The Toughest Guy in Sicily is Gay.

Governor Rosario Crocetta--or Presidente della Regione Siciliana--elected in October 2012, is the unlikeliest man  to govern the testosterone-fueled Mafiosi Sicily as he is not only anti-mafia, but  openly gay.. Yet, despite the two strikes against him, he won the  support of the people with his accomplishments during his anti-mafia crusade as Gela’s mayor for seven years (2003-2009).  During that time, Crocetta purged the city government of  this dangerous entity, and persuaded many shopkeepers to quit paying extortion fees.  In addition, as Gela's mayor, he put the brakes on the single-bidding contract system that left the city’s garbage collection under Stidda control. He also served on the EU’s Anti-Mafia Commission. Needless to say, he's made a very dangerous enemy, and has fortunately survived three assassination attempts.  Still, Crocetta said his election victory as Sicily's governor means "the Mafia can pack its bags."

“Back when he was mayor of a coastal town plagued by mob violence, Crocetta took on the dons, combating the ingrained practice of pizzo, or forced protection payments, while helping put hundreds of gangsters behind bars. His anti-mafia revolution led crime boss Daniele Emmanuello to call for his assassination, with police subsequently arresting a series of mobsters for plots against his life.

A devoted Catholic, Crocetta claims that southern Italy is "less homophobic than the north." His sexuality rarely became a dominant issue during his governor’s campaign, but it was there, just beneath the surface, and on occasion, even made the headlines. Nevertheless, as a matter of contention, homophobia paled in comparison to the act of declaring "war" on La Cosa Nostra. Not too long ago, anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino attempted to serve a far-reaching blow to the Mafia with the introduction of 'mafia association' as a charge before they were murdered in 1992.

“Freedom is about the moment you stand up and rebel. Sicily has stood up and is on its feet. What is happening here? A cultural revolution. I don’t know if we’ll succeed, but it’s about time we tried.” -- Rosario Crocetta

Links:

Inside The Sicilian Mafia's Drug Empire

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Meet the Exonerated: Massachusetts Death Row

Laurence Adams spent 30 years in prison--one of those years on death row--for a crime he did not commit. Adams escaped execution because Massachusetts had abolished capital punishment soon after he was sentenced.

In March 1974, Laurence Adams was convicted and sentenced to death as one of allegedly three men who had beaten, robbed, and killed a subway porter in Boston in 1972.

In March 1973, Harry Ambers confessed to the crime and implicated Adams along with his own brother, Warren Ambers as his accomplices. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts eliminated the death penalty one year after Adams’ conviction and his sentence was changed to life imprisonment.

Adams was further implicated in the murder by the testimony of Prosecution witnesses, Wyatt Moore and his sister Lynne (Suzie) Moore, who testified that Adams had admitted to committing the crime with the Ambers brothers. Exculpatory evidence in the files of the Boston Police Department was not revealed until decades later. This included the fact that Suzie recanted her trial testimony, admitting that she had testified to help get her brother out of jail. Wyatt was being held on serious felony charges, (and he was released the day after Adams’ trial). In fact, Wyatt Moore was in prison on the same date Adams allegedly confessed his participation in the crime to the Moores. Police further withheld a sworn statement from a witness who said that Harry Ambers had confessed that he and his brother Warren alone had committed the murder.

In May, 2004, the Superior Court Justice allowed a Motion for Postconviction Relief and ordered a new trial because records, witness statements, and police reports that had not been disclosed were considered newly discovered evidence. However, in June the district attorney announced that, “the state was dropping the case because witnesses are dead and physical evidence is lacking,” (Boston Herald, June 8, 2004, at 26). Adams was released after 30 years of incarceration.

Lawyer Johnson Massachusetts Conviction: 1971, Charges Dismissed: 1982
Lawyer Johnson was sentenced to death by an all white jury for the murder of James Christian, a white victim. In 1982, the charges were dropped when a previously silent eyewitness, Dawnielle Montiero, who was 10 years old when the murder was committed, says the real killer, Kenneth Myers, was the man who testified against Johnson in two previous trials, the state's chief witness as the actual killer.

Johnson has said all along that he was not at the scene, but in two trials could not prove it so he spent ten years incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.

In 1983, a bill was filed to obtain compensation for Johnson's wrongful conviction. (Commonwealth v. Johnson, 429 N.E.2d 726 (1982)).

“In an interview yesterday in his mother's house, where he has lived since he was released in February on bail, Johnson said that "anger destroys," but still he is bitter about the legal system that twice convicted him, once to death, and once to life in prison. He accused prosecutors of manipulating both the jury and the testimony because they cared only about getting a conviction, not about the truth.

