The allegation that Sicily’s Cosa Nostra helped finance the project was made in a Palermo court by Massimo Ciancimino, the son of a Mafia don who was close to the head of the Sicilian mafia’s “boss of bosses”, Bernardo Provenzano.

He claimed in court his father, Vito Ciancimino, along with two Mafiosi connected to the building industry, invested “dirty money” through front companies into Mr Berlusconi’s sprawling housing estate on the edge of Milan.

There has been intense speculation as to how the young Mr Berlusconi, who came from a modest middle class family, raised the capital to fund the construction of the ambitious apartment complex, known as Milano 2, which included lakes, tennis courts, schools and shops.

Mr Ciancimino told the court: “My father diversified his investments to evade anti-Mafia investigators. He considered the Milan megaproject a bit pharaonic and he was hesitant, but then he decided to participate through various companies.

Mr Berlusconi’s lawyer, Niccolo Ghedini, categorically denied the claim that the Italian prime minister had ever accepted Mafia money and said he would sue Massimo Ciancimino for defamation.

“All the flows of investment into Milano 2 were transparent and they’ve been subject to scrutiny many times,” said Mr Ghedini.

The profit Mr Berlusconi accrued from Milano 2 catapulted set him on course to become one of Italy’s richest men.

Mr Ciancimino was testifying in the trial of a senior Carabinieri police officer who is accused of giving protection to Provenzano and helping him evade capture, amid long-held suspicions that the Italian state struck a “truce” with mobsters which lasted for decades.

Provenzano was finally arrested in April 2006 in a run-down shepherd’s shack outside Corleone, after being on the run for an extraordinary 43 years.

The elder Ciancimino was born in Corleone, the Mafia stronghold in the mountainous interior of Sicily that was made famous by The Godfather films.

Source: The Daily Telegraph

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Read the rest over on this Article over at the  Huffington Post

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Massimo Ciancimino, son of a convicted Mafia associate and former mayor of the Sicilian capital Palermo, told the court that jailed Mafia leader Bernardo Provenzano had “direct links” to Senator Marcello Dell’Utri, a close associate of Berlusconi.

Provenzano was the “Boss of Bosses” of the Sicilian crime syndicate from 1993 until his arrest in 2006 after 43 years on the run.

“Marcello Dell’Utri and Bernardo Provenzano had direct links. My father told me this and he was told by the boss from Corleone,” said Ciancimino, referring to the Sicilian town made infamous by Mario Puzo’s best-seller “The Godfather,” where Provenzano was eventually found and arrested by police in 2006.

Dell’Utri is a long-time business and political associate of the 73-year-old media mogul Berlusconi and is appealing against a nine-year jail sentence for association with the Mafia. The court case late last year threw up allegations by a mob informer of links between Berlusconi, Dell’Utri and the Cosa Nostra.

Berlusconi is not formally linked to the Dell’Utri case and said last year that the mob allegations — which have not so far led to any fresh investigation involving the premier — were unfounded and part of a campaign against him by biased courts.

Berlusconi’s lawyer Niccolo Ghedini Monday rejected Ciancimino’s comments to the court on his first day in the stand, when he said his late father had invested in Berlusconi’s construction of a satellite city near Milan called Milan Two.

Ghedini said checks had “demonstrated the completely legal provenance of all the money used” in the 1970s to build the garden city, where Berlusconi launched his television empire.

Ciancimino was giving evidence in the trial of two senior policemen, Mario Mori and Mauro Obinu, accused of helping Provenzano evade an arrest attempt in 1995.

Provenzano was nicknamed “Bini the Tractor” because of the way he mowed down young rivals as a hitman. Ciancimino said he had enjoyed virtual immunity from arrest, partly for helping police nab his even more violent predecessor, Salvatore “The Beast” Riina, in 1993.

Source: Reuters

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WHY SO MANY RATS TODAY?
By
Sonny Girard

Over the last few days I’ve had a very personal experience with a dear friend rolling over for the Federal Government after having stood up for sixteen straight years in prison. I was shocked and saddened. I don’t know all the circumstances, other than what I’ve heard through the grapevine. I’m sure we’ll all be reading about it soon. All I can think of is that he’s traded the family of another guy or guys who trusted him to replace the suffering of his own…and that I lost another good friend. It is now the dominant event on my mind.

