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Gaetano Fidanzati
Gaetano Fidanzati (; 6 September 1935 – 5 October 2013) was a Sicilian Mafia boss of the Resuttana '' mandamento'' in Palermo and heavily involved in drug trafficking. He was among the first Mafia bosses to establish a presence in Northern Italy, in particular Milan, and was the protagonist of the alliances between the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the American Cosa Nostra, the Neapolitan Camorra and the Colombian drug cartels. Gaetano Fidanzati was on the Italian Ministry of the Interior's most wanted list from 2008 until his arrest on 5 December 2009.Mafia, presi due superlatitanti La Repubblica, December 5, 2009 Drug trafficking Fidanzati and his four brothers hailed from Palermo's Arenella neighborhood. They formed a Mafia clan, said to be among th ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palermo
Palermo ( , ; scn, Palermu , locally also or ) is a city in southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Metropolitan City of Palermo, the city's surrounding metropolitan province. The city is noted for its history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old. Palermo is in the northwest of the island of Sicily, by the Gulf of Palermo in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The city was founded in 734 BC by the Phoenicians as ("flower"). Palermo then became a possession of Carthage. Two Greek colonies were established, known collectively as ; the Carthaginians used this name on their coins after the 5th centuryBC. As , the town became part of the Roman Republic and Empire for over a thousand years. From 831 to 1072 the city was under Arab rule in the Emirate of Sicily when the city became the capital of Sicily for the first time. During this time the city was known ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1960s Sicilian Mafia Trials
The 1960s Sicilian Mafia trials took place at the end of that decade in response to a rise in organized crime violence around the late 1950s and early 1960s. There were three major trials, each featuring multiple defendants, that saw hundreds of alleged Mafiosi on trial for dozens of crimes. From the authority's point of view, they were a failure; very few defendants were convicted, although later trials as well as information from ''pentiti'' confirmed most of those acquitted were Mafiosi members, and were guilty of many crimes including some of those they were acquitted of. Emanuele Notarbartolo was stabbed to death on a train in 1893. A number of suspected Mafiosi were rounded up and tried in 1900 of the murder, and though convicted they were acquitted on appeal due to a minor technicality. In the 1920s, Cesare Mori was sent to Sicily by Benito Mussolini to combat the Mafia, although Mori's crude method of imprisoning thousands of men – many of them innocent – without trial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Claire Sterling
Claire Sterling ( née Neikind; October 21, 1919 – June 17, 1995) was an American author and journalist whose work focused on crime, political assassination, and terrorism. Her theories on Soviet bloc involvement in international terrorism and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, presented in '' The Terror Network'' and ''The Time of the Assassins'', respectively, were politically influential and controversial. Life Sterling was born in Queens, New York City. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics at Brooklyn College, worked as a union organizer. After receiving a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1945, she became the Rome correspondent of "a fly-by-night American news agency." When it folded, she joined '' The Reporter'', which she wrote for until it ceased publication in 1968. Sterling began writing her second book after losing her job at ''The Reporter''; it was published in 1969. She also wrote for various newspapers and magazines, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boris Giuliano
Giorgio Boris Giuliano (; October 22, 1930 – July 21, 1979) was a police chief from Palermo, Sicily. He was the head of Palermo's Flying Squad. He was killed by the Sicilian Mafia while investigating heroin trafficking and money laundering. Not long before his death he had been one of the first Italian policemen to have attended the FBI academy at Quantico, Virginia.Sterling, ''Octopus'', p. 215-16''A Palermitan diary: Twenty years of reporting at the foot of Italy'', by Attilio Bolzoni inIl sacrificio di Boris Giuliano La Sicilia, July 21, 2013 His son Alessandro became head of the Milan and arrested old guard Mafioso |
Reparto Volanti
The Reparto volanti ("Mobile Division"), that dispatch the various Squadre Volanti (mobile squads or flying squad (lit.)), is a section of the ''Ufficio Prevenzione Generale e Soccorso Pubblico'' (Office of General Prevention and Public Aid) of the Italian State Police. Headed by a high ranking member of the State Police, they are present in every "Questura", the provincial office of the Public Safety Department, which is the ministerial branch Italian State Police belongs to. The same service is also performed by personnel of Police Precincts, whose first-response vehicles work alongside and under the same provincial dispatch office that resides in the Questura, making them all identical. All patrol vehicles used by this Division are specifically equipped for this kind of response, including reinforcing plates in the bodywork, especially in the doors, bulletproof and shatterproof windows and the iconic prisoner transport partition behind the first row of seats. Police precinc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sicilian Mafia Commission
