Convicted gangsters serving time in Italian jails will no longer be able to spend that time singing.
The singing ban is part of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s plan to toughen up on convicted leaders of organized crime. Informants told officials that jailed bosses had literally serenaded their footsoldiers with messages and orders, often in Sicilian or Neapolitan dialects incomprehensible to other Italian speakers, particularly the guards and wardens of the northern Italian prisons in which most Mafia convicts serve time.
Other measures include a ban on socializing, and a dramatic reduction in the number of visits from families, friends and lawyers. The 570 convicts affected – including bosses such as Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, both serving life sentences – will be afforded one hour per day of outdoor exercise. They’ll spend the other 23 hours of the day alone in their cells.
OLAF heads to Bulgaria
Officials from Europe’s anti-fraud office will head to Bulgaria to pressure its officials to do more about organized crime and corruption.
The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) played a role in the European Union (EU)’s recent decision to suspend €500 million in aid to Bulgaria because the country had not done enough to stamp out organized crime or corruption after it joined the EU in January 2007. An OLAF report saying that influential people in the government had no interest in punishing a criminal group that had misused EU funds was leaked and made public less than a week before the European Commission released its own harsh report on Bulgaria’s progress last month. OLAF’s director and several other officials will be going to Bulgaria for discussions. No word on when, but it’s likely to be September, when the region heads back to work after the August holiday.
At the same time, the local press reports that more than 50 police officers have resigned from Bulgaria’s anti-mafia police department in the past month. Radio Darik reported that most of those submitting resignation letters are from the Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime’s drugs unit.
Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry is going through a restructuring following a series of mob-related scandals earlier this year led to the minister’s resignation. The ministry has not yet commented on the cause or the number of the resignations.
Swiss police raid French electric company in corruption probe
Swiss police investigating alleged corruption and contract bribes last week raided a unit of Alstom SA, a French company whose power stations generate one-fifth of the world’s electricity.
One person was arrested on suspicion of abuse of duty, and a company retiree was questioned, but no other information has come out about the investigation other than that the Swiss attorney general has said that it is unrelated to other allegations involving the company.
Those include French prosecutors investigating whether the Paris-based company paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to secure contracts in Asia and South America from 1995 to 2003. Alstom rival Siemens has had to pay $2 billion over a similar scandal that spanned one dozen countries.
US, Dutch seize cocaine in Caribbean
A U.S.-Holland raid on a ship in the Caribbean last week seized 4.6 tons of cocaine, the biggest-ever cocaine haul for the Dutch.
The Olympics are over, but this raid involved a similar parade of nations: The Dutch Navy received a tip-off at its Curacao office and sent a vessel with a US Coast Guard squad inside to intercept a Panamanian ship that had left Venezuela bound for Europe.
After stopping the ship outside Puerto Rico, the half-dozen strong US Coast Guard attachment boarded her and later found bales of cocaine in hidden compartments in the engine room.
The Coast Guard’s law enforcement detachments have been embedding with its allies’ militaries and police to seize drug shipments in the major drug trafficking corridor that is the Caribbean Sea, a Coast Guard spokeswoman told the AP.
Iowa work-at-home job linked to Russian mafia
And in more parade-of-nations crime news, an Iowa woman trying to make money from home found herself working for the Russian mafia.
Alexis Duncan starting working for Lithuania-based Lithutronics several months ago, receiving $20 apiece for re-shipping packages sent to her Des Moines, Iowa, address.
Authorities say the items, mostly high-grade electronics, were purchased online with stolen credit cards. The items were shipped to Duncan, who then sent them to various locations in Eastern Europe.
Polk County Sheriff's detectives executed a search warrant and recovered about $5,000 in electronics. Some of the credit card fraud victims were from the Des Moines area, authorities say.
U.S. authorities say that criminals tied to the Russian mafia steal the credit cards and set up these online business fronts.
Iowa housewives apparently aren’t the only ones, unwittingly or not, helping the Russian mafia. An Indian hacker last week allegedly hacked into the Best Western Hotel group’s online booking website and sold the details of how to access it through an underground network run by the Russian mafia. The cyber-attack reportedly netted the personal details of every customer booked into one of more than 1,300 Best Western hotels since 2007 – those of eight million people.
These and other high-profile cases, including a recent U.S. bust of the largest-ever-discovered identity theft ring, and another recent one in Northern Ireland, show that identity theft is becoming as lucrative for organized crime groups as cocaine and racketeering. Canadian police have been among the first to publicly note this very fact, in the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada’s annual report. This from the Canwest News Service:
According to the report, wireless technology allows fraud artists to steal payment card information without ever entering a store -- they can gather the information from a point-of-sale terminal inside while sitting in a car nearby. The information is then transferred to illegal debit card factories worldwide within seconds. The potential for profits is huge, making it very attractive to well-established organized crime groups traditionally involved in activities like drug trafficking.
Organized crime, said the head of Canada’s service William Elliott, is not giving up any of its traditional markets, but the groups are adapting and taking advantage of new areas they can exploit. The Canadian police may have said it first, but it holds true around the world. Nor are the Canadians alone when they admit that their police are not on top of organized crime, or that Canada is one of the world’s top suppliers of ecstasy (Holland and Belgium are the others), as they did in the same annual report that came out last week.
Brown to Karzai: Get rid of corruption
At least Canada can afford to do some soul-searching; in Afghanistan, acknowledged as one of the most corrupt countries on Earth, the government’s reflection on its shortcomings seems to be in short supply. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is the latest in a string of world heavyweights in recent weeks to tell the Afghan government to crack down on corruption and the opium trade; at the same time he said the UK would give an additional $120 million in developmental aid.