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The Salerno Report: The Mafia and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy: Texas judge rules Lee Harvey Oswald casket belongs...
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Italy police strike blow against Calabrian mob in north
BY VALENTINA ACCARDO
- Police conducted a huge dragnet against a Calabrian mafia clan operating in northern Italy on Wednesday, arresting 110 people and seizing more than 100 million euros ($114 million), underlining the mob's spread to the wealthy north.
About half of those arrested are accused of being members of the 'Ndrangheta, a traditional organized crime group from Calabria in Italy's deep south. The Cutro clan first put down roots in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna in 1982, investigators said.
The arrests for mafia membership, extortion, usury, money laundering, and corruption follow more than four years of investigation, uncovering a vast web of business interests, mostly in construction and real estate.
"This investigation is extremely important and without precedent, and it signals a turning point in fighting the clans in Emilia," Italy's chief anti-mafia prosecutor Franco Roberti told reporters. "Nothing will ever be the same."
The dragnet follows a major operation in Rome last week in which police broke up a 'Ndrangheta drug ring with links to Colombian cocaine producers. As the power of the Sicilian Mafia has faded, the estimated 150 'Ndrangheta clans have grown in strength by becoming some of Europe's biggest cocaine importers.
With Italian businesses struggling to survive six years of on-off recession, mafia groups have found fertile ground to launder criminal proceeds in northern Italy and in the capital, areas not normally associated with organized crime.
Seven of those sought for arrest on Wednesday remain at large, police said.
Businesses run by the clan won public contracts to remove debris after the 2012 earthquakes in Emilia that killed more than 20 people, Bologna prosecutor Roberto Alfonso said. An entire neighborhood of 200 apartments was among the assets seized.
At least six current and former members of law enforcement, two local politicians, businessmen, financial consultants, lawyers and a journalist are among those accused of favoring the clan, prosecutors said, and five mayoral elections may have been fixed. The investigation continues, Alfonso said.
"This mafia clan was all business," Roberti said. "And it modeled itself to reflect the reality of the territory where it operated in order to blend in."
(Writing by Steve Scherer; editing by Ralph Boulton)
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Gotti mob enforcer launches career as motivational speaker telling children how to stand up to bullies
• John Alite, 52, worked with John Gotti Jr for years until he found out the mob were planning to kill him
• Father-of-four now wants to make money through inspirational talks
• He thinks he lacked an inspirational role model when he was growing up
By Jill Reilly for MailOnline
John Alite, 52, was an enforcer in the Gambino family for years, undertaking grisly crimes, including murder
John A Gotti's crew leader is now hoping to make a living giving talks to children about bullying.
John Alite, 52, was an enforcer in the Gambino family for years, undertaking grisly crimes, including murder.
But when he heard they wanted to kill him, he went on the run, until he was eventually captured and then gave evidence against Gotti Jr. at trial.
He turned rat and linked his former best friend to a series of gangland slayings, boasted that he slept with his sister, reality television graduate Victoria Gotti, and claimed two police officers were in on a mob hit.
It was Alite's decision to release a tell-all about his time in the Gambino crime family that forced Gotti to write his own recent memoir in spite of his mother's protests.
But now Alite, who was released from prison in 2012, says he wants a fresh start and says he would be good for males that need inspirational talks.
On his website he offers himself as a speaker, seeking to cash in on an activity that has already proved fruitful for him: talking. 'John offers all ages and groups a forceful message and precise tutorial on simply, how not to be a victim,' the site states.
The website states: 'Over the course of a twenty-five-year career as a gangster he brutalized people, stabbing them, shooting them, beating them with clubs, blackjacks and baseball bats. He's not proud of that, but he doesn't try to hide from it either. It's who he was.
In an interview with The Tampa Bay Times, he says: 'I feel guilty for almost all these things I did,' he said, 'except [drug dealer] John Gebert. I'd like to wake him up and kill him again. Unfortunately, I'm not past it.'
The father-of-four says said that he still sees a therapist several times a week.
'I'm a human being,' he said. 'I'm not ashamed to tell my faults and be real. Hopefully, I will help some kids, whether it's one or a hundred. It helps me to live with myself and my past.'
He says he nearly decided to pull the book by George Anastasia - 'Gotti's Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia' - when someone threatened his son.
He nearly pulled the plug on the book last fall, he said, after someone threatened his son.
'I started getting nervous that I miscalculated,' he said. 'In our world, you don't go near kids.
Alite and Junior were best friends - Gotti Jr was his best man at his wedding.
But because he was of Albanian descent and not Italian, Alite could never have been a made man.
After he fled to Rio de Janeiro, he spent two years in a Brazilian jail fighting extradition and then testified against Gotti Jr in 2009.
Gotti Jr. was charged with racketeering, but never convicted.
New York's Gambino family has been the subject of a steady stream of government indictments and prosecutions since the Dapper Don was sentenced to life in prison in 1992.
He died behind bars in 2002.
Gotti Jr.'s own recent prison stint ended in Demember 2009. He claims to have left the crime world behind in 1999, but recalls with great detail what the life afforded his father--like breaks from prison to visit his family and relax in freedom.
On a so-called 'dental furlough,' Gotti says his father was escorted by armed guards from Green Haven correctional facility to a 'My father would go up to the dentist's office, open his mouth, and then go out the back of the building where one of the fellows would drive him away,' Gotti writes.
The guards, paid off with hundreds of dollars, would wait patiently as Gotti went home, changed out of his prison jumpsuit and spent quality time with Gotti Jr. and the rest of the family.
'When it was time to return to the prison, my father's man would drive him back to the dentist's building, and he would emerge from the front entrance back into the custody of the marshals,' Gotti writes.
Gotti recalls a time when, at just four years old, he visited his father in jail where he told him he wanted to be a police officer for Halloween.
Gotti recalls his father saying: 'If I ever hear you let my son or any of my kids, or you for that matter, talk to that cop, or any other cop, I'll kill you.'
Despite growing up with a father in and out of prison and seeing other dark sides of crime life, Gotti Jr. would go on to follow in his dad's footsteps and join the notorious Gambinos.
