, take a good look at the person serving you. He might just be a Mafia boss on the lam.
On Tuesday, police arrested the owner of a shoe wholesalers in east London and revealed that he was none other than Raffaele Caldarelli, suspected boss of the Naples-based Caldarelli gang (technically part of the Neapolitan Camorra, rather than the Sicilian Mafia).
It was less than two years ago that Francesco Tonicello, a feared member of the Venetian Mala del Brenta, was discovered selling the Big Issue and stolen newspapers in Vauxhall, just over the Thames from the Houses of Parliament.
I used to live close to Hackney Road, where Caldarelli ran his shop, and I can remember being turned away from one of the many shoe wholesalers on the road because they only did "trade, not retail". It was probably a different shop altogether, but the memory is a reminder of how closely human lives brush against each other in a big city, and how little we know about most of the people who cross our paths.
Italian gangsters have form for this habit of hiding in broad daylight, to the extent that there is even a term - "plant" - for someone who is active on the crime scene but in hiding from the police.
When the Mafia's capo di tutti capi, Salvatore Riina, was arrested at a traffic junction in Palermo in 1993, Italy was shocked to learn that his three decades of flight from the police had been spent living in a home in the Sicilian capital.
His successor, Bernardo Provenzano, carried the tradition to even greater extremes, flitting between a succession of shacks and boltholes in the Sicilian countryside for decades before he was finally tracked down this year to a semi-derelict farmhouse, near his home town of Corleone.
America's Mafiosi have also shown a knack for this sort of chutzpah. Vincent "the chin" Gigante, the feared boss of the New York-based Genovese crime family, earned the name "the oddfather" due to a long-lasting ruse by which he feigned mental illness in public, wandering distractedly around Manhattan wearing a dressing gown and slippers and mumbling incoherently. Before his final imprisonment in 1997, he managed to use the strategy to evade justice for three decades.
The knowledge that Mafia bosses are scattered through society, like raisins through a cake, might encourage people to show a bit more respect to each other in everyday life.
You wouldn't start that argument with a traffic warden if you thought he was really a capo in disguise - you might just get yourself whacked.
