The courts imposed 26 life terms on Riina for directing the killings of Falcone and Borsellino and his guilt in more than murders as a Mafia boss. He lived a long life. The Sicilian-born Riina died in an Italian prison in November , a day after his 87th birthday. Some Mafiosi in Palermo have lately joined with a Nigerian migrant gang, the Vikings.
The gang forces female Nigerian migrants into prostitution to pay off large debts they incur to emigrate. The boss quietly concealed himself for several hours behind his fireplace until officers heard him move. It was a long time coming. Police had searched for the year-old Giorgi for 23 years, since a judge sentenced him to 28 years in prison for drug trafficking in Police also believe he dealt in firearms and unlawfully disposed of hazardous waste by sinking a loaded ship off the coast of Italy.
Denaro, who cleverly evades justice in various hideouts, is a suspect in dozens of murders. Still, police may be getting closer to him. With the death of Riina, speculation about his successor has turned to Denaro, whose Trapani crew continues to make a good living in Sicily via extortion, fraud and skimming off public works contracts.
For more than a dozen years, warring drug cartels fighting over control of multibillion-dollar rackets, from drug and human trafficking to extortion, kidnapping, oil theft and illegal mining, have thrown Mexico into chaos. Since , more than , people have been murdered or declared missing, even with government-ordered crackdowns by the Mexican military.
Efforts to limit the power of the cartels frequently fail as criminal gangs simply make adjustments. Bribery and corruption by organized crime is widespread in Mexico, extending from small-town police and politicians to officials in the federal government. Jalisco New Generation started in when members quit serving as the armed unit of the Sinaloa cartel to create their own drug trafficking band.
Kingpin Act, passed by Congress in to lodge harsh criminal and civil fines against high-level drug traffickers. El Chapo is on trial in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, for a daunting list of murder, racketeering and other felony charges, and is almost sure to end up serving a life sentence.
As it goes, Caro-Quintero might be a contender with Oseguara-Cervantes for top boss of Mexican organized crime. American authorities believe Caro-Quintero directs activities of the Sinaloa drug syndicate and his Caro-Quintero trafficking organization in the Badiraguato region of the Sinaloa state. Furthermore, the U. He is known to use airplanes, trucks and cars to transport tons of cocaine from Colombia into Mexico, plus tons of marijuana and kilos of heroin, for trafficking into the United States.
When FBI agents arrested 19 alleged leaders and members of the Lucchese crime family in New York and New Jersey in May , the news media played up its association with a pop culture narrative of America organized crime. Both Lifshitz and Mace looked incredulous. Nobody in the mafia would talk to me, they insisted.
We meet at the Club A Steakhouse, a former mob haunt in Manhattan. We sit in a booth upstairs so we can chat in private. He grew up in poverty in Queens and his baptism into the world of organised crime came when, as a child working at a local delicatessen, he was asked to run errands for some made members of the Lucchese family who ran a bookmaking business from the back of a nearby store. Eventually, Alite met Gotti Sr. At first he looked up to him, wanted to be like him.
He found it easy to make good money on the street and as his status rose in the family he also became known for the levels of violence he was willing to inflict on anyone that crossed him or his family. In , he went on the run after getting word that he was about to be indicted. When he was in Brazil, Alite says he heard rumours that Gotti Jr was an informant and that several of his old cohort had flipped.
In return, he hoped for a lenient sentence. For his crimes, Alite got a ten-year sentence. Alite says the mob is being restructured. All those rules were put in place for a reason: to keep the structure and keep the fear. The concrete crumbles and it falls. Are they trying to build it from the bottom up again? John Alite introduces me to Stevie Newell — someone who could give me an example, he says, of just how active the mob still is.
When we meet, Newell is a few weeks away from going to prison for illegally possessing weapons because he thought someone connected with the mafia was going to kill him.
I order the soup. Newell opts for a cheeseburger. Newell looks tough, like an enforcer. He also has a glint in his eye. Newell was born a few miles west of here in Bushwick and grew up on the streets of Queens. His father played bocce ball with members of the Bonanno family. In his teens, he started knocking around with a made man in the Genovese family who he met through his girlfriend.
Although he could never get made — Newell has Irish blood — he tells me not to believe the hype. The saying goes: we do the work; they take the credit. Newell was charged with the murder of Bruce Gotterup, a mobster accused of falling behind on payments to sell drugs in Queens.
Gotterup was shot five times in the back of the head. The feds offered Newell a deal, but he denied the crime and refused to wear a wire. Instead, he spent two years in jail awaiting trial, at which he was eventually found not guilty.
Gotti declined to talk to me for this story. But Newell is a felon and therefore forbidden from possessing guns. One night in March , he got a knock at the door. Someone had apparently made a complaint that Newell had firearms.
