News from Italy

[Wiseguy]

The fact that Italian authorities are considering this at all is a product of Western European liberalism that has never understood the concept of true justice. It's disgusting.

[Strax]

'Mafia killed off sick, took bodies to funeral homes'

(ANSA) - Catania, June 20 - The Sicilian Mafia killed off terminally ill patients by injecting air into their veins in the ambulances taking them home to die and instead took them straight to funeral parlours in a 300-euro-a-head racket, an informant has told police.
The patients were finished off on their way from Catania's Biancavilla Hospital, the informant told police.
The racket started in 2012 and has earned the Mob thousands of euros, he said.
The informant first reported the scam to satirical TV news show Le Iene (Reservoir Dogs) and then went to police to reveal what he knew, judicial sources said.
Police are now pulling patients' records from Biancavilla Hospital, they said.

Source: http://www.ansa.it/english/news/2017/06 ... b12cc.html

[Wiseguy]

Sicily’s cornered Mafia primed for reversal of fortune
The Daily Star
June 24, 2017


PALERMO, Italy: Shortly before 8 a.m. on a sunny spring morning, Mafia boss Giuseppe Dainotti was cycling down a quiet street when two men on a motorbike drew alongside and shot him three times, killing him on the spot. It was a classic mob hit in the heart of the Sicilian capital. People claimed to have seen nothing and only one person admitted to even hearing the gunfire. A month on, no one has been arrested.

Released from prison in 2014, Dainotti, 67, had served more than two decades in jail for murder. The motives for his own murder are not clear but police say the first high-profile Mafia hit in Palermo since 2010 may signal renewed internal strife.

“The Mafia today is in search of a new leadership at a time when a lot of the old bosses are coming out of prison,” said Palermo police chief, Renato Cortese.

“The danger is that some bigwig will be released and try to put the Mafia back together again,” Renato told Reuters.

Once all-powerful on Sicily, the world’s most famous crime gang, known as Cosa Nostra, “Our Thing,” has been squeezed over the past two decades, with many bosses put behind bars, many of its businesses sequestered and many locals ready to defy it.

Despite these setbacks, no one believes it is dying. Indeed, after years of decline, with the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta overtaking it as Italy’s most powerful mobsters, prosecutors believe it is trying to rebuild, starting with its drug trade.

“The mafia organization is once again looking to develop and maintain a total monopoly on the extremely profitable narcotics market,” Matteo Frasca, the head of Palermo’s Appeals Court, said in a speech in January.

Italian prosecutors say the ‘Ndrangheta has a stranglehold on cocaine trade, but the Cosa Nostra is a major player in the Italian hashish market, often importing the drug from northern Africa and selling it throughout Europe.

In March, police found 400 kilograms of hashish, worth an estimated 3 million euros ($3.4 million), floating just off the Sicilian coast after a drop-off went awry. In May, police seized around 300 kilograms of hashish in a single raid in Palermo.

“For a while, the Mafia depended on public work scams and extortion rackets for much of their money, but with the economy in such dire straits here, they are returning to their old drug habits,” said a senior anti-Mafia magistrate, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Sicily’s economic output fell more than 13 percent between 2008 and 2015 and is only slowly recovering, while the jobless rate is 22 percent, twice the national average.

The deep recession has made it much more difficult for hard-up businesses to pay protection money, or “pizzo” in Italian, to the Mafia and more than 1,000 firms have revolted against paying that in Palermo alone in little more than a decade.

In May, the trial of nine men accused of extorting cash from a dozen stores in the city’s central Via Maqueda, which were all run by foreigners, mainly Bangladeshis, started.

“It is an extraordinary affair. For the first time in Palermo, a group of foreign storekeepers rebelled. They rebelled together. It was a collective action,” said Daniele Marannano, coordinator of Addiopizzo, “Goodbye pizzo.”

Addiopizzo is a grassroots civic movement that encourages companies to collectively fight back against Cosa Nostra.

“Lots of businesses still pay the pizzo, but they now want something back from the Mafia for their money – help fixing prices in their neighborhood, help keeping difficult employees in check, help collecting unpaid bills,” Marannano said.

A local businessman, who declined to be named because of the sensitivities involved, said one of the consequences of the Mafia’s decline was a rise in petty crime.

