Ukraine has been included in the list of the countries with high levels of organized crime, according to a rating compiled by World Economic Forum (WEF) experts.
Ukraine currently ranks 113th in the list of 137 countries with a score of 3.9 on a scale of 1 to 7 (best), according to the rating posted on the WEF’s website. A score of 1 means that organized crime (mafia-oriented racketeering, extortion) imposes costs on businesses to a great extent (huge costs) and 7 means it imposes no costs.
Ukraine is in a group of countries with high levels of organized crime together with the states of Latin America and Africa. El Salvador, Honduras and Venezuela have the worst ratings. According to the WEF, Finland, Norway and Oman have the best scores. The rating is based on data of 2015-2016.
Police in Kyiv have detained more than 60 people at an alleged gathering of organized crime bosses in the Ukrainian capital.
Authorities said the arrests were made late on November 26 during a raid by National Police and Ukrainian special forces at a restaurant in Kyiv’s historic Pushcha-Vodytsia neighborhood.
A statement from Ukraine’s National Police force said those gathered in Kyiv included powerful crime bosses who were able to “influence the criminal situation in Kyiv and other regions” of the country.
Data shows 2,186 murders were committed in May, surpassing May 2011 record
Crackdown on organised crime has consumed Mexico for more than a decade
Mexico marked another murderous milestone in its conflict with organised crime as the monthly homicide rate hit its highest level in 20 years.
Government statistics showed that 2,186 murders were committed in May, surpassing the previous monthly high of 2,131 in May 2011, according to a review of records that date back to 1997.
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) – A longtime Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was arrested Wednesday on accusations he helped smuggle a Mexican national with felony convictions into the United States.
The ICE agent was operating under the orders of a “local organized crime figure with business interests in Mexico,” the U.S. District Attorney’s Office reported Thursday.
Felix Cisneros, 42, of Murrieta, was taken into custody on federal felony charges of aiding and assisting an inadmissible alien to enter the United States.
The staggering death toll in Mexico’s drug war has outpaced the number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
A new documentary by Spanish journalist David Beriain discloses what and who is behind the brutality that has turned Mexico into one of the most violent places in the world.
Beriain spent several weeks in northwest Mexico filming the inner workings of the Sinaloa Cartel, whose leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s arrest and recent extradition to the United States has thrown the group—and Mexico—into an even more chaotic spiral of violence.
Organized crime helped Putin grab Crimea, and may open the way for him to take more of Russian-speaking Ukraine.
DONETSK, Ukraine—I was talking to some young black-clad pro-Russian agitators at a checkpoint they’d set up on the outskirts of this city in eastern Ukraine when a shiny black Mercedes pulled up a few yards away. Some of the men from the group walked over and stuck their heads into the car. I couldn’t see who the capo was, couldn’t hear what orders he was giving, but the scene was like something from a movie about the mob. Nobody wanted to say who that was in the car. Nobody wanted to repeat what he’d said.Such scenes are increasingly common in this contested part of Ukraine near the Russian frontier. “Bosses are starting to appear on the fringes of the protests, they are middle-aged, older and better dressed than the younger men who are in the vanguard of the protests,” says Diana Berg, a 34-year-old graphic designer. The grassroots agitation in favor of Russia has become less spontaneous and more focused in recent days.Before and since Russia’s move to annex the Crimea, many who favor the pro-European government in Kiev have argued that these “bosses” might be provocateurs from Russia’s FSB intelligence service or Spetsnaz special forces infiltrated into Ukraine to orchestrate pro-Russian sentiment. But Berg, an organizer of the pro-Ukrainian rally last week where pro-Russian thugs stabbed a student to death, says there’s a different and in some ways more frightening explanation: the ominous hand of organized crime.A public prosecutor, who declined to be named in this article for reasons of personal safety, says local hoodlums are operating among the pro-Russian protests in the restive eastern Ukraine, helping to direct them on the instructions of Kremlin-linked organized crime groups. He points the finger specifically at the notorious Seilem mob, which has been closely tied over the years to ousted Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, a onetime governor of Donetsk, who is now in exile in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
“We have already seen organized crime working hand-in-hand with the Russians in Crimea,” says the prosecutor. In that breakaway Black Sea peninsula, Moscow helped install former gangland lieutenant Sergei Aksyonov as prime minister, and his background is well known. Aksyonov and his Russian separatist associates share sordid pasts that mix politics, graft and extortion in equal measure and together they helped steer Crimea into the Russian Federation. Police investigations leaked to the Ukrainian press accuse Aksyonov of past involvement in contract killings. Back in January 1996, Aksyonov was himself injured after his car overturned on the Simferopol-Moscow road during a shootout.