He knows the mafia code of retribution is alive and well. Also, he knows what happened to Whitey Bulger. It was 8. At his trial in , a jury convicted him of extortion and racketeering and found him culpable in eleven murders between and But Bulger was also a rat, an informer who turned in rivals in return for protection from corrupt law enforcement agents, inexcusable in the mafia world.
What nobody could understand was why authorities had decided to transfer Bulger from a Florida prison to one in West Virginia and put him with other inmates in general population. What was really telling, though, was who had killed Bulger. Geas, who according to reports had a fearsome reputation as a ruthless killer and enforcer, was serving multiple life sentences for murder.
Anthony Arillotta knew as soon as Bulger was sent to the same prison as his old friend Freddy Geas that Geas was probably responsible. Geas and his brother Ty used to work as enforcers for Arillotta when he was a capo in the Genovese family.
The journey by car to Springfield from Queens takes a little more than two hours. You take the coast road up through Connecticut before joining I, which shoots north through Hartford up into Massachusetts.
Traditionally, in order to become a made member of the mob, you had to have killed someone. At the time, Artie Nigro was the acting boss of the Genovese family and he asked Arillotta to shoot someone in New York. After the year-old Dadabo climbed into his car, Arillotta and Ty Geas ran to the vehicle and emptied nine bullets through the window.
The government thought the Albanians did it. They never had a clue it was us. But Dadabo did not die — and he did not report the shooting to police either.
Soon after, Arillotta was inducted into the Genovese family. I would die for them. Bruno was 57 when he was shot in the chin, neck, elbow, cheek and groin one Sunday night in November , as he walked into the parking lot of Our Lady Of Mount Carmel Society, a social club in Springfield. He was still clutching his cigar when he died.
At his trial, Arillotta pleaded guilty to the murder, the attempted murder of Dadabo and to various other offences, including drug dealing and extortion.
Arillotta would serve just eight years. When he got out, Arillotta opted out of witness protection and moved back to Springfield. Some thought the move brazen; the FBI reckons he still has a target on his head today. There is no head of the Mafia. Instead, the word Mafia is an umbrella term that refers to any of several groups of gangsters who can trace their roots to Italy or Sicily.
In broad terms, there are five original Mafia groups, defined mainly by the regions they operate in or the regions they originated in. All five groups have their hands in criminal operations that span the globe and have set up operatives in many different countries. The Sicilian Mafia originated on the island of Sicily.
Finally, La Cosa Nostra is a name most often connected to the American Mafia, although this group can trace its history back to Sicilian families as well as some other Italian groups. No clear naming convention exists when it comes to Mafia families.
Early families were named after the region or town in Italy where they originated. Sometimes, the name of the family would change to the name of the boss, especially if he was a powerful or long-standing boss.
The five main New York City families had their names set semi-permanently by the testimony of informer Joe Valachi before a Senate subcommittee in The families were named for the current bosses, although in one case, it was an earlier, more powerful boss whose name was used.
The Profaci family was taken over by Joseph Colombo a few years later, and he became so famous that the family is now known as the Colombo family. The same thing nearly happened to the Gambino family when it was taken over by John Gotti.
Before it became the Gotti family, though, Gotti was arrested and convicted of racketeering and murder, based largely on the testimony of Mafia traitor Sammy "The Bull" Gravano. That family continues to be known by law enforcement officials as the Gambino crime family. Most of the other U. Thus, you have the Philadelphia family, the Buffalo family, the Cleveland family and so on. The details of a Mafia induction ceremony were a carefully kept secret for decades.
But in the early s, Joe Valachi's testimony before a Senate subcommittee shined a spotlight on the mob. The Mafia induction described here is the ceremony conducted by the Sicilian Mafia as well as most American Mafia families. Circumstances can alter some details of the ceremony, such as an induction in prison or a quick induction during a gang war. First, the potential gangster is told simply to "dress up" or "get dressed. Other Mafioso who are present will join hands and recite oaths and promises of loyalty.
The inductee may then hold a burning piece of paper. In some families, the new soldier is paired with a more experienced mobster who will act as his " godfather ," guiding him into Mafia life. The inductee must promise that he will be a member of the family for life, and then a drop of blood is drawn from his trigger finger.
It takes more than just an oath and a drop of blood to get into the Mafia, however. Only men of Italian heritage are allowed in. In some families, both parents must be Italian, while some require only an Italian father. The prospective mobster must also show a penchant for making money or at the least a willingness to commit acts of violence when ordered to do so.
Usually, the criminal must pass a test before he will be considered for induction, and this test is commonly rumored to be participation in an act of murder. One last obstacle that some mobsters face when they try to become made men: the Commission. In the s and '30s, the Mafia families in the United States were almost constantly at war with one another.
They would often recruit new soldiers by the dozens so rival families wouldn't recognize them as enemies. These new recruits could easily approach members of other families and assassinate them. To put a stop to this, the Commission began requiring all the families to make a list of their prospective members and circulate the list among the other families. In addition to helping to ID family members, these lists also allowed the bosses to weed out prospects that other families had problems with.
