Mafia News

ROME: A court in Palermo imposed stiff sentences Friday in a Mafia trial in which a restaurant owner rebelled against paying “protection” money to the Cosa Nostra and identified an extortionist in the courtroom.

Vincenzo Conticello, one of the owners of Antica Focacceria San Francesco, a popular eatery that opened in 1834, had told police about the Cosa Nostra’s efforts to make him pay “protection” money, according to prosecutors. Continue Reading »

AMERICAN GANGSTER (18) ***
DIRECTED BY: RIDLEY SCOTT
STARRING: DENZEL WASHINGTON, RUSSELL CROWE, CHIWETEL EJIOFOR, JOSH BROLIN

Denzel Washington gives a typically electrifying performance as Frank Lucas

ON THE DVD of Brian De Palma’s ultra-trashy Cuban gangster epic Scarface is a documentary acknowledging its odd status as “a hip-hop classic”. Over the years, and apparently without irony, America’s biggest rap stars have embraced the rise and fall of drug monster Tony Montana as a “how to” guide to making it big and living it large on the streets of America. It’s one of the film’s stranger legacies, but this fictional icon’s reign as the “ultimate ghetto superhero” may be about to come to an end if the seductive portrait of real-life New York crime lord Frank Lucas served up in American Gangster anything to go by. Continue Reading »

BRATISLAVA — Serbian and Slovakian interior ministers, Dragan Jočić and Robert Kalinak, met in Bratislava Friday.

They signed an agreement on cooperation in fighting organized crime, and pointed to the danger posed by ethnic Albanian mafia from Kosovo, Tanjug news agency reported from Slovakia. Continue Reading »

‘Frankie B’ was believed to be a member of the Mexican Mafia. He and another man were shot at a Pomona bar. Continue Reading »

The ‘Mafia Summit’ stakeout

Robert Croswell at home in Vestal, with newspaper articles about his dad, Edgar Croswell, a state police sergeant who broke up the largest meeting of mobsters on November 14, 1957, in Apalachin, New York. (Times Herald-Record/MICHELE HASK)

Apalachin — Fifty years ago today, this hamlet on Exit 66 off Route 17 was like Woodstock for mobsters. But the party came to an abrupt end because of a native son of Woodstock, a state police sergeant named Edgar Croswell.

Matter of fact, you could say that when Croswell rousted Mafia bosses with names like Joseph Bonnano and Joseph Profaci; Carlo Gambino and Russell Bufalino, the Mafia began sliding into oblivion. Up until then, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had soft-pedaled the presence of the mob, but the stones that Croswell kicked over at Apalachin led to investigations galore, the passage of new state and federal racketeering laws and the fabled code of silence being broken in pieces by Mafia songbirds like “Sammy the Bull” Gravano. Continue Reading »

ROME: Police on Tuesday arrested four aides to a reputed top Mafia chief who was himself arrested last week in a raid on a summit of Mafia dons in Sicily, police said. Continue Reading »

A wide-ranging operation is underway in Syracuse and various other areas of the country with 70 arrest warrants for mafia-related criminal association, drug trafficking, extortion and usury. Continue Reading »

Italian paramilitary police have arrested a fugitive from the Calabrian Mafia or ‘N’Drangheta’, in the southern town of Siderno near Reggio Calabria. Continue Reading »

Forty businesses in Palermo, Sicily have joined together to fight against mafia extortion, the first such group to exist in the island’s capital.

About 80 percent of Palermo’s 100,000 businesses pay the mafia tax, known as the pizzo, according to Pietro Grasso, Italy’s top mob prosecutor. The formation of the group, called Libero Futuro or ”A Free Future,” comes a week after the arrest of Salvatore Lo Piccolo, the suspected Cosa Nostra boss who controlled Palermo’s extortion racket. Continue Reading »

SWEEPING new powers to strip criminals of their assets are needed to avoid mafia-style corruption taking root in Scotland, a newly retired police chief has warned.

Graeme Pearson, who served his last day as director of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) yesterday, said current asset recovery legislation was “too restrictive” and insisted much tougher powers were needed to “isolate” organised crime and prevent it spreading further into legitimate businesses and spheres of public life. Continue Reading »