- JON VENABLES as a child -

Liverpool crime lords say the fiend, who murdered two-year-old James Bulger and swapped sick snaps after his release, shames their city.

Venables, 27, now back inside, has a secret identity and is guarded round the clock.

But underworld bosses have told henchmen serving sentences to hunt him down.

They have put the word out that whoever gets him will pocket a six-figure sum.

A source told the Daily Star: “There’s nowhere he can hide.

“There are guys in every prison in the country and one thing’s for sure – he’s in one of them.

“It’s just a matter of time before he gets the punishment he deserves.

“The word is there is £100,000 for anyone who kills or seriously injures him. He’d better start praying.’’

Venables and Robert Thompson, who tortured James to death in 1993 when they were 10, were freed in 2001.

Booze and drug-addicted Venables was jailed for another two years last week for downloading and swapping child porn.

He is likely to get a second new identity and protection, costing taxpayers £2million.

But our gangland source said he was more at risk in jail.

He added: “It may take weeks, it may take months but he will get what is coming to him.’’

A Ministry of Justice source said: “It is our duty to protect all inmates. We will take whatever steps are necessary.’’

Source: dailystar.co.uk

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According to a report in yesterday’s Rome daily, La Repubblica , Matteo Messina Denaro, currently the most wanted Sicilian godfather, may well have used the packed grandstand of Palermo’s Renzo Barbera football stadium during a vital Serie A game as the perfect rendezvous for an important Mafia meeting.

Following the arrests of Bernardo Provenzano in 2006 and his designated successor, Salvatore Lo Piccolo, in 2007, Cosa Nostra is believed to have been seriously reorganised by Messina Denaro, who now functions as the “boss of bosses” in Sicily.

Reportedly very careful and discreet in his movements, Messina Denaro is believed to communicate with associates by way of cryptic notes which he burns within minutes of receiving them.

Perhaps it was his obsession with his own security which prompted the choice of the football stadium. After all, what could be easier than to pass unnoticed in a crowd of 60,000-plus people especially if, like thousands of others, you are wearing a Palermo team shirt.

Indeed, by all accounts, Messina Denaro does not even care for football.

A police informant has claimed that the Godfather attended the Palermo v Sampdoria Serie A game on May 9th. Played on the second-last day of the season, it represented a virtual play-off for the Serie A fourth place, a seasonal finish that guarantees a place in the lucrative UEFA Champions League. (For the record, the game ended 1-1 with Sampdoria going on to qualify for the Champions League).

Police believe that Messina Denaro, who comes from Trapani in western Sicily, was summoned to Palermo urgently by a number of younger Palermitan godfathers keen to flex their muscles, perhaps with a series of bomb attacks on carabinieri stations on the island and on the Palermo courthouse.

Messina Denaro is reputed to be something of a bomb expert, having been involved in the Mafia’s 1993-94 bombing campaign in Rome, Florence and Milan.

Police sources believe he warned his associates against the repeat of that 1993-94 campaign, arguing that it would bring too much “heat” on to Cosa Nostra by way of police surveillance. Mafia experts are taking the report of a meeting of the Cosa Nostra commissione at a football match very seriously.

Democratic Party (PD) senator Giuseppe Lumia, a former head of parliament’s anti-Mafia commission, said: “We’ve got to keep our eyes wide open and exercise the utmost caution. It’s vital that there now be a serious evaluation of these reports suggesting that Cosa Nostra wants to strike the state again.

“Matteo Messina Denaro is . . . a godfather who has contacts with the world of politics, high finance and the apparatus of the state and he is well capable of rebuilding Cosa Nostra.”

Source: irishtimes.com

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- N'drangheta arrest -

In addition to mob association, the gang are accused of aiding and abetting fugitives.

Authorities also confiscated millions of euros worth of assets.

It follows the much bigger crackdown against the syndicate earlier this month. That saw some 300 alleged ‘Ndrangheta members arrested and weapons seized.

Codenamed ‘Robin Redbreast’, the arrests relate to a raid in Calabria a few years ago.