If the prospects became made men, individual disagreements could grow into violent wars between families. Families use a variety of activities to accomplish the Mafia's main goal of making money. One of the most common is one of the simplest: extortion. Extortion is forcing people to pay money by threatening them in some way. Mafia "protection rackets" are extortion schemes. The twist is that the Mafia members themselves are the criminals who threaten the business. The Mafia has made money through a wide variety of illegal activities over the years.
Mobsters have dealt in alcohol during Prohibition, illegal drugs, prostitution and illegal gambling, to name a few. Sometimes, burglaries and muggings generate income, but the capos know that their activities need a grander scale to ensure maximum profit.
That's why they hijack trucks and unload entire shipments of stolen goods. Another method used by Mafioso is to pay off truck drivers or dock workers to "misplace" crates and shipments that later end up in Mafia hands. The stolen goods could be anything from stereo equipment to clothing a favorite of John Gotti early in his career.
One of the most notorious Mafia schemes was the infiltration of labor unions. For several decades, it is believed that every major construction project in New York City was controlled by the Mafia. Mobsters paid off or threatened union leaders to get a piece of the action whenever a union group got a construction job, and they sometimes made their way into the ranks of union leadership. Once the Mafia had its grip on a union, it could control an entire industry.
Mafioso could get workers to slow or halt construction if contractors or developers didn't make the right payoffs, and they had access to huge union pension funds. At one point, the Mafia could have brought nearly all construction and shipping in the United States to a halt. In the last few decades, the federal government has cracked down on Mafia-union connections to a great extent. The current structure of the Mafia took centuries to develop.
To learn about the history of the Mafia and to see how law enforcement has dealt with organized crime over the years, read on. It began on the island of Sicily. Although there are major organized crime groups from other parts of Italy, the Sicilian Mafia is generally considered to be the godfather of all other Mafia organizations.
Several unique factors contributed to the development of organized crime in Sicily. The island is located at an easily accessible and strategically important place in the Mediterranean Sea. As a result, Sicily was invaded, conquered and occupied by hostile forces many times.
This led to an overall distrust of central authority. The family, rather than the state , became the focus of Sicilian life, and disputes were settled through a system in which punishment often went beyond the limits of the law.
In the 19th century, the European feudal system finally collapsed in Sicily. With no real government or functioning authority of any kind, the island quickly descended into lawlessness. Certain landowners and other powerful men began to build reputations and eventually came to be seen as local leaders. They were known as capos. The capos used their power to extract tributes from farmers under their authority much like the feudal lords before them. Their authority was enforced through the threat of violence.
Their criminal activities were never reported, even by the victims, because of the fear of reprisal. This was the beginning of the Sicilian Mafia. Several elements of Mafia life that have lasted for centuries first developed during the transition from a feudal to a modern form of government in Sicily. The phrase cosa nostra — "our way," or " this thing of ours " — was used to describe the lifestyle of a Mafioso in Sicily.
The shroud of secrecy that surrounded Mafia activities in Sicily became known as omerta , the code of silence. Mafia bosses relied on this code — in which no one spoke about Mafia activities to anyone outside the family — to protect themselves and the family from the law. The practice of recruiting young boys into the Mafia, culminating with a final test, also stems from Sicily.
In the early s, organized crime had so thoroughly infiltrated Sicilian life that it was virtually impossible to avoid contact with the Mafia.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini cracked down on the Mafia using harsh, often brutal methods. But when U. Before long, the Mafia had a firm grasp on Italy's Christian Democrat party. In the postwar years, the various competing Sicilian families realized that their constant fighting was costing them money.
They called a ceasefire and formed a group called the cupola that would oversee the operations of all the families and approve all major enterprises and assassinations. A similar system would be put in place by the American families in the s.
While these committees succeeded in stifling gang wars for a time, they also left the bosses vulnerable to prosecution because with the cupola in place, bosses personally approved murders. The fight against the Sicilian Mafia in Italy came to a head in the s. Two very prominent government prosecutors who had done a lot of damage to the Mafia were assassinated in bombings. The Italian public was outraged, and the government eventually responded with the so-called Maxi trial.
More than Mafioso were tried in a specially built bunker. Large cells in the back of the courtroom held the defendants, who would often scream and threaten witnesses as the trial went on. Ultimately, were found guilty, and 19 sentenced to life in prison. This wasn't enough to stamp out Sicily's Mafia, however. In , the Italian government sent 7, military troops to Sicily. They occupied the island until The Sicilian Mafia still exists today and is still active, but it is quieter and less violent.
Nevertheless, the article mentioned that many Sicilians still turn to the Mafia to "recover stolen goods, claim unpaid debts and manage economic competition.
In its place, another mob, the 'Ndrangheta syndicate , has emerged.
0コメント