4 arrested in killings of federal agents

MONTERREY, Mexico — Four suspects were arrested Friday in the kidnapping and killing of two federal agents investigating drug trafficking in Northern Mexico, authorities said.

The arrests came just hours after the bodies of Rene Lorenzo Lopez and Roberto Krhisna Raul Martinez, both agents of the Federal Agency of Investigation, Mexico's equivalent of the FBI, were found in a river in the city of Santa Catarina, in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, the federal Public Safety Department said in a news release.

The agents were naked, their limbs and heads bound with what appeared to be duct tape, state and federal police said.

Their names and cause of death weren't immediately released.

If linked to organized crime, the slayings bring to 29 the number of law enforcers believed killed by drug gangs this year in the Monterrey area, according to a media tally.

A mafia family feud spills over

The killing of six Italians in the German city of Duisburg has thrust into the spotlight the shadowy world of the 'Ndrangheta, whose tentacles have spread far beyond their rural origins in Calabria, in southern Italy.

The six men, one of whom was reported to be only 16 years old, were sprayed with machine gun bullets moments after they left a pizzeria in the western German city.

Based on the strong blood ties between interlinked families, membership of the 'Ndrangheta - which means "Honoured Society" - is believed to number in the tens of thousands.

"It is disturbing - firstly because of the sheer number of dead," the acting director of Italy's National Anti-Mafia bureau, Carmelo Petralia, told the BBC news website.

Bulgaria Linked to Most Powerful Italian Mafia 'Ndrangheta

The Italian 'Ndrangheta crime circle works in cooperation with Bulgarian organized crime groups, a report of the Italian anti-mafia directorate states, as cited by Giornale di Calabria newspaper.

The report warns of the 'Ndrangheta's constantly growing power and its links with Bulgarian crime bosses, who are backed by the even more powerful Russian mafia.

The report comes just two days after six Italians were shot dead near a train station in Duisburg, western Germany. All of them are believed to be members of the 'Ndrangheta crime group based in Calbabria. Police believe the motive for the killings is the result of a feud stemming from the Italian town of San Luca.

Ever more often Italian mafia bosses go to court together with Bulgarians and this is just one of the many examples that prove the links between Bulgaria and the Calabrian mafia, the report says.

Six Italians killed in mafia vendetta in Germany

DUISBURG, Germany (AFP) - Six Italian men were shot dead here on Wednesday as a powerful mafia clan exported a bloody vendetta to Germany.


Italy's Interior Minister Giuliano Amato said the victims, who ranged from 16 to 38 years old and included two brothers, were caught up in a feud between mafia families in the Calabria region of southern Italy.

A police patrol alerted by a passerby discovered four of the victims in a Volkswagen Golf hire car and two in an Opel delivery van, which were parked near the central rail station of the industrial western city of Duisburg early Wednesday.

Heinz Sprenger, the officer leading the German police investigation, said all six victims had "multiple gunshot wounds".

"These men were shot at indiscriminately," he told a press conference.

Sprenger said some of the victims showed signs of life when they were found by police, but although one survived longer than the others, doctors were unable to resuscitate him.

Police said the men had been celebrating the 18th birthday of one of the victims in a pizza restaurant near the scene of the shooting where some of the men worked.

Assassination exposes Japan's underworld

(07-29) 04:00 PDT Nagasaki , Japan -- For all the trouble he had caused, Nagasaki gangster Tetsuya Shiroo had atoned by cutting off half a little finger and the tips of two others.

And things were not looking up.

The code of the yakuza, or organized crime syndicate, calls for troublesome members to perform the joint-by-joint amputations when they upset the bosses. Shiroo was an old-style gangster, a man who believed in the rituals.

But yakuza life was hard and getting harder for Shiroo. Everyone knew he had money troubles. His bosses expected him to kick about $3,000 a month their way in homage, and it was tough coming up with the cash in a city where business had been so bad for so long. Even worse, the once- lucrative option of skimming money from public-works projects was dying now that the Japanese government had turned off the geyser of public money.

Anti-Mafia police uncover arms-to-Iraq plot

US loss of control over the flood of weapons into Iraq was highlighted again yesterday when it emerged that Italian anti-Mafia investigators had uncovered an alleged shipment of 105,000 rifles of which the American high command was unaware.

The Italian team, in an investigation codenamed Operation Parabellum, stopped the £20m sale and have made four arrests.