In his book, he describes how he first entered into the organization, a process called getting 'made.'
'There were roughly a dozen men sitting around a table…open seats for the new inductees,' he writes. 'A pin pricked my 'trigger' finger. A drop of blood was put on a picture of a saint, which was then burned in my hand. I moved the flaming picture from hand to hand, until it was totally consumed by the fire.'
Gotti Jr. has been tried four times since 2005 for racketeering. Each trial ended in a hung jury. He said he left organized crime in 1999.
The self-published ebook, out Monday, was not Gotti's first attempt at a memoir. He told the Daily News that he had over 300 pages of a previous iteration of the tome but destroyed it all to satisfy his worried mother.
'In 2010, I shredded it. I had completed 375 pages and I shredded 375 pages. I only had 70 pages more to go. So I apologized to everyone involved, but my family harmony is more important to me.'
When he learned of Alite's tell-all, Gotti changed his mind and went to his mother to ask permission to write the book.
'If you never talk to me again, then I'm gonna have to live with it,' he said to his mother. 'That's your choice, that's your prerogative, but you're asking me to sit here and let them
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The Mob in Vegas: Sinatra's Old Lake Tahoe Resort Set To Reopen
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The Life and World of Al Capone: A close call with Al Capone
The Life and World of Al Capone: A close call with Al Capone: A close call with Al Capone By Rev. John Lutton I invited readers to send me stories of famous people in their family tree last week,...
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Mafia victims begin to speak out, even in mob's backyard
ROME, Jan. 29 (Xinhua) -- Anti-mafia campaigners are hailing the news that the wall of silence that has protected Cosa Nostra for decades is finally cracking even in its Sicilian heartland.
In Corleone, the birthplace of the Mafia's most infamous Godfathers, and the town that lent its name to the fictional crime family of Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" films, a victim of extortion rackets has cooperated with law authorities for the very first time.
On Monday night Carabinieri officers arrested a local mob boss and three other suspects after the unnamed victim, who ran a car showroom, told police he was simply not able to pay the 500-euro-a-month "protection money."
Mobsters are thought to be demanding ever larger extortion payments to fund the families of the growing number of jailed colleagues. But local police commander Pierluigi Solazzo said that after the latest incident, and following a series of high-profile arrests in the past six months, the infamous code of silence or omerta was weakening. "It's an excellent sign," he said.
Umberto Di Maggio, the regional coordinator in Sicily of the anti-mafia organisation Libera, agreed that the rebellion by a Corleone business man was a "very positive sign."
"The end of the Mafia will come more quickly if people refuse to pay extortion money," he said. The development follows on from the success that the group Addiopizzo has had in fighting extortion rackets in the major Sicilian cities of Palermo and Catania, with almost 1,000 businesses joining its campaign.
Di Maggio noted that it wasn't only threats of violence that mobsters used against businessmen. "The thing that frightens shop owners and businessmen the most is the economic threat from Mafiosi; if people refuse to pay il pizzo (extortion money) they can deliberately set up rival businesses at knock down prices," he said.
However, with lingering economic crisis bearing down on him, the extortion victim in Corleone told police: "Every month I had to pay il pizzo - nearly 500 euros. Eventually I had to close my business because I wasn't able to pay it."
When he opened another business, he asked for his payments to be reduced. The local Mafia bosses refused. But the conversation was recorded by wiretaps, and the businessman agreed to cooperate with the police and magistrates.
"Businessmen already crushed by the crisis are not able to bear this additional Mafia pressure," said Commander Solazzo.
The latest arrests follow on from the seizure last September of six other senior mobsters in Corleone, the home town of Cosa Nostra's most notorious boss of bosses Salvatore "Toto" Riina.
The most important of those held was Antonino Di Marco, 58, who was said to have remained loyal to Riina after his arrest in 1993 and helped the jailed godfather continue to have a hand in procurement, extortion and election campaigns even from behind bars.
During his "day job" as the manager of a local sports ground, Di Marco organized high-level Cosa Nostra meetings. But when magistrates were able to bug his office, they received a mine of information about the Corleone mob's activity - and learned of the protection money being paid by the local businessman whose cooperation led to four more arrests on Monday.
Il Giornale di Sicilia today reported that several other cases of extortion were now being investigated. The newspaper hailed the action of the businessman that it said had "broken the wall of silence of the victims of extortion in Corleone, the symbol of Mafia power."
Corleone has a reputation as a Cosa Nostra stronghold in Italy and beyond. This small hill town of 12,000 inhabitants, just south of Palermo, acquired world-wide fame - or notoriety - thanks to the Oscar-winning "Godfather" films.
In January 2013, on the 20th anniversary of the arrest of "Toto" Riina, who ordered deadly bomb attacks against magistrates in 1992, Leoluchina Savona, Corleone's mayor, apologised "in the name of all the people of Corleone" for all the blood that had been spilt by local mobsters.
Everywhere in the town, however, there are references to its bloody history, from a local "Don Corleone Amaro" aperitif to the images of Al Pacino and Marlon Brando in their roles as Corleone family mobsters.
Di Maggio said, however, that Corleone had a proud history of fighting the Mafia, as well as producing its most feared bosses. "The first anti-mafia leader Bernardino Verro was from Corleone," he said. Verro was slain by the Mafia in 1915. Another Corleone figure, the peasant leader Placido Rizzotto, who led the fight against the mob, was killed in 1948. "So you see, Corleone has a proud history of resisting the Mafia, too," said Di Maggio.
Unfortunately, Cosa Nostra's most notorious Corleone leaders have endured longer than the people who opposed them.
Riina, aged 84, is in prison serving a life sentence, but is still making threats against magistrates. His successor as head of the Corleone clan - and de facto head of all Cosa Nostra - Bernardo Provenzano, was arrested in 2006. Since then the Sicilian Mafia has fractured, and an absolute "boss of bosses" is no longer thought to reign.
The most senior Cosa Nostra figure still on the run, Matteo Messina Denaro, a protege of Riina, is believed to be living in Western Sicily quite possibly in his hometown of Castelvetrano. But increasingly, many Mafia leaders are looking to the rich North of Italy and beyond to make their money, experts say.
