The Russian mafia is becoming “increasingly active” in Germany, with networks recruiting in German prisons and groups bringing in billions of euros each year, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has warned.
“The Russian-Eurasian organized criminality is very dynamic” BKA President Holger Münch told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. “They are already expanding in the west.”
One of the most dangerous groups, according to Münch, is the so-called ‘Thieves in law’ (Diebe im Gesetz) gang, founded in Stalin’s labour camps. The group from the former Soviet Union have their own ‘laws’ and a secret language, and is thought to be recruiting from within Germany’s prisons.
The BKA has previously linked 20,000 and 40,000 people in Germany to the group, and authorities believe that its members in Germany today represent “a five-figure number” – only rough estimates are possible due to the clandestine nature of the groups.
“Eight to ten percent of inmates in German penal facilities are Russian-speaking or of Russian origin; about 5,000 people,” explained Münch. “Not all of them are part of ‘Thieves in law’ but this figure shows the large potential for recruitment for these groups in Germany.”
The BKA President emphasized that organized crime may be operating in areas not traditionally associated with the mafia, for example apartment break-ins and shoplifting; Münch mentioned one Georgian shoplifter who had been able to earn €500 per day, and said it could be assumed “with certainty” that in 2015 criminality by these gangs had led to billions of euros worth of damages.
The mafia groups are also thought to operate in drug trafficking, tax fraud, economic offences, protection money and prostitution.
The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) is working closely with the BKA. Münch said: “When people use the asylum process to commit crimes, care must be taken to ensure that their stay is as short as possible and that they are quickly expelled.”
Full article – http://www.thelocal.de/20160711/russian-mafia-increasingly-active-in-germany
Italian Guardia di Finanza police inspect a cocaine refining laboratory, which was raided on Wednesday, in a town on the slopes of the Vesuvius volcano south of Naples, in this still image taken from a Guardia di Finanza video, February 17, 2016.
REUTERS/GUARDIA DI FINANZA/ HANDOUT VIA REUTERS
Italian mobsters make as much money trafficking narcotics in Italy as Fiat does selling cars, but without having to pay taxes, the anti-mafia prosecutors office said on Wednesday.
Citing estimates by the United Nations Office on Narcotics and Crime, anti-mafia prosecutors said that the narcotics trade earns more than 32 billion euros ($34.70 billion) annually for organized crime, which controls Italy’s drug trade.
“It’s as if the main national carmaker together with its suppliers, service providers and dealerships paid all their salaries and suppliers, and produced everything completely off the books and without any regulation, and then sold and reinvested everything without paying any taxes,” the annual report by the anti-mafia prosecutor’s office said.
“The small difference is that the profit margin for the drug traffickers is at least 10 times higher than any industrial manufacturer.”
It said the Calabrian mafia, known as the ‘Ndrangheta, had become Europe’s top supplier of South American cocaine.
Thanks to “privileged” ties with South American criminal groups that “recognize the full trustworthiness of the Calabrian clans”, the ‘Ndrangheta has also set itself up as the main supplier of cocaine to other mafia groups in Italy, it said.
From July 2014 to June 2015, Italy seized almost 4 tonnes of cocaine, a decrease of more than 8 percent from the previous period. In the port of Gioia Tauro in Calabria, 3 tonnes of cocaine have been seized by police in the past three years.
The report was comparing earnings to Fiat in Italy, not the work of the wider Fiat Chrysler group worldwide.
($1 = 0.9221 euros)
(Reporting by Steve Scherer; Editing by Alison Williams)
Sourced From – http://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-mafia-drugs-idUSKCN0W42H3
Hitman says mob planned ambush with men who had rifles and explosives
Cosa Nostra called off attack when scale of his security detail became apparent
Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, was targeted for assassination by the Sicilian mafia during a trip to Italy in 1992, according to an imprisoned Cosa Nostra hitman.
The attack was only called off when the scale of Cuomo’s security detail became apparent, he said.
Avola said that after the assassinations of prominent anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, Cosa Nostra bosses decided to escalate their war against the Italian state and its allies.
“The aim was to target politicians or members of institutions in order to send out a clear message,” he said, in an interview via messages carried by his lawyer.
When Cuomo’s visit to Italy was announced, Avola’s godfather, Aldo Ercolano, told him that the New York governor would be an “excellent target”.
Targeting a prominent American would also send a warning to the law enforcement agencies who had allowed several prominent mafia turncoats to start new lives in the US under assumed identities, Avola said.
“Cuomo was a symbol of America which during those years hosted collaborators who wanted out of Cosa Nostra and then got their bosses arrested. His death would have sent a strong signal to New York. It would have made them understand what happens to those who stand in the Mafia’s way,” he said.
Cuomo arrived in Rome on 19 November 1992 for a week of meetings. Soon after his arrival, a journalist from Corriere della Sera asked whether having an Italian surname was damaging for an American politician.
Cuomo replied: “Of course, any Italian American politician risks being associated with the mafia, not least because the media continuously plays on this image.”
Meanwhile, according to Avola a much more immediate risk was taking shape in the city of Messina, where a mafia hit squad was planning a daylight attack on Cuomo in the main square.
Around a dozen gunmen armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives were to carry out the ambush, while accomplices were ready to block potential escape routes, said Avola.
But just a few days before Cuomo was due in Messina, Ercolano called off the attack.
“The American politician arrived with extremely tight surveillance, lots of bodyguards and a bulletproof car. It made the execution impossible,” Avola said. “Reluctantly, Aldo Ercolano ordered the ‘men of honour’ to withdraw.’’
Born in Catania in 1962, Avola is believed to have killed about 80 people, including journalists, lawyers, politicians and mobsters, before becoming apentito, or informer.
Known as “Occhi di Ghiaccio” or Ice Eyes because of his cold-blooded blue gaze, he was recruited as a hitman by the Santapaola family, one of the most feared and powerful in the Sicilian criminal underworld.
He was arrested on a tip-off in 1993, the day after killing a former friend and fellow mafioso. Avola concluded that he had been betrayed by his boss, and a year later, he decided to cooperate with police, revealing details that led to the opening of new investigations and the arrest of more than 100 ‘men of honour’.
He is currently serving a life sentence for his murders and 40 armed robberies in a special prison for mafia informers in northern Italy – but will be freed in 2019 because of his cooperation with authorities. For security reasons, the Guardian is not naming the prison where he is being held.
A senior source at Palermo magistrate’s court confirmed that an investigation into Avola’s allegations of a plot to kill Cuomo was still open, but said that details of the case were confidential.
Avola’s lawyer, Ugo Colonna, said that his client’s allegations may help shed some light on the history of that period of Cosa Nostra.
“Understanding why the mafia wanted to eliminate the governor of New York, in 1992, could also help us to understand the violence of the bosses who, in those years, were waging a real war against the state,” he said.
Ignazio De Francisci, a Palermo prosecutor who worked alongside Falcone and Borsellino, said that in the early 1990s, mafia bosses had already spread their actions beyond Sicily.