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[mugshot] Palermo, 3 April (AKI) - The deportation of former Mafia boss Rosario Gambino from the United States to Italy has been delayed, sources told Adnkronos. The 65-year-old Gambino,(photo) cousin of Carlo Gambino, boss of the Gambino crime family, has been sought by Italian authorities since 2001, when a request for extradition was originally denied by US judges. Eleven attempts for his extradition were rejected by US authorities on the grounds that a law known as '41-bis' could be result in Gambino being tortured in Italy. The '41-bis' article of the Italian penitentiary act gives power to the minister...

-- snip -- On Aug. 7, 1999, the one-year anniversary of the U.S. African embassy bombings that killed 257 people and injured 5,000, President Bill Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to the victims of terrorism, vowing that he "will not rest until justice is done." Four days later, while Congress was on summer recess, the White House quietly issued a press release announcing that the president was granting clemency to 16 imprisoned members of FALN. What began as a simple paragraph on the AP wire exploded into a major controversy...

On a brisk November morning, Cathy Wilkerson strides down one of the city’s finest streets, 11th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, her glance sweeping across the row of handsome town houses, alighting nowhere in particular. “The street I remember,” Ms. Wilkerson says, “was a lot less polished.” If streets had memories, this one would recall a far less polished incarnation of her. On the morning of March 6, 1970, Cathy Wilkerson stumbled onto 11th Street in tatters, bleeding and her clothes all but ripped off her body. Her father’s town house, 18 West 11th Street, which she had borrowed on...

WONDERLAND Scooter Libby and Reputation Prosecutions that wreak ruin on a lifetime. The trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is the closest version of a Red Queen trial this country has had in a long time. One says that knowing it might start a stampede from past defendants laying claim to the most upside-down prosecution. Lewis G. Carroll's account of the Knave' s trial before the Red Queen and White Rabbit is famous for the Queen's dictum, "Sentence first, verdict afterward." But read the full transcript of the mock trial and one will see that the real subject is not...

Pardon Scandal Still Looms for Sen. Clinton's Brother A court-appointed bankruptcy trustee asked a federal judge this week to schedule a new court date in a case against Tony Rodham, the brother of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., accused of failing to repay $109,000 in loans from a carnival company whose owners received controversial pardons issued by President Bill Clinton in the last hours of his presidency. According to documents filed in the case, Rodham received the loans, before and after the pardons were granted, from United Shows of America, Inc., owned by Edgar Gregory and his wife, who had been...

The Terror Network: North America

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Authorities say a businessman pardoned by former President Clinton has been found dead inside his South Beach condo. Miami Beach police say 63-year-old Almon Braswell was found dead October 28th in his Ocean Drive condo by his employees. It's believed he died from a previous injury. Additional information hasn't been released. The Miami-Dade County medical examiner is labeling Braswell's death as "unclassified" pending more tests. Clinton granted 177 pardons and clemencies just before leaving office in 2001. Braswell was pardoned of convictions for fraud and other crimes stemming from false claims in 1983 about...

A bankruptcy trustee for a carnival company whose owners received a pardon from President Clinton is seeking to garnish the bank accounts of Mr. Clinton's brother-in-law to recoup more than $100,000 in loans. Anthony D. Rodham, one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's two brothers, got the loans from United Shows of America Inc. after its owners obtained the presidential pardon in March 2000 over the objections of the Justice Department. Michael E. Collins, trustee for United Shows, filed papers in Alexandria bankruptcy court seeking the return of $107,000 plus $46,034 in interest from Mr. Rodham, 51, for the loans he...

Here's an oldie but goodie, from February '01 - 5 years ago this month. It's more relevant than ever - because it reminds us of Libby's ties to MNEW YORK -- It is "utterly false" to suggest fugitive financier Marc Rich was pardoned in return for donations to the Clinton library, former President Clinton wrote in an Op-Ed piece in Sunday editions of The New York Times. Clinton said he pardoned Rich, who allegedly evaded $48 million in U.S. taxes, for a number of reasons, and only after concluding that the case should have been handled in a civil rather...