“Why should it surprise you,” the prosecutor in Donetsk asks, “if the same dynamic [as in Crimea] is playing out here? … Maybe there are Russian intelligence agents on the ground, but Moscow through crime networks has an army of hoodlums it can use, too.”
The international media were late to pick up on Crimea’s toxic nexus of organized crime, political corruption and politics. But across post-Soviet Ukraine the three have long been regarded as interchangeable and inseparable. And the eastern and southern parts of the country are the worst of all. “Political corruption is ingrained in eastern Ukrainian political culture,” the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, noted in a 2012 study.
The three regions most notorious for the closest relationships between gangsters, oligarchs and politicians—Crimea, Donetsk and Odessa—were the most resistant to the Euro-Maidan revolution that led last month to the ouster of Yanukovych. And now all three regions are at the forefront of the pro-Russian fight-back against the new national leaders in Kiev.
Taras Kuzio, a research associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, who wrote the Jamestown report, says the internal political turmoil in Ukraine should be viewed through the lens of the hand-in-glove relationships between politicians, mobsters and the so-called “red directors,” managers-turned-businessmen who are steeped in the ways of Soviet-style public sector corruption and deal-making.
The red directors also have their protégés: men such as billionaire Dmytro Firtash, the gas-trading mogul who was arrested by Austrian police on suspicion of mob activity earlier this month following Yanukovych ‘s ouster. Nor are the ties limited to the Ukraine. Their tentacles embrace Moscow: Firtash has joint business ventures with Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenburg and his brother, Boris, close friends and judo sparring partners of President Vladimir Putin. The Rotenburg brothers, not coincidentally, are prominent on a U.S. sanctions list announced Thursday by President Barack Obama to target Putin cronies.
The symbiosis of politics, organized crime and unscrupulousbiznesmeni developed quickly in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union in much the same way as it did in Russia. The ambitious, the greedy and the powerful lunged for the huge profits that could be made. The state was disintegrating. The big industries – energy, mining and metals – were being privatized, and may the most ruthless man win. “Individuals such as Yanukovych, Aksyonov and their Donetsk and Crimean allies literally fought their way to the top,” says Kuzio. In Donetsk, Yanukovych as governor “integrated former and existing organized criminal leaders into his Party of Regions,” says Kuzio.
In Crimea, “every level of government was criminalized,” according to Viktor Shemchuk, who served for many years as the chief public prosecutor in the region. “It was far from unusual that a parliamentary session in Crimea would start with a minute of silence honoring one of their murdered ‘brothers,’” Shemchuk recalled in a December interview with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a consortium of investigators and journalists tracking developments throughout Eastern Europe.
Donetsk was no different. A March 2006 cable from the US embassy to the National Security Council – one of several on Ukraine released by WikiLeaks—noted that Yukanovych’s Party of Regions was a “haven for Donetsk-based mobsters and oligarchs” and had commenced an “extreme makeover” with the help and advice of U.S. political consultants, including “veteran K Street political tacticians” from Washington D.C. and a onetime Ronald Reagan operative, “hired to do the nipping and tucking.”
According to the cable, Yanukovych was “tapping the deep pockets of Donetsk clan godfather Rinat Akhmetov.” Now supposedly Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch, Akhmetov has been keeping a low profile in these early post-Yanukovych days, staying out of the limelight and issuing inoffensive statements on how important it is for everybody to get along.
