All Blog Posts Tagged 'Italy' (153)

By David Amoruso

At 6’4” Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran literally was a towering figure. But to those who knew him in the American underworld, he was even taller. A fearsome force who had honed his deadly skills as a combat-hardened rifleman during the Second World War fighting the Nazis. Back home, he became a Mafia hitman,…

By David Amoruso

A secret pact between the Sicilian Mafia and the Italian State has resulted in the conviction of eight men, including Mafia bosses and police and government officials, among them a close political associate of Silvio Berlusconi. The pact was made in the 1990s to bring a halt to Cosa Nostra’s bloody war…

By David Amoruso

“I’m not crazy. Some of my relatives have been in a lunatic asylum, but I haven’t.” – Camorra boss Michele Zaza

Gangsters like Michele Zaza don’t come around often. Nicknamed “‘O Pazzo” or “The Madman,” he was known as much for talking candidly with the media as for his cunning and…

By David Amoruso

Every underworld has its first major crime boss. That man – or woman – who ascends to the top of the heap and controls organized crime in the city. For Hamilton, Ontario, that man was Rocco Perri. During the years of Prohibition, he became known as the “King of the Bootleggers.”

Born in…

By Gangsters Inc. Editors

A joint cooperation by the DEA and Europol has dismantled a drug pipeline between Colombia and Europe. Nine suspected drug traffickers were arrested today and charged with their role in transporting multi-kilogram quantities of cocaine from Colombia, Ecuador and Panama to Europe.

A…

By David Amoruso

He was the boss of bosses of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia. As leader of the infamous Corleonesi, Salvatore "Toto" Riina ordered the death of hundreds, including the high-profile assassinations of anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Now he is dead himself, at age 87, of natural causes.

Riina had turned 87 on…

By Thom L. Jones

In the only borough of New York to begin with the indefinite article, it was not unusual at end of day to watch “fathers trundling home with a monumental sadness on their shoulders”. * It was a hard place to live for the working man and his family. A good place for organized crime.

Frank Scalice lived at 211…

By Thom L. Jones

The media called them raggazzi di una stagione ‘straordinaria: “The boys of an extraordinary season.”

Beppe Montana and Calogero Zucchetto and Pippo Giordano and Roberto Antiochia and Natale Mondo and Ninni Cassarà and the rest of the Squadra Mobile, the Flying Squad. They knew what they had to do and lived their lives doing…

By Thom L. Jones

Sometimes, history makes us remember and then, at times, helps us to forget.

It’s easy to recall the first iPhone that was launched in 2007 and would come to change everything we have ever known about personal communication. Mention a judge who was blown up by the Mafia in 1983, and eyes glaze and heads shake and no one…

By Gangsters Inc. Editors

The Italian Senate approved an extension of the country’s Antimafia bill on Thursday, news agency ANSA reports. The bill is used to confiscate the assets of convicted Mafiosi, people convicted of bribery and corruption, and also of stalking and…

By Gangsters Inc. Editors

Angelo Gigliotti (photo above) was sentenced to 20 years in prison today for his role in a Calabrian Mafia-connected cocaine trafficking ring. The 36-year-old had been found guilty following a …

By Gangsters Inc. Editors

Gregorio Gigliotti was sentenced to 18 years behind bars on Tuesday for narcotics trafficking and firearm offenses. The 61-year-old man used his family’s Queens-based Italian restaurant as a front for importing 55 kilos of cocaine from Costa Rica hidden among produce. Gigliotti’s operation was allegedly linked…

By Thom L. Jones

If you Google ‘Mafia’ you will get 163,000,000 hits.

If you Google ‘Cosa Nostra’ you will get 5,280,000 hits.

In 1950 the Mafia did not exist, publicly that is. Sicily knew about it, but even then, to the…

By David Amoruso

Police in Italy scored a nice bonus this week when they busted a Neapolitan Camorra clan and recovered two stolen paintings from Vincent van Gogh worth $100 million in the process. The paintings of the Dutch master had been stolen in Amsterdam in 2002 and were missing ever since. Beside the painting, authorities seized…

By David Amoruso

Mike Pizzi is a prime example of what you can achieve with hard work and dedication. Starting out on the streets of New York, lacking a formal education, Pizzi went on to join the Marines as a teenager followed by a long and distinguished career as a U.S. Marshal. Now, he sits down with Gangsters Inc. to discuss his days…

By Thom L. Jones

"The only mystery in life is why kamikaze pilots wore helmets."

- Al McGuire

Then again, as Shakespeare’s Horatio said to Hamlet, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

Unless it was something as strange and…

By Gangsters Inc. Editors

Spanish National Police arrested 61 members of a sophisticated Georgian organized crime group specialized in burglaries. Overall, agents conducted 26 searches, seizing €33,000 euro, 8 vehicles, 7,100 tobacco packets, and many stolen pieces of…

By David Amoruso

A mass in memory of murdered Montreal Mafia boss Rocco Sollecito has been canceled, Italian news agencies report. The priest at the church in Grumo Appula, a town near the city of Bari in…

By David Amoruso

Matteo Messina Denaro, Sicilian Cosa Nostra’s boss of bosses, has been on the run for 23 years, but despite recent arrests of those closest to him authorities are far removed from catching the fugitive crime lord.

When police in Castelvetrano,…

By David Amoruso

Italian police arrested 22 individuals today in connection to their involvement in buying votes in the 2015 regional elections in Italy’s Puglia region. At the center of the scheme, prosecutors say, is the city of Bari’s Di Cosola clan, a crime group that is part of the…