He complained that fruit groves operated by his family food company were regularly raided at night by small-time thieves. “That never used to happen in the past. A fly couldn’t land on a fruit tree without permission first from the Mafia.”

The state’s fight against the Mafia only got serious in 1992 after the group murdered two of Italy’s top magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, triggering national outrage and finally forcing complacent politicians to act.

Successive governments introduced waves of anti-Mafia laws, allowing the state to seize mob assets, keep imprisoned mafiosi incommunicado and far from Sicily, and develop protection programs for informers.

As a result, hundreds of mafiosi have been arrested over the past 25 years, including Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the Boss of Bosses, who ordered the murders of Falcone and Borsellino. He is 86 and believed to be ill and likely to die in jail.

However, many other less prominent mobsters who were caught up in the big anti-Mafia trials of the last two decades have either been freed, like Dainotti, or else are coming up for release, like Riina’s nephew Giovanni Grizzaffi.

“The last Boss of Bosses was Riina. He was never formally replaced and people felt kept in check by him, even when he was in jail. When he dies, you might see a power struggle,” said police chief Cortese, who has a photograph of Falcone and Borsellino hanging in his office.

Dainotti was shot dead on the eve of the 25th anniversary of Falcone’s killing, leaving police and politicians wondering whether the date had been specially picked to signal that the Mafia was back in action.

Rosario Crocetta, the governor of Sicily and anti-Mafia crusader, has been the target of at least three mob plots to kill him, most recently in 2010. He says the group is much reduced, but ever evolving.

“They are chameleons,” he said, two bodyguards standing alongside his table at an outdoors cafe.

“You are never going to win total victory over the Mafia, just as you can never totally defeat evil.”

https://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/World ... rtune.ashx

[UTC]

Organized crime or disorganized crime--pick your poison.

[SonnyBlackstein]

Organized crime or disorganized crime--pick your poison.

The Westside or MS13.

I know which one I'd take.

[Wiseguy]

Looks like there's a big operation under way against the Ndrangheta. Over 100 arrested, including many bosses, in 23 clans.

http://www.newsweek.com/underground-maf ... eta-631650

http://m.espresso.repubblica.it/attuali ... refresh_ce

http://www.strettoweb.com/foto/reggio-c ... id/574864/

[Wiseguy]

Looks like another 54 Sicilian Mafia were busted...

http://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-n ... 3642f862e1

[SonnyBlackstein]

Good posts. Appreciated WG.

[Strax]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs-pZxCSciw

They are talking about La Santa, son of one of the clan bosses said:"I'm the State here"

[Wiseguy]

32 Camorra arrested in Italy, Spain, and Germany

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/07/05 ... -gang.html

[Strax]

[size:14pt]The Mafia Is Officially Worse Than Vesuvius[/size]

ROME—At first glance, it looks like Mt. Vesuvius, the volcano responsible for the devastation of Pompeii in 79 A.D., is erupting again. Thick black and yellow plumes of smoke are billowing from its flanks, causing a cloud of smoke to settle over Naples and spread east with the wind as far as the Adriatic Sea, hundreds of miles away.

And why wouldn’t it blow? For years, the residents who live on the sides of Vesuvius have worried that the active volcano they call home will soon erupt. Scientists have been saying it’s due, and near-constant seismic activity seems to suggest it just might blow.

But the smoke on the mountain isn’t a natural disaster; it’s a human one. Dozens of fires have been raging on Vesuvius for days, but on Tuesday several joined together to create what is edging toward a major disaster as they tear through the Camorra crime syndicate’s toxic-dump wasteland.

The area around Vesuvius is already called the land of fires, named for the illegal incinerators built by the Camorra in which they have been burning toxic waste for years in one of the most profitable rackets the mobsters run. The whole area is a health hazard with incidences of cancer higher than anywhere else in Italy.

In February of this year, eight children between the ages of 7 months and 11 years old died from cancer in a period of just 20 days. At the time of the deaths, one of the mothers of a young victim who is part of the group “Victims of the Land of Fires” led locals in a protest to try to stop the Camorra from using the territory for illegal dumping. “These victims have no peace even in death,” she said. “We are burying them in the toxic soil.”