Another US embassy cable from then-Ambassador William Taylor in September 2007 drilled down on how Yanukovych was centralizing Donetsk crime and political and business corruption in his party – something he would go on to do on an even larger national scale when he was subsequently elected as President in 2010. After Yanukovych became president, according to Ukrainian officials, more than $20 billion of gold reserves may have been embezzled and $37 billion in loans disappeared. In the past three years, they claim, more than $70 billion was moved to offshore accounts from Ukraine’s financial system.
The Americans have sent teams of experts to Kiev to help Ukraine’s interim leaders follow the money. “We are very interested in working with the government to support its investigations of those financial crimes,” U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt told reporters last week, “and we have already, on the ground here in Ukraine, experts from the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury who are working with their Ukrainian counterparts to support the Ukrainian investigation.”
Many of the financial crimes are likely to trail back to Moscow. Yanukovych confidant Firtash (the gas mogul picked up in Austria) admitted during a December 2008 meeting with then-US Ambassador Taylor that he had entered the energy business with the assistance of the notorious Russian crime boss Semyon Mogilevich, who, he said, worked with Kremlin leaders.
“Many Westerners do not understand what Ukraine was like after the break up of the Soviet Union,” Firtash told the ambassador. When a government cannot rule effectively, the country is ruled by “the laws of the streets,” he said.
That’s still the rule. The old order has much to fear from reform and change and will do all it can to preserve its wealth and power—and its best bet for that to happen is to look to Russia.
For precisely that reason, rights campaigners and reformers in Ukraine’s interim government are racing against time to uncover as much of the mob story as possible. An anti-corruption panel headed by Tetyana Chornovol, an investigative journalist who was nearly beaten to death in December for her reporting, is starting in earnest to recover billions of dollars of stolen money and piece together the financial crimes of the Yanukovych regime.
The Daily Beast learned something about these operations first hand when a team from the organized crime police raided a discreet boutique hotel in downtown Kiev where this correspondent was staying. According to the police the hotel is owned by Eduard Stavitsky, Ukraine’s former energy minister. He is now believed to be in hiding in Russia. The police searched all the rooms looking for any Stavitsky documents and combing through financial records. As one of the investigating officers told me, “We need to move fast before the cover-ups start.”
LOCRI, Italy (AP) — First Italy fought its mafia mobsters by confiscating their wealth. Now judges are taking away something more precious: their sons.
Riccardo Cordi’, a shy 18-year-old scion of one of Italy’s most notorious mob families, is a pioneer in a new strategy to fight the mafia by exiling crime clan sons from their homes and families.
Riccardo is the first of about 20 sons sent into a kind of rehab away from the mob by juvenile courts in the southern region of Calabria, home to the dangerous ‘ndrangheta syndicate
In this June 26, 2014 photo, Riccardo Cordi’ stands on a terrace in Reggio Calabria, Sicily, Italy with the Strait of Messina in the background. Cordi’ was exiled to Messina during a pioneering anti-mafia program for juveniles, a kind of rehab away from the mob.
By age 16, Riccardo seemed destined to go the way of his father, a reputed boss gunned down in a turf war, and three elder brothers in prison on mafia-related convictions.
Their photos line the wall of the fortress-like Cordi’ home in Calabria, seen in an exclusive visit by The Associated Press, in a testimony to the rule of blood in the powerful ‘ndrangheta.
But when Riccardo was charged with attempted theft and damage to a police car, judge Roberto Di Bella followed up his acquittal with a startling order: The ‘ndrangheta family prince would be sent away to Sicily until he turned 18.
Di Bella had sent Riccardo’s three brothers to prison and wanted to spare the last son a similar fate. He cited legal provisions that allowed courts to remove minors from families incapable of properly raising them.
Riccardo’s mother seethed, but there was nothing she could do.
“If you don’t like it, we’ll take him away anyway,” the judge told her.
Riccardo was placed in a Sicilian facility for troubled youths where nobody cared that he was a Cordi’. Rules were rigid, including no going out at night. Everyone made their own bed and sat down for meals at a communal table.
“It was tough. I was counting the days,” Riccardo said in interviews with The AP.
The judge put Riccardo under the wing of a fledgling psychologist, Enrico Interdonato. The psychologist had helped launch a courageous band of youths who encourage Sicilian business owners to stop paying “protection” money to the Mafia.