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City To Pay $5 Million To Family Of Man Killed In Mob Hit Facilitated By Crooked Cops
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — The City of New York on Friday agreed to pay $5 million to the family of a man killed after being mistaken for a mobster with the same name — thanks to information the killers gleaned from two former police detectives later convicted of moonlighting as hit men for the mob.
The city Law Department called Nicholas Guido’s 1986 death tragic in a statement Friday and says settling is in the city’s best interest.
The family’s lawyer did not immediately return a call from the Associated Press.
The 26-year-old Guido was shot outside his mother’s home on 17th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn on Christmas Day 1986, according to a New York Daily News report.
Federal prosecutors said the gunmen had Guido had no ties to organized crime, but happened to share a name with an associate of the Gambino crime family who was part of a team of hit men that tried to kill Lucchese family underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso three years earlier.
Casso who paid two detectives – Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa — to help in eight murders, according to the Daily News report. They were accused of carrying out two of those killings themselves.
Eppolito and Caracappa were both sentenced to life in prison.
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Vito Rizzuto became a victim when his eldest son was shot dead
While serving time in a Colorado jail for his role in the murder of three men, Montreal mobster Vito Rizzuto learned his son had been killed.
By: Peter Edwards Star Reporter, Antonio Nicaso
In their new book, Business or Blood, veteran Toronto Star reporter Peter Edwards and GTA. author Antonio Nicaso focus on Vito Rizzuto, once Canada’s most powerful Canadian Mafia boss. Edwards, who specializes in organized crime and justice issues, and Nicaso, an expert on organized crime, chronicle the events leading up to Rizzuto’s imprisonment in Colorado in 2006 and the unravelling of his empire.
Rizzuto was agonizingly far from his Montreal home when he learned of the murder. Violent death was a fact of life in his world, no more out of place than the slaughter of chickens and cattle on a farm. Murder had been necessary for Vito’s family to rise to power in Montreal’s underworld, and murder helped them expand that power and make money beyond his ancestors’ wildest dreams. And murder — three, in fact, that Vito had a hand in 28 years earlier — explained why he was stuck in a prison cell in the dusty former cowboy boom town of Florence, Colo., about an hour and a half south of Denver. That said, no murder that the mobster had ordered, witnessed or committed in his 63 years of life readied him for what the prison chaplain had come to tell him: this time, the bullet-scarred corpse was that of his own eldest child, Nick Rizzuto Jr.
A prison guard that day — three days after Christmas, 2009 — witnessed something that people who knew Vito well could not imagine: the face of Canada’s top Mafia don contorted with pain and shock. Life as a perpetrator didn’t mean Vito knew how to assume the role of a victim. Blindsided by the news, he didn’t cry. No one ever talked of Vito crying. But Vito was stunned and hurt and desperately needed to plan his next move. Vito always had a next move.
First, he should go to the funeral. That meant he needed to approach authorities — the same people he had spent his life deceiving — and ask for permission to leave the prison and cross the border. The prospect of asking anyone’s permission for anything served as another reminder of how far he had fallen.
If permission were granted, Vito would have to travel with guards and he would most likely be handcuffed. Maybe he would be required to wear a bulletproof vest, too, like he had worn during his extradition to the United States. He would also have to pay his own travel costs, but that was no problem. Vito could afford to buy a fleet of jet craft and hire an army of guards.
In the days following the news, Vito phoned his wife, Giovanna, every chance he could. Many times, Vito had come home in the early hours of the morning smelling of wine and the perfume of a mistress, but there was never talk of their marriage ending. They had been man and wife for 43 years, and Nick Jr. had shared in that life together for 42 of them. Giovanna knew life was often hard, even for the powerful; she was the daughter of Leonardo Cammalleri, himself a Mafia killer who emigrated from the Sicilian province of Agrigento to Canada, in part to evade murder charges. But with Vito behind bars, Giovanna needed sedatives to sleep at night. And now things had got worse, as she undertook the worst task a mother can imagine: preparing the funeral of her child.
Vito also spoke with his mother, Libertina, who some thought was the true guiding force in the family. In times of enormous stress and emotion, Zia (Aunt) Libertina betrayed the emotion of a sphinx. Vito’s father, Nicolò (Zio Cola, “Uncle Nick”) Rizzuto Sr., had moved up considerably in their world when he gained her hand in marriage over 60 years earlier. In fact, former Sicilian Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta suspected that Nicolò was admitted to the Mafia out of respect for Libertina’s father, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno, one of those old Sicilian Mafia dons who managed to appear all-powerful and yet humble at the same time.
Zia Libertina’s name translated roughly to “Liberty,” and she certainly felt free to speak her mind. She and Nicolò raised Vito to be mindful that he was their only son and carried their expectations upon him, wherever he went and as long as he lived. Vito grew up in a culture where a dutiful son takes every action to salve his mother’s pain, even if it means breaking the most serious laws in the Criminal Code. In Vito’s birthplace of Sicily, men might be the ones with their fingers on the triggers, but often it was the women who dictated the rhythms of a war, calling out for revenge for the deaths of their boys, husbands, fathers and brothers. There is no greater blow to a mob boss’s dignity than to sit at dinner and hear the family matriarch moan, “Noi mangiamo al tavolo e mio figlio mangia terra” (“We eat at the table and my son eats the earth”).
Vito also spoke repeatedly on the prison phone with his sister, Maria, and his two surviving children, both of whom worked as lawyers. Vito told each of them that he wanted to convince the warden to let him attend Nick Jr.’s funeral. They all came back strongly against this. It would be undignified, even dangerous. His presence would attract more media coverage. He would have to wear handcuffs. “There will be a guard with you.”