The Camorra’s racket includes burying and burning toxic waste that medical facilities and factories need to get rid of. Over the last decade, more than 400 companies have been investigated in the area for selling their dangerous trash to the crime group rather than getting rid of it in an environmentally friendly and legal way. The waste is often discarded in makeshift dumps on Vesuvius which, when they get too full, are burned.

Italy’s Forestry Corps says some of the fires burning out of control on Vesuvius were intentionally set, likely to get rid of the toxic trash or to protest local authorities’ recent sequester of illegal construction sites. Others may have been the result of discarded cigarettes that ignited tinder that has become dry during a lingering heatwave. Over the last few days, many of these fires have connected, creating an out-of-control situation for firefighters. The largest fire is 2 kilometers long. So far hundreds of residents have been evacuated from their homes, and hotels and restaurants have been closed.

Local Archbishop Marco Ricci told ANSA news service that the situation on the mountain was getting worse.

“There is toxic waste that propagates the flames and poisons the air. The smoke is black. Behind all this is a criminal hand,” he said. “We do not sleep anymore, we have sore throats and irritated eyes. It is not fair because many of our people have already paid for this with cancer because of the the waste.”

Last year, Ricci and a local doctor went door-to-door to conduct a survey of the prevalence of cancer within the diocese of the land of fires. They found 80 percent of the people they asked had at least one cancer patient in their family. “Our study has no scientific value,” he says. “But it tells us all we need to know about the situation we live in.”

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-mafia- ... n-vesuvius

[SonnyBlackstein]

Great article.

For those that think LCN has any 'nobility, honour or service to the community'.
Cancer. Innocent people. Children.

Perps should be given murder charges.

[Wiseguy]

How the Calabrian Mafia Discovered Hong Kong
Italian mafia families have begun using Hong Kong as a base for financial crimes.

By Antonio Talia
July 26, 2017


There are many “soft spots” in the world: some of them are haunted by organized crime, some others are known to turn sometimes a blind eye to illicit money, and certain individuals are capable of making huge fortunes by connecting the two dots on a map.

But on a summer afternoon in 2012 the Italian investigators listening to a tapped conversation between a ‘Ndrangheta Don and a broker could not believe their ears, because these particular “soft spots” were unimaginably distant, even for men used to investigating criminals with an international attitude. As far as investigators knew, ‘Ndrangheta (pronounced “An-Dran-Gh-Ta”) — the Calabrian version of Cosa Nostra, ranking in the last 20 years as the most powerful Italian crime syndicate — had established connections with Canada and Australia, but never ventured into the Far East.

Or so they thought.

The first man on the phone, Giuseppe Pensabene — aka “The Pope” — was no stranger to the detectives of SCO, a special squad of the Italian police focused on organized crime. Born in 1968 in Montebello Jonico, a tiny village in Italy’s southern region of Calabria and a ‘Ndrangheta stronghold, Pensabene started his criminal career in the early 1980 by joining the Imertis, a “respected family” involved in the so-called “Second ‘Ndrangheta War,” a bloody feud in which almost 500 people were killed between 1985 and 1991.

In 1988, Pensabene moved north and settled in Brianza, the region surrounding Milan and one of Italy’s wealthiest areas. But as every investigator working on Calabrian syndicates might confirm, it seems you can not teach a new trick to an old ‘Ndrangheta mobster: “The Pope” turned into a professional of extortion, drug trafficking, and money laundering. After the spate of arrests known as “Operazione Crimine-Infinito,” in 2010 he was eventually crowned boss of one of Northern Italy’s most notorious organizations.

The second voice on the phone was an Italian-Swiss broker named Emanuele Sangiovanni. As investigators listened in, he said, “This company is good, it guarantees a double shielding… First step is a trust company in Malta, second step is a Hong Kong company, so it’s virtually unreachable for authorities. The administrator is a Hong Kongese architect.”

“How do I do this from Italy?” Pensabene replied.

“You need an attorney, someone you can trust… Or you can reach an agreement and make the guy come here [to Europe], but it’s too expensive, we have to do this in Malta.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

When “The Pope,” Emanuele Sangiovanni, and 38 other people were arrested in 2014 Italian investigators seized goods, apartments, bank accounts, and 39 companies worth dozens of millions of euros. From a tiny office in Brianza with no windows and no toilets, dubbed “il tugurio” (“the shack”), Pensabene and his organization were able to launder several million euros for their Calabrian cousins, working as the financial arm of the southern clans deeply involved in cocaine trafficking.