It was an audacious pairing, because the Cordi’ crime clan was itself alleged to be in the protection racket. This unlikely mentor helped Riccardo understand the terrible human toll of organized crime, taking him incognito to ceremonies for Mafia victims.
If the psychologist acted as a surrogate brother, a construction company owner practically became Riccardo’s second father. Mariano Nicotra told Riccardo what happened when he refused to pay protection money: His car was torched, his daughter ostracized. Nicotra even gave away the family dog, because Mafia threats made walks dangerous.
Nicotra saw something in Riccardo that few back home even bothered to look for: a normal kid.
Slowly Riccardo began to change. Twice a week, he helped out at an after-school center for children from broken homes, even though doing something for nothing is an alien concept in the ‘ndrangheta.
He moved stiffly, always buttoned up, wearing a jacket even at outings at the sea. But he came willingly, a supervisor recalled. One day, he surprised everybody by clucking like a hen to make the children laugh.
Riccardo’s exile wasn’t all hard work. On Saturday nights, Interdonato took Riccardo out for pizza and beers, and even to discos. There, he earned respect because of his personality, not his name.
Just weeks before he was due to leave, Riccardo rebelled. He packed his bags. He wanted out. His mother helped persuade him to stay.
On his 18th birthday — Feb. 8, 2014 — Riccardo’s exile ended. The after-school center treated him to a birthday cake with strawberries. Soon afterward, he returned home to Locri.
In a letter to Corriere della Sera in May, Riccardo made clear he wasn’t repudiating his family. But he wrote that he now wants a “clean” life.
He recalled how one morning in exile, he went to the sea, from where he could see Calabria.
“This time, however, I saw it from another perspective: I was seeing it from another place,” he said. “But it was I who was different.”
Vito Rizzuto was the Steve Jobs of organized crime: charismatic, visionary, and shrewd enough to run a billion-dollar enterprise with tentacles reaching from Montreal to New York, South America, and Europe.
Because of its location along the St. Lawrence river and proximity to US markets, Montreal has always been a major point of entry for drugs, guns, and basically whatever else you can fit into a shipping container.
And for the good part of three decades, Rizzuto had his hand in almost every racket in the city, heading a “consortium” of organized crime which included Colombian cartels, Irish gangs who controlled the city’s port, and Hells Angels who took care of distribution of drugs across Quebec and Ontario.
Rizzuto’s death in December 2013—from natural causes—has left many speculating about his replacement and sources VICE spoke to hinted at a dramatic decline in the Sicilian Mafia’s power in Montreal and Canada since his passing.
With the rise of Haitian street gangs, the imminent release of numerous Hells Angels from prison, and rival Italian factions, there is no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding Vito Rizzuto’s replacement.
Chief among those theories is that the Ontario-based Calabrian mafia, also known as the ‘Ndrangheta, is moving in and getting revenge after having been violently pushed out of the city by Vito’s father in the 1970s.
But this line of thinking is deeply flawed, said RCMP Staff Sergeant Chris Knight, because it assumes that Vito Rizzuto can even be replaced.
“No one’s got the credibility, no one’s got the clout, and certainly no one has the charisma that Vito Rizzuto had—and I’ve met him—to make allies out of enemies. No one has that right now,” Knight told VICE.
Knight has been with the RCMP for 34 years and works with local, provincial, and international law enforcement to monitor organized crime in Quebec.
His squad has seen no sign of rival Italian gangs moving to replace the Rizzuto’s, as certain media and observers have speculated.
“We haven’t seen attempts or power moves from Hamilton or Toronto on establishments or persons here. And we haven’t received any information on the street to that effect either. It’s a myth. I’ve always heard these things about New York and Toronto controlling Montreal but nothing could be further from the truth.”
Antonio Nicaso agrees. He has authored 27 books about organized crimes and acted as a consultant for the government on these. In his most recent book Business or Blood he writes extensively about the final years of Rizzuto’s life and the implications of a post-Vito world.