A while ago, when Joe Massino, boss of the Bonnano Crime Family, rolled over and began cooperating with the Feds, someone I know who was close to Joey asked me how he could do something like that. My response was to say that the phrase “wiseguys” wasn’t put together carelessly. I’m sure, I said, that “dumbguys” had never even been considered. That term, “wiseguys,” didn’t mean that people with that moniker were geniuses, but that they were slick, sharper to see opportunities than most people; had a ruthless sense of how to survive best. I told my friend that if he thought back over the last two decades, he’d see that working with the authorities had more upsides than downsides. I asked how many men who had testified against the mob since Joe Valachi had been caught up with and killed? He said, “None.” I seem to recall one, but can’t remember who, and can’t even be sure I’m right. In either case, it’s little or none. Not much of a deterrent.

There have always been rats in the mob. They were harder to identify because they were virtually all “dry snitches,” which means they provided information without ever being exposed or having to take the witness stand and testify. Many times they were the highest ranking members, like Lucky Luciano, who used the authorities to reduce a case or solve a personal problem. Lucky Luciano had his rodent cherry cracked when he was just a young drug peddler in the Five Points area of Little Italy. Arrested without the heroin on him, he led the cops to where he had stashed it; working a deal for a softer charge. He reached back into his rat bag when Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel were at odds with Waxey Gordon, in what was then called “The War of the Jews.” Fearing that the war would break into a hot shooting one, with Siegel leading the charge, Luciano and Lansky sent Meyer’s brother, Jake, to the Feds with enough of Gordon’s financial records to send Waxey away on tax charges. Quiet. No one in the streets knew. War over. Poor Gypsy Rose Lee had to attend all those parties with her fornicating monkeys (yes, she used to have them entertain her guests), but without Waxey by her side. Boo hoo.

Those kind of dry snitch events are hard to document, since no one came forward to leak those crimes. However, from experience, I am absolutely positive there was much more going on than met the eye, and usually at higher mob levels than we would ever have believed. For mob leaders, it was, and remains, “Do as I say, not as I do.” And, as time went on, at least three of my own experiences had higher ups look the other way about proven stoolpigeons who were making money for them. Two of them went to prison when the informants they protected for money testified against them.
That doesn’t mean that there weren’t men who were real men in those days. I would say that the great majority were. They came out of the same ghetto environment that the great prizefighters of the day did. Each was fighting his way out of poverty by putting up his body as collateral. Boxers subconsciously said, “Beat my face and body, but I’m not going back there.” Mobsters said the same thing, but put their lives and freedom on the line. Becoming a rat was unthinkable and truly despised, not just with empty words to make them look good. A prime example is a well known story about the “Lord High Executioner,” Albert Anastasia. Willie Sutton was a bankrobber who was known more for his escapes from prison than his actual robberies. One day, while Sutton was enjoying a hiatus from his latest sentence, a haberdasher named Arnold Schuster spotted him and informed police where to catch him. The clothing salesman got a lot of good citizenship publicity. Unfortunately for him, some of it reached Anastasia. Despite the fact that Albert knew neither Sutton nor Schuster, he exclaimed, “I hate rats!” and ordered the latter eliminated. RIP Arnold.

On a more basic day to day level in the old days, before mass communication and the Witness Protection Program, and with leaders like Anastasia around, if someone testified against a mob figure then ran away, a local boss could pass off a story about how the turncoat was tortured and dismembered then fed to animals at the nearest zoo. Other potential turncoats sitting on the fence shook in their shoes and took a jail term instead. Today, the stoolpigeon gets a book and/or film deal, does interviews with Barbara Walters, and has photos released of him lounging by a pool with palm trees in the background. The fact that a lot of what they say in those interviews is self-serving, gratuitous bullshit means nothing. They’ve “wiseguyed” both the criminal and legal systems.