"It was a legal lynching," he said. The prosecution, he said, "fabricated and conspired" with Meyers. Both juries were all white; the murder victim was white, too, and Johnson, who is black, said the racial fears of the jurors were played on by the prosecution.

"I totally believed in the system of justice," he said. "My faith in the system is gone."

 

Louis Greco died in prison following a 1965 Chelsea murder conviction and was posthumously exonerated.

Louis Greco joined the Army before World War II, became a professional prizefighter, and was sent off to combat in the South Pacific. He won two Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart and came back disabled for life with a shattered ankle and no future in the ring.

With a sixth grade education, he did what a lot of broken-down fighters did in that era, he sold his muscle as an enforcer and worked as a repo man for the mob.

In 1965, Louis Greco and his co-defendants were convicted in the murder of a small-time hoodlum named Teddy Deegan in a Chelsea alley. The prosecution charged Louis Greco with being the shooter and the three others as accessories to conspiracy. Greco was sentenced to death, as were Limone and Tameleo.

Greco submitted himself to eight different lie detector tests administered by outside experts and passed all eight of them. He wasn't even in Massachusetts at the time of the shooting; he was in Florida. Judge Gertner would declare that the FBI had deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence at the 1968 trial: namely, that its star witness, a contract killer for the Mob, was telling considerably less than the whole truth. The Justice Department task force's discovered compelling new evidence that Greco and his co-defendants were actually innocent of the murder of Edward Deegan.

Peter Limone Massachusetts Conviction: 1968, Charges Dismissed: 2001
Thirty -three years after being convicted and sentenced to death for a 1965 murder, Peter Limone's conviction was overturned (Commonwealth v. Limone, 2001 Mass. Super. LEXIS 7 (2001)) and the case against him officially dropped.

The move came as a result of a Justice Department task force's discovery of compelling new evidence that Limone and his co-defendants Joseph Salvati, Henry Tamelo, and Louis Greco were actually innocent of the murder of Edward Deegan.

In 1968, all four were convicted and Limone was sentenced to die in Massachusetts' electric chair, but was spared in 1974 when Massachusetts abolished the death penalty and his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Salvati, who was released from prison in 1997 when the governor commuted his sentence, received word from prosecutors that they were dropping the case against him as well. Tamelo and Greco both died in prison.

At trial, the main witness against the four men was Joseph Barboza, a hit man cooperating with prosecutors, who later admitted that he had fabricated much of his testimony. The recently revealed FBI documents show that informants had told the FBI before the murder that Deegan would soon be killed and by whom, and a memorandum after the crime listed the men involved. Neither list included Limone, Salvati, Tamelo or Greco. (New York Times, 2/2/01 and Boston Herald, 1/21/01)

Henry "The Referee" Temeleo  was one of the founding members of the Boston criminal activities along with Phil Buccola and Joe Lombardo. Henry Tamaelo was also a member of the Bonanno Family and was the underboss of Family boss Raymond Patriarca in the 1950's till the end of the 1960's. In 1967 he and Patriarca were arrested for the murder of bookmaker Willie Marfeo. Before the trial's conclusion, Tameleo, along with Peter Limone, Louis Greco and Jospeh Salvati were indicted for the murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan on March 12, 1965. In 1968, all four men were found guily of the Deegan murder in the Superior Court of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and sentenced to death by the state. This penalty was later reduced to life in prison, where Tameleo died in 1985.

By 2000, all charges were dismissed against Tameleo and the other accused men, amid a flurry of accusations of a government frame-up and cover-up extending over thirty years. In 2007, a federal judge in Boston awarded damages of $101.7 million to the four men who were wrongly convicted for Deegan's murder in 1965 after Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents H. Paul Rico, Dennis Condon, John Morris, and John Connolly took affirmative steps to withhold evidence of their innocence in order to protect FBI informants Vincent Flemmi and Joseph Barboza. $13 million went to the estate of Enrico Tameleo, specifically his son, Saverio, as administrator of the Tameleo estate, and Tameleo's wife Jeanette.

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Counter Intelligence and the Deep State

The deep state can be defined as the secret structure that steers defense and foreign policy behind the facade of democracy. It’s.all of the ways the affluent—private wealth--influence policy, placing themselves above the law. The deep state in America is more complicated than it is in other countries. It is the complex of power exerted off camera by people who are not elected, who are not part of the Constitution or the bureauocracy, but who have real power and assert themselves in American politics.


Counter-Intelligence: II - The Deep State from S DN on Vimeo.

Some highlights:

War on Drugs:

Wherever you declare a war on drugs, you get more drugs, not less drugs.

In Columbia, ten years after President Bush declared a war on drugs,  the amount of cocaine production increased more than three times the amount before his declaration.

A US Senate staff report has estimated that $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through US banks.