Video footage showed the moment police entered the bunker of two top Mafia fugitives, Gregorio and Giuseppe Bellocco. The hideout, only accessible via an electronic opening, was fully equipped with electricity and a hydraulic system.

The two cousins used the underground network until their arrest in 2005 and 2007 respectively.

It is during that time that Gregorio is alleged to have written and recorded a CD about the criminal group and its associates, which police are saying is a key piece of evidence in the latest arrests.

Source: euronews.net

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- MS 13 -

Umana was indicted by a federal grand jury on June 23, 2008. Witnesses testified at his trial that Umana was a veteran member of MS-13 who illegally came to Charlotte to assist in reorganizing the Charlotte MS-13 cell. Witnesses also testified that on Dec. 8, 2007, while in Las Jarochitas, a family-run restaurant in Greensboro, N.C., Umana shot Ruben Garcia Salinas fatally in the chest and Manuel Garcia Salinas in the head. Witnesses testified that the shootings took place after the Garcia Salinas brothers had “disrespected” Umana’s gang signs by calling them “fake.” Firing three more shots in the restaurant, according to trial testimony, Umana injured another individual with his gunfire. Trial testimony and evidence showed that Umana later fled back to Charlotte with MS-13 assistance. Umana was arrested five days later in possession of the murder weapon. Additional evidence and testimony from the trial revealed that while Umana was incarcerated pending trial, he coordinated attempts to kill witnesses and informants. During trial, Umana attempted to bring a knife with him to the courtroom, which was discovered by U.S. Marshals prior to Umana being transported to the courthouse.

“Violent gangs like MS-13 terrorize communities across this country,” said Assistant Attorney General Breuer. “As the evidence in this case showed, murder and intimidation are a way of life for some members of this gang. Although there is no punishment that will bring back the lives taken by the defendant, this series of prosecutions of MS-13, and the punishments imposed, should make abundantly clear to gang members that we will not let them operate with impunity. As today’s sentence shows, their criminal actions have serious consequences.”
“The imposition of the death penalty – the harshest sentence in the criminal justice system – is a sobering event for all involved in the investigation and prosecution,” said U.S. Attorney Tompkins. “The death penalty in this case is fair, just, and merited. The U.S. Attorney’s Office, based upon the facts and evidence, advocated for the death penalty, and the jury agreed that Umana deserved nothing less than the death penalty. I commend the investigators and prosecutors for engaging in this critical process with professionalism and integrity.”
“While the outcome of today’s hearing does not change that two innocent people are dead, it will hopefully bring closure to the families and loved ones of the men who were killed and the many other victims left in the wake of the MS-13 crime spree. This case has spanned international borders, taken years of investigation and thousands of hours of arduous work. It proves our law enforcement partners are determined to bring those who break the law to justice, regardless of the obstacles that may block the path,” said Owen D. Harris, Special Agent in Charge of the Charlotte Division of the FBI.

“Our goals as law enforcement officers are to put an end to gang violence and see that those who are responsible are punished. This sentence serves as a reminder that gang violence has harsh consequences, and those who choose to be involved in gangs need to understand that their actions will not be tolerated. We have the motivation and determination to keep pursuing gang members. That motivation creates a safer Charlotte,” said Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Rodney Monroe.

The investigation of the MS-13 enterprise in Charlotte has led to charges against 26 MS-13 members. In addition to Umana, six defendants were convicted at trial in January 2010, and 18 others have pleaded guilty. One defendant remains in custody in El Salvador. To date, 11 of the 25 defendants convicted have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to 20 years.

The case was investigated by the Charlotte Safe Streets Task Force. The case was prosecuted by Chief Criminal Assistant U.S. Attorney Jill Westmoreland Rose of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina, and Trial Attorney Sam Nazzaro from the Criminal Division’s Gang Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Don Gast and Adam Morris of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina were also members of the government’s trial team.

Source: prnewswire.com

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- Wanted Dino Soerel -

Dino Soerel, 49, also allegedly behind shipments of cocaine, heroin and cannabis to the UK, has quit his Amsterdam base and is known to have links to Manchester.