The consignment appears to have been ordered by the Iraqi interior ministry. The US high command in Baghdad admitted that it had no knowledge of any such order, even though the ministry is supposed to inform the Americans before making any arms purchases.

Italian police arrest 14 people with U.S. mafia links

Italian police have arrested 14 people in Palermo in an anti-mafia operation, local media reported Friday.

The operation uncovered close ties between local Cosa Nostra families and the Mafia in the United States.

The 14 included businessmen, extortionists and municipal employees, most of them face charges of criminal conspiracy, extortion and public contract rigging, the report said.

Mafia man serves up warning

With organised crime syndicates believed to be behind the betting scams that have repeatedly tarnished the reputation of tennis, the ATP have employed the services of a convicted member of the American mafia to warn their leading players of the inherent dangers of allowing themselves to be lured into a web of corruption.

In the light of investigations into unusual betting patterns surrounding last week’s defeat of world No 3 Nikolay Davydenko by the 87th-ranked Argentinian Martin Vassallo Arguello in the Orange Prokom Open in Sopot, Poland, the ruling body of men’s professional tennis has intensified its desire to banish the potential for players to be coerced into throwing matches.

Reputed Mafia boss arrested in Italy

A reputed Mafia man considered one of Italy's most dangerous criminals was arrested by police.

The fugitive, Franco Franzese, 43, was arrested in the Sicilian city of Palermo, police said. He is believed to be an aide to Salvatore Lo Piccolo, considered with Matteo Messina Denaro to be the new head of the Mafia.

"This is an important demonstration of the efficiency of the police and the state's ability to oppose the evil plant of criminality with force," Justice Minister Clemente Mastella said in a statement.

Three people were arrested with Franzese and could face charges of aiding and abetting, police said.

Franzese was on an Interior Ministry list of Italy's most dangerous criminals and has been condemned to life in prison.

Ansa news agency said Franzese was being sought for Mafia association.

Recent homicides in Sicily point to Mafia turf war

ROME — The hit was classic mob. There were shots to the face and to the abdomen. The killers used a Lupara, a sawn-off shotgun that is the traditional weapon of choice for Mafia executions. The target was Giuseppe Lo Baido, 36. He was gunned down on July 13, near his house outside Palermo, Sicily.

The Italian police are not treating the Lo Baido case as just another mess to be scraped off the street in the heartland of the Cosa Nostra, the name for the Mafia's Sicilian branch. His was one of four recent killings. All of the victims were thought to be members of the Corleone family.

Some of Italy's Mafia prosecutors think the killings could be the start of a new internecine war. "The homicides of recent weeks may be a sign of a potential war between the families," said Maurizio De Lucia, the Palermo state prosecutor.

Italian Organized Crime Called `Dangerous, Pervasive'

Aug. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Organized-crime groups in Italy are a ``dangerous and pervasive'' priority of the security services, as Mafia-type groups from eastern Europe infiltrate the country's economy, the Italian spy agency said.

``Organized crime still represents a major threat,'' said a report published today in Rome by Cesis, the country's central spy agency. ``The web of corruption, intimidation, public mismanagement, violence and `omerta' -- which in all likelihood is behind the recent `garbage emergency' in Naples -- is but a part of a more threatening criminal globalization.'' Omerta is a code of silence.

Local officials in Naples and its suburbs are struggling to cope with months of uncollected garbage on the streets. Yesterday, the Sicilian Mafia burned to the ground a hardware and paint store that refused to pay extortion in the city of Palermo, and there have been a spate of murders in Sicily tied to an internal power struggle after Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano was captured last year.

Provenzano: The Phantom Of Corleone

Unhappy with the way things have been going here in the United States? Tired of scandal and corruption, and people saying the republic has gone the way of ancient Rome? Well things could be much worse. All you have to do is look at present day Rome, and Italy, where the mafia with its friends in business and government still forms one of the country's biggest enterprises. Prime Minister Romano Prodi has called the mafia "the constant reality."

For well over a century, the mafia has endured by forming relationships with people in power, playing a role in who gets elected, and developing a web of protection that reaches into the highest levels of the Italian government. And as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, there is no better example than the "Phantom of Corleone."

Mafia Snitch Gets Snitched Out Of Gambling Racket

(AP) JERSEY CITY, N.J. Like Michael Corleone in "The Godfather," he tried to get out, but they just kept pulling back him.