The London Independent reported in 2004 that drug trafficking constitutes ‘the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade’.

According to US Justice Department records obtained by the Guardian, one bank alone, Wachovia, which is now part of Wells Fargo, laundered $383 billion drug dollars between May 2004 and May 2007

The “crime” of drug possession accounts for one in four persons imprisoned in the US. According to some estimates, drugs and/or drug related crimes account for over half of all criminal offenses.

Today, a marijuana smoker is arrested every 38 seconds. More people are arrested for marijuana possession than for all violent crime combined.

Prison profit

It’s no secret that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. With only 5% of the global population, the US holds one quarter of the world’s prisoners. The expanding prison industrial complex, which has grown 350% over the last 15 years, has a vested interest in keeping people locked up.  This complex has been lobbying Congress hard to pass legislation that would imprison more people. Yes, the true criminals are pushing for the criminalization of very minor behavior, most of it, victimless.

Wells Fargo, who received $37 million in bailout money—that we know about-- is the main investor in four private prisons.

The Octopus:

Danny Casolaro called it "the Octopus", a vast, interlocking network of criminal conspiracy that reaches into every branch and agency of the U.S. government, According to Casolero, the Iran-Contra affair, Iran hostage crisis, and all funds channeled through BCCI, charged with everything from money laundering to fraud has a common thread: PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) and the Inslaw affair, when a court ruled the Reagan justice department stole valuable law enforcement software from the Inslaw corporation.

Cosolaro’s theory is that righ-winged zealots sold the software for profit. The money went to Iranian officials who supposedly delayed the release of Iranian hostages back in 1981, the so-called October surprise and later went to the back training funding of the contras.

Just days before his death, Casolaro told friends he was close to breaking the story that consumed him the past year: the political conspiracy of the century that implicated US justice offcials.  All of the Casolaro’s papers and documents disappeared.

Mafia

September 10 1931 - On orders of Charles Luciano and Frank Costello, boss of all bosses Salvatore Maranzano is murdered in his headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan by gangsters disguised as police officers. That same day, several of Maranzano's lieutenants, including James Marino, are killed by unknown gunmen including outside a Bronx neighborhood barbershop. The bodies of Maranzano allies Samuel Monaco and Louis Russo would later be recovered from Newark Bay; both corpses would show signs of torture. These events may or may not have been the basis for the beginning of the alleged "Night of the Sicilian Vespers" in which many old world Sicilian-born mafiosi are killed throughout the country by the Luciano-Lansky faction in the aftermath of the Castellammarese War.

In 1942, US Naval intelligence made deals with Luciano to protect the docks from German saboteurs since the mob was in control of the labor on the docks. In turn, the mafia was assisted by Patton who got the foothold in Italy by coming up into the mountains instead of going down into the cities  You see, since Mussolini regarded the mafia as a rival, and had broken up crime syndicates and executed mob bosses, he was no friend of the mob. The cities were controlled by Mussolin who chased the old mob up into the hills, so Patton approached through the mountains, bringing with him a scarf with LL Lucky Luciano as a symbol to Don Calogero Vizzini who was a head of the Italian mob. They rode through the towns who wanted revenge against Mussolini. Then they released hit men from the prisons and replaced those in political offices throughout Siciily .

The link between intelligence and mafia didn’t end there.

On November 21, 1993, 60 Minutes revealed the government was involved in running drugs. The CIA had joined the Venezuelan National guard in drug smuggling: a  ton of pure cocaine worth millions of dollars. Moreover, for more than 30 years, the federal government had been protecting drug dealers.

Thomas Drake, Bradley Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Jin Woo-Kim, James F. Hitselberger, and John Kiriakou were all charged under the Espionage Act during the Obama administration in its first term.

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Harvesting Profits and Power Despite the Human Toll.

In Roman society, just before the birth of Christ, lived the richest Roman of Julius Caeser's day. His name was Marcus Licinus Crassus; his passion for wealth rivaling even that of modern day banksters. How did he amass his millions? Well, to quote Plutarch, "he got [his riches] by fire and rapine, making his advantage of the public calamities."

You see, there was no such thing as a fire department in the Rome of Crassus' day. Once a fire started, it could level a whole neighborhood. So, Crassus took it upon himself to organize a fire brigade. Once the call of fire was heard, his men would rush to the blaze; however, once they arrived, the stood idly by while Crassus haggled with the frantic owners. If the owners agreed to sell cheaply enough, he ordered his men to stop the blaze. If the owners wanted a better price, he and his fire fighters left.

That's just one of the many calamity-induced schemes Crassus created, making him the wealthiest, and one of the most, if not, thee most powerful men in Rome.

