Italian police have arrested a top mafia boss who escaped from a hospital in 2011, finding him in a hideout built between the bathroom and his son’s bedroom at his home.

Antonio Pelle was on the interior ministry’s list of most dangerous mafia fugitives. He was serving a 20-year prison sentence for mafia association and arms and drug trafficking when he slipped away from hospital in the town of Locri, in the southern region of Reggio Calabria.

A police video of the arrest showed Pelle’s head peek out from the top of a large wardrobe in his home in Benestare, a small town on the toe of Italy’s geographical boot. As he talks to police, he climbs down and is handcuffed.

“Fifty of us searched the two-storey villa where Pelle had always lived, but it took a very attentive eye to discover his hiding place,” police commander Francesco Ratta said in comments broadcast on TV.

Pelle had lain silently in a niche built behind the wardrobe during the search until he was discovered, police said. The room contained a mattress, a fan, some bottles of water and cash, the video showed.

First arrested and jailed in 2008, Pelle escaped three years later when he was sent to hospital for urgent medical treatment.

Pelle is considered the head of the Pelle-Vottari clan, which is active in the Calabrian town of San Luca. It has been fighting the Nirta-Strangio clan, which drew international attention to Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta mob in 2007 when one of its feuds left six dead in an Italian restaurant in Duisburg, Germany.

Over the past two decades the Calabrian mafia, known as the ‘Ndrangheta, has become Italy’s most powerful and wealthy organised crime group thanks to its role as one of Europe’s biggest importers of South American cocaine, investigators say.