Free Republic

Wishing away the ghost of a slain predecessor, our president is trying to bury a living law. ********************************************************* Hypocrisy is never a good look. On June 30, our secretary of Education declared that the Supreme Court, by striking down President Biden’s student-debt forgiveness program, had “substituted itself for Congress.” On the very same day, Biden issued his “Memorandum on Certifications Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” decreeing that, from now on, executive-branch agencies would adopt the CIA’s “Transparency Plan” for releasing assassination related files they control. The problem: The federal...

There is a risk of mafia interference in Italy’s upcoming general election, some of the country’s top politicians warned on Wednesday. Interior Minister Marco Minniti said it was a “fact” that there was “a concrete risk of the mafia conditioning the free vote”. “To say that the mafias are a threat to democracy does not seem irrational on the eve of an electoral competition,” Minniti said in a speech at the Italian Senate. He went on to say there had been “too much silence on these issues” in the election campaign so far, and that Italy faced a “double threat”...

Hamilton, NJ (FOX5NY) - Authorities in New Jersey are investigating the death of a man who was found in a tanning bed at a gym. It happened Monday in a Crunch Fitness on South Broad Street in Hamilton. Police say that the body of Nicholas Ricigliani, 27, of Hamilton was found in the tanning-bed room by an employee of the gym. Investigators said that there was no indication that foul play was involved but did not elaborate. Ricigliani's body was transported by the Middlesex County Medical Examiner's Office to determine the exact cause of death. The Hamilton Police asked that...

A bishop in Sicily has banned known mafia criminals from acting as godfathers at baptisms in churches in his diocese. Michele Pennisi, bishop of Monreale, near Palermo, said Friday he had issued a decree to that effect in a bid to challenge any notion that the bosses of organized crime have a paternalistic side to them. “The mafia has always taken the term ‘Godfather’ from the Church to give its bosses an air of religious respectability, whereas in fact the two worlds are completely incompatible,” the bishop told AFP. Pennisi’s diocese includes Corleone, a vendetta-haunted village inland from Palermo which...

Just In: Wikileaks Issues A Formal Statement On Murder Of DNC Staffer Seth Rich.

Mafia bosses have 'declared war' against migrants on the holiday paradise of Sicily as one thousand new arrivals pour on to the island every week. The feared Cosa Nostra are desperate to maintain supremacy after African crime gangs arrived with the migrants - and they are engaged in a deadly turf war. An innocent Gambian man was shot through the head by an assassin in broad daylight sparking fears of a wider bloodbath. Mayor Leoluca Orlando told MailOnline: 'Palermo is no longer an Italian town. It is no longer European. You can walk in the city and feel like you’re...

Senator Ted Cruz went off on Donald Trump during an interview Tuesday with host, Glenn Beck. Cruz called the New York businessman a "Cosa Nostra" mobster...insulting all Italian-America with his contiuing, hate lie telling!!! First Cruz insults all New Yorkers, now, he, insults all Italian-Americans. Who is next, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, etc. My....what a low life bigot...Mr. Ted Cruz is. Certainly not POTUS caliber material. I might remind the ignorant bigot, Cruz that New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, California have vast numbers of Italian-Americans...who will not take kindly to his hateful remarks. I think Cruz...

The toughest guy in Sicily is a gay man. Nine months ago Rosario Crocetta was elected as Sicily's governor on an anti-Mafia platform, and his fearless campaign against the degenerate mobsters has so impressed an otherwise conservative electorate that his sexuality has become an irrelevancy as reported by Anthony Faiola for The Washington Post: "'Having Crocetta in Sicily is like having an openly gay man elected governor in Alabama,' said Ivan Scalfarotto, a member of the national parliament and a Milan-based gay rights advocate. 'But the most telling point is that his sexuality became a small detail for voters. This...

Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor Vincenzo Macri says that the 'Ndrangheta or Calabrian Mafia "certainly" is behind the 1989 killing of Australian Federal Police assistant commissioner Colin Winchester as reported by Richard Guilliatt for The Australian: "he said he believed the Winchester murder was carried out by the same organisation that murdered Griffith anti-drug campaigner Donald Mackay in 1977 and federal police officer Geoffrey Bowen in 1994." In recent years Cosa Nostra or the Sicilian Mafia has been eclipsed by the Calabrian Mafia as Italy's most powerful crime group due to its obscene profits from the cocaine trade in Europe. The Calabrian...