Fast forward to present day, and Crassus looks like Mother Theresa in comparison to the greedy corporate bastards in power. Well, at least Crassus didn't start the fires (as far as we know). The same can't be said for those who think they rule the world in 2011. That's right...some say the Army Corp of Engineers flooded the land to drive down prices. Remember, because the floods were man made, insurance companies are refusing to insure these people, or they're claiming June 1, as the start date; therefore, anyone who bought flood insurance after May 1, 2011, are not covered.

Some river bottom property owners say they received a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers' Kansas City district office asking them if they want to sell their land.

KMBC's Micheal Mahoney reported that the letter is angering some of the people who received it because some of them are fighting for their land from a flood they believe the Corps caused.

The letter reads: "The Corps is currently seeking willing sellers." It is part of a 15-year-old corps plan to buy up river property or obtain easements.

That's not all. Ann Barnhardt of Barnhardt Capital Management, Inc. reports that George Soros, through Ospraie, is buying up farmland, too.

1. File this one under “Now It All Makes Sense”. A Missouri farming and ranching contact just got off a conference call wherein he was informed that the federal government is sending out letters to all of the flooded out farmers in the Missouri River flood plain and bottoms notifying them that the Army Corps of Engineers will offer to BUY THEIR LAND.

Intentionally flood massive acreage of highly productive farmland. Destroy people’s communities and homes. Catch them while they are desperate and afraid and then swoop in and buy the ground cheap. Those evil sons of bitches.

2. Speaking of evil sons of bitches, George Soros appears to be “investing” in farmland through the same puppet company that he used to get into the grain elevator and fertilizer business.  The company is called Ospraie Capital Management and is buying up farmland in a joint venture with Teays River Investments as a partner.

Okay. Here’s the connection. This Ospraie outfit was a hedge fund specializing in commodities that was started and run by some cocky child who didn’t know how to trade bear markets and got his butt kicked into next week in the grain market of 2008. He also lost a fortune trying to trade RARE EARTH METALS. In fact, it was so bad that he had to shut his fund down because he had promised his investors that he would give them all of their investment money back if the fund lost more than 30% in one year.

But it appears that Soros swooped in and saved the day because this Ospraie is the “co-investor” with Soros that bought the remnants of ConAgra’s trading operation and renamed it . . . Gavilon. In the industry, it is widely acknowledged that Ospraie IS Soros.

As you probably remember, Gavilon just recently bought both DeBruce Grain out of Kansas City and the biggest grain elevator company in the Pacific Northwest, thus making Soros (who is the money behind Gavilon through both his own Soros Fund Management AND his de facto control of Ospraie) the third-largest grain company in the U.S. with 280 million bushels of storage capacity, behind only Archer Daniels Midland (542 million bushels storage capacity) and Cargill (344 million bushels storage capacity).

Bottom line: . Please also note that the hotlink citation above is dated June 26, 2009. My contact says this has been going on for two years – and also remember what I told you about farmland prices inflating wildly, especially in Illinois. I have personally confirmed farmland in Illinois selling for $13,000 per acre within the last month, whereas that same kind of ground in Illinois was going for $5500 per acre the day Obama was inaugurated.

Links:
Ospraie launches JV Agricultural Fund.

Rogers & Soros: Farmland “One of the Best Investments of Our Time”

Betting the Farm

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Mafia, Like Cockroaches and

The Bishop of Sicily yesterday described the "Mafia sub-culture" as "absolutely irreconcilable with the Gospel and the Christian faith."

We won't pay you protection, traders tell Mafia

By Malcolm Moore in Rome
Last Updated: 2:07am BST 28/04/2006

A group of 100 shopkeepers in Palermo, the nerve centre of the Sicilian Mafia, have staged an unprecedented rebellion against the Cosa Nostra by refusing to pay protection money.

Until now, almost every business in the Sicilian capital has quietly paid off the Mafia or faced retribution.

But since Bernardo Provenzano, the 73-year-old "boss of all the bosses", was arrested two weeks ago after decades in hiding, the island's anti-Mafia movement has gathered momentum.
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One mobster, Vittorio La Barbera, was sentenced last week to four years and eight months in jail after being caught on camera extracting a "pizzo", or bung, of £1,400 from one business.

The outcome of that trial has emboldened other shop and restaurant owners and 100 small and medium-sized businesses will appear at the University of Palermo next week to declare in public that they will no longer pay up.

"These are the first flames of a revolt," said the newspaper, La Repubblica. "It is a small but great revolution in the capital of Sicily, where quarter after quarter has been suffocated by this tax."

On May 5, or "Pizzo Free" day, the businesses, half of them run by men, half by women, will hold an open-air market for locals to show their solidarity with the movement.

"We are opening up an economic niche for clean business in Palermo," said Francesco Galante, a founder of a movement that is fighting the protection racket.