Helplessness was a fresh emotion for Vito. Although for decades he had been on the radar of more police projects than anyone could remember, this was his first prison stint. Vito was generally the one causing the tears and the funerals, and his underlings were the ones who got locked up. Just a few years before, the only thing in Montreal it seemed he didn’t control was the city’s nasty winters, and he routinely fled those for warm Caribbean climes, where he mingled business with pleasure on manicured golf courses with city bureaucrats, union and business bosses, Hells Angels and other Mafiosi. Vito was gliding through life at the top of a multi-million-dollar international empire of large-scale construction fraud, drug trafficking, extortion, bribery, stock manipulation, loansharking and money laundering.
For all of Vito’s life, the ways of the underworld had been the natural order of things for him, with its cycles of murder and revenge. There had never been room for pacifists at the top level of the underworld, and no one doubted that Vito intended to please his mother and return to the upper echelon of what Montrealers called the milieu. Had he been free, an attack on Nick Jr. would have been unthinkable.
Vito’s father was a product of west Sicily, but he was himself a Canadian hybrid. A large part of his skill was the ability to pull together disparate North American groups who otherwise might have ignored or plotted against each other, such as rival Haitian street gangs, Hispanic cocaine traffickers, Montreal’s Irish West End gang, rival bikers in the Hells Angels and Rock Machine, and factions from the Sicilian Mafia, Calabrian-based ’Ndrangheta and American La Cosa Nostra. What Vito created was something wholly modern and New World and businesslike: a consortium. Under his leadership these criminal factions could pursue shared business interests, with Vito convincing them that there was enough cake for everyone to eat.
Just a few weeks before his January 2004 arrest, Vito had described his role in this milieu of multicultural criminals to Michel Auger, Quebec’s best-known crime reporter: “I’m a mediator. People come to me to solve disputes because they believe in me. They have respect in me.” That description was wholly true, although deliberately lacking in details. Vito preferred to speak with his intense brown eyes, expressive face and loaded body language. His very few words, such as what he uttered to Auger, were as accurate as a bullet from one of his hit men. Preferring to see himself as a gentleman and a man of destiny, he didn’t need to raise his voice or lose his temper to make life-altering — or ending — decisions. His demeanour was that of someone born into royalty, playing out a role that had been determined long before his conception. It was as though he were from the House of Rizzuto, not the Rizzuto crime family. And if survival for himself and his house meant killing others, then that was his destiny too.
Vito’s conversation with Auger took place in a hallway of a Montreal courtroom, not long after a Canadian government lawyer described him as “the godfather of the Italian Mafia in Montreal” in a court document. Vito scoffed at such a pronouncement, telling Paul Cherry of the Montreal Gazette that he played a more folksy role: “I’m the jack of all trades.”
Whatever his title, it had been an honour in the milieu to kill for Vito. The ultimate honour, however, was to share a round of golf with him at top country clubs in Montreal, Toronto and the Caribbean. Inside the prison doors at Florence, however, confined to a cell the size of one of his old walk-in closets, Vito was just U.S. Federal Inmate 04307-748, stripped of all his personal possessions save his wedding ring. Visits were restricted to office hours between Monday and Friday, but it didn’t matter much: so far from Montreal, no one was coming to see him.
The power Vito had wielded in Montreal meant virtually nothing to his fellow prisoners. Other inmates in Florence had included American domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, before his execution by lethal injection, and numerous 9/11 Al Qaeda terrorists, as well as a nasty grab bag of white supremacists and members of Mexican-American gangs, such as the Nuestra Familia street gang. McVeigh and some of the prisoners within the concrete and steel walls of the neighbouring super-max facility were guilty of attempts to change American history in a profoundly bad way. For all the blood on his hands, Vito had taken pains to confine his violence to the underworld. When one gangster pulled the trigger on another in Vito’s milieu, police routinely joked it was urban renewal or the street equivalent of a self-cleaning oven.
If some of Vito’s fellow prisoners knew anything about him, they had most likely heard that he was a triggerman back in 1981 in the Brooklyn murders of three upstart captains of the Bonanno crime family. That event was hard to ignore, since it had been re-enacted, with dramatic embellishments, in Donnie Brasco, the blockbuster 1997 movie starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino.
Other inmates in Florence certainly would have paid more attention to Vito had they known of his linchpin role in the importation of narcotics into North America. Getting close to Vito meant the opportunity to quickly become a millionaire. The Port of Montreal is one of the two vital entry points for drugs bound for the United States, and Vito had more control over it than anyone else. Once the drugs reached Montreal, Vito’s people had to worry about little more than speed limits as they drove the narcotics through back roads and into New York City, the world’s top market for cocaine.
The other key entry point for American-bound drugs is the border at Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which sits across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Tex. Vito’s rivals in the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta worked with Mexican cartels to control Juárez, considered one of the world’s most dangerous cities. El Paso sits on Highway 10, which connects the desert city directly to the continent’s major drug markets. Most enticing are the profits awaiting in New York City, just 3,315 kilometres (2,060 miles) of open road ahead. Despite the southern competition for Vito, leaders at both ends of the continent were still growing rich.
But none of the old competition mattered after Vito got the news about his son. Aside from trying to arrange his trip to the funeral, there was little Vito could do. How could he soothe his family from so far away? And how could his family comfort him? He lusted for revenge, but he didn’t even know whom to blame. Was his family under attack from outlaw bikers, the Irish or Italian Mafias, Haitian street gangs, francophone criminals or some combination of the above?
For the time being, all Vito could do was grieve alone in his cell, rising before six a.m. for breakfast, building wooden office chairs for $1.10 per hour and plotting against an invisible enemy.
Excerpted from Business or Blood: Mafia Boss Vito Rizzuto’s Last War. Copyright © 2015 Peter Edwards and Antonio Nicaso. Excerpted by permission of Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Ltd. a Penguin Random House company. All rights reserved.
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From old-school gambling to drug cartels and the Web, organized crime has entrenched grip on Texas (update)
By Dane Schiller
Talk of organized crime conjures up images of Chicago’s Al Capone, or the Gambino Crime Family’s John Gotti, but most crime bosses, especially those who have had footprint in Houston or other parts of Texas, aren’t legendary, but largely unknown to the general public.
A step through court records, news files, and the streets, shows how the emergence of drug trafficking and related crimes have long-entrenched a whole new style of criminal underworld in the Lone Star State.