Jerrold Nadler's Two Faces on Terror By Jacob LaksinFrontPageMagazine.com | June 13, 2005Last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Patriot Act had already been adjourned, but Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic blimpish congressman from New York and one of the leftmost members of the House Judiciary Committee, was too wound up to care: “We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it,” bellowed the hefty Nadler. By this, Nadler meant to defend his attacks on the alleged abuses of the (in fact) privileged  prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Thanks to the efforts of the...

Chicago Police have told former congressman Mel Reynolds, a convicted sex offender, to move from his South Side home because he is living too close to a school. Reynolds has been living in the 11800 block of South Indiana for several years. Last month, he went to Chicago Police headquarters to register as a sex offender, as he is required to do annually. He was told he had to move because he was living within 500 feet of a school. Salem Christian Academy is across the street from Reynolds' home. Reynolds is raising his three children there, and for a...

Convicted leftist terrorist Susan Rosenberg must be counted among the unlikeliest candidates ever to be awarded a university teaching post. Just four years ago, Rosenberg was serving out the 16th year of a 58-year sentence for the possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives and a stockpile of illicit weapons. Moreover, the onetime member of a leftist terrorist outfit called “The Family” was also a suspect in a 1981 robbery-gone-awry that left three people dead in Nyack, New York. However, next January students at Hamilton College, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York, will know Susan Rosenberg,...

Ex-fugitive Marc Rich is suspected of having become one of Saddam Hussein's middlemen in Iraq's illegal oil trade just a month after he won a controversial pardon from former President Bill Clinton, a news report said. ABC News reported last night that Rich's alleged role in the growing UN oil-for-food scandal is under investigation by federal officials. Rich, who was pardoned by Clinton in January 2001, and several other prominent oil traders are suspected of making illegal kickbacks to Iraq to win the lucrative oil contracts, the network reported. The UN program was set up in 1996 to help Iraqis...

The former congressman heads down 79th Street just east of Jeffery, wearing a baseball cap from his college alma mater and flashing the gap-toothed grin that first charmed voters more than a decade ago. Back then, former Rep. Mel Reynolds was a rising Democratic star and congressman from the 2nd District, which es-covers much of the South Side and south suburbs. That was before 1995, when a sexual misconduct conviction stemming from an affair with an underage campaign worker sent him to prison and destroyed his political career. On a recent Monday morning, most remember the face, even if they...

Morales is not worried about being extradited and will live here until he is cleared of his charges or given a full presidential pardon, something his lawyer briefly looked into before President Clinton left office. HAVANA -- Guillermo Morales is a shy, soft-spoken man with streaks of gunpowder embedded in his nose, chin and cheeks and nubs where his hands should be. In 1978, as a member of a militant Puerto Rican separatist group, Morales blew off his hands when a pipe bomb he was assembling in a New York safe house accidentally exploded. Sentenced to 89 years in...

But Michael New, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-MIT Data Center, has inspected the South Dakota Secretary of State's Web site to discover other striking facts: While Democrat Tim Johnson ran statewide about 12 percentage points behind what Mr. Daschle got in his 1998 Senate victory, in Shannon County Mr. Johnson ran about 12 percentage points ahead. He got 92% of the vote compared with Mr. Daschle's 80%. Nowhere else in the state did Mr. Johnson improve his vote share relative to Mr. Daschle. Senate voter turnout was up 27% statewide for this year's close contest compared with 1998,...

Ashcroft to Make it Official: Clintons Are Above the Law Attorney General John Ashcroft is said to be ready to close out a key aspect of his Justice Department investigation into the Clinton pardon trading scandal, effectively confirming that both the ex-president and his New York senator wife are now officially above the law. "The Justice Department is expected within a month to shut down its probe into whether (then-President) Clinton gave clemency to four convicted felons of the Hasidic enclave of New Square after the town voted 1,400 to 12 for Hillary Clinton in her Senate election," the New...

For the past 10 months, convicted former U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds and his estranged wife, Marisol, have shared a South Side apartment on weekends. But they have not had sex in eight years. He yells at her in front of their three children, calling her "fat" and "slut," she said. She calls him names, too, like "pedophile," he said. She feared for her safety so much Sunday that she called police to the home. On Tuesday, a Cook County judge came down on Marisol Reynolds' side, saying she was a credible witness when testifying about Mel Reynolds' alleged mental abuse....