"Goodbye Pizzo" was started just under two years ago by five graduates who wanted to open a bar in Palermo. Realising they would be asked to pay a Mafia tithe, they decided instead to organise against the pizzo.

The movement plastered posters around Palermo proclaiming: "A population that pays the pizzo is a population without dignity." Now run by 50 people, the group is encouraging shoppers to buy products only from stores that refuse to co-operate with the Mob. More than 7,000 residents have signed up in the past few weeks.

"Other than the first hundred shops, there are lots of others who have decided to not to pay," Mr Galante said. "They just need a little more time to gather up their courage and announce their decision."

Another campaigner, Enrico Colajani, said "The Mafia have not threatened us so far. Perhaps they think we will remain a small group and without influence. The thing they hate the most is public attention."

In the past, Mr Colajani said, Cosa Nostra has not had to work hard to extract its payments. "They might just leave a can of petrol outside a store to show it is in danger. Usually the owners run to find the nearest Mafioso and pay up," he said.

Italy's fight against the Mafia has made huge progress since Provenzano's arrest earlier this month. Notes retrieved from his house have opened a new window on the inner workings of the Mob and shown links with drug cartels in South America.

Yesterday 38 members of the Camorra clan were arrested near Naples in a raid by 500 police officers. More than 200 stolen cars were seized. In Spain, Marco Del Vento, a middle man for Crisafulli Biagio, a gang boss, was arrested.

In Sicily itself, Rita Borsellino, the sister of a leading prosecutor murdered by the Mafia 14 years ago, is running for regional president in elections at the end of May.

The Bishop of Sicily yesterday described the "Mafia sub-culture" as "absolutely irreconcilable with the Gospel and the Christian faith."

In the past there has been a strong link between the Christian Democrats in Sicily and the Mafia. But the bishop's office said the church would tread a neutral line in the forthcoming elections.

While I completely applaud any such initiatives, which are at the root of a very good start, let me be moderately optimistic and introduce you to this article about Roberto Saviano and recommend you his book Gomorra.

This will help you get a better picture of what modern mafia is all about. Indeed as jonmc says, strip away the hollywood bull and what you have...were tugs. Nowadays, tugs are still part of the outlook, but more tragically they turned into businessman and successful one.

As a college graduate in economy, I probably share an education that was received by the second generation mafiosi as well, as they were prepare to "run businesses" and given an ideology that completely supports and rationalizes exploitation as the only rational choice of a free market economy. As many MBAs and college graduates know, a good economic education does prepare you to understand some dynamics, but hardly prepares you for the harsher realities of meeting deadlines and putting what you have learned to practice.

Yet, it's all a lot easier when

1. your financier has very good supply of money at very low cost
2. doesn't really care about immediately turning a profit
3. is primarily concerned with creating a good facade that is , as soon as possible, able to turn a positive balance sheet
4. have a decadent legal system which isn't really up-2-date with the reality of business, the speed of capital movements, the escamotages

All of this seems a reasonable, almost auspicable outcome for illegal capitals , turned finally into profiteable and legitimate activities. Certainly, better then reinvesting
in more drugs and crimes. Yet, the mentality remains the same, as the profiteer mentality is reinforced by the evidence given by the incredible efficacy of racketeering and gross disregard of law.

If you paid some attention to news you probably heard of the Naples trash scandal. A city the size of Naples, depicted as if it was submerged literally by trash. Fact are obviously a little different and concentrate on the spectacularly disgusting display, whereas the scandal is deeper.

The general unofficial consesus among better informed italians is that this scandal is yet-another-emergency created to have government finance the construction of incinerators , which are also known as "thermovalorizators" , a marketing trick worthy of Orwellian Newspeak. The few that are already operating in Italy would operate as at a loss , if they weren't financed by state aids ; apparently the net energy they produce is financially insignificant and they actually produce nastier forms of pollutions, such as untreatable ashes , C02 and other undesiderable byproduct of combustion, such as extremely fine particles which are suspected to cause cancer.

That's the "new" mafia, the one that is so entrenched and in collusion with all level of political activity and markets. And it's no longer an italian export, as this developement can find parallels in Enron , schemed energy crises and other scandals that represent a "new" approach to economy, the one in which all the costs are socialized and the profits privatized...which is hardly new.

Man who took on the Mafia: The truth about Italy's gangsters
Roberto Saviano's explosive revelations about the Camorra of Naples- a racket he says is bigger than Sicily's Mafia - have led to death threats and, belatedly, an armed guard. By Peter Popham reports
Published: 17 October 2006

Roberto Saviano is in mortal danger. Yesterday he was - very belatedly - granted an armed bodyguard by the district of Naples where he lives. He is in grave danger of being shot, stabbed, blown up, and done away with because he has had the courage and the recklessness to spill a large number of beans about the Camorra, the Mafia of Naples. This sprawling network of criminal gangs, according to him, now dwarfs both the original Mafia of Sicily, the 'Ndrangheta and southern Italy's other organised gangs, in numbers, in economic power and in ruthless violence.