The investigators never managed to fully identify the “Hong Kongese architect,” but his shell company was not the only clue pointing to a connection between Pensabene and the Far East. Almost 100 percent of the clients requesting Pensabene’s “services” were Calabrian gangs, but a certain invoice attracted the detectives’ attention: a Chinese company named Fengrun International Ltd. It was connected to Pensabene’s shady web through several bank transfers for hundreds of thousands of euros. The key figure in this deal was Giuseppe Vinciguerra, a 40-something Sicilian who connected the Calabrian mobsters with businessmen looking for a safe way to clean their money and provided Pensabene and his partners with many firearms at his disposal after some former deals.

In 2012, according to the SCO, the Pensabene-Vinciguerra joint venture was worth 8.2 million euros ($9.6 million), and the Sicilian had already accomplished a plan to diversify their business targeting new markets and brand new customers: the Chinese.

Vinciguerra had been a person of interest since the end of “Operazione Crimine-Infinito” and his different mobile phones were tapped, regardless of his efforts to switch from one telephone to another on a weekly basis. In December 2011 SCO detectives listened to six conversations between Vinciguerra and a Chinese national dubbed “Michele.”

The two men were discussing several different “deliveries,” “containers,” “parcels,” and “journeys,” referring to bank transfers that might — or might not — be related to Fengrun International Ltd.

On the evening of December 11, Vinciguerra and “Michele” agreed to meet to tie up some loose ends, and the investigators — who were clueless about the true identity of “Michele” — decided to put up a surveillance system around the Sicilian. The next afternoon, a blue Volkswagen Touareg parked side by side with Vinciguerra’s Mercedes SW in the courtyard behind GMB, a company in the whereabouts of Milan the mobsters used as a facade for their activities.

A 30-something-year-old Asian stepped into the Mercedes and the two men spent the next two hours discussing, unaware that police officers hidden at a convenient distance were shooting pictures and tracking their mobiles.

The Volkswagen’s plate number and the phone in the Asian man’s pocket were eventually traced to Chen Sheng, born in 1981 in Zhejiang province, China. The Chinese national, owner of a prosperous waste-disposal company in Milan, had reported the theft of his mobile to the police several months before and the investigators never managed to prove whether he was or was not the same “Michele” in partnership with the Calabrians for a money laundering scheme.

“It is very likely they were the same person but the chances are not 100 percent. Actually, by listening other phone conversations, we cannot confirm that the man discussing in Italian with a Chinese accent with Vinciguerra was always the same person,” says one of the investigators, hinting at a broader audience of Chinese customers for the Calabrians’ “special services.”

Pensabene, Sangiovanni, Vinciguerra, and all the others were found guilty of mafia-type conspiracy, money laundering, loan sharking, extortion, attempted smuggling, possessing of undeclared firearms, and several other felonies. Although the “Asian connection” is still under investigation, it soon turned out they were not the only ‘Ndrangheta wiseguys looking at the Far East for opportunities. Somebody had arrived in Hong Kong long before them.

Like many Calabrian crime stories, these two tales are obliquely intertwined: in December 2014 the Milanese DDA (Direzione Distrettuale Antimafia) arrested 59 people for accusations of various criminal activities. The Martino brothers, Giulio and Vincenzo, are accused of being the leaders of a dangerous organization with legal and illegal interests in many different businesses. Born in Reggio Calabria — the region’s biggest town, and the most plagued by organized crime — both brothers trace the beginning of their criminal career back to the infamous Second War of ‘Ndrangheta.

During this vicious feud for supremacy over the Calabrian gangs — in a time when Reggio Calabria and neighboring villages experienced execution-style murders almost every day for six long years — the Martino brothers were part of the DeStefano family, a name largely synonymous with the quintessential aristocracy of Calabrian crime. In their 20s, Giulio and Vincenzo found themselves battling against a 20-something Giuseppe “Not-Yet-The-Pope” Pensabene, initiated to the mob by DeStefanos’ bitter enemies, the Imerti family.

