Mafia News

There is $1m on Bulger’s head

Sicilian police have launched a manhunt for one of America’s ten most-wanted criminals after apparently spotting him in Taormina.

James “Whitey” Bulger, 78, has been on the run for 12 years after being convicted on 18 counts of murder and several other charges of running a Mafia operation. There is a bounty of $1 million on his head.

Bulger was the inspiration for the villain played by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s film The Departed. Continue Reading »

Moreno Gallo, a man believed by police to be a major figure in the Montreal Mafia, will have to spend the next two years behind bars because his parole has been revoked.

Gallo, 62, is serving a life sentence for the 1973 murder of Angelo Facchino, 26, a drug dealer shot to death in Montreal. He was paroled in 1983. Continue Reading »

With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman - until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body.

The elaborate dragons, phoenix and a medieval courtesan with one breast bared and a knife between her teeth are a symbol of Tendo’s childhood as the daughter of a “yakuza” gangster and her youth as a drug-using gang member. Continue Reading »

A SALES war among a proliferation of rifle ranges in Bulgaria is attracting increasing numbers of Irish criminal gangs for target practice, as reported in yesterday’s Irish Examiner.

Six members of a notorious Limerick gang which travelled to the Bulgarian city of Varna were robbed of all their money when they were held at gun point by members of the Bulgarian mafia. Continue Reading »

Antonio La Torre

THE Scottish wife of a Mafia mobster, alleged to be the godfather of one of Italy’s most feared crime syndicates, finally broke her years of silence yesterday to protest her husband’s innocence.

Gillian La Torre has been married for 25 years to Antonio La Torre, the Aberdeen restaurant owner who was dubbed “The Don on the Don” after he was first accused of having links with the Camorra, the Neapolitan equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia. Continue Reading »

TORONTO (AFP) — Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg came close to the bloody underworld he depicts in his latest movie “Eastern Promises,” about the deadly Russian mafia.

The crime thriller with ripped-from-the-headlines details of the Russian mafia premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this week. Continue Reading »

A lawyer for retired FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. urged a federal appeals court today to overturn his 2002 racketeering conviction because one of the government’s key witnesses, former New England Mafia boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, allegedly boasted to a fellow mobster that he lied on the stand. Continue Reading »

‘Godmother’ may face payouts probe

A mafia moll whose husband ran a £42million crime empire is raking in benefits of more than £11,000 a year.

Brit Ann Hathaway, 45, is wed to Sicilian godfather Antonio Rinzivillo, who is serving life in an Italian jail for murder and drug trafficking. Continue Reading »

When FBI agents this year claimed they found $90,000 in cold cash in Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson’s deep freeze, I immediately thought of how three-time state Gov. Earl Long coped with a similar experience in 1959.

The day before I interviewed Long in Ruston on May 5, 1959, FBI agents raided the governor’s New Orleans Bourbon Street apartment, looking for incriminating financial papers and cash. Continue Reading »

U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, center, Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, right, and Benjamin Baer, chairman of the U.S Parole Commission, pose in undercover clothes in this July 9, 1986 file photo, after D’Amato bought what he later told a news conference were vials of crack on a New York City street. Before becoming mayor of New York, Giuliani made a name for himself as the crime-busting federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who steered dozens of high-profile cases to completion, and garnered more than 4,000 convictions over nearly a seven-year stretch, ending in 1989. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

NEW YORK - Rudy Giuliani clearly has a love/hate thing when it comes to the Mafia: celebrates the fictional characters, incarcerates the felonious ones, keeps mum about those in his own family tree.

The former federal prosecutor is both film buff and mob buster, still breaking out his raspy Don Corleone impression and quoting lines from “The Godfather” more than two decades after busting up the New York mob’s ruling hierarchy. Continue Reading »