Salon.com > Mafia

Yakuza gang wars spiraling out of control

Tue, 07 May 2013 18:32:00 +0000

KITAKYUSHU, Japan — Visibly nervous, the chairman of a local construction company asks that we lower our voices at the lunch table, and that his name be withheld from publication.

A few shady characters nearby are eavesdropping, he says. This neighborhood is the territory of one particularly violent faction of "yakuza," the powerful criminal underworld of Japan.

Every month, bargaining with the mid-level mobsters and shakedowns have become draining tasks.

“The yakuza have a hand in all sorts of industries, and working with them is just a part of doing business in this city,” admits the executive, who himself was a mafia-connected negotiator for a construction company for almost 40 years.

But times are changing.

“We used to have a sort of harmony with these bosses,” he laments. “They were enforcers, protectors who asked for our money to smooth out permits and deals, but who kept the battles to themselves. Now they’re out of control.”

Whitey Bulger: Secrets behind the capture of the FBI’s most wanted man

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

They’d greeted each other a few times in passing, but the semi-friendship between Whitey Bulger and Josh Bond began in earnest during the summer of 2007 after Josh moved into unit 304 of the Princess Eugenia Apartments. Late one afternoon, Josh was walking around his apartment hugging his guitar while strumming a mix of blues and country. He and a musician friend named Neal Marsh were teamed up and starting a band, For the Kings, with hopes of playing in Los Angeles-area clubs and eventually recording an album.

Some of Josh’s songs were original; others were by Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, the Rolling Stones, and the Band. He played hard and sang loudly, and he knew the old couple in the next apartment could probably hear him, but this was his time to practice and to recover from work. He usually came home from the manager’s office, located in the hotel across the street, wiped out from talking with tenants, suppliers, staff, and guests and servicing their varied needs.

He finished playing, collapsed onto the couch in the living room, and zoned out. Then he heard a knock at the door. Josh didn’t move. No one had ever knocked on his door since he’d moved in. He’d purposely avoided being neighborly with the tenants; he didn’t want them thinking that just because the general manager lived in the building he was available around the clock.

Mafia wars rage in Montreal

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:07:00 +0000

TORONTO, Canada — In the back room of the Cosenza Social Club, a strip mall café in an Italian neighborhood of Montreal, the city’s top mobster held court over piles of cash.

Hours of surveillance video captured by the RCMP, Canada’s national police, show the since-assassinated godfather of Montreal’s powerful Mafia, Nicolo Rizzuto, in variations of the same scene: counting bills, pausing only to lick his fingers, and stuffing the bundles in his knee-high socks.

No one is surprised that the mob conducts its illegal activities in cash. Shocking many, however, are revelations about the source of the money — a Mafia-controlled scheme that rigged bids and dispensed bribes on Montreal public construction contracts.

The scam, revealed in an ongoing corruption inquiry in Montreal, added an estimated 30 percent to the cost of municipal construction projects in Canada’s second-largest city — a corruption tax paid, in the end, by the city’s taxpayers.