Once the bill is prepared and goes through
"For every moment that there is no witness protection program in
Watch this space for an in-depth look into this later this month.
Mob rule in Israel is also a function of weak laws and a lack of police pressure, a retired police officer told the Post in a separate article last week. Former Northern District police chief Commander Yaakov Borovsky said that the 80 to 100 crime families that operate in
As the law stands now, Borovsky said, there is a three-strikes rule that applies to holding membership in an organized-crime family. The third time a suspect is proven be connected to a crime family, through phone calls or surveillance photographs, for example, the information is put in that suspect's file.
"There needs to be a change in the law," he said. "It should go on their file the first time it happens, and after three, I suggest they receive jail time. The next time they're caught with a crime family, double the jail time, and so on. If this had been the case yesterday, those people might not have be walking around freely, and the shooting on the beach may have been prevented."
UNODOC: Corruption hinders fight against Afghan opium trade
Afghan leaders are too corrupt to fight the enormous opium trade in the country, leaders of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said last week.
"We talk about those who are not behind bars, but who should be," the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in
"They are people with power and people with powerful friends who can use their mobile phones to release a suspect from detention without a fair trial," she said.
The UNODC press conference came just days after the
Anti-mafia prosecutor: “Historic moment” in
La Cosa Nostra’s extortion racket may be on the way out, said a regional anti-mafia prosecutor last week.
"Phone taps are showing that extortionists are becoming afraid to ask for 'protection money' because they fear they could be asking an entrepreneur who will report them to police,"
He said that prosecutors are expected in the next few days to order no less than 80 suspected Mafia bosses, extortionists and collaborators to stand trial.
The suspects include 15 shopkeepers who failed to report their extortionists to the police, Gozzo stated.
Gozzo did warn, however, that though the Mafia may be in disarray, it could easily regroup if business owners don’t stand up for themselves and refuse to pay the protection money that for so many years was part of life on the Italian island.
Meanwhile, two men thought to be “postmen” for an accused Sicilian Mafia boss have been arrested – one in Rome last month and one in Palermo last Friday night. Police said that boss Bernardo Provenzano was able to supervise a mob network throughout
Bulgarian PM: We have our work cut out for us
In the same month that a damning report on
"The report was objective ... pointing out problems that we simply cannot close our eyes about," Stanishev said after a meeting of his three-party ruling coalition in the southern resort of Bansko.
""Without successful investigations that lead to charges and end up with sentences, our efforts will not look convincing enough to anyone,"" he added.
Stanishev also urged the interior ministry to curb the leaking of information to criminals from its own ranks after the issue sparked major scandals over recent months and led to the resignation of former interior minister Rumen Petkov.
Meanwhile, another murder has the local press chattering that it was mafia related. Totio Totev, 36, was found dead in the town of
If Mr Totev’s murder were found to be mafia-related, it would hardly be the first contract-style killing in
RICO law argued in
Russia’s Federal Customs Service is trying to use the US’s RICO law to bring a $22.5 billion lawsuit against the Bank of New York, reported the Moscow Times Aug. 4. No other country has ever tried to argue that RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act), which has been used to attack mob groups in the
From 1996 to 1999, Lucy Edwards, a former vice president at Bank of
In 2000, the couple pled guilty to conspiracy in a
In 2005, the bank — one of the oldest in the United States — paid $14 million in penalties to end two criminal investigations after admitting that it did not report and supervise suspicious transactions.
Although the bank has received immunity in the
The bank refused an initial offer to settle the claims out of court, leading the customs service to sue.
A group of
Notables like Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and former
Also in
Summer Olympics hit by ticketing scam
Sports fans and families of athletes competing in this month’s Summer Olympics in Beijing were bilked out of millions of dollars by a website touting fake tickets, reported the news wires on Aug. 4. Antipodean media reported that families in Australia and New Zealand spent tens of thousands of dollars on tickets that did not exist; fans in the US, Japan, Norway, China and Britain were also conned by the US-based website. Australian papers estimated that victims worldwide sent more than $46 million to scammers at beijingticketing.com, which has since been disabled.
Corruption round-up
Britain’s highest court ruled Wednesday that the Serious Fraud Office was right in calling off its investigation into arms dealer BAE Systems’s behavior in getting deals in
Siemens announced last week that it was suing 11 senior executives over their alleged supervisory failures, which caused a corruption scandal that has cost the company millions of dollars and ruined its reputation.
In
Corruption in Iraq is still a problem, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction reported last week. The inspector, Stuart Bowen, told Cox News Service that Iraqi corruption is a “second insurgency” that could be harder to get rid of than the armed insurgency.