The Mafia's Ten Commandments have been found after police arrested a top Godfather in Sicily. Under the secret Cosa Nostra code of conduct, the so-called "men of honour" must avoid bars, other gangsters' wives and girlfriends and be on time. The list of rules emerged from documents seized after the arrest of Salvatore Lo Piccolo, 65, at a secret mob meeting in Palermo, along with his son Sandro, 32, and two other godfathers. The 10 'Mafiosi' commandments are: 1. No one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it. 2....

The Sicilian Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, is facing a revolt by local businessmen who refuse to pay protection money. Until now almost every business in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, has paid off the Mafia or faced retribution.

Hillary Clinton Corleone, Mortgage Lender By Matt Carrothers August 13, 2007 There is a key sequence of scenes in “The Godfather: Part II” in which a young Vito Corleone exerts his ascending power and influence over New York’s Little Italy neighborhood. A poor widow named Signora Colombo asks Corleone to intervene with her landlord, Roberto, who wants to evict her. Colombo cannot afford to move, and she has no where else to live. Corleone seeks out the landlord Roberto and offers to pay six months of Signora Colombo’s rent in advance, at an increased rate. Roberto refuses, but soon finds...

NEW YORK - At an age when most of his contemporaries were long out to pasture or in prison, Matty "The Horse" Ianniello was still riding high. Retirement held no appeal for the old man — and why would it? The notorious Genovese crime family captain, an eyewitness to gangland history from the slaying of "Crazy Joey" Gallo through the conviction of Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, ascended to family boss just three years before his 80th birthday. It was 1997, and big money was rolling in from rackets in Little Italy, the garbage industry, a mobbed-up union local. The silver-haired...

When a mutual friend complained to Abel Prieto, the Cuban culture minister, about the beating administered by a mob to Martha Beatriz Roque, an infirm 60-year-old economist, he lowered his head and begged out of the question, saying that those were ''Fidel's doings.'' He was ashamed that such a cowardly act could be committed. He would have liked to prevent it, but the matter was out of his hands. All he could do was to resign from government, but he didn't have the nerve to do it.He was right. Except for international pressure, nothing and nobody in Cuba can stop...

CORLEONE, Sicily - Decades before Mario Puzo borrowed its name for his novel about a ruthless Mafia family and Marlon Brando brought "The Godfather" to life with a throaty voice, Corleone — the town, not the don — had its own bloody story. For generations, this medieval mountain town overlooking rolling fields where sheep and horses graze has been home to the murderous Corleonesi crime clan. The capture this month of Bernardo Provenzano, reputed chieftain of the Corleonesi crime family and No. 1 boss of Cosa Nostra across Sicily, ended one shameful chapter in the town's life. While breathing a...

A dramatic drug bust at two Aspen restaurants busy with the après ski crowd has created a rift between the two major law enforcement agencies at one of Colorado's premier ski resort towns. Fifty-three officers from a number of law enforcement agencies, some with guns drawn, stormed into two Aspen restaurants during the busy after-ski time last Friday. The raids happened shortly after 4 p.m. and netted about 2 ounces of cocaine, $3,000 in cash, nine arrests for drug involvement and 11 for immigration law violations. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, an opponent of the "war on drugs" who believes...

The official end of judicial independence in Venezuela Today the National Assembly named the new members of the TSJ, our High Court, based on the new law voted a few months ago. At least the opposition had the delicacy to step out of the assembly when the vote took place. It is fair to say that today is a dark day in Venezuelan history. By packing the TSJ with 17 political appointees, the Government ensures that his already clear majority in the present Court will be a large one, a commanding one in every single of the different court halls...

The New York mob boss often called "the last don" was convicted yesterday in a federal racketeering case that centered on charges that his bloody 25 years as the dominant power in the Bonanno crime family included seven murders and a host of other crimes. The conviction of the boss, Joseph C. Massino, 61, on all 11 counts followed a startling trial that included damaging testimony from his own brother-in-law and underboss and an unusual claim by the defense lawyer that if Mr. Massino was a crime boss, he was a peaceful one opposed to rubouts. The verdict was a...

t can be hard for certain New York City neighborhoods to lose their reputations. To some people, the South Bronx is still burning and Hell's Kitchen is still a place filled with gangsters with Irish names and a taste for sadistic violence. And while gentrification can tame parts of Brooklyn, it cannot rewrite their rap sheets. Such is the plight of Pleasant Avenue — a six-block stretch in East Harlem that is one of the most famous gangland stretches in mob history. The avenue, which runs from 114th Street to 120th Street, just east of First Avenue, is an Italian...