Mob snitch Peter Caporino faces prison time for continuing to run a gambling racket while informing for the government.

The 70-year-old Caporino, nicknamed "Petey Cap," will serve a seven-year prison term, most of it in isolation.

While running a Hoboken members-only social club, Caporino helped inform on numerous members of the Genovese crime family, though authorities say he was never a ranking member.

His information led to the convictions of 16 Genovese members and associates.

'Vinny Gorgeous' Convicted In 2001 Mob Killing

NEW YORK -- A former beauty salon owner known in Mafia circles as Vinny Gorgeous was convicted on Tuesday in a 2001 hit on one of his gangland rivals.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn had accused Vincent Basciano of using a 12-guage shotgun to rub out mobster Frank Santoro because he believed Santoro wanted to kidnap one of his sons.

Basciano's attorney said prosecutors built the case on untruthful testimony from mob turncoats, but a jury deliberated for one day before finding him guilty of murder, racketeering and other charges.

Goldfinger held for Mafia empire

CRIME baron John “Goldfinger” Palmer was being held by anti-Mafia cops last night probing his £400million empire.

The timeshare king was arrested in Tenerife.

Palmer, 57, was seized by armed officers as he stepped off a private jet from the UK.

Spanish police accuse him of masterminding a criminal empire on Tenerife involving fraud, drug trafficking, money laundering, gun running and falsifying passports and credit cards.

60 arrested in anti-mafia swoop

ROME – Police in southern Italy arrested 60 people on Tuesday in a swoop on the local mafia known as the 'Ndrangheta, suspecting them of crimes ranging from smuggling drugs and illegal immigrants to national insurance fraud.

The 'Ndrangheta, based in Calabria south of Naples, has outgrown its more famous Sicilian counterpart, the Cosa Nostra, thanks to clan loyalties ensured by blood relationships and arranged marriages.

A police spokesman said the 'Ndrangheta clan targeted by the police operation were also believed to have backed candidates for regional and provincial councils, showing how deeply they influenced local politics and business.

"According to the estimate we have come up with, six million euros would have shortly been taken from the national insurance funds," the spokesman said.

Anti-mafia prosecutors were also investigating those held for crimes including extortion, loan-sharking, illegal transport and possession of weapons and explosives.

Five charged after pub drugs raid

Five men have been charged with supplying cocaine following a drugs raid at an east London pub.

Police searched two bars at Bar Bed in Leman Street - ending a 20-month inquiry codenamed Operation Telon.

The men, aged 37 to 54, from east London, are due to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court.

Four women, aged 31 to 60, arrested in the raid have been bailed to return to a police station in September while inquiries continue.

Sixteen people were initially held as a result of the operation on 7 July.

Five of those were cautioned for possession of drugs.

One man was cautioned for possession of an offensive weapon while another man received a caution for obstruction.

24,860 gangsters nabbed

GUANGZHOU -- Police from south China's Guangdong Province, Hong Kong and Macao have jointly broken up 1,400 gangs, cracked 10,942 criminal cases and nabbed 24,860 suspects in a sweeping crackdown on organized crime which ended the week before the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to China.

The 50-day-long "Thunderbolt 07" operation, launched from early May to June 24, focused on closing down online gambling, loan sharking, cross-border prostitution and drug dealing, as well as other types of crimes, said a spokesman with the Guangdong Provincial Department of Public Security on Wednesday.

Twelve of those arrested were wanted by police in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Another is a member of Hong Kong's notorious 14K Triad. Six others are from other countries, the spokesman said.

Police confiscated 159 guns, 580 rounds of ammunition, 30 kg of heroin, 400 kg of crystal methamphetamine commonly known as "ice", 300 kg of ketamine commonly known as "K" and more than 9,000 motor vehicles, he said.

Triad-Style Attacks On Tycoon's Interests Roil Hong Kong

HONG KONG -

Every now and then, Hong Kong residents are reminded of the existence of a parallel society usually seen only in the crime movies the former British colony is so adept at producing.

A series of unusual gangland-style attacks have been made over the last few days on properties of New World Group, the business empire of billionaire Cheng Yu-tung, a patriotic tycoon with connections to top leadership in Beijing whose fortune is estimated at $6.5 billion by Forbes.

