From: mongo@bitme.com   
      
   https://timesofmalta.com/article/alfred-bugeja-ilporporina-notorious-   
   career-criminal-dies-67.1106678   
      
   Alfred Bugeja il-Porporina, notorious career criminal, dies aged 67   
      
   Bugeja achieved notoriety in the 1990s following prison escapes   
      
   March 17, 2025| Matthew Bonanno, Bertrand Borg   
      
   Updated 11am   
      
   Notorious career criminal Alfred Bugeja, better known as Il-Porporina has   
   died aged 67.   
      
   Bugeja died at the St Vincent de Paul home for the elderly, where he was   
   residing while out on parole. He had only been out of prison for two   
   weeks.   
      
   In a 2024 interview, Bugeja said that he was introduced to crime by a   
   schoolteacher, who instructed him to steal a pair of wipers. He was 14   
   years old.   
      
   Within a couple of years and still a teenager, Bugeja would receive his   
   first conviction and jail sentence - for car theft.   
      
   He would continue to enter and exit prison in the ensuing decades and his   
   nickname became a household name in the 1980s and 1990s as a synonym for   
   crime.   
      
   Prison escapes   
      
   In 1992, he spent six months on the run after escaping from police custody   
   while at St Luke’s Hospital, ostensibly to receive medical treatment. He   
   was apprehended in November of that year as he and another man attempted   
   to burgle a jewellery store in Marsa.   
      
   Bugeja was sent back to prison, but less than four months later, he   
   escaped once again.   
      
   He and another inmate, David Monsigneur, broke a number of locks, sawed   
   through iron bars and scaled a wall at Corradino as they made their   
   getaway. The two were caught three weeks later.   
      
   The escape prompted a crackdown at prison and the sacking of the prison   
   director and many top staff members.   
      
   Minister at his prison wedding   
      
   Bugeja got married in prison in February 1994. His betrothed, Helen   
   Azzopardi, was also a prison inmate.   
      
   The wedding achieved notoriety because Bugeja and Azzopardi were allowed   
   to have a wedding reception inside prison, which the Home Affairs Minister   
   of the time, Louis Galea, attended.   
      
   Political uproar ensued and the Opposition moved a motion of no confidence   
   in Galea, saying the wedding reception was symptomatic of the amateurish   
   way in which prison was being run.   
      
   Bugeja's trouble with the law continued into the 21st century.   
      
   In 2012 he was jailed for two-and-a-half years for crimes committed in   
   1992, which included carrying out a hold-up, stealing a car and attempting   
   to rob a bank.   
      
   In 2015, he was jailed for a further 33 months after he was found guilty   
   of theft from a warehouse in 2008.   
      
   Later that year, he was jailed for seven years and fined €11,500 for   
   organising a drug deal from inside his prison cell. Bugeja had conspired   
   to import 2kg of cocaine, 1kg of heroin and around 2,000 ecstasy pills   
   from the Netherlands in May 2002.   
      
   Also in 2015, Bugeja's wife Helen was given a nine-month prison sentence   
   after she was caught trying to smuggle heroin into jail for him by hiding   
   it in a pair of shoes.   
      
   Bugeja was again in the news in 2020 when it was revealed that he had been   
   strapped to a restraint chair installed in prison by then-CCF director   
   Alex Dalli. Bugeja would deny that claim while testifying in court and   
   thanked Dalli for "putting me on the right path".   
      
   Later in life, he expressed remorse for the way he had lived his life.   
      
   “I started taking drugs in prison. I was 39 years old,” he said, noting   
   that his wife had ended up in prison because of him. “If I could, I would   
   serve double the time in her stead,” Bugeja said on TV show Xarabank.   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)