Free Republic

MONTREAL — For the third time in just over four years, the main Italian Catholic church in Montreal hosted a funeral for Canada's reputed first family of Mafia power. A cortege of 11 limousines followed a hearse carrying the body of Vito Rizzuto, the multilingual don who ran an international crime syndicate that frustrated Canadian law enforcement for decades. The 67-year-old Sicilian-born Montrealer died of complications from lung cancer a week earlier. About 100 people attended Monday's funeral, mainly close relatives of the don. None of them spoke to reporters. It was a far cry from the big crowds that...

WASHINGTON — Remember the new spirit of cooperation in Washington? That’s so last week. The era of good feeling is over, its duration measured in days, or perhaps hours. Last Wednesday, 36 Senate Republicans — 80 percent of the caucus — voted against the budget compromise drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, last year’s Republican vice presidential nominee. Already, Republicans, including Ryan, are making noises about another showdown early next year over the federal government’s debt limit. You might say they’ve returned to their default position. By Thursday morning, Senate leaders were back to petty bickering. Harry Reid, the...

MONTREAL — Time took care of crime boss Vito Rizzuto before his enemies could get to him. The 67-year-old died Monday morning of a lung ailment, ending his 35-year reign atop Canada's criminal underworld and throwing the Mafia into disarray. A source at Montreal's north-end Sacre-Coeur hospital confirms Rizzuto died Monday at 4 a.m. An ambulance transported Rizzuto to the hospital's emergency room on Saturday evening, with family members in tow. A source says he was confused and had a fever. Nicknamed "Montreal's Teflon don," Rizzuto ran a powerful organized crime syndicate for decades but was never convicted in Canada...

Rudy Giuliani has claimed that the mafia in Italy put an $800,000 contract on his head while he was mayor of New York City. Giuliani, who was praised for his leadership during the 9/11 terrorist attacksy, revealed to Oprah Winfrey on her OWN cable-channel show "Oprah: Where Are They Now" that as a former prosecutor he was a target for criminals who he'd put behind bars, especially mobsters. "I don't think anybody prosecuted more mafia members than I did," said Giuliani, who was U.S. Attorney before becoming the mayor from 1994-2001. "Certainly, no one sent them to prison for the...

The anti-corruption stance of Pope Francis has riled Italy’s powerful mafia groups, according to a prosecutor who specializes in mob cases. State prosecutor Nicola Gratteri – who works in the southern Italian region of Calabria, where the ‘Ndrangheta mafia is active – told the Italian daily Fatto Quotidiano that Francis’ statements on transparency and dismantling economic power in the Vatican are making mobsters “nervous and agitated.” “I cannot say if the organization is in a position to do something like this, but they are dangerous and it is worth reflecting on,” Gratteri said. “If the godfathers can find a way...

The five most popular JFK assassination conspiracy theories, as outlined by Adriane Quinlan, has generated questions and thoughtful responses from readers: WhoDat Garrison is the closest yet... Nobody will ever know exactly what happened to JFK, but know these facts: With the number, angles and accuracy of the bullets, Oswald 100% did not act alone. Secret service assigned to JFKs car all pulled back seconds before he was shot. George HW Bush has repeatedly denied being in Dallas Tx on the day of the shooting after multiple sources have evidence proving otherwise.Velociraptor I believe there was a conspiracy but that...

"A State with No Republicans!" Very interesting...Note this. A US State with zero Republicans in office - The State of Illinois. Think about this. Some interesting data on the 'state' of Illinois ... There are more people on welfare in Illinois than there are people working. Chicago pays the highest wages to teachers than anywhere else in the U.S. averaging $110,000/year. Their pensions average 80-90% of their income. Wow, are Illinois and Chicago great or what? Be sure to read till the end. I've never heard it explained better. Perhaps the U.S. should pull out of Chicago ? Body count:...

Pope Francis (CNS) Pope Francis’s life is in danger from ‘ndrangheta, Italy’s most feared crime group, a leading anti-mafia judge has said.Nicola Gratteri, a magistrate in the southern city of Reggio Calabria, near ‘ndrangheta’s heartland, has said that Pope Francis’s crackdown on financial corruption in the Vatican, has angered bosses in the notorious crime squad.Gratteri said: “I don’t know if organised crime is in the position to do something, but it’s certainly thinking about it. It could be dangerous.”He said Francis was “on the right path” in attempting to clean out the stables at the Vatican.But Mr Gratteri, who has...

ROME (RNS) Pope Francis could be at risk from the ‘Ndrangheta organized crime organization, according to a leading anti-mob prosecutor who has himself been the target of threats from the mafia. Nicola Gratteri, 55, a state prosecutor in the southern Italian region of Calabria, where the ‘Ndrangheta is most active, said the pope’s effort to reform the church is making the ‘Ndrangheta “very nervous.” The organization is considered by experts in Italy to be the most dangerous, most unified and most difficult to penetrate mafia-type organization in the country. “I cannot say if the organization is in a position to...