Most, but not all, of the modern players have been accused of tapping into the underground pipelines that move drugs, cash and guns.
Some of them are hardened figures who have years of run ins with the law. Others had never even been arrested before authorities leveled heavyweight accusations against them.
“Capone epitomized organized crime to the public,” said Larry Karson, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Houston Downtown. “But there were numerous other individuals that were involved during Prohibition and were involved in the years afterward leading up to current drug cartels.”
In the most modern of examples, Ross Ulbricht, who lived in Austin and formerly attended the University of Texas at Dallas, is waiting to learn his fate Wednesday. as federal jurors in New York are to consider whether he was the mastermind of a semi-secret online drug market known as Silk Road.
As The Wall Street Journal notes:
Mr. Ulbricht’s trial in a New York federal court, which started three weeks ago, has painted conflicting portraits of the 30-year-old California man, who faces potential life in prison for alleged crimes related to his alleged operation of Silk Road. Prosecutors say he was a power-hungry kingpin who used threats of violence and murder to protect his drug empire on the Internet. Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyers say he was the site’s peaceful and innocent creator, who was framed by the real villains.
The prosecutor has referred to Ulbricht as kingpin, the very same term used by the Department of Justice officials to describe the leaders of drug cartels. A copy of the indictment filed against Ulbricht is posted at the bottom of this article.
UPDATE: The Associated Press reported Wednesday afternoon that Ulbricht “was swiftly convicted … of creating and operating an underground website that prosecutors said enabled drug dealers around the world to reach customers they would never find on the street”
Another person awaiting charges for allegedly creating a running a spinoff of Silk Road is Blake Benthall, also a Texan and formerly of Meyerland, who is charged in drug trafficking, conspiracy and money laundering by federal authorities in San Francisco. Texas Monthly recently profiled both men.
Closer to home, Houston Chronicle reporters James Pinkerton an Mike Tolson recently filed an in-depth piece on the still unsolved 2013 death of a Phil Liase, who had sought to open an upscale strip club here before he was shot by two people as he sat in his Bentley.
Twice that year, as workers were turning a building on Richmond Avenue into a pleasure palace that Liase had hoped would rival any in Houston, fires were set in acts of arson, but did not spread enough to destroy the project.
Was the killing connected to organized crime? Nobody’s is saying, but Liase’s demise does provoke pause.
The University of Houston Downtown’s Karson, who is also a retired U.S. Customs Service agent, explained that organized crime is not a couple of kids taking a couple of cars for a joyride, but a couple of dozen people ripping off cars to ship them overseas. It is a group effort.
Crime groups clearly evolved through the ages, going from Prohibition to gambling and prostitution, to ultimately cartel level activity.
There have been several cases recently uncovered in this region that involved human trafficking for the illegal sex industry. Authorities have also often pointed to how cartels based in Mexico have enlisted U.S. gangs to do work for them on U.S. soil.
“Organized crime is an easy way to view a group of people coming together solely for the objective of criminal activity,” Karson said.
“In many cases with an organized crime group, you are finding the same leadership competencies that you find with business,” he continued. “The difference is that organized criminals are more likely to utilize violence in the fulfillment of their objectives.”
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Asia’s most notorious gangs: an ever-present power
• Amy Chavez A criminal organization’s activities vary depending on where they are in the world but all such groups use bribery, violence and fear to achieve their goals. The growing threat of gangs in Asia is partly due to their booming economies that attract criminals with the prospects of taking a cut of the wealth. Globalization is further helping these gangs to spread their activities, making it easier to smuggle everything from weapons and drugs to people and exotic animals across borders. Money laundering, counterfeiting and document forgery are even easier when a group has a presence in multiple countries. Sound like Armageddon? Read on.
In this article, we look at mob activity in Japan, China and Indonesia and the threats they pose to the public as well as to tourists. We also delve into what experts think the future holds for transnational gang activity. Just a warning: things ain’t lookin’ pretty.
1. Japan–Yamaguchi-gumi
Likelihood of encountering them as a tourist: Low
According to Forbes magazine, Yamaguchi-gumi has the highest revenue of any gang in the world at US$80 billion. The Yamaguchi-gumi is also the largest of all the yakuza syndicates in Japan. But overall gang membership is decreasing throughout Japan and as of 2013 less than 60,000 people claimed to belong to such groups, a record low. Tokyo Reporter estimates the membership in Yamaguchi-gumi is around 11,600. A weak Japanese economy hasn’t helped the organization, who participates in construction contracts, gambling, and extortion (among other things), and who is known for interrupting company stock-holder meetings. The tight-knit Japanese mafia is often described as “highly organized and hierarchical.”
Like other organized crime groups, the yakuza spend some time trying to present a good image and curry local favor by donating to charitable causes or helping with disaster relief activities. Such activities also help gangs keep their status as community organizations or whatever legal entity they might be registered as. This on-paper legitimacy allows them a front from which to operate more easily. The yakuza helped people after WWII by providing much needed goods via the black market, and they’ve stepped in to provide emergency relief for victims of the Kobe Earthquake (1995) and cleaning-ups after the Tohoku Disaster (2011). More recently, the Yamaguchi-gumi put up a website, purporting to support the banishment of illegal drugs, an attempt to improve their image.
If you start a business in Japan, you’re very
likely to come into contact with them
If you don’t take part in drugs or prostitution, and you’re just schlepping your way around Japan on the tourist beat riding the bullet train, you’re very unlikely to see them. The first encounter most Westerners have with yakuza is when they move here and spot the nearly naked, tattooed men taking part in the town’s local annual festival, which often involves bare-chested men in traditional fundoshi loin cloths. If you start a business in Japan, you’re very likely to come into contact with them, even if it’s just as customers in your establishment. Their presence is a part of everyday life in Japan.
2. China’s triads
Likelihood of encountering them as a tourist: Low
Chinese gangs, known as triads, are best known for arms and drug smuggling, counterfeiting, credit card fraud, loansharking, cyber crime, software piracy and smuggling people, animals and plants. As famous as China is for cybercrime, however, none of the groups compare to Japan’s Yamaguchi-gumi when it comes to sheer revenue. China’s triads tend to consist of smaller groups working independently. With well over 1.5 million people estimated to be involved in organized crime in China, the largest triad, Sun Yee On, reportedly has a membership of 55 to 60,000 members.
