I’m not sure what the hell to make of this.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Seems like Michael Corleone’s decision to diversify has paid off in dividends for his successors…
No wonder business and industry nowadays seem to be run like Mafia fiefs. The blueprint was right in front of our eyes.
How is this different than always? It’s not like organized crime was keeping its lucre under the mattress until the crisis hit. Aside from giving “Banksters” a whole new depth of meaning though, the charge does open up a bunch of interesting issues — for example, how much campaign funding comes from laundered mafia money? Which would in turn do much to explain the pols’/media’s pigheaded insistence on maintaining and expanding the vast subsidy to organized crime known as the War on Drugs.
I suspect that the various regulators agreed to look the other way this year when it comes to organized crime money as long as it could keep the system from imploding. Usually banks are afraid to take the dirty cash through the front door, forcing the crime rings to go to more elaborate money laundering schemes. But if the regulators say they’re not fining for it this year (wink, nod,) why not just take the stuff? It’s badly needed reserve cash in the vault.
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Mob money has been propping up banks, according to the UN drug czar. “Stupid and diabolic” bank behavior since the world financial system crumbled in September 2008, wrote UN Office of Drugs and Crime head Antonio Maria Costa, has allowed the transnational mafia’s drug money to enter the financial system. “With the financial crisis, banks became desperate for cash, and one of the few sources of liquidity these days is the transnational mafia,” he said in an e-mail.
“Bankers have done something both stupid and diabolic,” he said. “They have allowed the world’s criminal economy to become part of the global economy. Investment bankers, fund managers, commodity traders and realtors have assisted syndicates to launder the proceeds from crime and become legitimate partners to business.
The upshot is not just a simple case of criminals dealing without police watching. In one country, when banks are not lending, mafia groups step in as a high-interest and violent version of the banks. Italian banks – stingy with small business loans even in the best of times – have nearly stopped lending. And Italy’s four mob groups – Sicily’s La Cosa Nostra, Naples’s Camorra, the Calabrian region’s `Ndrangheta, and the Puglia region’s Sacra Corona Unita – are reportedly enjoying various aspects of the windfall. Italy’s intelligence service told parliament earlier this month that the growing number of unemployed could provide mafia groups with new recruits, and that cash-strapped businesses had become more vulnerable to loan sharks and proftection rackets.
Last year, a Sicilian judge dismissed the allegation made by other Mafia supergrasses that Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister, and Marcello Dell’Utri, his long-time Sicilian crony, were implicated in the murders. It took him 14 months to make up his mind. Even then, he ordered an investigation into links between Mr Berlusconi’s company Fininvest and the Cosa Nostra to be reopened.
Mr Giuffre also put flesh on allegations that Italian American mobsters had been paying regular visits to Sicily to learn the dos and don’ts of the Cosa Nostra. A report by the FBI has claimed that members of the Bonanno clan, one of the five Mafia “families” of New York, were sent to Castellammare in the far west of Sicily for toughening up. The clan was led by Joe Bananas, who died in his bed in Tucson, Arizona, last May, aged 97.
Confirming the report, Mr Giuffre said: “[Castellammare] is the right choice. That’s where you find the hard base of the Mafia, attached to courage and respect, and the kids who come there from the US learn that even their bosses talk too much …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Very interesting, Oui. Thanks for these.
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TURIN, Italy (Dec. 4, 2009) – A jailed Mafia hitman told a court that a godfather convicted of a 1993 bombing campaign had boasted to him of his links to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
He recounted a meeting with clan boss Giuseppe Graviano— later given multiple life sentences along with his brother for the bombings in Rome, Milan and Florence — in a cafe on Rome’s Via Veneto in early 1994, after the deadly bombing campaign.
“Graviano told me we had obtained everything, thanks to the seriousness of the people who’d helped with our affair … he mentioned two names, he called Berlusconi ‘the man from Channel 5’,” said Spatuzza, referring to a Mediaset television channel.
He quoted Graviano as saying: “We have everything thanks to the seriousness of these people, specifically Berlusconi … they put the country in our hands.”
Berlusconi says biased courts are making false charges to bring down the 19-month-old government — his third since 1994 — and attack his Mediaset business empire.
“NOBODY FURTHER FROM THE MAFIA”
“It’s all false. And of course Berlusconi is completely calm about it too. He’s more afraid of his wife than Spatuzza,” joked Dell’Utri referring to Berlusconi’s current divorce proceedings.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Two sides of the same crooked coin…
Second generation of crime families tends to send their children either into crime or into finance. Here it looks like the same guys who were handling the laundering of drug money also called on their criminal friends to save their asses after they destroyed the world economy.
The two – crime and finance – bleed into each other as criminal families use strong arm tactics to win economic competition. It looks like the reverse is also true as the money laundering also corrupts the banks.
That’s assuming, of course, that the banks are not yet already so corrupt that the crime business is not already part of their operations. These are people who corrupt otherwise semi-human politicians.