Free Republic

A suspected hitman from the Camorra or Neapolitan Mafia has been arrested after police obtained a security video which seemingly shows him gunning down a rival mobster last December in a cheese factory as reported by ANSA: "the 20-second security-camera footage allegedly shows Gianluca Troise pursuing a member of a rival Naples mafia clan, Luigi Felaco, bringing him down with a shot, racing after him after he gets up, and finishing him off with four shots to the head." [Video] A turf war for control over drug markets in Naples, Italy between the rival Scissionisti and Di Lauro clans has...

Italian authorities have seized a record $1.7 billion in assets from a Sicilian green energy entrepreneur with alleged ties to the Mafia.

G-men interviewed Chicago mobster Jimmy "the Monk" Allegretti only a week after the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in order to determine whether he had any connections to Jack Ruby who on November 24 had killed supposed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald according to the recently released FBI file on Allegretti. Allegretti was the Rush Street crew boss who ran the vice rackets -- gay bars, strip clubs, whore houses, gambling dens -- from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s on the Near North Side for Chicago Outfit underboss Ross Prio, and in the FBI interview he denied...

...Litvinenko "was giving Scaramella lots of information about Russian and criminal infiltrations in Italy, but most of it was very difficult to verify and crosscheck. It was a little bit out on a limb." In the old days, Litvinenko had been familiar with criminal clans in Russia, now he was making risky approaches to the Italian mafia. Scaramella believed if they could get inside this network, they would be able to leverage much more damaging intelligence about Italian politicians. They spread their net wider. The Litvinenko dossier lists a dizzying roll call of names investigated by the pair, among them...

Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor Vincenzo Macri says that the 'Ndrangheta or Calabrian Mafia "certainly" is behind the 1989 killing of Australian Federal Police assistant commissioner Colin Winchester as reported by Richard Guilliatt for The Australian: "he said he believed the Winchester murder was carried out by the same organisation that murdered Griffith anti-drug campaigner Donald Mackay in 1977 and federal police officer Geoffrey Bowen in 1994." In recent years Cosa Nostra or the Sicilian Mafia has been eclipsed by the Calabrian Mafia as Italy's most powerful crime group due to its obscene profits from the cocaine trade in Europe. The Calabrian...

Can Whitey Bulger blame his own raging case of Obama Derangement Syndrome rather than a tabby cat for his 2011 capture? That’s the suggestion in a bombshell new biography, “Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss,” by veteran Boston reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. When Whitey and moll Catherine Greig had been living in Santa Monica, Calif., as “Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Gasko,” Greig became close to Icelandic model Anna Bjornsdottir, bonding over the care of a stray cat. Whitey often joined them outside their apartment building. But, Lehr and O’Neill write, Bjornsdottir and Whitey never spoke...

Just got done watching Gangster Squad and it is a great movie. It takes some artistic license but clearly gives credit to Chief Parker for keeping the mob out of Los Angeles. I've lived in Los Angeles all my life as has my father - and he often has talked about how Chief Parker went Roman on the mafia in the 1950's in order to keep them out of Los Angeles. As a result, Los Angeles was considered off limits to the mob. The lack of corruption in Los Angeles from the 1950's on thru the 1980's was an important...

PBS' Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable. What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly...

Willie Sutton, a notorious theif from the 1930's, was once asked why he robbed banks. "Because that's where the money is," he replied. So where's the money today? Government subsidies for renewable energy - massive subsidies with little oversight. In Europe, this means easy pickings for organized crime. And the Sicilian mafia is cleaning up. Washington Post: The still-emerging links of the mafia to the once-booming wind and solar sector here are raising fresh questions about the use of government subsidies to fuel a shift toward cleaner energies, with critics claiming huge state incentives created excessive profits for companies and...

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York; George C. Venizelos, the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); and George N. Longworth, the Commissioner of the Westchester County Police Department, today announced the unsealing of charges against 32 individuals as part of a multi-year investigation into organized crime’s alleged continuing control of large aspects of the commercial waste-hauling industry in the greater New York City metropolitan area and in parts of New Jersey. The main indictment charges 12 defendants under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt...

One of Russia's top crime lords was gunned down Wednesday in Moscow in what police described as a war between two powerful mobs over lucrative construction projects, allegedly including ones for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Police said an unidentified gunman fired seven shots from a sniper gun at Aslan Usoyan near a restaurant in central Moscow — the third assassination attempt on him since the late 1990s. Usoyan, also known as Grandpa Khasan, was a 75-year-old ethnic Kurd born in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Police say for the past two decades he headed one of the...