Overseas triads … sometimes threaten
territories of domestic criminal groups
Triads, whose leaders are called “dragon heads,” are heading more and more towards transnational organized crime, where their contacts abroad allow them to more easily smuggle people and drugs across borders. Overseas triads can be found in Japan, Russia, and the U.S. where they sometimes threaten territories of domestic criminal groups. Sun Yee On is the largest triad, operating in China and Hong Kong, with their presence also reported to be in the U.K., U.S., France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Recently, authorities in China are cracking down on the triads, forcing them to go further underground with their activities. They’ve also scattered their forces as a result, operating in less organizational, more independent-minded splinter groups. Many are moving abroad to tie up with organized crime syndicates in other countries.
3. Laskar Bali
Likelihood of encountering them as a tourist: High
Wherever there is money, gangs will thrive and Indonesia’s island paradise of Bali is rife with prospects. With a constant influx of tourists livin’ it up on their holidays and a healthy population of expatriates who choose to live the high life year-round, the island is a natural draw for drugs, prostitution and other illicit activity. In Bali, foreigners constantly make the headlines for being on death row for drug smuggling and with so much money involved, you can guarantee that the local mob is getting their cut.
Newspapers refer to the groups as
‘community organizations’
There are at least five major gangs in Bali, who often refer to themselves as keluarga besar (big families). But the largest is Laskar Bali. Newspapers refer to the groups as “community organizations” because technically, that’s what they’re registered as and thus can qualify as legal entities.
Most tourists who do encounter them will not be aware of who these guys are. Laskar Bali has most of the security contracts for restaurants, bars and nightclubs in Bali’s touristy areas. Door men, bouncers and security guards in Kuta, Legian and Seminyak, for example are almost all Laskar members. You may even see them out and about wearing t-shirts with the gang’s name and motif on them.
One of the other major organizations, Baladika, with a membership of around 25,000, was awarded the high-security contracts for the 25th APEC Conference and Miss World Contest that took place in Bali in 2013, where the group worked alongside army and police.
But everyone knows who these organizations are. “I don’t like them,” says Ketut, a 34-year-old who owns a printing shop. “It shows the close ties with the new governor and gives him power.”
But not all people believe these neighborhood gangs are bad. Wayan, who works at a restaurant in Sanur, a tourist area not dominated by Laskar, but one called Sanur Bersatu, says “They help protect the neighborhood. If someone bad come to our restaurant and cause problem, we just call them up and they come immediately. The police no good, not come. But the group send someone immediately.”
Me: Do you pay them?
Wayan: Yes, everybody pay them. Restaurant, hotel, all pay.
Me: How much?
Wayan: Big hotel, I think 1 million rupee [US$80] . Restaurant like ours pay 500,000 rupee [US$40] .
Me: Every month?
Wayan: Ya, every month.
Me: I see.
Wayan: You know? Last year my village, we had big fight between two big group. Very terrible. Five hundred guy on each side. Very, very hard.
Me: So these are criminal gangs, right?
Wayan: No, not criminal. They just help keep safe our village. I know about three of members.
In her book Snowing in Bali, Kathryn Bonella, who spent years interviewing drug lords and traffickers in the local Bali prison, says there is no mistake about these organizations being criminal. “Laskar Bali is the holiday island’s most notorious and violent gang,” she writes. They deal in drugs, weapons, prostitution, payoffs and revenge killings. They’ll kill for hire–just a couple thousand dollars. When gangsters do get in trouble for using weapons or for drug trafficking, the group claims no responsibility, saying they should not be blamed for the actions of just a few members. Furthermore, they insist that the group does not approve of such behavior. Yet most people (including the police), are so afraid of possible retribution that even the newspapers will not print the gang’s name.
The future of Asian gangs
Where is all this headed? I asked Robert Whiting, author of Tokyo Underworld. what he thinks about the future of Asia’s organized crime. While the overall declining membership of Japan’s yakuza is perhaps a result of the government’s recent anti-gang rules cracking down on boryokudan, or “violent groups,” Whiting tells us why this isn’t necessarily reason for optimism. “To circumvent the new law, gangs use individuals outside their organizations, so-called han-gure or quasi yakuza, young toughs who don’t belong to organized crime groups.” Since much gang activity has gone underground, Whiting says, “It’s more difficult to pin crimes on yakuza because they are using these irregular forces, like the han-gure, or in many [instances] foreigners (Koreans, Chinese, Cambodians, etc.) who are not full or associate members of the gang.” He concludes saying, “Yakuza activity and arrests may be down on paper but crime is about the same, or actually increasing.”
China’s triads are already moving abroad and succeeding. The internet revolution has brought more opportunities for hacking and general cyber crime. And in Bali, with an economy in overdrive, organized crime is growing right along with it. Laskar Bali was started in 2002 after the first Bali bombings by an violent Islamic group that killed 202 people, mainly tourists. Laskar Bali was formed to help protect the island. With a corrupt Indonesian police force prone to accepting bribes (used to supplement the police officers’ salary of about US$220 per month), citizens are forced to depend on vigilante-type groups to protect their businesses, land and growing wealth.
“Crime will always be with us,” Whiting reminds us. “I certainly don’t see it declining….They [yakuza] provide services that many, many people want, illegal though those services may be. There will always be a demand for them.”
Featured Image: Flickr (David Robert Bliwas) *Not a real gang member
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RECIPES WE WOULD DIE FOR: Braciole de Manzo (Braised Beef Rolls)
RECIPES WE WOULD DIE FOR: Braciole de Manzo (Braised Beef Rolls): Makes 6 servings FOR THE ROLLS: 1-1/2 cups milk 2 cups cubed day-old Italian or French bread, crust removed 2 hard-boiled eggs...
