The Chicago Syndicate
The Mission Impossible Backpack

Monday, January 11, 2010

Al Capone Hideout Purchased by Northern Wisconsin Tribe

A northern Wisconsin tribe is the new owner of Al Capone's Wisconsin hideout.

The Lac Court Oreilles Tribe purchased the nearly 400-acre property near Couderay for $2.7 million according to the Sawyer County Record.

The property was foreclosed on several months ago by Chippewa Valley Bank.

Mob Museum Gets $2 Million More in Funding

The Las Vegas City Council quietly approved spending nearly $2 million more today for the mob museum project, which is on track to open in 2011 in the city's downtown. But City Councilman Stavros Anthony made it clear he still doesn't like the project, which will be officially known as the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement.

Las Vegas Mob Museum Gets $2 Million More in Funding

Anthony didn't speak out today about the project, which is estimated to cost about $50 million. But his actions were fairly loud and consistent with his past votes.

He asked to have the item pulled from the council's routine consent agenda so it could be voted on separately. Then he was the lone vote against the extra funding among the seven council members.

Anthony had also voted against additional funding for the retrofit project back in November. At that time, he had explained he could not justify spending money on such a museum.

The extra money approved today, amounting to $1,958,908, is needed to take care of some structural retrofit work on the historic 1933 federal office building and post office building at 300 Stewart, which will house the museum.

The work includes modifying the beams on the second and third floors, removing more hazardous material from the building, doing more work on the exterior plaster and courtroom ceilings and installing a new remote fire pump assembly that's needed because of failing water pressure in the downtown area, according to the city's finance and business services department.

The museum, which is expected to open in the first quarter of 2011, would tell the tale of how federal and local law enforcement officers fought the mob and eventually drove it out of Las Vegas' casinos.

The exhibits would features items from the FBI, plus artifacts from mob life, including many donated from the children and grandchildren of top members of organized crime and their underlings.

The museum has been pushed by the city's mayor, former high-profile mob lawyer Oscar Goodman, and by the FBI.

Councilman Ricki Y. Barlow, who made the motion to approve the extra funding today, has said in the past he supports it as an additional tourist attraction for the downtown.

Thanks to Dave Toplikar.

Former President of the Chicago Crime Commission to Head Illnois Tollway Investigations and Audits

The Illinois tollway has appointed a retired top FBI agent to head up investigations and audits.

James W. Wagner, 66, who previously directed the Chicago Crime Commission, became the tollway's general manager of investigations and audits effective Monday.

"He brings a wealth of experience to our agency as a seasoned investigator with a diverse history," Illinois State Toll Highway Authority spokeswoman Joelle McGinnis said.

Wagner served as an FBI agent from 1969 to 2000 in Chicago, New York and Little Rock, finishing his career as supervisor of the organized crime section. He worked as deputy administrator of investigations for the Illinois Gaming Board from 2000 through 2005, then president of the Crime Commission until 2008.

Duties at the tollway will include rooting out fraud and corruption, conducting internal investigations, internal audits, correction of mismanagement and misconduct and supervising staff.

Wagner essentially replaces the previous tollway inspector general who has come under scrutiny by the Illinois attorney general's office. Inspector General Tracy Smith resigned unexpectedly from her position in August.

A spokesman for Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said the agency was "seriously concerned about her conduct" in light of revelations that Smith was a college friend of former tollway Chairman John Mitola's wife.

Smith, as part of her job, supervised ethics investigations including complaints that involved Mitola.

Mitola called any questions of impropriety unfounded and ridiculous, and Smith said there was no conflict of interest.

The position of inspector general was being re-engineered because of a change in state law, McGinnis said.

Wagner's salary will be $130,000. Wagner was hired by Acting Executive Director Michael King and tollway board members were aware of it although the issue was not discussed in public at tollway meetings.

Thanks to Marni Pyke

Mafia Suspected of Starting Race Wars

More than a thousand African workers were put aboard buses and trains in the southern Italian region of Calabria over the weekend and shipped out to immigrant detention centers, following some of the country’s worst riots in years.

The clashes began Thursday night in Rosarno, a working-class city amid citrus groves in Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, after a legal immigrant from Togo was lightly wounded in a pellet-gun attack in a nearby city. It is not clear who pulled the trigger — the authorities said they were investigating whether organized crime had provoked the riots — but the consequences were severe.

Blaming racism for the attack, dozens of immigrants burned cars and smashed shop windows in Rosarno in two days of riots, throwing rocks at local residents and fighting with the police. More than 50 immigrants and police officers were wounded, none seriously, and 10 immigrants and locals were arrested before the authorities began sending the immigrants to detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy on Saturday.

The images emerging from Calabria over the weekend — of torched cars and angry African immigrants hurling rocks — were the most vivid example of the growing racial tensions in Italy, which have been exacerbated by an economic crisis whose depth has only recently been acknowledged in the national dialogue. Both the official and underground economies increasingly rely on immigrants, while Italy remains torn between acceptance and xenophobia.

The riots also shone a bright light on a side of the country rarely seen in tourist itineraries. On Sunday, the authorities began bulldozing the makeshift encampments outside Rosarno where hundreds of immigrants live in what human rights groups describe as subhuman conditions. They are often paid less than $30 a day picking fruit, a job that many Italians see as beneath them. Organized crime syndicates are known to have a strong grip on every level of the Calabrian economy.