Thirty-two arrests of suspected mobsters or mafia associates were made in dawn raids across New York and New Jersey today as part of an ongoing investigation into mafia control of the private garbage-hauling industry. Suspected members of five key criminal families in the area were arrested, according to ABC News. They said figures known as 'Papa Smurf,' 'Uncle Sonny' and 'Joe Cali' in the criminal underworld had been detained and charged with running an extortion racket. It is the lastest operation in the joint FBI and police investigation investigating illegal ties between waste disposal and the mafia. U.S. Attorney for...

NEWSER) – The third time was not the charm for Aslan Usoyan, a prominent Russian mob boss who was assassinated today after surviving two previous hits. Officials say "Grandpa Hassan" was killed by a single bullet fired by a sniper as he was leaving a Moscow restaurant. The 75-year-old last survived a 2010 attempt on his life in which he was shot in the abdomen, and a police source says the group that injured him then is believed to be the same one that succeeded in killing him today, reports RT.

Tony Zerilli, alleged to be the underboss of Detroit's biggest crime family, is breaking his silence on one of the greatest unsolved crimes in American historyA man who federal agents say is a main character in the infamous unsolved mystery about the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa is breaking his silence after decades of refusing to answer questions. The reputed gangster says the union leader was buried in a field in suburban Detroit -- about 20 miles north of the restaurant where he was last seen. Eighty-five years old and barely able to walk, Tony Zerilli never thought this day would...

People around the world have embraced the local food movement as a way to support local economies, eat healthier and reduce their carbon footprint. Residents of Naples, Italy, however, are doing just the opposite. Napolitanos like Antonio Trotta read grocery store labels to avoid eating local fruit and vegetables, meat, even the region’s famed buffalo mozzarella produced in eastern Campania, outside Naples. The area north of Naples* was once an important agricultural center. But the local mafia, the Camorra, has been dumping waste from European factories and hospitals on the land for decades—an environmental problem compounded nightly when dozens of...

For decades the Mafia controlled gay bars, and in the 1950s Lee Mortimer was the first to unmask the relationship. Mortimer was a hybrid crime reporter/gossip monger who penned the syndicated column New York Confidential which took a walk on the Big Apple's wild side. The intrepid muckraker had a field day when he discovered that the wise guys were behind the so-called "daffodil dens." Although a homophobic tone is pervasive throughout his writing -- Mortimer obviously relished coining terms by which to slur gays -- the clear target was the mobsters. Indeed, Mortimer was a consistent crusader against the...

This Sunday the Discovery Channel is running two back-to-back documentaries -- "Did the Mob Kill JFK?" and "JFK: The Ruby Connection" -- exploring the role of the Mafia behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: New information and never before heard details of a startling confession raise new questions on just who was behind the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the subsequent killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. * * * "I had the little bastard killed. He was a thorn in my shoe" -- according to a secret FBI informant these were the...

One of the enduring myths about the Mafia is that it respects women and children. However, for several years boss Vito Genovese protected one of his top earners Salvatore "Sally Burns" Granello who allegedly raped multiple underage girls. Indeed, at one time Granello even was being groomed as a possible successor to Don Vito. The only thing that prevented the child rapist from becoming a family boss was his big mouth which finally got him whacked in 1970. Multiple sources claimed throughout the 1960s that Granello "has taken advantage of several young girls," and "is known to be extremely rough...

Former FBI agent missing in Iran By PAT MILTON, Associated Press Writer NEW YORK - An American who disappeared in Iran while on a business trip is a former FBI agent in New York and Florida known as a meticulous investigator and an expert in busting Italian and Russian mobsters. The retired agent was identified as Robert Levinson, 59, of Coral Springs, Fla., a U.S. official familiar with the case told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He was last heard from around March 11 while in a coastal area of southern Iran, where he was working for an independent filmmaker,...

Photos of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s abandoned private island At the height of his power, Pablo Escobar was worth an estimated $3 billion (USD) and his Medellín Cartel controlled 80% of the global cocaine market. So he may have had a few extra dollars to throw around on a private island. In fact, many drug lords had luxurious villas on small islands off the coast of Cartagena, islands that have since been abandoned by their human occupants. Urban explorer and photographer Stefaan Beernaert, also known as Fotantje, has explored the islands off Catagena and photographed the so-called "Drug Islands."...