Bruno upset mafia, club owners

Editor's note: In the months leading up to his death in November 2003, mobster Adolfo "Big Al" Bruno's control of organized crime in Western Massachusetts was falling apart. With the pressure on him and monitoring by members of the New York-based Genovese crime family who traveled to Springfield, Bruno faced a coup by an up-and-comer in his organization. This is the first of a two-part series tracing what unfolded in Bruno's final months.

SPRINGFIELD - During the spring of 2002, Adolfo "Big Al" Bruno inflamed local mafia wiseguys and club owners by muscling them for increased "rent" to revive illicit revenues choked by a law enforcement crackdown on organized crime in Western Massachusetts, police reports show.

In the end, Bruno could well have been a victim of his own tough tactics. A gunman in the parking lot of a South End social club fatally ambushed the longtime mob boss 18 months later. The shooting occurred on the night before Bruno's 58th birthday.

Boston mafia leader, 88, to be freed from prison

BOSTON— “I’ll be back before my pork chops get cold!” Boston Mafia leader Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo boasted when FBI agents hauled him off in handcuffs from Francesco’s Restaurant in the North End in 1983.

Twenty-four years later, Francesco’s is long gone from the North End, but Angiulo, 88, may soon be back for the first time since that night after being granted parole.

The U.S. Parole Commission granted Angiulo’s parole request two weeks ago and ordered his release from a federal prison hospital in Devens, where he’s serving a 45-year prison term for racketeering, The Boston Globe reported. He’ll be freed on Sept. 18.

Bookie testifies at Chicago mafia trial

CHICAGO: A convicted bookie who went to jail rather than testify against reputed mafia boss Frank Calabrese Sr. relented Monday and told jurors he paid thousands in "street tax" to the mob and once got a loan from Calabrese.

Calabrese and four other defendants are facing Chicago's biggest mob trial in years. They are charged with taking part in a racketeering conspiracy that included 18 murders, gambling, loan sharking and extortion.

Among the killings are the death and dumping of Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, once the Chicago mob's man in Las Vegas, whose case was an inspiration for Joe Pesci's character in the 1995 Martin Scorsese film "Casino."

Joel Glickman, looking haggard after spending a week behind bars for contempt because of his earlier refusal to testify, said he paid as much as $400,000 in "street tax" over 25 years of working as a bookmaker.

Couple Told To Pay Up In 'Mafia' Case

NEW PORT RICHEY - For a decade, Michael Leotis paid hundreds of thousands of dollars toward gambling debts while under threats from mobsters in New York.

Now, after the FBI got involved, it may be Leotis' turn to collect.

Pasco Circuit Judge W. Lowell Bray Jr. has ordered a New York couple identified in court papers as associates of the Columbo crime family to repay Leotis more than $280,000.

The order came after the defendants in a lawsuit, Orlando and Barbara Sergi, ignored court rulings and failed to defend themselves.

Hong Kong's Triad Police Probe Attacks on New World

July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Hong Kong's anti-organized crime police are investigating attacks on properties of billionaire Cheng Yu-tung's New World Development Co. and its affiliates, including the ramming of a car into the group's headquarters.

Those behind the attacks ``are challenging the government as well as the police,'' Ambrose Lee, the city's secretary for security, said late yesterday. The police organized crime and triad bureau is investigating.

``The triads want to challenge the police openly,'' Cheng, New World's chairman, said in an interview on Hong Kong's Cable Television news channel today. ``I haven't offended anyone and no one ever blackmailed me.'' His company is Hong Kong's sixth- largest developer by market value, and also invests in public works, transport and telecommunication.

Witness says he got inside Chicago mob

CHICAGO - Straining to hear and with his right hand shaking badly, a career criminal who has been in and out of prisons for decades admitted Wednesday to passing worthless stock, pandering to pornography fans and even blowing up a house as a late-joining member of the Chicago mob.

Alva Johnson Rodgers, 78, a lanky, drawling Texan, was both the most improbable and most colorful witness to testify so far at the government's Operation Family Secrets trial of five alleged members of the Chicago mob.

Mexico denies official complicity in drug suspect's cash hoard

MEXICO CITY: The Mexican government vigorously denied this week the accusations of a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is wanted on drug charges here but who asserts that $150 million found hidden in his mansion came from members of President Felipe Calderón's party, including the secretary of labor.

