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 alleged to have fired at police officers when they caught him while on the run in 1992.

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. 

Bugeja surrounded by police officers during an arraignment in 1992, following one of his escapes.

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.

Correction March 17, 2025: A previous version misstated Bugeja's age. He was born on December 3, 1957.