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15 arrested in RCMP-led investigation into Mafia-linked drug-trafficking ring
Paul Cherry, Montreal GazetteMore from Paul Cherry, Montreal Gazette
Fifteen people were arrested Wednesday, including a few who were already behind bars, as part of an RCMP-led investigation into a Mob-tied cocaine-trafficking ring that used an unusual — and some might say streetwise — technique to sneak their product into Canada.
While cocaine is often smuggled into Canada creatively hidden among products buried deep in shipping containers, some of the people arrested Wednesday are alleged to have smuggled the narcotic in by mixing it with asphalt powder. A release issued by the RCMP describes the method as unusual and alleges that one of the accused sought Wednesday is “the chemist of the group (who) was responsible for extracting the cocaine from the legitimate substance.”
A total of 36 charges, contained in two indictments, were filed at the Montreal courthouse after members of the RCMP-led Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit made the arrests. At least a few of the people sought were very easy to find. Steven Fracas, 30, is currently detained while charged, along with seven other men, in the murder of Salvatore Montagna, a Mafia leader who was gunned down near Montreal in November 2011. Stéphane Parent, 47, is incarcerated in a federal penitentiary serving a five-year prison term after pleading guilty to a series of charges, in 2012, in connection with a drug and contraband tobacco ring tied to the Hells Angels in the Quebec City region. He is scheduled to have his first parole hearing next week.
The third man already behind bars, Artur Klodkowski, 38, is detained while awaiting a possible trial in a different drug-trafficking case at the Montreal courthouse brought against him and six other people last year.
The indictments detail alleged drug-trafficking conspiracies that stretched throughout Eastern Canada from Ontario to Nova Scotia. In its statement, the RCMP alleged the network “was to control drug trafficking in the greater Montreal area as well as the Atlantic provinces.” The Mounties also noted in the statement that the drug-trafficking cell busted on Wednesday was linked to arrests made in June in Project Clemenza. Just like in Clemenza, the alleged drug-trafficking conspiracies involve a time frame limited between 2010 and 2011. That is because the Mounties had to put both probes on hold while investigators with the RCMP’s C Division based in Montreal had to turn their attention toward another investigation.
Five of the people arrested on Wednesday were previously charged in June in Project Clemenza, including Antonio Bastone, 52, of St-Jean-de-Matha, and his younger brother Roberto, 42, of Laval, the alleged leaders of one of two cells broken up last year. The brothers were released on bail in July after posting $5-million bonds on real estate.
Giuseppe Arcoraci, 49, a man listed in business records as the president of a restaurant in LaSalle, was also among the people arrested on Wednesday. He faces three charges in all, including one alleging he was part of a conspiracy, between October 2010 and September 2011, to traffic in cocaine and marijuana. The alleged plot involved a dozen of the people arrested Wednesday as well Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle, a 38-year-old man tied to the Mafia who was murdered in St-Léonard in March 2012.
Most of the people arrested appeared before a judge at the Montreal courthouse, via a video conference, on Wednesday and their cases are scheduled to return to court on April 20. The RCMP also issued a notice that they are seeking to arrest two more men as part of the most recent investigation. Mathieu Bouchard, 37, and Mike Di Battista, 39, are being sought.
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Could These Reputed Mobsters Have Answers About Hoffa?
Some key players may be dead.
Still, the website, Gangster Report, lists a host of live reputed mobsters -- including offspring of the dead ones -- who might be able to shed light on the 1975 disappearance of ex-Teamster boss James R. Hoffa.
Two of the people on the list include Joseph (Joey Jack) Giacalone, son of the late Detroit mafia street boss Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone and Jack (Jackie the Kid) Giacalone, son of the late mobster Billy Giacalone, alleged to be the current Detroit mob Don. The elder Giacalone fathers were brothers.
Of Jack Giacalone, the website writes:
Jack (Jackie the Kid) Giacalone – Alleged to be the current Detroit mob Don and the son of Billy Giacalone, Jackie the Kid was only 25 at the time of the Hoffa hit, but was very close with his dad and uncle and was being groomed for the boss’ chair since the early 1980s, so it wouldn’t be hard to believe that he was given the “inside scoop.”
Another person who made the list: Anthony (Chicago Tony) La Piana.
The website writes of La Piana:
Alleged to be the current Detroit mob underboss and a protégé and nephew via marriage to recently-deceased Michigan Don Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco, Chicago Tony has been the Midwest mafia’s labor-union representative since the early 1980s and the assassination of his predecessor Allen Dorfman, according to federal documents related to former Teamsters president and FBI informant Jackie Presser. Investigators think La Piana, 70, may have been filled in on details of the Hoffa hit by his mentors Jack Tocco and Tocco’s one-time underboss Vincent (Little Vince) Meli , his father-in-law who died of cancer in 2008 and was a longtime liaison between Hoffa, the organized labor movement and the mob.
The site also names Tommy Andretta, a "retired New Jersey wiseguy who was a young mob soldier under the tutelage of Genovese crime family caporegime Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano and has been implicated in the high-profile homicide since the start of the investigation 40 years ago. Andretta, 75, currently lives in Las Vegas, but back on July 30, 1975, he’s believed by authorities to have been one of Provenzano’s representatives on the Hoffa hit, according to FBI files, most likely used for “clean up” purposes."
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The Chicago mob and the Stradivarius - priest admits to bizarre plot
BY MARY WISNIEWSKI
(Reuters) - In a case that reads like a movie script, a Catholic priest on Wednesday pleaded guilty to trying to help a convicted mob hitman recover a purported Stradivarius violin hidden in the wall of a house.
Eugene Klein, who had been a federal prison chaplain, admitted to conspiring in 2011 to defraud the United States by passing messages from mobster Frank Calabrese to an unnamed associate on how to get the violin out of Calabrese's Wisconsin home.
If found and authenticated as made by 18th-century instrument maker Antonio Stradivari, such a violin would have been worth millions of dollars. Calabrese had also claimed the violin had once been owned by pianist Liberace, according to local media accounts.
Calabrese, also known as "Frankie Breeze," was serving a life sentence at the federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, in connection with more than a dozen gangland slayings.
Federal authorities were selling his property to compensate the families of victims, and he wanted the violin recovered before the house was sold, court documents said.