Zhenli Ye Gon, a naturalized Mexican citizen who owns a pharmaceutical company, rocked the political world here recently by suggesting, through his lawyer in New York, that the labor secretary, Javier Lozano Alarcón, had threatened to kill him last year unless he agreed to hide duffel bags stuffed with tens of millions of dollars in his house.

On Tuesday, Lozano Alarcón issued a statement calling the charges "false, absurd, untrue, crooked and perverse." A spokesman for Calderón, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the president had yet to make an official statement, said Zhenli appeared to be making false charges as part of a strategy to broker a deal with prosecutors here.

BI bans strip-searches to find Yakuza tattoos

Philippine immigration officers have been ordered to stop forcing some Japanese visitors to disrobe as they try to flush out suspected members of Yakuza crime syndicates through their distinctive tattoos, the immigration chief said Thursday.

Marcelino Libanan ordered the new "no-touch" policy following complaints that many Japanese visitors sporting tattoos were being harassed by immigration personnel at the airport, a statement from the immigration department said.

Mafia making millions from brutal horse races

The Mafia is making more than £500 million a year from racing horses illegally through the streets of Sicily, according to a jockey.The races, in which the horses are frequently injured, are run over the hard asphalt or slippery cobbles of cities including Palermo, Catania and Siracuse.

The police seized a hippodrome full of horses, and 10,000 crates of performance-enhancing drugs, last year but managed to stop only seven out of an estimated 300 races.

Experts said the number of races this year would be far higher. Horse racing has long been a tradition in Sicily, but only recently has the Mafia seized control of the sport.

Death penalty for yakuza stands

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld lower court decisions to hang a former yakuza for killing two other gangsters in 1997.

"The crime was systematic and pre-arranged, and brought about the gravest consequence. . . . A death sentence is inevitable," the presiding judge, Toyozo Ueda, said in handing down the ruling to Sumio Nakahara, 60.

2 million yen phone fraudster nabbed

Police arrested a yakuza who headed a telephone fraud ring Monday on suspicion of bilking an elderly woman out of 2 million yen last year.

The ring headed by Satoshi Nagasawa, 24, of no fixed address, allegedly telephoned the home of a 75-year-old woman in the city of Kagoshima last June and told her that her daughter, an elementary school teacher, injured one of her students through corporal punishment.

The hidden hell of yakuza families

04 July 2007 06:00

It is only when Shoko Tendo removes her tracksuit top that you appreciate why, even on a hot day, she prefers to remain covered up in public. Outwardly she is much like any thirty-something you would encounter on a Tokyo street. Her hair is of the dark-brown hue favoured by many Japanese women her age, her greeting is accompanied by a bow, and her voice seems to be pitched a little on the high side, a common affectation in the company of strangers. But her protective layer comes off to reveal stick-thin arms covered, from the wrists up, with a tattoo that winds its way to her chest and across her back, culminating, on her left shoulder, in the face of a Muromachi-era courtesan with breast exposed and a knife clenched between her teeth. It is an appropriately defiant image for Tendo and the most obvious sign that, as the daughter of a yakuza (mafia) boss, she hails from a section of Japanese society that most of her compatriots would rather did not exist. Her story, Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughter, became a surprise bestseller in Japan in 2004, shining a light into a dark and little-understood corner of modern Japan.

In a Very Cold Case Finally at Trial, a Subtext of Russian Mobsters

In the Eastern European immigrant neighborhoods of South Brooklyn, where the notorious heroin smuggler Boris Nayfeld was running the Brighton Beach waterfront, the collapsing Soviet bloc had opened new routes for money laundering. The crime syndicates of the early 1990s began to expand their ambitions beyond extortion and racketeering toward increasingly complex financial fraud.

Among the strivers and the hustlers, the thieves and the aspiring gangsters, were four Ukrainian men, none much older than 21, who roamed the billiard halls and the boardwalks as a crew seeking to impress Mr. Nayfeld, prosecutors have said.

One of the men, Boris Roitman, 21, did not survive the summer of 1992. He was killed by two shotgun blasts delivered in an alley beside a tennis court. The first slug obliterated his heart. His killing went unsolved for more than a decade.

Chicago mob trial pits son vs. father

CHICAGO, July 4 (UPI) -- A Chicago organized crime trial has pitted testimony by the son of a reputed mobster against his father, accused of homicide and running a protection racket.