Now, in 2011, 500 murders and exactly 20 years after the Second War of ‘Ndrangheta ended with a truce between the DeStefanos, the Imertis, and their allies, the Martino brothers were sitting in a bar in Milan face-to-face with their former rival to strike a bargain. What happened?

Both “The Pope” and the Martino brothers had been aware of each others’ presence in Milan for many years, but their paths never crossed until two Milanese businessmen, in financial trouble, asked for the Dons’ help to solve a potential conflict. Cristiano Sala was an entrepreneur whose companies offered many catering services to San Siro Stadium, the arena where A.C. Milan and Inter Milan play soccer every week. And yet, Sala was in dire need of money, and in a desperate effort asked Pensabene’s help to persuade Marco Santulli, another businessman who owed him at least 500 thousand euros, to pay up — by any means. Santulli, knowing that there was a powerful Don behind Sala turned to the Martino brothers for help. The former ‘Ndrangheta enemies had learned their lesson from the previous war in Calabria, and instead of battling again found an appeasement between the concerned parties. That’s how the Martinos met Sala, who eventually started working for them and helped the Calabrese brothers to infiltrate his network of Milanese wealthy entrepreneurs.

After a decade-long conviction for cocaine trafficking, Giulio and Vincenzo Martino became apparently “respectable,” investing in several businesses from construction to car dealers, but in fact they had never quit their old habits: Edmondo Colangelo, one of their henchmen, was caught in the port city of Genoa buying 283 kilograms of cocaine through some Dominican connections, an investment worth millions of euros. It became clear to the investigators who were trying to nail them that the Martinos had kept their huge wealth even during the long years spent in prison through some hidden bank accounts; now these funds were finally back at their disposal.

The financial mind who made this possible was Francesco Longo, an Italian broker established in Switzerland whose role finally came under the spotlight after months of investigations. The Martinos were trying to buy the majority stake of a big hotel on the Riviera, between Italy and France, but to reach their goal they first needed to have some of their hidden cash back. On a brisk Milanese morning in March 2011, during a meeting between Giulio Martino and his financial broker Longo held at the Western Palace Hotel, the investigators managed to catch this conversation:

“The companies in that list… These are our companies in Dubai. Peter took the money, but… Oh! They made such a mess, they created 10 companies because they can’t keep the money frozen, the money needs to flow,” said Longo.

“I know,” answered Martino.

“So, do you know where this money comes from? It comes from Hong Kong!”

“Yes, I know. Hong Kong.”

“The money comes from Hong Kong, flows to Dubai, and then… Every time somebody ask for this they owe me 15 [percent]. So, if you ask me to [handle] 5 million… It’s always 15 [percent].”

“That’s normal.”

The detectives eventually found confirmation that from 1996 to 2009 the Martinos had kept their hidden capitals in Switzerland and Hong Kong through Edmondo Colangelo, the Martinos’ henchman and drug dealer. Colangelo started cooperating with the authorities after his arrest. Here is a transcript of his declarations to the District Attorney:

DA: Do you have any knowledge about financial operations by Franco Longo involving the Martino Brothers, especially in Dubai and Hong Kong?

Colangelo: In 2011 Giulio Martino told me that , before they were arrested in 1996, both he and his brother Vincenzo kept their money in some confidential bank accounts in Switzerland. He also mentioned that he went through some difficulties because the Swiss bank was acquired by a larger financial institution, and he could have lost his money because of the increasing controls. So he asked for Longo’s help, and he told me that Longo managed to get his money back through foreign bank accounts in Hong Kong and Dubai. But I don’t have any other details.

DA: The Franco Longo you mentioned in several occasions, do you know what’s his job?

Colangelo: Frankly, I never fully understood. Giulio Martino said that Longo had a trust company in Switzerland, that he was a man who knew “how to make the money flow,” and that he “had the right acquaintances.”

According to some investigators, these “acquaintances” included the mysterious “Peter” mentioned in the tapped conversation between Long and Martino at the Western Palace Hotel in Milan, and also a certain “Oliver” whose name pops up here and there in many other confidential conversations. The identity of these men still remains unknown, even after Longo’s arrest, but few people at DDA think that these individuals might be anything else than careful middlemen, brokers hidden in “soft spots” on the financial world map, like Dubai and Hong Kong.