“I don’t see anyone with the same vision as Vito Rizzuto. His mafia was the real one, not a cheap imitation,” Nicaso told VICE. “Rather than fighting over turf, they are now trying to create a balance of power where different organizations will work together.
So it’s a group of people rather than one person like Rizzuto who was a master mediator capable of striking alliances and reaping huge profits through criminal enterprises.”
What is certain, for both Knight and Nicaso, is that the Sicilian Mafia no longer wield the power they once did in Canada. All signs point to a decentralization and instability—not a replacement.
“Their monopoly or their stranglehold is not what it used to be. It’s greatly diminished. They have lost a lot of power and there have been a lot deaths in the family,” said Staff Sergeant. Knight.
“You’re going to get struggles for street corners like you see in New York. In New York, it’s basically whoever has the biggest gun or the most soldiers gets the street corner for the distribution of narcotics and other organized crime activities.”
In 2010, Vito Rizzuto’s father and his son, both named Nick, were gunned down within months of each other.
The murders took place during a period of intense fighting wherein rival Italian factions, namely New York’s Bonanno family tried to take advantage of the power vacuum created after Rizzuto’s imprisonment in Colorado.
He had been deported and was serving time for his involvement in the triple murder of Bonanno family captains in 1981.
FBI surveillance photo of Vito Rizzuto (in black) from 1981, the same year he was involved in a bloody triple murder immortalized in the film ‘Donnie Brasco.’
Earlier this month, Raynald Desjardins pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the murder of Sal “the Iron Worker” Montagna.
Desjardins was Rizzuto’s right-hand man during the golden years of his reign and, according to wiretaps, one of the only two non-Italians to be “made” in the Mafia.
Montagna was the acting head of New York’s Bonanno crime family who tried—and failed—to replace Rizzuto as the boss in Montreal. Obviously, their relationship soured and Desjardins’s car was showered with AK-47 fire north of Montreal in 2011.
Two months later, Montagna’s body was found floating in the Assomption River. Desjardins’s case is a salient reminder of just how complex and delicate the balance of power can be for organized crime in Montreal.
The city has seen a period of relative calm in recent months but that doesn’t mean that it’s stable or lasting. Based on the RCMP’s analysis, all signs point to splintering drug turf and increased instability.
“It’s very volatile on the street. Whereas ten years ago, if there’s one thing that Vito Rizzuto had it was the ability to gather people, negotiate truces, and make arrangements that everyone made money. With him being gone, it’s more volatile now.”
Ironically, this volatility is directly linked to the effective police work done by the RCMP who arrested almost 100 suspected mobsters in Project Colisée and pretty much every Hells Angels patch member during Operation Sharqc.
Obviously, these arrests did nothing to curb the demand for drugs and, according to sources who spoke with VICE, all of that demand was absorbed by notoriously unstable Haitian street gangs who are plagued with internal Bloods-Crips rivalries and have effectively replaced the Hells Angels on the street.
Sources also pointed to the fact that the notoriously racist Hells Angels will want their old drug turf back and will not be pleased with the fact that black gangs are now in control. There’s trouble a’brewing in la métropole.
“The Hells Angels will definitely become more and more important, that goes without saying,” said Antonio Nicaso.
Knight agreed: “They’re going to want more territory and more cheap drugs and a monopoly over extortion or illegal gambling. There will be conflict for sure. It’s all about money and power. And the more players you have, the less you have to go around.”
Without Rizzuto’s unifying and stabilizing influence, the current period of relative calm is likely to be short-lived. And in order to survive in a post-Vito world, the Sicilian Mafia will have no choice but to rebrand.
Unlike stereotypes propagated in the media, the Mafia in Montreal isn’t all about guns, drugs, and prostitutes—it’s actually more boring than that.
The inquiry heard testimony from almost 200 witnesses and exposed a massive criminal conspiracy involving the mob, construction companies, unions, and high-ranking municipal employees—a reminder that crime in Montreal was able to fester in an environment of political collusion.
“The Mafia is strong and powerful is because they were capable of infiltrating our society and our politicians. What they used to do with the gun, they now do with corruption, relationships, and contracts,” Antonio Nicaso said.
