By Guia Baggi - Investigative Reporting Project Italy

Italian law enforcement agencies last week seized assets worth nearly US$600 million from suspected organized crime figures in two separate operations that stretched from Rome to the toe of Italy’s boot.

The targets were “clans” or family groupings allegedly involved with the ’Ndrangheta, an organized crime group that originated in Calabria in southern Italy.

One of the richest men in Ukraine was arrested Wednesday in Vienna on a US arrest warrant issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Kyiv Post reported Thursday.

Although billionaire Dmytro Firtash, 48, had bodyguards with him, he was arrested without incident in a Viennese street near his business offices, the Austrian News Agency reported.

According to Italian prosecutors, organized crime figures manipulated the bid process for a high-speed railway project related to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, as well as a more recent tourism development project in northwestern Italy.

The leader of a Mexican vigilante group formed to fight back against a drug cartel was himself arrested Tuesday for murder—of two rival vigilantes.

Swiss authorities are investigating Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, for money laundering.

Authorities from the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime have detained the mayor of Budva, Lazar Rađenović, on suspicion of abusing his position.

Former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader was sentenced to nine years in jail on Tuesday for siphoning more than US$12 million of state money for his political party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).

A United Nations report issued Tuesday claims that North Korea has come up with some creative ways to evade international sanctions, from illegally trading weapons through its embassies to using offshore financial structures to buy luxury goods.

Since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, thousands of citizens have been punished as part of a countrywide anti-graft sweep. However, according to the Associated Press (AP), in some cases the Communist Party's extrajudicial means of extracting confessions involves torture.

Marines have killed the founder of the La Familia Michoacana and leader of the Knights Templar, a mythical figure in the Mexico underworld, who disappeared in 2010 and was believed dead.