Mafia ‘Q’ arrested

A mafia gun maker who was inspired by the ingenious pen guns created by the character Q in the Bond films has been arrested by Italian police.
Guglielmo Ponari, 63, started manufacturing hand-made pistols and machine guns for the Sicilian mafia in the early 1960s and reportedly watched the film ‘From Russia With Love’ seven times.
The [...]

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 Sends Bullet to 5-Year-Old Boy, Seeks to Silence Father

Aug. 9 (Bloomberg) — The Sicilian Mafia sent a threatening letter with a bullet to the five-year-old son of a witness to alleged state complicity with organized crime in the early 1990s, according to the boy’s father.
“The sons of shameful traitors must pay for their father’s guilt,” the letter read, according to Massimo Ciancimino, who [...]

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 [...]

Italy police arrest dozens in anti-Mafia raids

ROME (Reuters) – Italian police arrested dozens of people accused of links to a clan of the powerful Calabrian mafia and seized assets worth up to 250 million euros (209 million pounds), Italian police said Wednesday.
The crackdown is the second significant wave of arrests in a week aimed at dismantling the ‘Ndrangheta, which has overtaken [...]

Sculptures of two investigators murdered by Mafia vandalised

EIGHTEEN YEARS after they were both killed by Cosa Nostra, Sicilian anti-Mafia investigators Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino still upset some people in Palermo. Or so it would seem, given that last Saturday sculptures of the investigators, placed in central Viale Della Liberta, were vandalised.
Today marks the 18th anniversary of the Via D’Amelio bomb explosion [...]

Another mafia bust in Italy

Italian police busted a Sicilian Mafia drug ring operating in Peru and Colombia, making 13 arrests and seizing 20 kilogrammes (44 pounds) of high-quality cocaine overnight, a statement said Monday.
Among those arrested was the suspected kingpin, Paolo Messina, accused of operating in rare collaboration with the Naples-area crime syndicate the Camorra, the statement said.
Camorra clan [...]

Meet Ilda Boccassini, the lady who scares the Italian Mob

A fearless anti-Mafia judge has launched a new onslaught against the country’s most dangerous gangsters
Ilda Boccassini has had some spectacular moments in her 30-year career as a prosecutor, taking on the Sicilian Mafia, corrupt fellow magistrates and the terrorists of the Red Brigades.
But none have been quite so dramatic as the morning last week when [...]

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 [...]

Italian Mafia probe shines light on GTA mob

A top Mafia boss flew to Toronto in an underworld detente mission aimed at quelling tensions between GTA mobsters and rebellious underlings in Thunder Bay, Italian court documents show.
The underworld peace mission last year came to light in what’s considered the biggest Italian police offensive in more than a decade against the ’Ndrangheta, a strain [...]

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