Mafia clans use mobile texts to Italian TV show to contact jailed mobsters

Popular football programme unwittingly scrolled texts across screen among innocent messages of support for teams
Mafia clans have used a popular football show on Italian television to send secret messages to jailed godfathers held in isolation, a magistrate has revealed.
Imprisoned crime bosses were kept up to date on mob business through mobile phone texts sent to [...]

Anti-Mafia, immigration successes

ROME – ITALIAN police have arrested almost 6,500 Mafia members, including 20 of the most dangerous, since Prime Minister Berlusconi took office in May 2008, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said on Sunday.
‘Between May, 2008 and July 31, 2010, 6,483 Mafiosi were arrested, including 26 of the most dangerous fugitives. That’s an average of eight Mafiosi [...]

Low note for ‘Tony Soprano’

THE Tony Soprano of Australia last week pleaded guilty to cocaine importation. Arrested in 2007, Alen Moradian gained the moniker from an email sent to him by his disgruntled wife Natasha, which was previously tendered as evidence during the trial.
“Why do you just sit there and show off, ‘I am the man, I am the [...]

Meet the most powerful Mafiosi in Italy

The leading members of the ’Ndrangheta crime gang who were arrested this week look more like a group of grandfathers on an outing to the local bowling club than capos in Italy’s most powerful crime syndicate
TO LOOK AT THEM as they file through the iron-gated entrance to the sanctuary you could mistake them for the [...]

Member of Montreal Mafia family gunned down

One of the longest-serving Sicilian Mafiosi in Canada, 66-year old Agostino Cuntrera, has been gunned down in Montreal.
Mr. Cuntrera was shot and killed outside a wholesale food business he owned in the city’s St. Leonard borough at about 4 p.m. yesterday. His driver, who police said was in his forties, was also shot outside Distribution [...]

As Italian firms fall victim to the recession, Mafia fills the void

Italy’s feared mobs are taking advantage of the recession by moving from their traditional southern strongholds to buy up legitimate businesses in the country’s rich north to launder their vast earnings from cocaine and extortion rackets, anti-mafia judges have told The Independent.
One magistrate said yesterday that mobsters from ‘Ndrangheta, Italy’s biggest crime syndicate, were investing [...]

Victim of S. Phila. slaying was grandson of notorious mobster

The grandson of notorious Philadelphia mobster Harry “The Hunchback” Riccobene was gunned down outside his South Philadelphia home early Thursday.
Rocco Maniscalco, 38, had just watched Wednesday night’s Flyers game at the Wolf Street Cafe when he walked the short block home to his rowhouse on Wolf near Colorado.
Outside his home, an armed man leaped from [...]

Ndrangheta brokering Mexican drug trade

Calabrian syndicate has re-focused efforts on shipping drugs from Latin America to West Africa, grossing $60 billion a year.
NEW YORK — This Friday, mafia boss and notorious narco-trafficker Vincenzo Roccisano is scheduled to appear before a Nassau County judge after his February arrest, at a Long Island restaurant, for illegally re-entering the United States. Four [...]

US crackdown on mafia sees 14 mobsters charged.. including boss who ordered execution of own nephew

A MAFIA Don ordered the murder of his own nephew for ratting on the notorious Gambino family.
Daniel Marino, a top member of the Gambino ruling council, condemned Frank Hydell to death over claims that he was a “grass”.
Mob hitmen then lured Hydell, 31, to a New York nightclub, where they shot him three times in [...]

Facebook chatter betrays alleged Mafia hitman

Italy’s godfathers might well be holding emergency meetings this weekend, after one of their remarkably obedient godsons was snared due to an especially pernicious habit. Yes, chatting on Facebook.
Pasquale Manfredi is reputed not to be the most affable of our human brethren. < According to CNN, he is wanted for, among other acts of charmlessness, [...]

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