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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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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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.
Reference 1 , Reference 2

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.
Reference 1

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.
Reference 1

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.
Reference 1

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.
Reference 1

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.
Reference 1

12: Feed spam – Feed spam is basically a way of feeding real sites that use aggregated RSS feeds with bogus information and malware links.
Reference 1

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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