The mafias of Italy have never hesitated to kill, but for reasons of prudence, and to keep the police and the media off their backs as far as possible, they usually go to some lengths to keep the killing within the criminal underworld: there is nothing to be gained from collateral damage.

For those outsiders, whether magistrates, politicians or journalists, who meddle in their affairs, who dishonour them, spill their secrets or threaten to break their cosy arrangement with the courts, retribution is often swift and drastic. And this is what Roberto Saviano now fears.

His crime, in the eyes of the gangs, is to have published a book, Gomorra (a word play on Camorra, and a reference to the disastrously lawless situation of Naples) that digs deep inside the gangsters' world, naming names, spelling out criminal structures and their ways of working, drawing a detailed picture of a city which, in his analysis, has largely surrendered to the criminals.

Gomorra was published by Mondadori, one of Italy's top publishers, six months ago and has been on the best-seller list for five months: sales now top 100,000. Saviano was also awarded a major prize, the Premio Viareggio, for the book, his first, and it is soon to be published in Britain, America, Germany and France. But the greater his book's fame, the more irritating it has become for his subjects. The threats began as a subtle murmur in the background of daily life: the phone that went dead when he picked it up, waiters in local restaurants who told him, "You're not welcome here," shopkeepers who whispered in a pleading tone, "Must you really keep on buying your bread at this shop?".

Then there was the gesture of rejection by the top elected official in the city. When Rosa Rossa Iervolino, the Mayor of Naples, awarded him a prize for the book, she gave him a slap in the face with a barbed comment. "Saviano," she said, "is a symbol of the Naples that he denounces."

Clearly the temperature was rising. But the moment that Saviano realised his life was at risk came as a weird counterpoint to his new fame and prominence.

On 23 September a campaign conducted by the Ministry of Justice against the Naples gangs was wrapped up with a public meeting in Casal di Principe, a tough suburb of Naples, addressed by Saviano. The author did not mince his words. "Iovine, Schiavone, Zagaria," he told the crowd, naming the local Camorra bosses, "are worth nothing. Their power is founded on your fear, they must clear out of this land." It was a moment of great courage - and recklessness.

Nothing went amiss for Saviano that day. But the local newspaper, the Corriere di Caserta, put a striking spin on the story. In their report they noted that none of the city's MPs had shown up for the meeting. They also reported that a cousin of "Sandokan", another of the gang leaders named by Saviona, "pinned one man to the wall with his ferocious stare and made him say, one by one, who was applauding too enthusiastically." The report went on to say that "not everyone was impressed by the invective of Saviona". The small change of local press reporting, one might think - except for the fact that the newspaper's editor is soon to go on trial accused of blackmail.

As Saviona's book makes clear, to live in these badlands and not come to terms with the gangs who rule them is to put one's life at risk. And Saviona has not only made it very clear that he is deeply opposed to the gangs; his work has already had an effect.

According to L'Espresso, the magazine that has published much of his work, "Gomorra ... has forced the state to act. The Interior Ministry is putting in place a plan to restore public order in Campania, and there is a reawakening of resistance among the civilian population. While everybody has been looking at Naples and the outskirts, the book has put under the eyes of everyone the economic and military power of the clans of Caserta," the area at the heart of Gomorra.

When Italy's criminal gangs, which are always in league with powers deep inside the bureaucracy and the government, decide to eliminate an enemy, they do not strike without due preparation. The preparation consists of rendering their victim weak, friendless and alone. It was the strategy followed in the assassination of the Sicilian magistrates Falcone and Borsellino, and many others. Saviano's enemies seem to have been following a similar script themselves.

Now Saviano's friends have started to declare themselves. The first was the celebrated writer Enzo Siciliano, who just before he died said: "Let's remember that this is not just a good book; this lad's life is at risk, too."

As word of the threats spread, a supportive blog was launched. On Sunday the great Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, went on national TV news to appeal for Saviona's protection. "We must not leave Saviano alone like Falcone and Borsellino," he said. "In this case, appeals to writers for solidarity are of no use... We know where the threats are coming from, we know the Christian and surnames of those who are making them. What's required is a public intervention by the state."

Yesterday the Prefect of Caserta answered that appeal by granting Saviano a bodyguard. The writer himself is currently taking "a break" away from the Naples region. "Only a stay of a few weeks," reports L'Espresso, "to relieve the pressure and concentrate on new projects."

But how long it will be before Saviano can breathe easy again is anybody's guess.