“They are not as strong and powerful anymore mainly because they are not able to replace Vito Rizzuto but without connections to those who hold the power and money, the Mafia would just be a bunch of hooligans.”
European police made more than 1,000 arrests in a 10-day, continent-wide sweep against organized crime this month that netted suspected people traffickers and cocaine smugglers, law enforcement officials said on Wednesday.
The operation was carried out in towns, airports, and harbors and involved thousands of policemen from all 28 countries of the European Union and six non-European countries.
Police identified 200 victims of human trafficking and saved 30 Romanian minors from trafficking. Some faced forced worked in prostitution or begging gangs, Europol, Europe’s police organization, said.
“It’s the single largest coordinated assault on organized crime ever seen in Europe,” Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol, told a news conference at the organization’s headquarters.
He said the operation was made necessary by the increasing sophistication and interconnectedness of Europe’s crime groups, many of whom were using the hard-to-monitor “dark net” — or encrypted internet — to communicate with one another.
“Months in the planning, it was a carefully coordinated series of attacks on key nodal points and crime sectors that underpin the underground crime economy in Europe,” he said.
“What we have seen emerging is an integrated underground criminal economy,” he said.
Arrests were concentrated on criminal middlemen and go-betweens, as crime kingpins are not typically caught in sweeps but in operations designed to ensnare them.
Dubbed “Operation Archimedes,” 1,027 arrests were made between Sept. 15 and 23. Authorities seized 599 kilograms of cocaine, 200kg of heroin and 1.3 tonnes of cannabis.
The operation yielded leads that would result in further investigations and arrests, Europol said.
Authorities in United States and Colombia also helped in identifying new drug trafficking routes to Europe, including drugs increasingly being shipped in parcels sent by post.
THE CARABINIERI, ITALY’S MILITARY POLICE, USED A NEW SOFTWARE PLATFORM TO ANALYZE THE PHONE RECORDS OF ORGANIZED CRIME GROUPS. HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED.
There’s a reason why the NSA likes metadata so much. Metadata–the auxiliary data generated by every digital move you make–can track a person’s digital life in detail. Now a team of Italian academics are showing how metadata can reveal the structure of organized crime groups with a software tool called LogAnalysis, which combines information from mobile phone records with police databases. And among LogAnalysis’s first users is the Carabinieri, the Italian military police.
Emilio Ferrara, a postdoc at Indiana University, created LogAnalysis with three researchers from the University of Messina in Sicily. Ferrara explains that their platform “infers, with pretty high confidence, the roles of individuals involved in criminal activity from communication data, simply looking at patterns and network features.”
Here’s how it works: Police feed phone logs they obtain into LogAnalysis; those then get mashed up with mug shots, criminal records, and other proprietary information from police databases. This information then shapes the Carabinieri’s investigations by giving vital clues about intra-group relationships of an organized crime group believed to be behind robberies, extortions, and narcotics trafficking. It’s important to note that their paper anonymized all records, and did not identify which organized crime group Italian law enforcement were investigating.
It turns out that metadata can tell quite a lot about the way an organization is set up. Matt Unger, the chief digital officer of New York firm K2 Intelligence, explained over the phone to Fast Company that “with a good analytics platform, cell phone metadata reveals who the influencers are. They are the ones who send and receive the most communications, and you can also see the ripples they make in turn.”
A number of software tools are already available to intelligence agencies, law enforcement, military, and private investigators which apply network analysis to mobile phone metadata for their investigations. In the course of their paper, IBM i2’sCOPLINK and Analyst’s Notebook, Xanalys’s Link Explorer, and Palantir Governmentare all cited. The researchers, however, feel their software offers a specific need.
Ferrara believes that many investigative platforms law enforcement use are designed for counterterrorism and cybercrime first, with physical crime as a secondary priority. “Our system is focused on the analysis of communication data related to criminal events occurring in the physical/offline world, as opposed to cybercrime,” he says. “It has already proved to be an asset in real investigations related to robberies, murders, prostitution, bribery, and drugs trafficking.”
Organized crime helped Putin grab Crimea, and may open the way for him to take more of Russian-speaking Ukraine.
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