The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/organized-crime/)
On Wednesday, the FBI announced the global takedown of hundreds of criminals involved in drug trafficking and organized crime, thanks to an encrypted social messaging platform the FBI was secretly peddling to criminals. Authorities around the world say this saved lives, and transforms the way investigators will fight organized crime in the future.
Experts say that traffickers have been able to exploit economic anxieties fueled by COVID, while using the Internet to advertise, recruit and exploit their victims. A new report tracks trafficking “hot spots” across the U.S.
Belgian, Dutch and French police said they hacked into the Sky ECC network, allowing them to look “over the shoulders” of crime bosses as they communicated with customized devices to plot drug deals and murders. Over 80 people have been arrested.
The future of a state law enacted to keep the mafia from operating legal gambling in California is in doubt after a judge upheld a claim by Hustler Magazine founder Larry Flynt that it is unconstitutional.
Rising youth unemployment will provide a “fertile field” for the expansion of Mexico’s crime cartels in the aftermath of COVID-19 — and is likely to pose a new threat to national security in America’s southern neighbor, three researchers predict.
“The mafia becomes almost like a benefactor–they behave like the Red Cross–for which a certain portion of society is grateful,” a roundtable of experts on Italian organized crime was told.
In Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-biggest city, Alejandrina Guzman, a daughter of jailed drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, was among those seen by reporters handing out the packages stamped with her own company’s ‘El Chapo 701’ logo.
James LaRossa’s clients included unsavory figures such as mob bosses Paul Castellano and Vincent Gigante. But the controversial New York trial lawyer’s defense career really began when he quit his job as a federal prosecutor after a collision over with Robert Kennedy over a terrorism case, LaRossa’s son tells TCR in a conversation about his recently published memoir.
The late Mafia boss John Gotti’s crime empire was facilitated by a group of murderous underlings whose eventual exposure led to a shakeup in New York’s organized crime hierarchy—and the Mob’s slow fade from power, journalist Anthony DeStefano, the author of a new book, tells TCR.
Notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera was formally sentenced Wednesday to life in prison plus 30 years on drug trafficking and weapons charges.