A Vespa ride through 'the pusher's piazza'

From "The War of Secondigliano", chapter three of Gomorra: "I had been hanging out in Secondigliano for some time. Since he gave up working as a tailor, Pasquale (a friend) kept me up to date with the buzz in the area, a place that was changing at blinding speed...

I used to cruise around the area north of Naples on my Vespa. I liked the light in Secondigliano and Scampia. The streets were huge and wide, airy compared to the tangle in the centre of Naples... it was like being in the open country... Scampia was the rotten symbol of the architectural delirium (of the Sixties), or perhaps more simply a utopia of cement which was able to put nothing in the way of construction of the machine of the drug trade that wore down the social fabric of this part of the earth.

Chronic unemployment and a total absence of plans for social growth turned this into a place capable of storing tons of drugs, and a laboratory for laundering dirty money into legal commercial activity... In 1989, it was reported that the north of Naples had one of the highest incidences of drug dealers per head of population in Italy. Fifteen years later it had become the highest in Europe and among the top five in the world.

My face had become known for some time to the lookouts of the gangs, the "pali", and I was regarded as neutral. In an area riddled with lookouts like this one, at every second there are people who have a negative value - police, carabinieri, people working for enemy clans - and a positive value, namely the customers. Everything that is neither negative nor positive is neutral and useless. To enter into this category signifies not to exist.

The pushers' piazza has always fascinated me because of its perfect organisation, which contradicts its reputation as a place of pure degradation. The mechanism of pushing is as regular as clockwork. It's as if the individuals move exactly like the machinery that keeps the time ticking.

Nobody moves without causing the movement of somebody else. Every time I see it I find it enchanting. The wages are paid out weekly, €100 for the lookouts, €500 for the co-ordinator and the man who collects the money from the dealers in a piazza, €800 to the individual pushers and €1,000 to those who take charge of the warehouses and hide the drugs at home.

The shifts run from 3pm to midnight and from midnight to four in the morning. In the morning it's difficult to deal because there are too many police around. Everyone has one day off per week, and anyone who comes to the piazza late loses €50 from his wages for every hour missed..."

But the calm of the piazza was exploded by a feud between the Camorra clans, with dozens of deaths:

"I drove back and forth on my Vespa through this blanket of tension. Every time I went to Secondigliano during the conflict, I was stopped and searched dozens of times a day. If I had had as much as a Swiss army knife on me I would have been done for. The police stopped me, the carabinieri, the lookouts of the Di Lauro clan and of the Spagnoli. All with the same little authority, mechanical gestures, identical words. The forces of order took my ID papers and scrutinised them, the guards of the clans bombarded me with questions, checking for an accent, on the lookout for lies..."

From 'Gomorra' by Roberto Saviano, published and copyright 2006 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. Extracted with permission

They knew too much

* The most celebrated and widely mourned victims of the Mafia in recent times were Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, both assassinated by car bombs in Palermo in 1992 in retribution for their success in bringing hundreds of high-ranking mafiosi to trial.

As seems to be the case with Roberto Saviano, it was not only the gangsters but their secret allies within the institutions of state that first isolated the two investigators, then plotted their deaths. The murders provoked the first ever mass demonstrations against the Mafia by ordinary Sicilians, and prompted a resolute attempt by the state to clamp down on the mob which resulted in the breaking of the leadership. The life and death of Falcone was recently made into a hugely popular television drama series.

* A celebrated investigative journalist, Mauro de Mauro, disappeared suddenly in Palermo in 1970 while in the middle of investigating Mafia crimes. His body was never found and his fate remained a mystery until last week, when a Mafia supergrass claimed that the journalist had been strangled and his body dissolved in acid.

* Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a general in the carabinieri, scored heroic successes in the fight against ultra-left terrorism in the 1970s, but was assassinated by the Mafia in Palermo in 1982 when he tried to repeat the performance.

* Francesco Fortugno, politician and vice-president of the regional council of Calabria, was shot dead by gangsters at a polling station in Locri, Calabria, one year ago. The murderers have yet to be arrested and the crime remains a mystery.

* Don Giuseppe Diana, a priest in Naples, was shot dead in his church while celebrating Mass on 19 March 1994. A popular scout leader, he had showed a defiant attitude to the Camorra and paid with his life.

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Is the Mob Controlling Your Computer?

Organized crime has had its fingers in criminal activity on the internet for some time, but until about two years ago most of its activity was limited to obvious scams, pornography and gambling. But in the past two years the rapid growth in organized crime in Eastern Europe and a huge increase in sophistication has jumped organized crime on the internet from an irritation to a serious problem.

How is this happening? The basic reason is that almost half all computer users connected to the internet have no or ineffective security protecting themselves and their systems while they web browse or even when using email. That doesn't even take into account new threats spreading into instant messaging, VoIP and even cell phones.

