Mafia News

R. Lindley DeVecchio

A retired FBI agent will enter a Brooklyn courtroom Monday to face charges that long before he tooled around Sarasota on his motorcycle, and prior to running a homeowners association at a quiet gated community, he helped the mob commit murder.

Prosecutors in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office say the ex-agent, R. Lindley DeVecchio, leaked confidential information to a Mafia informant that led to four gangland killings from 1984 to 1992. In exchange, prosecutors allege, DeVecchio took cash and crime tips that bolstered his 33-year career with the bureau. Continue Reading »

Police hunting the killer of English teacher Lindsay Hawker are scouring Tokyo’s red-light district amid claims he is being hidden by the Japanese mafia. Continue Reading »

Ian Thomson reviews The Force of Destiny: a History of Italy since 1796 by Christopher Duggan

Christopher Duggan, a distinguished Italophile and professor of Italian history, describes the Mafia as a grotesque parody of Mediterranean family life. Cosa Nostra clans are known as cosche, after the Sicilian dialect term for artichoke leaves: the clans fit snugly inside each other, overlapping tightly. Continue Reading »

Mafia bosses normally try to avoid going anywhere near jail, but crime leaders near Naples have been discovered holding meetings in their local police station. Continue Reading »

NEW YORK - A Sullivan County deputy sheriff was arrested Friday on extortion charges for allegedly shaking down $3,500 from a man who he said was about to be killed by the Mafia, federal prosecutors say. Continue Reading »

Forty orders for the arrest for criminal association with the mafia are being carried out by the police of Florence. Continue Reading »

FORMER champion Pat Cash believes the Russian mafia is attempting to fix matches on the ATP tour.

Cash’s comments came a day after retiring British star Tim Henman and world No.3 Novak Djokovic revealed illegal bookmakers were attempting to influence the outcomes of matches. Djokovic, who piloted Serbia to a Davis Cup victory over Australia last week, even outlined a £110,000 ($256,000) approach he had fielded from a bookmaker to lose in the first round of a tournament in St Petersburg last year. Continue Reading »

BEIJING: Chinese police have cracked nearly 500 criminal cases and busted over 4,000 gangs since it launched a crackdown against mafia-style crimes in February 2006, the state media reported on Sunday. The police had so far referred 340 cases of alleged gang crimes for prosecution, a spokesman of the office for national campaign against organised crime said. Continue Reading »

ROME – Italian police said yesterday they had arrested the man who handled the economic interests of jailed Mafia top boss Bernardo Provenzano.

Giuseppe Lipari, 72, had been released from another jail term last year. Continue Reading »

David Flusfeder reviews The Havana Mob: Gangsters, Gamblers, Showgirls and Revolutionaries in 1950s Cuba by T J English

Charles “Lucky” Luciano

One of the great pleasures in reading any chronicle of the Mafia is the rough street poetry of the names. In the pages of T J English’s enjoyable – yet morally uncertain – account of the rise and fall of the Mob’s Caribbean empire of gambling, pleasure, sin, murder and profit, we come across such figures as Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, William “Lefty Clark” Bischoff, and Nicholas “the Fat Butcher” di Costanzo. Continue Reading »