The Sicilian Mafia Commission (Italian: ''Commissione provinciale''), known as Commissione or Cupola, is a body of leading Sicilian Mafia members to decide on important questions concerning the actions of, and settling disputes within the Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra. It is composed of representatives of a mandamento (Sicilian Mafia), mandamento (a district of three geographically contiguous Mafia families) that are called ''capo mandamento'' or ''rappresentante''. The Commission is not a central government of the Mafia, but a representative mechanism for consultation of independent Mafia families who decide by consensus. "Contrary to the wide-spread image presented by the media, these superordinate bodies of coordination cannot be compared with the executive boards of major legal firms. Their power is intentionally limited [and] it would be entirely wrong to see in the Cosa Nostra a centrally managed, internationally active Mafia holding company," according to criminologist Leti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medusa
In Greek mythology, Medusa (; Ancient Greek: Μέδουσα "guardian, protectress"), also called Gorgo, was one of the three monstrous Gorgons, generally described as winged human females with living venomous snakes in place of hair. Those who gazed into her eyes would turn to stone. Most sources describe her as the daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, although the author Hyginus makes her the daughter of Gorgon and Ceto. Medusa was beheaded by the Greek hero Perseus, who then used her head, which retained its ability to turn onlookers to stone, as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield. In classical antiquity, the image of the head of Medusa appeared in the evil-averting device known as the '' Gorgoneion''. According to Hesiod and Aeschylus, she lived and died on Sarpedon, somewhere near Cisthene. The 2nd-century BC novelist Dionysios Skytobrachion puts her somewhere in Libya, where Herodotus had said the Berbers originated her myth as part of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perseus
In Greek mythology, Perseus ( /ˈpɜːrsiəs, -sjuːs/; Greek: Περσεύς, translit. Perseús) is the legendary founder of Mycenae and of the Perseid dynasty. He was, alongside Cadmus and Bellerophon, the greatest Greek hero and slayer of monsters before the days of Heracles. He beheaded the Gorgon Medusa for Polydectes and saved Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus. He was the son of Zeus and the mortal Danaë, as well as the half-brother and great-grandfather of Heracles (as they were both children of Zeus, and Heracles' mother was descended from Perseus). Etymology Because of the obscurity of the name "Perseus" and the legendary character of its bearer, most etymologists presume that it might be pre-Greek; however, the name of Perseus's native city was Greek and so were the names of his wife and relatives. There is some idea that it descended into Greek from the Proto-Indo-European language. In that regard Robert Graves has proposed the only Greek derivation avai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South America's southeastern coast. "Buenos Aires" can be translated as "fair winds" or "good airs", but the former was the meaning intended by the founders in the 16th century, by the use of the original name "Real de Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre", named after the Madonna of Bonaria in Sardinia, Italy. Buenos Aires is classified as an alpha global city, according to the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) 2020 ranking. The city of Buenos Aires is neither part of Buenos Aires Province nor the Province's capital; rather, it is an autonomous district. In 1880, after decades of political infighting, Buenos Aires was federalized and removed from Buenos Aires Province. The city limits were enlarged to include t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia Clan
The Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan () was a Mafia clan of the Cosa Nostra and held a key position in the illicit drug trade and money laundering for Cosa Nostra in the 1980s and 1990s. The Italian press baptized the clan as "The Rothschilds of the Mafia" or "The Bankers of Cosa Nostra"."The Rothschilds of the Mafia on Aruba" '''', Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer 1997 Italian prosecutors described the Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan as an "international holding ... a holding which secures certain services for the Sicilian Cosa Nostra as a whole: drug-trafficking routes and channels for money laundering." The clan is " ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gaspare Mutolo
Gaspare Mutolo (Palermo, February 5, 1940) is a Sicilian mafioso, also known as "Asparino".'Parlai con Borsellino e lui fu ucciso' La Repubblica, 8 June 1994 In 1992 he became a (state witness against the Mafia). He was the first mafioso who spoke about the connections between Cosa Nostra and Italian politicians. Mutolo’s declarations contributed to the indictment of Italy’s former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and to an understanding of the context of the 1992 Mafia murders of the politician [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pentito
''Pentito'' (; lit. "repentant"; plural: ''pentiti'') is used colloquially to designate collaborators of justice in Italian criminal procedure terminology who were formerly part of criminal organizations and decided to collaborate with a public prosecutor. The judicial category of ''pentiti'' was originally created in 1970s to combat violence and terrorism during the period of left- and right-wing terrorism known as the Years of Lead. During the 1986–87 Maxi Trial, and after the testimony of Tommaso Buscetta, the term was increasingly applied to former members of organized crime who had abandoned their organization and started helping investigators. Role and benefits In exchange for the information they deliver, ''pentiti'' receive shorter sentences for their crimes, in some cases even freedom. In the Italian judicial system, ''pentiti'' can obtain personal protection, a new name, and some money to start a new life in another place, possibly abroad. This practice is comm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
