Pietro Grasso warned authorities not to repeat mistakes made after the 1980 earthquake in the Irpinia region near Naples, when Mafia bosses took the money earmarked for reconstruction and profited by using substandard materials.
That earthquake killed 3,000 people and left 300,000 others homeless.
Some people in the
Also warning of the lessons of the earlier earthquake was Italian journalist and author of the bestselling Neapolitan mob expose
The risks of the reconstruction programme are just that. The higher the damages are assessed, the more money, the more contracts and subcontracts will be generated and the whole flow of cement, movement of earth, diggers and building will attract the avant garde of subcontract building in Italy, namely the clans, the Mafia, Camorra and ’ndrangheta families .
Local officials are trying to head the groups off at the pass. Regional anti-mafia prosecutor Olga Capasso will help local magistrates check bid contracts for rebuilding homes and public buildings by cross-referencing them against a national database of people and companies suspected of mob ties. The state prosecutor has also opened an inquiry into the earthquake, focusing on shoddy building that contributed to the extent of the earthquake’s damage; that inquiry will also try to prevent crime groups from infiltrating the rebuilding. The town’s mayor has called on the police to help set up a commission to watch over the rebuilding. And national prosecutor Grasso has pledged to set up a task force of anti-mafia prosecutors and other experts to help the
Other
In other Italian organized crime news, six women were among the 35 suspects arrested on suspicion of murder, attempted murder, extortion and association with the Calabrian mafia or ‘Ndrangheta. Earlier last week, anti-mafia police seized €1.5 million in assets from a Palermo businessman who’s on trial for mafia association. The assets include property, bank accounts and the 25 percent stake the man held in a
UN: Organized Crime Has Global Reach
Organized crime has gone global, threatening the security of cities, countries and regions, said the UN crime czar at a commission meeting in
Antonio Maria Costa, UNODC (UN Office on Drugs and Crime) executive director, said Thursday at the opening of a U.N. Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice session that transnational criminal groups and drug cartels are expanding their operations around the world. Costa warned that without action from the international community, regions in Asia, South America and
Costa also noted that the financial crisis could be an opportunity to fight money laundering by criminals – by ending bank secrecy, closing tax havens and strengthening regulation and compliance measures. The 40-member commission ends it session on April 24.
In other international crime news, journalist and author Misha Glenny has apparently landed a film deal for his 2008 book McMafia. The book, which is about criminals and their illegal businesses worldwide, is here described by Reuters as “something of an underworld equivalent of Thomas Friedman’s ‘The World is Flat.’”
Report: World Bank Weak on Corruption
The World Bank’s methods of detecting fraud and corruption in a program that lends money to nearly 80 poor countries are so lackluster that a report by the WB’s independent auditor referred to the anti-fraud measures as a “material weakness.” The Wall Street Journal had the story:
The bank's Independent Evaluation Group gave it the lowest possible rating for fraud-detection procedures in the $40 billion aid program, called the International Development Association. That could hurt contributions to the effort, which gives grants and interest-free loans to the world's 78 poorest countries.
The 690-page report, the first for the program, was completed last fall. Since then it has been the subject of lengthy discussions between World Bank management and the independent evaluation unit over whether the single designation of "material weakness," the lowest of four ratings, was justified. None of the program's other marks were as low; six other areas were labeled "significant deficiencies."
"The bank's traditional control systems weren't designed to address fraud and corruption," one of the report's authors, Ian Hume, said in an interview. "They were designed for efficiency and equity -- the cheapest possible price." That increases the risk that corruption could occur in the use of IDA grants, he said.
The World Bank has been pilloried by critics for years for not taking corruption seriously enough, and some staffers worried that the report's publication was being delayed for political reasons. The
Arms Trafficker gets 20 Years
A South African described by a judge as a “petty crook who got in over his head” was sentenced last week to 20 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle military-type weapons into the
Christiaan Dewet Spies, 37, was convicted in July 2007 of multiple charges including conspiring to defraud the
Spies, ringleader Artur Solomonyan of
The ring had tried to sell the grenade launchers, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and other weapons from
A warning from Britain’s Foreign Office of “an underlying threat from terrorism and organised crime in Croatia,” along with a BBC report on the matter, have drawn the ire of the Adriatic seaside country of Croatia.
The BBC program pointed to last fall’s murders of Ivo Pukanic, the editor-in-chief of a prominent weekly, and Ivana Hodak, the daughter of a high-profile
The murders of Ivo Pukanic and Ivana Hodak, together with a spate of attacks on journalists and businessmen, have confirmed a belief in the minds of many Croats that their country is in the grip of powerful mafia whose roots lie in the international embargo against Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
Robbed of trade revenue and legitimate supplies of weapons, the constituent republics, including
Croatian officials, meanwhile, took both the warning and the report to be deliberately malicious and timed to coincide with the beginning of
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In other
And in neighboring
