Gomorra star Giovanni Venosa arrested

Matteo Garrone, director of the prize-winning Italian film Gomorra, which as The First Post reported last month has attracted big audiences in Italy for its depiction of gang life in Naples, made a big thing of using real people rather than professional actors to play the gang members. Now one of the 'actors', Giovanni Venosa (pictured), has been picked up by police after he was recognised by inmates at a Naples jail during a special screening of the movie.

Presumably forgetting in their excitement their code of omerta, or silence, several prisoners belonging to Camorra gangs - the local mafia - exclaimed the Italian equivalent of "Oi, that's Giovanni!" Police easily tracked Giovanni down and he has now been jailed in the northern city of Modena. "We would have never known Venosa was who we were looking for if he had not been recognized by the inmates who saw the film," a grateful spokesman for the Carabinieri in Naples told the Italian daily, Corriere della Serra.

In the film, which won the jury prize at the Cannes festival this year, the character played by Venosa kills two teenagers. Police did not say what crime he had been accused of in real life.