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CRIME

16 arrested in joint anti-mafia raids in Italy and the US

Italian police and the FBI launched a joint operation on Wednesday against suspected members of the mafia in Sicily and New York, targeting the powerful Gambino crime family and its associates.

16 arrested in joint anti-mafia raids in Italy and the US
File photo by Miguel MEDINA / AFP

Warrants for the arrest of 17 suspects were executed, seven in the Palermo region of Sicily and 10 in New York, Italian police said in a statement.

They stand accused of crimes ranging from mafia and criminal association to extortion, arson and auction rigging, it said.

The US Department of Justice later clarified that only 16 of the suspects had actually been detained, saying one individual targeted in Italy remains at large.

It confirmed ten alleged members or associates of the Gambino family had been arrested in the US raids, charged with racketeering conspiracy,
extortion, witness retaliation and “union-related crimes”.

“As alleged, for years, the defendants committed violent extortions, assaults, arson, witness retaliation and other crimes in an attempt to dominate the New York carting (waste disposal) and demolition industries,” US Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.

In one incident, the US government alleges, two of the suspects coordinated a “violent hammer assault” on a member of a demolition company with whom they
had a financial dispute – and then circulated the pictures to others in the industry.

Italian police said investigations had also highlighted extortion against restauranteurs of Sicilian origin in New York, as a way of pressuring their families back home.

The Gambino family is one of five linked to the Cosa Nostra based in New York, according to US prosecutors. The others are the Genovese, Lucchese, Colombo and Bonanno families.

The Cosa Nostra became famous as the inspiration for the “Godfather” films, although it has since been surpassed in wealth, power and global reach by the ‘Ndrangheta mafia, based in the southern Italian region of Calabria.

But the Italian police said their investigation with the FBI, which began in April 2021, confirmed the “robustness” of US-Italian crime links and highlighted “the American interest in the organisational affairs of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra”.

The US defendants include Joseph Lanni, a 52-year-old alleged Gambino “captain” – head of a crew – also known as “Joe Brooklyn” and “Mommino”, along with alleged “soldiers” and associates, authorities said.

The New York mafia has been weakened by several blows in recent years, including arrests, fratricidal struggles and competition from other criminal organisations, but they are still considered active.

The reputed boss of the Gambino clan, “Frank” Cali, was shot and killed outside his home in the New York borough of Staten Island in March 2019.

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CRIME

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

Amanda Knox was again found guilty of slander on Wednesday, in a retrial in Italy related to her infamous jailing and later acquittal for the 2007 murder of her British roommate.

Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italy in slander case linked to 2007 murder

The American cried in court in Florence as she was sentenced to three years already served for having accused, during police questioning, an innocent bar owner of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.

“I’m very sorry I was not strong enough to have resisted the police pressure,” Knox told the judges.

“I was scared, tricked and mistreated. I gave the testimony in a moment of existential crisis.”

She was 20 when she and her Italian then-boyfriend were arrested for the brutal killing of fellow student Kercher at the girls’ shared home in Perugia.

READ ALSO: ‘I hope to clear my name’: Amanda Knox back in Italy for slander retrial

The murder began a long legal saga where the pair was found guilty, acquitted, found guilty again and finally cleared of all charges in 2015.

But Knox still had a related conviction for slander, for blaming the murder on a local bar owner during initial questioning by police.

In October, Italy’s highest court threw out that conviction on appeal and ordered a retrial, which began earlier this year in Florence in Knox’s absence.

The night she was interrogated was “the worst night of my life… I was in shock, exhausted”, she said on Wednesday.

“The police interrogated me for hours and hours, in a language which I hardly knew, without an official translator or a lawyer”.

“I didn’t know who the killer was… They refused to believe me”, she said.

‘Something so horrible’

Kercher’s half-naked body was found in a pool of blood inside the roommates’ cottage in November 2007. Her throat had been slit and she had suffered multiple stab wounds.

During police questioning, Knox implicated Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who then spent almost two weeks behind bars before being released without charge.

Knox was convicted of slandering him in 2011 and sentenced to three years already served.

But she said she was yelled at and slapped during the police investigation – claims that prompted a separate charge of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.

Amanda Knox arriving in court in Florence, on June 5th, 2024. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

The police had found a message on Knox’s phone they said was proof she and Lumumba were plotting.

“They told me I had witnessed something so horrible that my mind had blocked it out,” Knox said on Wednesday. “One of the officers cuffed me round the head and said ‘remember, remember!’,” she said.

“In the end… I was forced to submit. I was too exhausted and confused to resist.”

The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 ruled that Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation.

That ruling, which found her treatment “compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”, was cited by Italy’s top court last year when it ordered the retrial.

‘Monster of Perugia’

Knox said last October that at the time of Kercher’s murder, Lumumba “was my friend”.

But Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, described how Knox’s accusation changed his life.

“When he was accused by Amanda he became universally considered the monster of Perugia,” he told reporters outside court.

Knox was hugged by her husband in court – the same one where she was reconvicted of murder in 2014 – as reporters looked on.

Her murder trial attracted global interest, much of it salacious, focusing on prosecutors’ claims that Kercher died as part of a sex game gone wrong.

But Italy’s highest court, when it acquitted Knox and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito once and for all, said there had been “major flaws” in the police investigation.

One person remains convicted of Kercher’s murder — Ivorian Rudy Guede, who was linked to the scene by DNA evidence.

He was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault, his sentence later reduced on appeal to 16 years.

Guede was released early in November 2021.

Now 36 and with two young children, Knox is a journalist, author and campaigner for criminal justice reform.

She first returned to Italy five years ago to address a conference on wrongful convictions, appearing on a panel entitled “Trial By Media”.

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