Paramilitary cops swooped on Matteo Messina Denaro while he was undergoing treatment at a private clinic in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, according to The Associated Press. Italian news agencies reported he is believed to be suffering from cancer and had been attending appointments at the clinic under a false name for some time.

The 60-year-old, nicknamed “Diabolik” after an Italian comic book villain of the 60s, was 30 when he went underground, but is said to have continued to pull the strings of the Sicilian mob while on the run.

Messina Denaro, who is from the town of Castelvetrano, is alleged to have boasted he could fill an entire cemetery with his victims, with scores of murders and deadly bomb attacks in his wake. Two separate bombings killed top anti-Mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, as well as numerous bystanders, in 1992. He is also accused of strangling a rival’s pregnant girlfriend to death.

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Source: https://www.newsweek.com/mafia-matteo-messina-denaro-captured-applause-1774155

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The post Italians Cheer As Mafia Boss Matteo Messina Denaro Finally Arrested—Video first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The ‘Ndrangheta is based in the southern region of Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, and has surpassed Sicily’s more famous Cosa Nostra to become the most powerful mafia group in the country — and one of the largest crime gangs in the world.

Police said they seized hundreds of suspects in early morning swoops around the country, with some arrests also carried out in Germany, Switzerland, and Bulgaria.

Amongst the possible charges facing those detained were mafia conspiracy, murder, extortion, loan sharking, corporate fraud, and money laundering.

“Politicians were involved, as well as lawyers, accountants, public officials, court clerks. All people who had jobs and did not need to put themselves at the service of the ‘Ndrangheta,” said prosecutor Nicola Gratteri, who led the investigation.

“The mobsters are not in a position to carry out sophisticated money laundering. To do that they need professionals,” he added.

Gratteri said it was the largest haul of suspected mobsters in Italy since a massive anti-mafia swoop in Sicily in 1984 which led to the so-called Palermo maxi-trial when more than 450 members of Cosa Nostra were tried.

The Palermo trial marked a turning point in the battle against the Sicilian crime gang, and their influence has waned dramatically over the past three decades, allowing ‘Ndrangheta to surge to prominence.

Italian investigators say the group, which is made up of dozens of smaller clans that all answer nominally to senior leaders in Calabria, is now Europe’s top cocaine broker.

Amongst those arrested on Thursday was a former lawmaker from Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia (Go Italy!) party, the center-left mayor of a Calabrian coastal town, and a senior official in the Carabinieri police.

“This has inflicted a very hard blow on the ‘Ndrangheta,” said Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese.

Investigators say that while the ‘Ndrangheta is still centered on Calabria, one of the poorest regions in Europe, it has successfully managed to infiltrate the wealthy north.

The head of the Valle D’Aosta region, which borders France and Switzerland, resigned last week after being placed under investigation for alleged vote-rigging linked to ‘Ndrangheta at 2018 local elections. He has denied the accusation.

The post More than 300 people arrested in huge Italian mob swoop first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

On Thursday, the government is due release its final batch of secret files relating to the assassination, the majority of which will come from the FBI and CIA. The files are being released in keeping with a 1992 law that was passed in part due to Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” which explored the efforts of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison to investigate Kennedy’s death.

Stone’s film was popular but widely criticized by experts who saw the film as a disservice to history. Scholars of the assassination are nearly unanimous in their belief that Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, while Garrison argued that elements of the U.S. government were actually responsible. Other conspiracy theorists point to the Mafia or foreign governments, such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba or the Soviet Union, as the hidden actors behind the assassination. Meanwhile, former Trump adviser Roger Stone, who says he had been pushing the president to release the files in full, has written a book claiming President Johnson was the real culprit.

President Trump is the only person allowed by law to halt the release of the files, although he’s said that he will release all of them “subject to the receipt of further information.”

There are numerous questions surrounding the assassination, which shocked the nation on November 22, 1963. For example, it is difficult to discern a clear motive for why Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine who had briefly defected to the Soviet Union, would shoot Kennedy. Oswald also denied shooting Kennedy and famously claimed to be a “patsy” moments before nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed him on November 24.

The Warren Commission, which was put appointed by Johnson to investigate the assassination and lead by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, determined in 1964 that Oswald had acted alone. Still, a CBS News poll from 2013 found that 61 percent of Americans believed that more than one man was responsible for the assassination. Other polls have routinely found that majorities of Americans likewise believe in some sort of conspiracy surrounding Kennedy’s death. The same CBS poll found that 56 percent believed there was a cover-up.

It’s unclear whether Thursday’s big reveal will change anyone’s mind. But here’s what we do know: the new collection includes over 3,100 documents, and some of them are related to Oswald’s trip to Mexico City right before the assassination. But most experts are of the opinion that the new documents are unlikely to reveal all that much about what happened that day in Dallas, because the government was legally required to release anything particularly relevant to the case years ago.

On the other hand, it’s impossible to know if there’s a bombshell hidden in this new tranche of documents.

“It’s always possible that a really good researcher will find new information that they think is significant and will add to their version of the story, or perhaps even lead them in other directions,” Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board, told Time Magazine earlier this week.

“There’s a lot of still unanswered questions about the assassination. For example, did Oswald, when he lived in Minsk, have any connection with Cuban intelligence agents who were being trained in Minsk by the Soviets? There are issues like that that aren’t fully resolved anywhere, and going through these documents might give good researchers an opportunity to come up with more than what we know today in the official story.”

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/secret-jfk-files-released-by-us-government/

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