Estimates of losses from internet and other computer-related fraud in the UK alone are over $4 billion annually. And the losses come in all forms – from small sums scammed out of people via email up to blackmail, extortion and outright theft of very large sums from large corporations. Some of these attacks come with collusion or inadvertant access inside organizations to secure systems, but most come from some form of trickery that exploits naïve and insecure practices in all kinds of ways. And because of the embarassment, many of these frauds go unreported.

First up, WHAT criminals are up to - the top types of internet, telephony, email and credit card scams.

Top Scams

1: Credit card and telephony billing fraud. Example: The Gambino family telephony scam – a couple of telephony company executives organized a billing fraud for credit card and telephony services and a related internet pornography ring on behalf of the Gambino family – that netted over $500 million over a five year period.
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2: Nigerian (and Eastern European and Indonesian and...) scams – if you never received a Nigerian scam email you have probably never received email at all – that's how much of it there is – now also known as a 419 scam after the Nigerian anti-fraud law code.
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3: Phishing – typically an email supposedly from a bank or credit card company or anyone that has an online financial account that tries to tempt you to log into a site that LOOKS like the real site but is really just a way to watch and capture your account information. These have gotten much more sophisticated and just this past week a kit was made available online to help criminals automatically build sites that transparently pass the data on to the real site and that report that they are the real site – making it even harder to detect the fraud. More recently VoIP and IP Phishing scams have become more prevalent.
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4: Zombies – these can be a really subtle scam – you may never even know that you were involved. In this scam your PC is taken over subtly to help run almost every other form of scam. A piece of code gets run on your computer – and it sets itself up as one of a big network of computers (aka a botnet) that hackers have taken over. Once it gets activated, the zombie computer gets used to deliver spam or to infect other computers or to install keyloggers or other malware or even distributed denial of service attacks – then at some later date it just gets turned off again until another time.
Reference 1

5: Extortion – this is one of the big time mob moneyspinners. They infect computers with zombies – often paying unscrupulous hackers something like 20 cents per infected PC – until they have many thousands of infected computers – and then they block access to a major site by having all those zombie PCs access it simultaneously. Depending on circumstances they deliver an extortion demand before or after the attack. This technique has been used successfully against offshore gambling sites and with mixed success against all kinds of other sites. Demands are typically kept in the $50,000 range to make it easy for companies to pay rather than lose business.
Reference 1

6: Wifi Spying and Packet Sniffing – sure it's fun to kick back and surf the web at Starbucks or the local library. But as David Pogue of the New York Times has illustrated, it is incredibly easy for any hacker to watch everything you do and to also install software onto your laptop without you knowing. And packet sniffing techniques can be combined with devices that read data right off a wire to rebuild network traffic and capture data on the fly.

7: Buddying Up – cyber criminals are also making friends online – on MySpace, Facebook and even business-oriented LinkedIn – it is easy to fake an attractive identity and then suck in new online friends and harvest personal information – many social network posters are willing to give up information that reveals enough to aid in identity theft.
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8: Insider Trading – organized crime is starting to hire and train employees to get inside target companies and then steal information and access codes. There is also evidence that some hackers are getting sponsored through college courses to improve their knowledge of IT and security systems purely in order to make them more effective at creating and running attacks.
Reference 1

9: Event Piggybacks – whether it is the World Cup, the Superbowl or a hot celebrity scandal, current events are now part of the social engineering attacks used by malicious hackers. An example is online games or downloadable screensavers associated with an event – prior to the 2006 World Cup, German hackers created downloadable screensavers for many of the teams that enticed fans to download them. Along with the screensaver came a pile of trojan malware.
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10: Dumpster Diving – not really a scam – just taking advantage of people disposing of (or losing) storage devices without taking security precautions. Take your pick of the scare stories – either the US military USB drive with highly confidential data that was for sale at an Afghani bazaar or the German police computer hard drive that was full of criminal data that was sold on eBay.
Reference 1 , Reference 2

11: Invisible Links – the latest trick – borrowing techniques from the latest web practices – is to run a piece of javascript code when the user simply hovers over a link – that code looks for holes in browser security and downloads a trojan like a keylogger to your PC – all without you even knowing. Plus lots of other Ajax and javascript nastiness is possible.
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12: Feed spam – Feed spam is basically a way of feeding real sites that use aggregated RSS feeds with bogus information and malware links.
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13: Up And Coming – video and multimedia trojans – the next big target is going to be online media – streaming audio, streaming video, flash movies, animations and games and more. It is quite feasible that someone will find a way to have a YouTube link trigger a method of loading malware onto your computer. How well do you really know that person sending you the latest awesome online video?

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