The ministers were also unanimous that the recent assassination of controversial Croatian journalist Ivo Pukanić had confirmed that mobsters in the Balkans made up a single network.
One of the characteristics of the Pukanić case is the fact that Croatians, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims were engaged in his assassination, said (Croatian Interior Minister Tomislav Karamarko), adding that this means that none of mafia groups or organized crime gangs are limited by state frontiers.
None of this is new to any Balkan observer, much less to professional law enforcement in the region. And I suspect that all of the European Union talk, in the wake of the European Commission’s annual scorecard of potential member countries – a scorecard that slammed every one of these countries’ approaches to organized crime – is more posturing for
"The harder Montenegro clamps down on corruption and organized crime, the bigger its chances of making more progress,” Rehn said, adding that membership could not be achieved “before the country conducts major reforms.
Former
Two former
In the late 1990s, Kozeny was trying to buy
Rastas, who worked for a Kozeny-run investment bank, says she attended a dinner where Egyptian businessman Shafik Gabr, an investor in Kozeny’s project, asked why the Azeris would sell the oil company, according to the court documents. Kozeny said “he thought the Azeri government would do what Kozeny wanted because he was paying the president of
Pulley, Kozeny’s security chief from 1995 to 2000, says he witnessed Kozeny’s lawyer, Hans Bodmer, creating Swiss bank accounts for Azeri officials, other documents show. He says he inferred Kozeny “might be giving things of value to Azeri officials.”
Azeri government officials have denied taking bribes. Kozeny, however, has admitted outright that he paid them off, but said that
Russian Mob Stealing Globally?
When the treasurer of
That has law enforcement convinced that Russian organized crime is involved, (
"This is above us, way above us," Miller said.
Russian officials are aware that their home-grown organized crime operates outside Russian borders, as was made evident by last week’s signing of a Russia-Hungary pledge to renew their joint coordination team to fight international organized crime.
Perhaps
If you own a BMW X5 or a Porsche Cayenne, you shouldn't park it in the streets of
"Such vehicles are brought into nearby body shops … where they are tuned or taken apart completely," Bernd Finger, the head of the
Car theft is actually the Russian mob’s smallest potatoes, Finger went on to say. Prostitution and human trafficking are bigger, outshined only by money laundering. Meanwhile, the German Police Union is admonishing German political leaders to spend more money on the cops, and to spend the money in the right way.
The head of a Sicilian mob clan and his three sons managed to do all the clan’s business from their separate cells in a maximum-security Italian prison, police said last week. Francesco Madonia and his offspring may have been held under various restrictions, such as limited visitations, single cells, no packages and limited contact with other inmates, but using code language and mime they managed to run the family’s extortion business and order a hit on another mob boss before Madonia Senior died in prison last year. Police last week arrested a Madonia wife who allegedly carried orders out of the prison.
Police outside
The officers came across the shooting range by chance. While searching the flat of a suspected drug dealer, one officer noticed a large bunch of keys and asked what they were all for.
They found what appeared to be a shed in the courtyard, with an entrance opened by remote control. From there, they descended to an armoured door beyond which was a refuge for fugitives, complete with TV, air conditioning and €7,000 (£6,000) in cash.
When another security door was forced open the police found themselves navigating some 100 metres of passageways circling the foundations of the block. At the end of the last passageway was the firing range - 10 metres long and sound-proofed.
And in a novel way of breaking up La Cosa Nostra’s extortion rackets, police last week arrested 10 businessmen for allegedly paying the mob “protection” money for the past 40 years. The arrests came months after 18 other businessmen who’d been victims of “pizzo,” or protection schemes, identified their suspected extortionists in court in July. Already 255 shopkeepers and other small business owners have publicly pledged not to pay pizzo;
During the Knesset session, an incredulous committee chairman, MK Ophir Paz-Pines, asked the police representatives how long the negotiations were going on and offered to intercede with the Treasury to help speed talks along.
"The work with the Tax Authority has been limited. This has been going on for a long time," (Interrogations and Intelligence deputy head Dudu) Matzur replied.
Money Talks, German Agents Walk
Three agents of the German Federal Intelligence Service were publicly held in Pristina, accused of throwing a bomb at a European Union office, despite the emergence of a new grop, calling itself “Army of the
Judges shrugged off the failure of lab tests to link the agents or a police report that supposedly said the Germans had not been involved. And questions arose about why an issue such as this was not dealt with quietly, as usual between rose. Or tempers.
One view was that the agents were held because of German intelligence reports on key Kosovar officials, reports that linked top officials tightly to organized crime.
As the hours ground on, the Pristina district court did not seem close to settling the matter and, according to Die Welt:
When the German authorities in
German aid is big to Kosovo—the country is the second largest bilateral donor country after the
The theory of why Prime Minister Hashim Thaci allowed this, according to German media, is that two German intelligence reports accuse him, former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj and Xhavit Haliti of the parliamentary leadership of involvement in organized crime.
