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In an unprecedented assault against seven mob families in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, the FBI and local authorities arrested close to 130 people on charges including murder, racketeering, and extortion. The sweep began before dawn, and the targets ranged from reputed small-time book makers and crime-family functionaries to six reputed senior mob figures from three crime families, including the entire current leadership of the Colombo crime family. Among those charged were roughly 30 made members of New York’s five crime families and the families in New Jersey and New England, along with scores of mob associates and several union officials.

More than 100 members of alleged organized-crime families and their associates were arrested in a sweep by federal agents and police in three states. The arrests were made around the New York area, in New Jersey, and in Rhode Island on charges including labor racketeering, loan sharking, conspiracy, drug trafficking, arson, extortion, and murder. The arrests involved accused members and associates of all five New York organized-crime families: the Gambinos, Genoveses, Bonnanos, Luccheses, and Colombos. Also arrested were members of the DeCavalcantes in New Jersey and accused mobsters in Rhode Island. About 127 people in total were charged.

Gunmen kidnapped a 28-year-old woman who was the sole police officer in the Mexican town of Guadalupe, close to the violent northern border city of Ciudad Juarez. Unidentified gunmen set Erika Gandara's home ablaze before abducting her. She was the last police officer in Guadalupe after her colleagues either resigned and fled or were killed. Guadalupe, population 9,000, is in an area used by traffickers to smuggle drugs into the United States. The town is just up the road from the town of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, where a 20-year-old college student and mother named Marisol Valles took over as police chief in October.

Como trabajadores de la información queremos que nos expliquen qué es lo que quieren de nosotros, qué es lo que pretenden que publiquemos o dejemos de publicar, para saber a qué atenernos.

Ustedes son, en estos momentos, las autoridades de facto en esta ciudad, porque los mandos instituidos legalmente no han podido hacer nada para impedir que nuestros compañeros sigan cayendo.

Es por ello que, frente a esta realidad inobjetable, nos dirigimos a ustedes para preguntarles, porque lo menos que queremos es que otro más de nuestros colegas vuelva a ser víctima de sus disparos.

Ya no queremos más muertos. Ya no queremos más heridos ni tampoco más intimidaciones. Es imposible ejercer nuestra función en estas condiciones. Indíquenos, por tanto, qué esperan de nosotros como medio.

Esta no es una rendición. Se trata de una tregua para con quienes han impuesto la fuerza de su ley en esta ciudad, con tal de que respeten la vida de quienes nos dedicamos al oficio de informar.

http://www.diario.com.mx/notas.php?f=2010/09/18&id=6b124801376ce134c7d6ce2c7fb8fe2f

Fed up with extortion and violent crime, ordinary citizens in Italy are rising up against organized crime. A new citizens group called Addiopizzo has organized resistance to the protection rackets.

According to a University of Palermo study, around 80% of businesses in Palermo still pay for protection. The racket in Sicily alone brings the Mafia at least a billion euros annually. Attacks on resisters continue.

In Partinico, a town near Palermo, Pino Maniaci runs a small TV station, Telejato. He has declared war on the local Mafia. "We are a little fire that we hope will become a big fire," Mr Maniaci said.

The government has, however, weakened the anti-Mafia campaign. "We have Berlusconi. That is our problem," Maniaci said. "We cannot destroy the Mafia because of its connection with politics."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/In-Sicily-Defying-the-Mafia.html

Despite vocal condemnations by church authorities, Italy's organized crime still has close ties to Catholic rites and traditions. This, said sociologist Alessandra Dino, who has written a book on the links between the church and the mafia, is no surprise: the connection stretches back to the very origins of organized crime. The church, says social activist Vincenzo Linarello, who has funded co-op businesses that the mafia has targeted for their refusal to pay protection money, has been silent on the mobsters' exhibited religiosity for too long.

http://www.globalpost.com/print/5576259

Mr Lee died of liver cancer at the age of 73. The 108-car funeral procession conveying his body to a crematorium included a Rolls Royce hearse, Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. Female models carried signs announcing each delegation. It was believed to be the island's biggest ever gangster funeral, with more than 20,000 attending and lines of spectators stretching for more than a mile.

http://mafiatoday.com/general-breaking-news/politicians-gangsters-mix-at-funeral-for-taiwan-mafia-boss/

Bocca Mafiosa by Io Me Ne Strello

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Io Me Ne Strello - Bocca Mafiosa.mp3 (3.13 MB)

http://iomenestrello.splinder.com/post/21011393/Il+vizietto+del+premier%2C+l%...

Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who do not live by the country's infamous omertà code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mafia book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard.

Saviano says the rioters are among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught up in a brutal cheap-labor system the Mafia runs for legitimate businesses from Milan to Naples. Many have political asylum or are otherwise legally in Italy, but legal or not, the migrants are managed by a Mafia-run employment system, the caporalato, that operates like a 21st century chain gang. Saviano says that those who object to low wages or poor working conditions are simply eliminated. If they complain, they get killed.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1953619,00.html