Camporeale is a mediocre town in a landscape filled with the emptiness of broken dreams. It lies twenty-two miles to the south and west of the city of Palermo. On the island of Sicily, a place of endless despair on the edge of Italy, that makes you a
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Moroccan-Dutch crime boss Ridouan Taghi was sentenced to life in prison today in a court in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He was found guilty of six murders, four attempted murders, and several murder plots. Taghi is viewed by the DEA as one of Europe’
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The boss and two members of the Brooklyn-based Real Ryte gang pleaded guilty to racketeering charges stemming from Real Ryte’s gang war with the Breadgang crew of the 5-9 Brims, a subset of the Bloods, including a shooting in which Real Ryte members
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“Loose lips sink ships.” It’s a line that can be found in many a Mafia social club as a reminder not to talk about, alleged, crimes. Why? Because that sort of talk gets you locked up. Something Crips gang boss Duane “Keffe D” Davis found out when he
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A former high-ranking member of the Los Zetas cartel entered a guilty plea last week to a conspiracy to import tons of cocaine into the United States. 43-year-old Jose Maria Guizar-Valencia, of Tulare, California, is considered one of the last number
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Sicilian Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro passed away today. He was 61. The elusive Mafioso was viewed as the last man to know the people on both sides of the law involved in some of Italy’s most heinous and profitable crimes. He took those secrets t
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Everyone called him Tommy Brown, but that was not really his name. It was a nickname, a mob monicker, but it really got confused. His name in Italian is Gaetano Lucchese, and the closest we get to that is Guy Lucchese, as the name is pronounced “Guy
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Two Kansas City, Mo., men who led 246, a violent street gang, were sentenced in federal court on Monday for their roles in a drug trafficking conspiracy that included illegal firearms and a drive-by shooting outside a daycare center where children we
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A New York man pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Boston to leading a sophisticated international money laundering organization that also distributed large quantities of cocaine and MDMA (ecstasy).
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The story of a successful narco kingpin always has the same arc. There is the rise and the inevitable fall. The fall comes in the form of death or prison. No amount of power, money, bloodshed or a combination of all three can stop that. Not even when
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The leader of One Family Clique (OFC), a Lowell-based gang, pleaded guilty Thursday, September 7, to conspiring with fellow OFC gang members to traffic wholesale quantities of cocaine, and to launder millions of dollars in drug proceeds through casin
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Trevor Scott Sparks, a Kansas City, Missouri, federal defendant who escaped after trial and was recaptured, was sentenced in federal district court on Tuesday for his role in leading a $4.1 million heavily armed drug-trafficking conspiracy, and direc
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A kingpin at the center of a narcotics trafficking plot on behalf of notorious gangs MS-13 and the Mexican Mafia received over 17 years in prison this week. 52-year-old Nelson "Mula" Alexander Flores was sentenced for trafficking large quantities of
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A Florida Bloods gang boss was sentenced to almost 17 years in prison on Monday. 36-year-old Antonio Eugene Brutton had pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm as a convicted felon and possessing with the intent to distribute methamphetamine, fentanyl
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Five bosses of the Gangster Disciples were sentenced in the Southern District of Illinois for their participation in a years-long interstate racketeering conspiracy involving drug trafficking, witness tampering, and multiple murders.
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51-year-old Dairo “Otoniel” Antonio Úsuga David, Colombia’s most powerful drug lord, was sentenced on Tuesday to 45 years in prison for engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise as a leader of the multibillion-dollar paramilitary and narcotics tra
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John Derek, the movie actor, once said, “Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.” Dominic Di Ciolla managed two out of three, but missed out on the last one. A lesser known player in the field of American organized crime, he came and w
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The world of narcos is one where truth is stranger than fiction. Just look at fugitive cartel boss Sebastián Marset. While on the run from serious drug and murder charges, he fled to Bolivia. Last week, he barely managed to escape arrest. Rather than
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Truman Capote, the late, famous American novelist and playwright, once said, “Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.” A more than perfect observation of what took place in New York and various outlier areas of north-eastern Am
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Several months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it soon became clear to those in the Kremlin that their so-called “brother nation” was not going to sit still for target practice. What’s more, they were running out of professional soldiers. Russia h
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