Klein, 66, had been permitted to meet with Calabrese regularly to provide religious ministries, like giving communion. He knew that he was not supposed to pass messages to and from Calabrese, prosecutors said.
But Klein agreed to be a messenger, the plea agreement said. The communications included a letter concealed in religious reading materials and passed to Klein through a slot in the door of Calabrese's prison cell, the plea agreement said.
The letter had instructions on how to find the violin, and how to get into the home.
Klein didn't turn over the letter but admitted to telling the unnamed person what it said.
Federal authorities had found paperwork about a 1764 violin in another of Calabrese's homes. A certificate describing the violin bore an emblem with the word "Stradivari," but it said the violin was made by Giuseppe Antonio Artalli, court documents said.
No violin was found.
Thomas Durkin, Klein's attorney, questioned whether the violin ever even existed, and he compared the hunt for it to "looking for a unicorn," according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Durkin was not immediately available for comment.
Klein, of Springfield, Missouri, faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine when he is sentenced on June 23.
Calabrese died in prison in 2012.
(Reporting by Mary Wisniewski; Editing by Eric Beech)
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Italian cops: Ancient artifacts stolen by mafia recovered
Reuters
ROME – Italian police have seized more than 2,000 ancient artifacts in a nationwide sweep aimed at dismantling a criminal gang that was operating throughout southern Italy and dealing in stolen archaeological treasures.
During their operation, police discovered a house that had been turned into a private museum packed with some 550 ancient finds, a police statement said. Three people were arrested.
The investigation was launched after part of a fresco was stolen from the House of Neptune in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, near Naples, police said.
Italian media reported the loss of part of a fresco of Apollo and Artemis in Pompeii last March. The police, who dubbed their investigation "Artemis", did not say if they had recovered the art work, which was hacked out of a wall.
Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini hailed Wednesday's operation, which was coordinated by anti-mafia officials in Naples and involved some 142 police searches in more than 20 Italian cities and towns.
"(This) has led to the recovery of thousands of archaeological items and defeated a criminal organisation dedicated to plundering southern Italy's cultural heritage," Franceschini said in a statement.
Amongst the items recovered were decorated vases, coins and fragments of ancient buildings. Police also seized metal detectors and items they said had been used for illegal digs.
Underlining the challenge faced by Italy in protecting its vast cultural wealth, authorities said on Wednesday that heavy rain had washed away part of a garden in Pompeii, which was buried under volcanic ash nearly 2,000 years ago.
The damage occurred in an area that was due to be restored under the Great Pompeii Project -- a 105 million euro ($119.9 million) plan partly funded by the European Union.
The project has been delayed due to legal squabbles over who should carry out the work.
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Mafia resurgence feared after Port Authority policy change
By Philip Messing
The Port Authority is no longer running criminal background checks on businesses applying to operate at area airports — a policy that critics say will welcome back the Mafia, The Post has learned.
The astonishing change began nearly four months ago when the PA quietly ditched its long-standing corruption-fighting tool that required background checks on new businesses and their principals before they could operate at JFK, La Guardia, or Newark airports, a source explained.
“This will lead to bad outcomes. It’s an open invitation for organized crime figures to once again do business at our airports,” one insider said.
The checks, implemented about 25 years ago to weed out mob-owned businesses, were performed by a PA lieutenant and several detectives who carefully reviewed paperwork and conducted in-person interviews on about 100 new companies annually.
Additionally, the screening called for existing firms and their senior executives to be “revetted” whenever their PA contracts were renewed.
Only about 5 percent of applicants were disqualified, but sources said the probes also had a “deterrent effect.”
“You can never measure how many vendors or officials simply didn’t apply [to work at the airports] because we did this,” said the source.
On Oct. 16, the PA police issued an internal memo abruptly canceling all vetting protocols.
“Such background checks are not required by applicable law or regulation. Accordingly, effective immediately, such background checks are hereby eliminated,” wrote PAPD Superintendent Michael A. Fedorko.
The policy change was ordered after businesses complained that the vetting process, which took anywhere from a few weeks to several months, had grown burdensome, a source explained.
The firms bellyached that background checks were “taking too long to complete,” the source added.
The protocols were adopted as a “best practice” meant to safeguard the integrity of airport businesses permitted to interact with millions of travelers each year.
The checks were meant to help loosen the mob’s stranglehold on area airports, a problem depicted in the 1990 movie, “Goodfellas,” which showed the powerful grip the Luchese crime family once exerted over JFK Airport.
Firms were required to submit incorporation papers, PA vendor contracts, a list of other airport firms with whom they did business, names and photos of senior executives and other paperwork.
PA detectives would then scour the documents and perform “due diligence” probes, combing data bases for terrorism links, mob ties, prior criminal histories, outstanding civil judgments, bankruptcies or suspiciously large debts that threatened the ability to deliver promised goods or services.
And finally, applicants were required to submit to in-person interviews so they could clear up any lingering suspicions that cropped up.
Those who passed muster not only won permission to work inside airports, but gained closer access to tarmacs or restricted areas, critics say.
The PA did not directly address charges that the decision had compromised security, but spokesman Steve Coleman said:
“Every employee and individual with unescorted access to the secure areas of the Port Authority’s airports undergoes a rigorous FBI and TSA background check and Security Threat Assessment.”
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Former NJ union chief gets 22 months for Mafia-linked scam
By Leonard Greene
Ex-union chief Thomas Leonardis sought "collections" on behlaf of Stephen Depir (above), authorities say. Photo: Justin Hubbard
The former head of the union representing New Jersey dockworkers landed 22 months in prison in Brooklyn federal court Tuesday for his role in shaking down union members for Christmas “tributes.”
Thomas Leonardis, 57, was head of the International Longshoremen’s Association from 2008 to 2011.
Authorities say the collections were made at the behest of Stephen Depiro, a reputed soldier in the Genovese crime family.
In his guilty plea, Leonardis admitted conspiring to compel donations from ILA union members, who made the payments based on “actual and threatened force, violence and fear,” according to the US Attorney’s office.
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