Old Mafia lairs now peaceful Sicily B&Bs

The confiscated homes of Mafia bosses in Sicily have been turned into bed-and-breakfasts.
It could have been the rural retreat of a hedge-fund magnate or an Italian prince: a two-story villa of beige stucco and stone, perched in isolation on a rise overlooking the Jato Valley in northern Sicily. The front doors opened onto a refurbished [...]

Krejcir scoffs at ‘Mafia boss’ claims

Johannesburg – Fugitive Czech billionaire Radovan Krejcir scoffs at suggestions that he is “some big Mafia boss from the Eastern Bloc” and says he has “absolutely nothing to hide”.
Breaking his silence ahead of a renewed bid by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to have him extradited to the Czech Republic, Krejcir told Rapport he was [...]

Reputed Montreal mob boss Vito Rizzuto loses U.S. appeal

MONTREAL – Reputed Montreal mob boss Vito Rizzuto has lost an appeal in a U.S. court where he was seeking a chance at an earlier release from prison. He is serving a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty in a racketeering case involving the 1981 murders of three Mafia captains in Brooklyn, New York. Earlier this [...]

The Costa Nostra

HE had been on his annual summer holiday with his girlfriend and two small children, Jake, aged three, and Jasmine, nine months. Over to attend a friend’s wedding the following weekend, John O’Neill, 41, had been having a quiet drink with his girlfriend Maxine and friends in Coco’s Bar, in Benalmadena, when all hell broke [...]

France extradites suspected mafia boss to Italy

MARSEILLE, France — French prosecutors say a suspected mafia boss who had been among Italy’s top 30 fugitives was handed over to Italian authorities after he failed in his appeal to stay in France.
The prosecutor’s office at the Aix-en-Provence appeals court says 40-year-old Guiseppe Falsone was handed over Wednesday under high security.
Falsone was arrested in [...]

Italy: Mafia thanks God for new boss

A crime family’s use of a sacred shrine to sanctify its new don provokes outcry.
ROME, Italy — A group of men stand in circle outside a church in a secluded patch of Italy, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the background. In the middle, an 80-year-old mafia boss speaks in heavily accented Italian, having [...]

Mafia boss on run for seven years nabbed in Brussels

Police finally caught up with a Camorra mafia boss after seven years on the run including two in Brussels, where prosecutors said on Thursday he had been arrested the previous evening.
Vittorio Pirozzi, aged 58 and considered a top figure in the Naples underground organisation, had figured on Italy’s 100 most wanted list since 2003 after [...]

Italy’s white-collar mafia

How the Italian mafia turned from massacres to stealth operations and political infiltrations.
ROME, Italy — This week, Italy commemorates the cold-blooded murders of two anti-Mafia heroes. Eighteen years ago, Judge Paolo Borsellino was blown to pieces in full daylight when a small Fiat car, loaded with TNT, detonated in front of his mother’s house in [...]

Reputed Georgian Mafia Boss Jailed for 10 Years

A reputed Georgian mafia boss linked to last year’s slaying of Russian mafia boss Vyacheslav Ivankov was sentenced Monday to 10 years in a maximum-security prison on charges of kidnapping and extortion.
Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court ruled that Tariel Oniani, 51, also known as Tariel Mulukhov, kidnapped Georgian-born businessman Johnny Manadze in Moscow in March 2009 [...]

On the run in Calabria

As police fan out across Italy in a bid to shut down the notorious ‘Ndrangheta, Adrian Humphreys looks at the Mafia investigation’s Canadian connections.
For the past five years, Antonio Coluccio ushered guests through tall glass doors into his office on the ground floor of his million-dollar home north of Toronto, where a five-foot-tall oil painting [...]

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