Italy’s credit rating may be heading south and plenty of businesses are struggling to survive, but in a country where so much is hidden, there is often growth where you don’t see it, writes Jo McKenna, a Rome-based freelance journalist.
Mafia
Letter from southern Italy: deaths raise new questions about power of mafia
Cacciola was a police informant, a strong and courageous woman who took on the world’s most powerful Mafia, and the took her own life, writes Josephine McKenna in Rome.
Meet the Taiwanese Mafia
The Global Post takes a look at Taiwan’s underbelly — a world of organised crime where mobsters are just as involved in local politics and religion as drugs, gun-running and prostitution.
How immigants to Italy are enslaved by the mafia
Impoverished African and Eastern European immigrants to Italy are being trapped into a mafia-controlled employment racket that sees them working 10-14-hour days for $3 an hour.
Inside the Italian Mafia
Roberto Saviano is the author of a best-selling book that exposes the inner workings of the most powerful, but least known Italian Mafia groups, Naples’ Camorra. He takes Vice inside their vicious and violent world.
Inside Asia’s Dog Meat Mafia
A look inside Asia’s shady and highly-lucrative dog meat trade — a multi-million-dollar black market operating from Thailand to Vietnam, feeding the region’s increasing appetite for the taste of feral dog.
Vanstone’s mob connections
Why did former Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone grant a Visa to an alleged member of the Italian mafia? Perhaps it has something to do with the tens of thousands of dollars his supporters have donated to the Liberal Party…
The Italian Mafia’s new standover men: crocodiles
Because sometimes guys in suits carrying violin cases just aren’t scary enough: an Italian Mafia boss has been using a 1.7m crocodile to shake-down people for protection money.
Italian Mafia take out the trash. Literally.
Informants say the Calabrian Mafia have set up a lucrative radioactive waste disposal business — for a tidy fee, they will take a ship full of your toxic waste out to sea and blow it up.
Women break through Italian Mafia’s glass ceiling
Score one for the sisterhood: Female mobsters — or “Godmothers” — are on the rise amongst high-ranking members of Naples area crime families, as their husbands get knocked off or go to prison.
The Italian Mafia goes green
In Australia, the Mafia (such as it is) tend to focus on drugs and armed robbery, but in Italy, they’ve turned their attentions elsewhere: windfarms.
Vanstone’s underworld ministerial discretion
Surely a terror suspect not accused of any violence but merely of giving his cousin a SIM card is a greater potential threat to our security than a suspected mafioso, writes Irfan Yusuf.
Vanstone may have to walk over mafia visa
If the John Howard Liberals took money from the Exclusive Brethren then why would alleged Mafia dollars be refused? asks Barry Everingham.