But in this shadowy world of mobsters and financial brokers there was also another specific individual eager to help the ‘Ndrangheta to travel across the Silk Road: a politician. Former Senator Nicola Di Girolamo is a Roman lawyer who — according to “Operazione Phuncards-Broker,” an investigation led by Rome’s DA — owed his seat at the Italian Senate to the Arena family. That particular ‘Ndrangheta clan, based in Isola Capo Rizzuto — a small village in northern Calabria — spread its men and its money across Italy and several European countries.

Di Girolamo ran his campaign for Silvio Berlusconi’s party PDL (Partito della Libertà) and was elected in 2008, but in the previous years he had been working hard behind the scenes to win the Arenas’ support. As the investigators unraveled his past movements, they found evidence that at the end of 2006 Di Girolamo was traveling across Southeast Asia to take care of “the family businesses.” At the end of November 2006, Di Girolamo was in Hong Kong to establish several shell companies such as New Success Ltd., Y2K Diamonds, and Super Harvest Finance. At the beginning of December he was in Kuala Lumpur and then in Singapore, where he left some traces of expensive payments at the lavish Raffles Hotel.

What Di Girolamo did not know, at the time, was that within three years he would find himself at the epicenter of a huge scandal: the web of shell companies he set up was meant for a huge tax evasion scheme that benefited both the top management of two of Italy’s most important IT companies and the Arena family itself. The scheme was nicknamed in Italian “Carosello” (“Carousel Tax Fraud”): the shell companies were used to sell to each other fake IT services in order to provide the mother companies with an illegal exemption of VAT. According to the investigators, Di Girolamo’s contact in Hong Kong was an individual named “Raymond Choi” or “Raymond Chan”: in 2007 the phone calls between the two men and several others involved in the scheme became frantic, as they grew aware of the attention of the authorities that their illicit activities had already drawn, but the identity of “Raymond” has never been established.

One of these persons of interest in the case, Silvio Fanella, allegedly the bookkeeper of the organization, was shot dead in Rome in 2014 while he was serving four years of home detention. The killers, disguised with the uniforms of Guardia di Finanza — the Italian military police responsible for enforcing financial laws — were never found. Di Gregorio, Fanella, Gennaro Mokbel — allegedly the leader of the gang — and 50 other people, including some men of the Arena family, were formally charged with several crimes, including tax evasion and money laundering. Some cautious estimates shows that between February 2006 and February 2007, in Hong Kong alone, the organization managed to hide from Italian revenue authorities approximately 14 millions euros.

Many investigations are still ongoing, but the road to the east is already open. It seems that the ‘Ndrangheta has fallen in love with Hong Kong and the honeymoon is far from over.

http://thediplomat.com/2017/07/how-the- ... hong-kong/

[SonnyBlackstein]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/t ... -1.3467453

[BillyBrizzi]

New Dutch police unit to crack down on Italian Mafia in The Netherlands

The Dutch police have introduced a special police unit which will be completely dedicated to fighting mafia activities on Dutch soil as part of a deal with the Italian authorities, the AD reports. The team will gather information and track down mafia members on the run from the Italian police. The deal includes the right of the Dutch police to question mafia members about their activities in the Netherlands. The move comes in response to complaints by the Italian government about Dutch complacency in the face of mafia activity, allowing wanted criminals to live ‘a carefree life’ in the Netherlands, the paper writes. A 2012 police report showed the ‘Ndrangheta’ could have as many as a hundred active members in this country. Mafia activity in the Netherlands is mainly concentrated around the drugs and weapons trade but experts warn the criminal organisation is infiltrating sectors of the Dutch economy as well. In 2015 police investigation showed a mafia family had been active in the Aalsmeer flower auction for years. ‘The whole mafia repertoire was there: drugs trade, extortion, fraud,’ head of police criminal investigation Wilbert Paulissen told the paper. ‘But we know how dangerous these people are,’ he said. ‘We want to have better idea of the extent of their operations here. We have talked to one mafia member turned informer and he had some extremely interesting things to tell us,’ the paper quotes him as saying.

http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2 ... out-in-nl/