Mafia News

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 »

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to be a major figure in the Montreal Mafia, will have to spend the next two years behind bars because his parole has been revoked.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 »