Mogilevich remains jailed

Published: 12 August 2008

By Beth

Alleged uber-criminal Semyon Mogilevich will remain in jail as per a Moscow City Court order last week, reported Itar-Tass.

Mogilevich, known as Sergei Shnaider, was arrested last winter on charges of tax evasion stemming from his ownership of the Arbat Prestige chain of Russian cosmetic stores. Investigators say that his partner Vladimir Nekrasov, who is also in custody, underpaid 49.5 million rubles ($2.02 million) in tax monies in 2005 and 2006.

Mogilevich has a long and colorful history as an alleged crook. Investigators say that the Ukrainian-born Mogilevich first joined a Moscow crime gang in the 1970s, and became wealthy in the 1980s, when Russian Jews were allowed to emigrate for the first time: Mogilevich bought their properties, promising to send on the money, which never arrived. Since then, prostitution, smuggling, art theft, fraud, manipulating stock and money laundering are just a few of the crimes he has been alleged to have committed. Before his arrest last winter, he had been wanted by police in Russia and other countries for 15 years. The FBI put Mogilevich on its most-wanted list in 2003.

Ingush OC officer killed

A police officer working at the interior ministry’s organized crime department in Ingushetia – a Russian province that has Chechnya to its east and Georgia to its south – was brazenly murdered last week.

Unknown assailants driving a car without license plates ambushed Bekkhan Buzurtanov’s car at an intersection in the town of Nazran and sprayed the car with automatic gunfire. Buzurtanov died at the scene, just after the 9 a.m. attack.

Bulgaria adopts anti-OC measures

Just weeks after an opprobrium-laced European Commission report on Bulgaria’s lackadaisical approach to organized crime and corruption meant the loss of hundreds of millions of euros in aid to the country, Bulgaria adopted some 80 measures on legal reform, corruption and organized crime.

Banks, for example, will now have to report transactions of more than 30,000 lev ($23,000) to the Bulgarian National Bank and the State Agency for National Security. Other measures included a decision to audit two European Union fund programs.

Serbia fails to adopt anti-OC measures

Serbia’s last government – the fractious partnership between then-Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica’s nationalists and President Boris Tadic’s more Western-leaning party – announced that it would introduce asset seizure to crack down on organized crime. But even though there’s yet another new government in Serbia, this one an alliance between Tadic and the Socialists (the party of Slobodan Milosevic fame), the asset seizure law is still languishing in parliament. It’s unlikely to be passed anytime soon, as basically all of Serbia shuts down for the annual summer holiday.

Critics say that the lack of asset seizure hampers anti-organized crime measures in Serbia; the former head of the Interior Ministry’s financial crime unit also noted that there are not enough trained police to fight these types of crimes, and that Serbia has only one anti-organized crime law enforcement office in Belgrade that covers the entire country.

Romania: Chief anti-corruption prosecutor’s job on the line

The Romanian government is set to review the work of Daniel Morar, the country’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor. The Economist reviews the five arguments against him, and advocates that he continue his work, though the courts and parliament are stacked against him.

Calabrian mafia heads arrested

Italian police last Thursday arrested a Calabrian mob boss with family ties to the main suspect in the gangland-style murders of six Italians in Duisberg, Germany, last August.

After a short chase on foot, police blocked 31-year-old Paolo Nirta down a narrow alley of San Luca, a town considered the stronghold of the Calabrian version of the mafia, the 'Ndrangheta.
 
Nirta is the suspected acting-boss of the Nirta family, which has been locked in a bloody feud with a rival clan, the Pelle-Vottari family, since the early 1990s. Investigators who believe that the mob-style shootings in Duisburg a year ago were linked to the feud have named Nirta's brother-in-law, Giovanni Strangio, as one of the suspected killers.
 
Paolo Nirta is also the brother of another of the Nirta clan's bosses, Giovanni Luca Nirta whose wife Maria was killed in a 2006 Christmas-day shooting which triggered the feud with the Pelle-Vottari clan.

The Duisberg murders, which saw six men riddled with bullets outside a pizza parlor last Aug. 15, were revenge for Maria Strangio’s murder, reported Bloomberg. The two feuding Calabrian clans are part of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia, which Italian and US law enforcement have reckoned to be larger and more dangerous than Sicily’s La Cosa Nostra.

On the same day that Nirta was arrested, Canadian police also arrested another suspected ‘Ndrangheta head north of Toronto. Guiseppe Coluccio, wanted on drug charges in Italy since 2005, was arrested outside a strip mall in Markham, Ontario. “Coluccio had lived happily in Canada thanks to the (support) provided by the Calabrian clans – a situation that shows the extraordinary reach of the ‘Ndrangheta,” public prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone was quoted as saying in the Italian press by Reuters.

In Italian-American mafia news, John Gotti, Jr., the former head of the Gambino crime family – and the son of the late “Teflon Don” John Gotti – was arrested in New York last week and charged with RICO conspiracy vis-à-vis cocaine possession and trafficking, and the murders of three men.

Meanwhile, back in Italy, Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi deployed 3,000 troops to various cities last week, ostensibly to crush crime. But some media criticized the government for sending in the troops to fingerprint Gypsies at the expense of acting against organized crime and corruption. This from The Economist:

Whether they will help stem crime is another matter. General Mario Buscemi, who led the last deployment of the army in Italian towns, to tackle the Mafia in the 1990s, recalled that he had 20,000 men just for Sicily. The current operation, he said, was “substantially symbolic”. The soldiers do not have powers of arrest, nor are they properly trained or equipped for policing operations.
…
Amid the melodrama—including the “emergency” over the arrival of migrants on boats from north Africa and the eviction of gypsies—there is a nagging question. Why is a government so tough on crime so indulgent about corruption?

Among Mr Berlusconi’s first acts in government were closing the office of the high commissioner against corruption and passing a law that means he himself will not have to answer to bribery charges.

Israel poll: Corruption as dangerous as Iran

Two weeks after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he would step down amid a corruption probe against him, a new poll in the country has shown that Israel’s Jewish citizens believe that corruption is just as much of a threat to the country as is the threat from its Arab neighbors or Iran.

Twenty-four percent of those polled saw the threats to be about equal in seriousness, according to the poll conducted by the Jerusalem-based Keevoon Research consulting group.

“Israel’s leaders have been spending a lot of time speaking about the threat of Iran and about security issues like terror, but they seem to be missing a large part of the population,” Keevoon managing director Mitchell Barak told the Jerusalem Post.