Cops in Holland have asked Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency and Interpol to help find the gangland “godfather”.

It is thought he may have disguised himself with plastic surgery.

A British police source said: “We understand from colleagues in Holland that this is one bad man.

“We’re told he doesn’t shrink from violence.”

Source: thesun.co.uk

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- Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem was known in previous decades as a home for the Mafia. But the mob influence has faded. -

It was one of the first grim acts to be documented on Pleasant Avenue, a street that once had trouble living up to its name.

Two years later, in 1884, a day-old newborn was abandoned on the avenue, wrapped up in newspapers, his throat cut. In 1935, Thomas D’Auria, 20, attempted to intervene during an argument between his parents at their house on Pleasant Avenue. His father killed him, stabbing him with a bread knife.

In 1949, Candido Perry made the mistake of reducing the price of a beer to five cents a glass at his Pleasant Avenue bar and grill. Some men with an apparent interest in competitive pricing assaulted Mr. Perry and smashed up the place.

Over the next few decades, Pleasant Avenue would become known as one of the most famous gangland stretches in the history of the mob. It was where Anthony Salerno, known as Fat Tony, ran the Genovese crime family before he was convicted of racketeering in 1986. It was where Francis Ford Coppola filmed the scene in “The Godfather” when Sonny Corleone beats up his brother-in-law.

On Sunday afternoon, a city’s focus once again returned to Pleasant Avenue, for entirely different reasons.

A new Target store was opening. Fifty years after a teenager who lived on Pleasant Avenue was pulled from the East River with 124 stab wounds on his body in 1960, nearly seven years after a man was shot at Rao’s restaurant at Pleasant Avenue and 114th Street for heckling a Broadway soprano in 2003, crowds of shoppers packed the neighborhood. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal was on sale, two for $4.

The Target’s grand opening represents a new era in the life of one of New York City’s most misnamed thoroughfares. Target’s advertisements for the new store, at the East River Plaza at 517 East 117th Street, featured a drawing of a little gray bird resting on a Pleasant Avenue street sign. The soundtrack of the day came not from police sirens but from the jingle-jangle of the Soft Sensations ice cream truck parked outside Rao’s. A bodega owner fiddled with his iPhone. The only Tony people knew was the one on the cereal boxes.

A 14-year-old boy who lives on the avenue said he heard something about the street being a mob stronghold years ago, but he did not know the particulars. “The Mafia is no more,” he said. “No gangs. Just regular people.” He could not talk for long. He was on his way to Target.

New York City’s streets and the residents who live on them have at least one thing in common: Their reputations can change, for good or bad. There were three homicides reported last year in the 25th Precinct, down from 35 in 1990.

Pleasant Avenue is no longer an Italian enclave, but a black, Puerto Rican and Mexican one. It is home to the Love Café, a laundromat, bodegas, apartment buildings, community gardens and a halal food cart. It is a short street, spanning just six blocks from 114th Street to 120th Street near Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. At the southern end is Jefferson Park, and at the north are the red-brick buildings of the Wagner Houses public housing complex.

John Vitale, 51, grew up on Pleasant Avenue. He remembers when there were five Italian social clubs on the avenue, when even the car thieves stayed away out of fear of stealing a mob man’s vehicle. “I’ve seen guys leave cars running, brand-new Caddies,” said Mr. Vitale, who now lives in the Bronx but still visits the old neighborhood. “Nobody’s touching it.”

Though the mob influence in the neighborhood has faded, that old reputation lingers in small ways. One 56-year-old Puerto Rican man recalled the bad old days of the Mafia, and the dividing lines that kept East Harlem’s blacks, Puerto Ricans and Italians separated. Asked his name, he declined to give it, worried about the consequences all these years later.

It was shortly before 2 p.m. as shoppers strolled past a 68-year-old man sitting in the shade of the trees along Pleasant Avenue. He is one of the few Italian-Americans who still lives on the avenue, and he remembered the street’s Italian past fondly. “It was just like any other old Italian neighborhood,” he said. “People had respect for each other. Not like today.”

