Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Major Anti-Mafia Success In Italy Is Making Skilled Italian Police In Demand Elsewhere
Posted by Peter Quennell
Gamechanger
The mafias really are gone from the United States and Canada, and in Italy it is mostly likewise.
So the mafias have been moving elsewhere - the UK, Germany, Netherlands, especially Malta - and Italian police are being invited to spearhead huge sweeps against them.
Hundreds of special forces arrested at least 84 men and women overnight in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in the largest-ever pan-European investigation into organized crime. Raids were also carried out in South America as part of the sting operation. More than three tons of cocaine and 140 kilograms of ecstasy were also seized, police said.
UK-based expert Felia Allum explains the organizational adjustments.
When I walk around London, I wonder how many of the busy nail bars, shops and restaurants are merely fronts for organised crime. For I was once told by a former member of the Neapolitan mafia: “The ambition for [an Italian] mafia member, is to go abroad, and particularly, England.”
They consider the UK to be an attractive destination because it is relatively easy to set up a company, and its legal system does not recognise “mafia membership” as a crime….
In 1991, British police based in Rome warned of the presence of Italian mafias in the UK. Two years later, the French parliament reported on the fight against the mafia’s attempt to penetrate France. Similar warnings were being made in the Netherlands.
But it wasn’t until 2012 that the European Parliament really addressed the situation. The following year, Europol (the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation) finally published an “Italian Organized Crime Threat Assessment”.
It attempted to fill the “important information gap” which exists around the activities of Italian mafias in Europe. As Europol itself noted, the “difficulty in collecting information” highlights the fact that mafias operate “under the radar” outside Italy.
Finally, in November 2018, Europol set up a specific operational network focusing on Italian mafia activities abroad, with the Italian Anti-Mafia Police playing a leading role.
Malta is fighting an influx similar to that in the Dominican Republic, a Raffaele Sollecito hangout till his uncle bought it.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/22/19 at 05:06 PM in
Comments
Thank God the Mafia has been trounced. I’ve often thought of how horrible it would be to run some honest little shop that barely makes a living, only to have 2 disgusting thugs walk in and demand “protection money” from me or threaten to break my kneecaps, burning my shop to the ground or hurt my children if I didn’t comply with their theivery.
If I went to police, maybe some of them are terrified of these same bullies or have been paid off to turn a blind eye to my cries for help. With Mafia in control, my whole life would be a capitulation to pure evil, or I’d be pushed to consider violence myself. It’s bad enough when one lone robber runs into my store waving a knife or handgun and cleans out my entire labors for the week in my cash drawer. But if such thieves get organized and work in large numbers and pay bribes, what hope does a single man have? he is a clay pot crushed under the horses’ hooves and the whole land reeks with evil unfairness and eventually hopelessness and mass corruption. The few brave people who have put their lives in danger to break this chain, especially in the early years, are true heroes.
In recent post about Netflix omitting so many facts in their Knox “documentary”, I reread Mignini’s response to Judy Bachrach who crowed after she saw the Netflix perversion of truth. Mignini was glad to push back against the slurs against him and the distortions Netflix used to paint the prosecution against Knox as wildly unfounded.
As Mignini said, Netflix left out one important element (he graciously said it may have been due to timing of Cassation’s ruling) but Netflix left out that Fifth Panel of Cassation confirmed as PROVEN FACT….yes look at that again, say it again, PROVEN FACT…that Knox was present at the “scene of the crime when the crime was committed”. Now that’s a big omission to leave out of a documentary on the case. Cassation also confirmed that Meredith was murdered by more than one person. “Rudy acted together with others”, the Court ruled. The court also agreed with the lower court that “Knox heard Meredith’s harrowing scream”. That puts her at the scene of the crime as it unfolds, she is there. She is there! This is a huge Netflix omission. Cassation also confirms that Knox had victim’s blood on her hands and washed it off in the cottage. This is a huge Netflix omission!
Mignini goes on to highlight the fact that the High Court raised doubt only about the particulars of “Knox’s active participation in the action of killing.”
Mignini reminds us and Netflix and Judy Bachrach that Knox lied voluntarily and accused an innocent man of the crime. That is also missing from Netflix version.
Mignini was proud to receive handshakes and recognition from the Perugian people in 2013 for how strong and unwavering he stood year after year against “difficulties and attacks” against him for his work on the Narducci case. He again withstood harsh pressure by international media after the Kercher case. He has a proven track record of resisting wrongful influence. He stands on his integrity. So he was disconcerted to find himself blasted for being biased against Knox for her low morals, when he has been inured to such bias by decades of legal training and knows how to remain objective, and how to distinguish a person’s morality whether high or low, from the issue of whether that person has crossed a codified law and committed an actual crime. That is all that matters.
Mignini was surprised he said at how “a certain American environment…keeps going on in a raving manner about this case.” In doing so, they tried to make Mignini a key character in their “fictional story”. Strange, since the Kercher investigation was “based on the work of a number of judiciaries” who all had decision making powers “equal or greater than” Mignini’s own. So any of these judges could have ‘stopped the investigation or changed its orientation”, he says. By no means was some singular obsession the media tried to nail onto Mignini, the force that directed the prosecution of Knox and her Catholic beau. But the media wanted a bogey-man as Peter Quennell aptly summed up.
The simplistic media wanted a single bogeyman to focus against. They weren’t interested in the fact that Mignini had Manuela Comodi not as a deputy but as an equal prosecutor, and that Mignini and Comodi were not the only two who determined just cause to prosecute Knox, and this was based on her lack of alibi, her blood at the scene, and much more than rumors of her revolving door of men and marijuana. Facts drove the case, not moral issues.
The very understated Mignini, never one to namecall, remarks only that he has never had the misfortune to meet the Vanity Fair writer, Judy Bachrach who seriously contorted the true facts to cheerlead a Netflix show.
Posted by Hopeful on 01/22/19 at 06:41 PM | #
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