“This event pulled the lid off something that we who work in the sector know well but no one talks about: That many Italian economic realities are based on the exploitation of low-cost foreign labor, living in subhuman conditions, without human rights,” said Flavio Di Giacomo, the spokesman for the International Organization for Migration in Italy.

The workers live in “semi-slavery,” added Mr. Di Giacomo, who said, “It’s shameful that this is happening in the heart of Italy.”

Pope Benedict XVI veered from his prepared remarks in his Angelus message on Sunday to denounce the violence in Calabria. “An immigrant is a human being, different in origin, culture and tradition, but he is a person to respect, with rights and duties,” the pope said. He also criticized the “exploitation” of immigrants.

It was not entirely clear if all the immigrants left willingly for the detention centers, or if some were forced to leave. In a reconstruction of the days of violence, the police said they were protecting the immigrants against would-be assailants, at least one of whom brandished a pistol.

Some immigrants told the Italian news media that Calabrians had shot at them and beaten them with sticks in the riots, and a front-page editorial in La Repubblica on Sunday compared the situation to Ku Klux Klan violence in the United States in the 1960s. But other news reports said that many immigrants had fled their encampments in haste before the police began clearing them with bulldozers.

Not all immigrants appear to have left the city, but those who are in the immigration centers with regular residence permits, or who had requested political asylum, are free to go, the interior minister, Roberto Maroni, said Sunday in a television interview. The others, he said, will be identified and deported.

The riots in Rosarno were a rare instance in which an entire city was engulfed by immigrant violence. In September 2008, Italy sent 400 members of the National Guard to Castelvolturno, outside Naples, after violent protests broke out over the shooting deaths of six African immigrants in clashes with the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. Last February, immigrants set fire to the detention center on the island of Lampedusa, where many had been held awaiting deportation.

There are 4 million legal immigrants in Italy, out of a population of 60 million, and even more illegal immigrants. And while many Italians rely on them to work in their businesses and take care of their young children or elderly parents, many Italians see the new arrivals as a threat.

In television interviews, some Rosarno residents said they had lived peacefully alongside the immigrants and tried to give them work and food. But others were more hostile. “We’ve put up with them for 20 years,” one man shouted in a television interview on Sky TG24.

In recent years, the center-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has issued strong anti-immigrant statements. Mr. Berlusconi, who is recovering after being struck in the face with a statuette of the Milan cathedral by a mentally unstable man last month, has not commented on the riots.

But in his interview on Sunday, the interior minister, Mr. Maroni, called the situation in Rosarno “the fruit of the wrong kind of tolerance.” The day before, he had been quoted as saying the riots were the fruit of “too much tolerance.”

A member of the powerful Northern League Party, known for its anti-immigrant language, Mr. Maroni also defended a proposal introduced by his party last week to cap the number of immigrant students in public school classes at 30 percent. “Sometimes they speak different languages, and there’s no common balance in the classroom,” Mr. Maroni said.

Human rights groups say that many African immigrants come to Italy with what appear to be legal offers of work in the agricultural sector in the south, often by paying middlemen more than $10,000 for the opportunity. When they arrive, the rights groups say, the immigrants often find that the agricultural outfits refuse to honor their end of the bargain, instead compelling the migrants to work under the table at wages far below the legal minimum wage. Often, the outfits that hire them have links to organized crime.

Mr. Maroni has said in the past that the ’Ndrangheta, or Calabrian Mafia, is the most powerful organized crime group in Italy because its members are bound by strong blood ties, making it difficult to cultivate informants. Last week, two bombs were found at the main courthouse in Reggio Calabria, in what was widely seen as a message by the ’Ndrangheta to prosecutors trying to dismantle clans.

Mr. Maroni also said that the notion that the ’Ndrangheta had provoked the riots was “one possible hypothesis” that the authorities were examining.

In an interview in La Repubblica on Saturday, Roberto Saviano, the author of the bestseller “Gomorrah,” about organized crime near Naples, called the immigrants in Rosarno courageous. “Immigrants are always braver than we are against the clans,” Mr. Saviano said.

Thanks to Rachel Donadio

Mafia Princess Caught on Video Shoplifting from Target

Mafia princess Kim Persico was caught on video pushing a cart full of hot goods out of Target on Staten Island, authorities said.

Persico, daughter-in-law of Colombo crime family boss Carmine (The Snake) Persico, smiled as she was released without bail after appearing in Criminal Court yesterday.

Persico, 47, is charged with stealing $597 worth of cleaning supplies, clothing, health and beauty aids and home decor items.

"She put the items in a shopping cart and walked out of the store without paying," said William Smith, a spokesman for the Staten Island district attorney's office.

Her lawyer, Salvatore Strazzullo, said he expects the charges will be tossed. "Are you kidding me? Why is she going to steal from Target?" he said.

Persico, of Brooklyn, is married to Lawrence Persico, one of three sons of Carmine Persico. The don's son Lawrence has a "long history of severe mental health issues," according to papers filed in a 2003 racketeering case.

Thanks to Matthew Lysiak and John Marzulli.

Affliction!

Affliction Sale

Flash Mafia Book Sales!