Henry Hill, for example, never told Nick Pileggi about how he was despised by most mob guys but given some modicum of respect because Paul Vario loved him and cast his wing of protection over him. The expression commonly used about Henry at the time was, “You respect a dog for its master.” Instead of that side of the story, he wove a tale of how well he was respected by all. The “facts” he told Pileggi and other interviewers was what they wanted to hear, about how the mob turned on poor him. They also mean nothing. The truth is that he turned on everyone because he was a junkie and a punk, and decided to trade the suffering of his family for those of his former friends. Paul Vario, for example, got Hill a no-show job for him to get out of prison and into a halfway house. Hill testified to that fact, which sent his former father figure to prison, where he moaned about the betrayal until he died. The fact that he tells interviewers what they want to hear makes him a media darling. In the early 1990’s I appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s show, with Hill brought in via satellite. I challenged his lies. His only defense was to nervously stammer that I was wrong. I ripped Hill a new ass, but was never invited back, while he’s always been Geraldo’s mob expert pet and has appeared numerous times over the years.
The truth is that government tactics and pressure get too much credit for destroying the mob. It has destroyed itself both by natural causes, as the ghetto areas that spawned traditional mobsters are gone. Little Italy is now restaurant row. East Harlem, which produced many mob legends, is reduced to one famous restaurant, Rao’s, and a couple of social clubs for some of its geriatric neighbors. South Brooklyn is trendy Carroll Gardens. All the other ghetto areas have been turned over to those other ethnic groups at the bottom of the social and financial ladder. Young wannabes grow up in suburbs. They can shoot, but they won’t stand up to being shot at. A former partner of mine used to say, “Everybody can be a toughguy if the shoe fits. It’s when the laces get tight that you see who screams.” When these young mob hopefuls grow up, the shoe fits comfortably. They have nice homes, girlfriends, cars, and MTV. There is no one that they “needed” to help them stay alive as they grew up. They have no loyalty experiences in their background. What they need is their MTV. When the prison gates clang behind them, those laces tighten quickly and they scream. Older wiseguys feel like jerks when they realize that their co-defendants are likely to have palm trees instead of jail cells, and they too rush forward. Joe Massino might be the first official boss to roll over, but the recent past is filled with high ranking members who have chosen rolling over to standing up: Jimmy The Weasel, Acting Boss of L.A.; Ralph Natale, Acting Boss, of Philadelphia; Underboss, Sammy the Bull, of New York; Gaspipe Casso, Little Al D’Arco, and on and on and on.

Another problem for the mob is its Americanization; the idea that the only goal is money. Years ago, believe it or not, there was a thread of honor that ran alongside the thread of crime. As time went on, the crime should have been discarded, with the code of honor dictating a tight, secret organization, much like the Masons, which circulated money among its members. The “Me Generation” has taken over. A number of years ago, a partner of mine died. The brass called me in to find out what he had going; what profit was out there to be had. One of the things we had our fingers in was to maintain order in a huge auditorium-type operation. The big guy asked how much was made from it. I answered, “Nothing.” He said that if there was no money coming out of the place, we should step back and let someone from another crew go in. I replied that there was no responsibility for him, since I handled all the beefs, and that we had maintained our position of authority there to guarantee that we had jobs for our guys coming out of jail. His answer: “Fuck the guys in jail.” That sort of thinking explains a lack of loyalty among underlings even further. For years, guys have gone to prison with zipped lips, many times to protect their superiors. Unless they are bosses, it is a rarity that any of their families get a cent; that they get any money themselves for commissary. In fact, more times than not, money is stolen from operations they had going when they went to jail. The Government didn’t do that. Add all the corrosion from the inside-out and you’ll see why there are so many rats and the mob is gasping its last breaths.

Twenty years ago a friend of mine from Jersey said that one day there would be a time when a bunch of mob guys would be standing on a corner when they saw another mobster coming, and one would say, “Shhh, don’t talk, he’s a stand up guy.”

That day is now.