Forty-nine years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy former mob buster Robert Blakey contends the most likely explanation from the available evidence is that the Mafia was responsible as reported by Tovin Lapan for the Las Vegas Sun: "I think the mob set Oswald up as a patsy. It's not that I think (Oswald) didn't shoot (Kennedy), but that I think he was set up so (investigators) would focus on the Cuban connections (and not the mob). Did the mob do it? I don't know for sure, but it explains more of the evidence than anything else." Blakey,...

And so it begins – the plentiful coverage of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy. The date itself is weeks away and there will be countless commemorative programs, specials and copious punditry on TV. JFK: The Smoking Gun (Sunday, Discovery, 8 p.m.) is one of the most controversial of the bunch. Made for the tiny U.S. cable channel Reelz, it’s a two-hour docudrama based on the book of the same name by former Australian police detective Colin McLaren. He claims to have spent years on “the forensic cold-case investigation of JFK’s assassination” and says...

I realize that delving into the world of assassination research and a belief in a conspiracy will lead some to brand me as an extremist or a nut, but the facts I have uncovered are so compelling that I must make the case that Lyndon Baines Johnson had John Fitzgerald Kennedy murdered in Dallas to become president himself and to avert the precipitous political and legal fall that was about to beset him. Snip When Lodge was in his eighties, he served vigorously as the chairman of Ronald Reagan’s campaign for President in Connecticut, a post I had recruited him...

Dan Rather excluded from CBS' anniversary coverage of Kennedy assassination Published: November 5, 2013 1:57 PM By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The 50th-anniversary coverage of the Kennedy assassination on CBS News won't include the recollections of its longtime anchor Dan Rather, further proof of the lingering bitterness following Rather's messy exit and subsequent lawsuit against the network. Rather helped organize CBS' plans for President John F. Kennedy's visit to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and as a young reporter was a key component of assassination coverage. Now 82, with his own show on AXS-TV, he's one of the few reporters on...

James L. Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer was a New York Times bestseller, won the Edgar Award, and became mandatory reading for official Washington. Its fans included President George W. Bush, Speaker of the House John Boehner, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Now, for the 50th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy, Swanson returns with End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, a gripping account of the murder and its aftermath. JFK’s trip to Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 set in motion a chain of...

ReelzChannel is getting back into the Kennedy family business, and once again likely to make some waves. In November, the network that aired the Emmy-winning 2011 miniseries "The Kennedys" will debut "JFK: The Smoking Gun," a new documentary offering the theory that John F. Kennedy was killed, not by Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle, but by the friendly-fire bullet of an inexperienced Secret Service agent. "The only possible gun that could have been in that area is that Secret Service gun. So the finding is that it was an accidental discharge. Nobody's claiming anybody did anything wrong. But at the time,...

Today, Team Obama isn’t getting any support from its normally active cheering section at CNN. Bob Laszewski, an executive who provides consulting services to many major American insurance companies, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “The White House is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet.” Here’s what’s Bob is talking about: Insurers who expose Obamacare’s most sinister effects are told they can’t become authorized Obamacare insurance providers – that means they’d be denied access to the largest market in the country just for telling the truth about how many people are being forced off their...

America is suffering from an epic case of Armageddon fatigue. Budget showdown, government shutdown, debt ceiling debacle—the stakes are real but the establishment seems to feed off the chaos they create as a means to foment fear and outrage and translate it into campaign donations for themselves. Look closely and you’ll see that something seismic is going on under the surface of the manufactured chaos in D.C. Washington has morphed into an extortion racket, a place where members of the permanent political class threaten to inflict legislative and regulatory pain to extract campaign donations that they can then siphon into...

Federal agents will start targeting high-level drug traffickers in Puerto Rico with intelligence gathered during a three-month blitz on criminal activity in the U.S. territory, the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday. The campaign is part of a federal operation that began in July 2012 with help from local authorities that focuses on the smuggling of drugs, weapons, money and migrants. The agency says agents have seized a total of 53,000 pounds (24,000 kilograms) of drugs, confiscated hundreds of firearms and arrested more than 320 suspected criminals who will be prosecuted at federal and local levels. …

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — Is the counterfeiting of designer goods different from knock-offs? Is organized crime involved in the fashionindustry? If so, what happens to the ill-gotten gains? As New York Fashion Week wraps up, it's high time to explore some of these issues. Professor...

Forty years ago, the battle of the sexes took a more literal turn in the world of sports, and captured the imagination of the country — and the world. By then a fading star in men’s tennis, Bobby Riggs challenged rising women’s tennis star Billie Jean King to a three-set match to settle whether women could compete against men on an even field. But how even was the field? ESPN and ABC report that Riggs may have thrown the match in cahoots with the Mafia: Breaking News |Celebrity News |More ABC News Videos The “Battle of the Sexes,” a 1973...