The man was happy to give the name of his pit bull, Cinnamon, but declined to provide his own (“You can ask, but you’re not getting it,” he added).

He pointed to the corner where Mr. Coppola shot the fight scene in “The Godfather.” He has lived all his life on Pleasant Avenue, except for the 27 years he was incarcerated. He was asked if the time he served was related to the mob history of the neighborhood.

“No,” he responded with a chuckle, “that was related to me.”

Source: nytimes.com

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- Surveillance footage released by police showed the greying boss being 'sworn in' under a statue of the Virgin Mary at Polsi near Reggio Calabria -

Monsignor Giuseppe Fiorini Morosini, bishop of Locri Gerace in Calabria, spoke out after more than 300 alleged mobsters – including the 80-year-old “Godfather” Domenico Oppedisano – were arrested in a police blitz earlier this month.

Surveillance footage released by police showed the greying boss being “sworn in” under a statue of the Virgin Mary at Polsi near Reggio Calabria.

In his letter to bosses of southern Italy’s N’drangheta crime group, Monsignor Morosini demanded that they stop gathering at the shrine.
“We have seen images of your illegal gatherings and divisions of power at the shrine to the Madonna at Polsi,” he wrote.

“We had always thought that these meetings at holy shrines were folklore but now we have had to re-think.

“What sense is there in having meetings and ceremonies at a shrine to the Madonna, where while the faithful pray and reflect in God, you plan your activities which God and the Virgin Mary cannot bless?” he asked.

He ended his letter by reminding the mobsters that the Church was “always willing to welcome you with open arms because it is the only institution that believes in the possibility of your conversion”.

Religion and the Mafia have a long shared history. Mobsters follow rituals including the burning prayer cards of saints while promising: “As this card burns so will I if I betray secrets”. Members of the mafia are known to carry prayer cards in the belief they will offer divine protection from police or enemies.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

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- Mexican Federal Police in Ciudad Juarez, 2008 -

MEXICO CITY, Mexico — The father and son team of security guards was at its usual post guarding an explosives magazine in Durango, northern Mexico, when the assailants arrived.

Two white Suburban-type SUV’s rolled up and 15 to 20 masked men stepped out bearing automatic rifles.

“The security guards were ordered at gunpoint to open the magazine, and the gunmen made off with a large quantity of Tovex brand explosives and electric detonators,” reads a report by the United States Bomb Data Center obtained by GlobalPost.

The theft was in February 2009 on a site owned by a Texan company in Mexico.

On July 15 this year, the same type of explosives went off in a car in Ciudad Juarez, killing a federal police officer, doctor and civilian.

While car bombs have long been used in Iraq and Colombia, this was the first effective use of such a weapon against police in Mexico.

It sent waves of fear across Juarez and the nation, because car bombs have a terrifying potential to hit civilians not involved in the drug wars.

Mexican police confirmed last week that Tovex explosives were set off by a mobile phone-operated detonator, and said the explosives were likely stolen from a U.S. company.

If it was from the same magazine raided in Durango, it would implicate the gangsters have plenty more of the material.

The report states that 267.75 pounds or 900 cartridges of the explosives as well as 230 electric detonators were taken. That attack used just 22 pounds to make the bomb.

Stoking these fears, gangsters sprayed graffiti on the walls of Juarez, promising more such attacks.

“We still have car bombs,” said one message in black spray paint.

The report said the assailants threatened the guards and their families over the incident.

“The leader of the armed group took the guards’ address and threatened to return to kill the guard and his family if they reported the crime during the 30 minutes it would take the group to flee. The group initially intended to take the father with them but did not do so after he determined the guard did not know how to use explosives,” it said.

The report also warned back last year that the theft could lead to bomb attacks.

“This incident has the potential to lead to further explosives-related incidents in the region, especially if the armed subjects are connected to a Drug Trafficking Organization,” it said.

In Ciudad Juarez, 250 soldiers scoured the city for explosive material.