P.S.:
A current example of the case I’ve made is that of Chris Paciello, a Staten Island “toughguy” until he faced prison time. Paciello has had a book written about him, a television movie about him done too, and is now relocated in Los Angeles, where he mingles with entertainment figures like the cast of “Entourage,” who are excited by his past. Some may have been patrons of his hot Miami nightclub. Some will probably wind up in his bed.
This week’s events, with my now former pal rolling over against others brought to mind an article that Richard Johnson had published about Paciello in the New York Post, one that also involves MySpace.com:

MYSPACE MISERY FOR MOBSTER

January 15, 2007 — WHILE Brooklyn mobster Chris Paciello tries to start a new life in Los Angeles, having served six years in prison for a 1993 murder, there are plenty of former friends from Bensonhurst who wouldn’t -mind if he got run over by a truck.
Paciello was a government witness – along with such pals as Fat Sal, Applehead and Skeeve – who helped send a dozen of his old associates behind bars, including Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, the acting boss of the Colombo crime family.

“Paciello is a no-good snitch, a rat, and a selfish [bleep-bleep]er,” says a Brooklynite surprised that Paciello didn’t undergo plastic surgery and enter the witness-protection program.
Always quick with his fists, the handsome Paciello was Miami’s nightclub king 10 years ago and dated the likes of Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Sofia Vergara and models too numerous to mention.
Now, one of his enemies has set up a phony MySpace page bearing Paciello’s likeness and his (made-up) words: “For some reason everyone in Miami and Hollywood thinks I only ratted on four people.” The entry then lists five “Springville Boys” from Staten Island he actually helped put away for sentences ranging from 3 to 10 years.
“I also took the stand against Eddie Boyle [a high-end bank burglar associated with the Gambinos] and Tommy Dono from Brooklyn. I provided information on Tommy Reynolds and Fabritzio “The Hurter” DiFrancesi, now serving 30- and 36-year sentences.

“I also snitched on my best friends from Brooklyn who I grew up with my whole life, Rico Locasio, 5 years, and Dom “Black Dom” Dionisio, 16 years.”
A law-enforcement source says this account is accurate: “Paciello would have testified in a lot of other cases, but the majority of defendants pleaded guilty and there were no trials.”
The MySpace hoaxer points out that even after all his cooperation, Paciello was sentenced to 10 years: “As I cried in the courtroom, the prosecutor said he would appeal the sentence. A few weeks later, I got a 7-year sentence. Basically what I’m saying is I could not do an extra three years . . . I’m a selfish rat [bleep-bleep]er.”
All I can say is, “Kudos to the MySpace mischief maker.
To check out who’s infesting your neighborhood, go to www.whosarat.com
© 2010 R.I.C.O. Entertainment, Inc.

Sonny Girard is a former mobster who has published three novels based on his experiences, and is an internationally recognized expert on organized crime. He has appeared on many TV shows as such, including The O’Reilly Factor, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, WABC Nightline, and RAI-TV in Rome, Italy. Read more about Sonny, his work, and more mob stuff at www.SonnysMobCafe.com

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WEST DEPTFORD — A 61-year-old South Jersey man is in custody after being arrested on charges he delivered a fake horse’s head to the Gloucester County office of Senate President Steve Sweeney.

Robert Godman, of Wenonah, was charged with fourth-degree harassment and is being held on $25,000 bail at the Gloucester County jail, State Police said. He was arrested last Thursday.

Investigators said they don’t know what the motive was, but it was taken seriously when delivered Jan. 15, three days after Sweeney took office and while he served as acting governor.

“We don’t really know what his motivation was here. The intent’s not clear,” Jones said.

State Police needed “to determine if there was any real threat to our state officials,” said State Police spokesman Sgt. Stephen Jones. After the package was delivered, the Camden County bomb squad was called.

Sweeney aide Michelle Coryell said the incident occurred three days after Sweeney became Senate president and while he was filling in as acting governor for Jon Corzine, who was in Europe during his final week in office. Chris Christie became governor on Jan. 19.

“A man came in and gave the package to a male staffer,” Coryell said. “He said ‘I have a package for Sen. Sweeney to give to Gov. Christie.’”