Frank Calabrese Jr., 47, spent 45 minutes Tuesday describing how he began collecting protection money for his father while he was in high school, and worked his way up to doing the books, The Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday.

Judge asks that prosecutor face hearing

BOSTON — The chief judge of the federal court in Boston has asked the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers to conduct disciplinary proceedings against a federal prosecutor who withheld key evidence in a New England Mafia trial.

Uganda: Nigerian Mafia Lure Citizens Into Drug Deals

THE 10 Ugandans held on charges of drug trafficking in China were lured into the illicit business by a squad of Nigerian mafia operating in Kampala, the government has said.

"There is a network of Nigerian drug mafia operating in the suburbs of Kampala," State Minister for Youth James Kinobe said yesterday. "After these people were arrested and interrogated, they revealed details and operations of their [Nigerian] masters in Kampala. They even pleaded for mercy."

Mr Kinobe, who has just returned from official duty in China, said he carried home a detailed file containing classified testimonies of the 10 Ugandans, who include three women, describing the bases and nature of the Nigerian drug mafia in Kampala.

Naples Mafia drives priest out of city

The local Mafia in Naples has forced a priest who preached against crime to quit the city.

The Camorra, which masterminds a significant part of Europe's cocaine trade, threatened to kill Father Luigi Merola if he did not leave.

The final warning came in the form of a photograph of the priest with a bullet entering his mouth. Father Merola was in charge of the parish of Forcella, a violent neighbourhood in the heart of the city which is controlled by the crime gang. He has had a police escort for the past three years and last week, a 30-year-old man was shot just outside the priest's church.

Although he was popular in the area for his fight against organised crime, the local curia finally decided that it was too dangerous for Father Merola to remain.

He has been given a job at the Italian Bishops' Conference in Rome.

In his final Mass a few weeks ago, Father Merola told worshippers that criminals could not stop "spring" from arriving in Naples and it would be "a season of peace".

Father Merola said he was not being forced out by fear. He said he reached the decision with Cardinal Sepe, the Archbishop of Naples.

"One phase is closed, a new one begins," he said. "But I will continue to fight against crime." Meanwhile, in Palermo, four shopkeepers won a battle against two Mafia dons demanding protection money.

CIA tried to get mafia to kill Castro-documents

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A treasure trove of CIA documents released on Tuesday shed light on the spy agency's efforts to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro in the 1960s by getting the mafia to kill him in a "gangster-type action."

The CIA declassified hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detail some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping.

The documents are known in the CIA as the "Family Jewels," and some describe the agency's efforts to persuade Johnny Roselli, believed to be a mobster, to help plot the assassination of Castro.

A CIA official at the time, Richard Bissell, in August 1960 approached Col. Sheffield Edwards of the Office of Security to determine if Edwards "had assets that may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action," according to the documents.

"The mission target was Fidel Castro," one memo said.

Suspected Mafia Members Arrested

Police said they arrested several people who they suspect are Mexican Mafia members.

Police said they received a tip that high-ranking mafia members were meeting at Club Movida on East Mitchell Street.

Officers raided the club and arrested the suspected mafia members.

Among the arrested were James Jimenez, 39, and Christina Oviedo, 32, who are being held on charges of cocaine possession.

Officers also arrested Carlos Ybarra, 31, on accusations of possessing a weapon.

Police said the arrests send a strong message to the mafia.

"Several arrests were made," Sgt. Gabe Trevino said. "We found some weapons and we were able to gain a lot of intelligence about who's involved in some of these gangs.

Trevino said gathering the intelligence may help lead to more arrests.

Russian police begin large-scale effort to exterminate notorious mafia

The complete liquidation of organized criminal groups has begun in Russia, according to the Russian Interior Ministry. “There are 450 large organized criminal groups operating in Russia these days. These groups exert a considerable influence on a socioeconomic and criminogenic situation in the regions,” said Russia’s Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, in an interview to Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

Mobster May Have Seduced Brooklyn Investigator Assigned to Protect Him

An investigator for the Brooklyn District Attorney's office has resigned amid allegations she got "too close" to a mafia associate she was assigned to protect, WNBC.com has confirmed. The mob-linked con artist allegedly tried to seduce the investigator during the time she was assigned to guard him while he was holed up at a hotel for questioning as a cooperating witness.