The troops used British-made molecular-seeking devices that can detect explosives. However, they had located no bomb-making material by Thursday.

American agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were also in Juarez aiding Mexican officials with the investigation.

“This bomb shows how the conflict in Mexico is escalating,” said an American law enforcement official involved in the struggle against cartels. “The gangsters are fighting police and soldiers with body armor. So they have started using bombs to hit them. But bombs do not discriminate and they often harm civilians.”

The explosives were set off using a ruthless trap.

First, the gangsters kidnapped a civilian, dressed him in police uniform, shot him and then dumped his body. When the federal police came close they set off the car bomb.

“Such an attack has implications for anyone attending crime scenes, including police, paramedics and journalists,” the official said. “They have to think about the possibility they are being lured into an IED.”

Mexican police blamed the attack on La Linea, a gang of assassins who work for the Juarez drug-smuggling cartel.

They say it was in retaliation for the arrest of alleged La Linea commander Jesus Acosta, a.k.a. El 35.

Federal police had released an interrogation video in which Acosta confessed to working as a cartel hit man.

It was the latest of several videos of captured cartel members describing how they allegedly set up murders and carved limbs and heads off victims.

Critics accuse the police of obtaining the videos through torture and say they fail to provide clear evidence while provoking gangsters to retaliate.

Graffiti apparently sprayed by the La Linea accused the federal police of working with their arch rivals the Sinaloa Cartel, of Mexico’s most notorious mobster Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman.

One message addressed American officials, demanding they investigate the corruption.

“FBI and DEA. Go and investigate authorities that are giving support to the Sinaloa Cartel,” said the message on the wall of an elementary school. “If not, we will put more car bombs.”

Source: tucsonsentinel.com

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-Russian Mafia Narco Sub -

Surprisingly sophisticated homemade “Narco subs” are the drug cartels’ latest tool for smuggling drugs from Latin America into the U.S. Although cartels once relied on speed boats to outrun authorities, they have shifted their focus to submersible vessels that are hard for surface vessels to spot. One of the first such craft intercepted was this Russian-designed submarine, confiscated by police on September 7, 2000 while under construction on the outskirts of Bogota. The submarine could have had the capacity to carry at 150 metric tons of cocaine or heroin. A Colombian military official said Russian-language documents found alongside the partially completed, 100-foot-long vessel led authorities to conclude that “the Russian Mafia or Russian technicians” were involved in its construction

Source: abcnews.go.com

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- Local 608 Mafia Corruption -

Murray recently returned from Ireland after the Feds put the heat on him to testify against the union bigs in a case that is straight out of ‘The Sopranos.’

Court documents show a long time pattern of huge bribes, threats by Italians and Irish, and rigged job bids facilitated by 608, and Murray knows where all the bodies are.

He is all over the indictment as contractor No. 1, and holds the fate of many of those being pursued in his hands.

Murray had gone to Ireland hoping to escape the Feds, but it soon became evident that he could run but not hide.

His return has already played a role with John Greaney, former president of Local 608, who admitted sharing bribes with 608 leader Michael Forde. Greaney has turned evidence against Forde and fellow union official Brian Hayes while pleading guilty to a numerous crimes tied to 15 years of labor racketeering. Greaney, 50, admitted he took huge payoffs from four contractors. He also admitted lying under oath to deny the scheme and helping to obstruct a federal investigation of corruption at the carpenters union the District Council.

Forde served as secretary-treasurer there until he was busted last year. Ironically, Forde beat a similar rap a few years ago, but it hardly seems likely this time. Manhattan federal Magistrate Judge Henry Pittman had warned Greaney that he faces 155 years in the slammer for his 13 felonies, but now under terms of his deal, prosecutors will seek leniency if he cooperates fully. Greaney will remain free on bail through August 20.

He is the seventh person to plead guilty in the case.

Forde, Hayes and contractors’ rep Joseph Olivieri — who Feds say is a member of the Genovese crime family –are set for trial in September.

Source: irishcentral.com

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