Inside the box was a toy horse’s head in an obvious attempt to conjure images from a famous scene in the 1972 film “The Godfather.”

“He never saw the senator,” Coryell said. “The senator doesn’t know him. There was no note. We didn’t feel it was very funny. It was shocking. It shut down our office.”

Coryell said the man paid another visit to Sweeney’s office last week.

State Police said Godman was arrested at home, where he lives with his parents. Jones said he will undergo a psychiatric evaluation and will be barred from having contact with Sweeney.

Godman was apprehended after State Police investigators traced messages sent by fax to both Sweeney’s office and the Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton, where the attorney general and state Supreme Court are housed. Godman is on probation stemming from a November 2007 conviction for providing false information to authorities and misleading public officers.

Source: NJ.com

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Such shows, he said, were “an ugly trend” that he hoped would end soon.

Yet if anyone can help stop the trend, perhaps it is Mr. Berlusconi himself. His Mediaset company, Italy’s largest private broadcaster, showed “The Sopranos” to great success on one of its pay channels, while its Canale 5, a free channel, has shown “The Boss of Bosses,” a 2007 miniseries about the Sicilian Mafia boss Salvatore (Totò) Riina, and “The Last Godfather,” a 2008 program about the Sicilian boss Bernardo Provenzano.

In baroque Italy, where image and reality are so intertwined that the term hypocrisy seems inadequate, many did not even blink. “Those are the typical things you say when you go in an area with high Mafia density,” said Gianluca Nicoletti, a radio commentator. Besides, he added, “I don’t think he said it with great conviction.”

In his 2006 best seller “Gomorrah,” on the Camorra, or the Neapolitan Mafia, Roberto Saviano recounts how some real members of the Mafia model their style on that of fictional mobsters.

Mr. Berlusconi made his remarks at a news conference in the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria, where his cabinet unveiled an ambitious 10-point plan for fighting organized crime. They chose the site to demonstrate the presence of the state in Calabria after the ’Ndrangheta, or Calabrian mafia, threatened bomb attacks in recent weeks against magistrates and the president of Italy.

Read the rest of this article over at The Dispatch

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Italian crime syndicates raised profits by almost 8 percent in 2009 over the previous year by taking advantage of Italy’s distressed economy, according to a new report from Confesercenti, an organization representing Italy’s small and medium-sized businesses, including shopkeepers who are among those most affected by Mafia extortion and crimes.

Italy’s Mafia has generated record profits amid the recession even in the face of growing public protests, such as this one from last year.

With its ready access to cash, the Mafia has been able to launder its money even more readily by snapping up cheap assets, the report said. And Italy’s newly unemployed are both vulnerable to loan-sharking and more willing to work for the mob.

“In times of crisis the Mafia’s money, even though it is dirty, makes people’s mouths water,” the report said.

Even the stock market may not be immune to Italy’s biggest crime syndicates, which include Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, Naples’ tough Camorra, Calabria’s ‘Ndrangheta, and Puglia’s Sacra Corona Unita. SOS Impresa cited interviews and statistics from police, mob informants and government officials indicating that the Mafia may increase its targeting of the stock market to launder its ill-gotten gains.

“There is a risk the Mafia could take advantage of the difficulties of some large business groups who are undergoing a liquidity crisis to attempt to get into the stock market behind the scenes in a big way,” the report said.

“The Mafia is more powerful than ever,” a spokeswoman for Lino Busa, head of SOS Impresa, said Wednesday. “They are doing well in these bad times.”

The report also indicated that the mob has diversified as its profits have continued to soar. While drugs remain the single largest source of revenue, other old-style Mafia interests such as construction and public contracting are waning as the syndicates turn to more sophisticated targets such as stocks and bonds and marked-down companies.

The report pegged the Mafia’s joint overall turnover last year at an eye-popping $169 billion, almost two-thirds of which was profit. An estimated $27 billion was laundered.

SOS Impresa said there was a risk that with the prices of property, stocks and bonds, and companies themselves brought down by the crisis, mobsters could use profits from recession-proof activities like drugs to “go on a financial shopping spree.”

Source: AolNews

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