A Naples railway police officer was arrested with cocaine and €40 in counterfeit banknotes.

Padua – In the glove compartment of his car, he was keeping a "rock" of ultra-pure cocaine ready to be cut. In the trunk, stuffed inside a suitcase, was a small paper treasure: €40 in counterfeit €20 bills. The man arrested with a shipment that would have fetched a fortune on the drug market wasn't just any criminal, but a Padua Railway Police officer, a 34-year-old originally from the province of Naples, arrested along with the driver of the car, a 28-year-old from Piove di Sacco.

The blitz on the A13 and the stalking

Suspicion had been looming over the officer for weeks. The Padua Flying Squad had been keeping him under close observation, convinced that behind that uniform lurked a big shot in a local drug ring. The trap was sprung late on Tuesday evening, September 22, along the A13 highway.

Detectives intercepted and stopped the car, which was returning from Bologna after a trip to the Naples area, where the officer had been living before moving to Veneto. During the search, the matter came to light. The 166 grams of ultra-pure cocaine, once processed and cut, would have allowed over half a kilo of white powder to be distributed to drug dealers.

The two occupants of the vehicle were taken to the "Due Palazzi" prison in Padua, while the 34-year-old was immediately suspended from duty as a precautionary measure.

The Police Chief: "Colleagues and citizens have been betrayed."

A severe blow to the image of the force, to which Padua Police Chief Marco Odorisio responded with rigorous firmness: "When a police officer commits a crime, he violates the fundamentals of his service, which he swore by oath. He betrays the citizens, the institutions, and the colleagues who carry out their duties every day, but above all, the memory of those who gave their lives in service." Odorisio then reiterated how the operation demonstrates the effectiveness of internal controls: "The bad apples must be isolated and removed. The Padua Police Force has proven it has the antibodies necessary to combat those who commit crimes from within."

The dark points of the investigation

The legal case is far from over. Investigators are now working to reconstruct the rogue police officer's network of contacts. The investigation aims to identify the drug supply channels in Campania and the clandestine mint where the counterfeit banknotes originated. The key question the Flying Squad intends to answer concerns the 34-year-old's actual role: was he simply a passkey to bypass traffic controls, or a true organizer of the trafficking operation?