H  ALLEGED ITALIAN MOB BOSS IS DENIED BAIL IN BRITAIN 

S1  This article is part of TIMES EXPRESS.
S2 It is a condensed version of a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times.
S3 );

S4  LONDON - To the Italian police, he was Domenico Rancadore, or “the professor,” a Mafia boss on the lam as a dangerous fugitive for almost two decades, a onetime enforcer for the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.
S5 To those who lived near him on a leafy street in a bland West London suburb, he was Marc Skinner, a father of two, a former teacher and a good neighbor who spent contented hours buffing the paint jobs on his fancy cars.

S6  But this week, his double life began unraveling.
S7 A British judge denied him bail Friday, two days after his arrest on an international warrant seeking his extradition to Italy to serve a seven-year sentence for extortion and other crimes.

S8  Right until the brief court hearing Friday, there had been speculation that he would be freed because of technical flaws in the warrant.
S9 At a separate hearing the day before, Judge Quentin Purdy of Westminster Magistrates’ Court said, “There are concerns about the validity of the warrant that has come before the court.”

S10  But Friday, while Rancadore, 64, was still in a police holding cell, a new warrant was issued.
S11 At the court hearing later, Purdy denied his bail request, meaning that Rancadore will remain in custody while he awaits extradition proceedings.

S12  According to court filings in London, Rancadore was sentenced in 1999 to seven years in prison after being tried in absentia and convicted of extortion, membership in the Mafia and other serious crimes.
S13 The Italian authorities placed him on a list of “dangerous fugitives,” the Italian Interior Ministry said, because he had been a “man of honor” in Cosa Nostra.

S14  As a top Mafia member, the Italian authorities said, Rancadore went by the sobriquet U Profissuri, the professor, from a Mafia clan in Trabia near Palermo, the Sicilian capital.

S15  Italian investigators believe that Rancadore fled Italy in the early 1990s because of an internal conflict, when the “boss of all bosses,” Salvatore Riina, ordered the killing of two top anti-Mafia prosecutors.
S16 The Italian police issued an international arrest warrant in 1998.

S17  For almost two decades, Rancadore lived in England under the assumed name of Marc Skinner, using the maiden name of his wife, Anne, and leading an innocuous life in London’s outer fringes, far from the perennial battle in Sicily between the authorities and the mob.

S18  Joan Hills, 76, who lives nearby, told The Independent that Rancadore was “one of the best neighbors you could ever have.”

