The Soccer Mafia

The Ozone Mafia

We prefer to know them as the mafia.

The Congolese war lords were selling this stuff to the mafia in exchange for weapons, and the mafia would then sell it on to Western markets.

My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it's mostly deployed by the Russian mafia in order to steal your grandmother's bank accounts.

Ukraine had become a transit point for the international drug trafficking mafia, and it needed international cooperation in order to solve the problem.

And in Bulgaria, the mafia was soon joined with 14,000 people who were sacked from their jobs in the security services between 1989 and 1991.

They endured 17 long months in solitary confinement and a trial tainted by manipulation, bias and the vengeful hatred of the anti Cuban mafia and its slanders.

What was unusual about Bo was his open ambition. Chinese party bosses, like Japanese politicians or, indeed, Mafia dons are supposed to be discreet in their appetite for power.

This image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in Chernobyl originally, and I pasted it in Southern Italy, where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground.

This image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in Chernobyl originally, and I pasted it in Southern Italy, where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground.

Ukraine s Orange Revolution, as well as Georgia s Rose Revolution, seems to confirm this. While revolutions in the late 1980 s and early 1990 s were directed against totalitarian communist regimes, nowadays they aim to get rid of this mafia type post communism.

The multiplication of assassinations of political opponents and economic rivals, the mafia practice of contract murders, cannot be seen as signs of a regained stability. Nor can the Putin regime s manipulation of popular xenophobia against citizens of the former Soviet empire, such as Georgians.

But there are many Albanians who know differently, and believe that Kosovo is failing to come to terms with the acts of a few rogue fighters. These Albanians fear that, in the absence of the rule of law, Kosovo will become a mafia state.

Journalist Misha Glenny spent several years in a courageous investigation of organized crime networks worldwide, which have grown to an estimated 15 of the global economy. From the Russian mafia, to giant drug cartels, his sources include not just intelligence and law enforcement officials but criminal insiders.

Let us also not forget that Russia, too, has deployed cyber attacks in the service of foreign policy goals. Indeed, Russia has far more formidable hackers than North Korea (though much of the top talent currently is employed in mafia rings, rather than in strategic operations).

Because KGB Mafia structures now rule Russia and manipulate the judicial system, it is assumed that Yeltsin wanted to handpick his successor in order to avoid future prosecution. But we who chose Putin were charged with finding someone to continue Yeltsin s reforms, not shield him and his family.

Likewise, in Russia, President Vladimir Putin rules a state apparatus designed and run by elements of the country's old intelligence services and its new mafia. The law is used to reward the regime's cronies and to penalize its critics, such as the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the activist Alexei Navalny.

But Colombia the region s oldest and most stable democracy is still plagued by illegal, armed guerilla organizations. Unlike in other countries, where guerrillas pursued exclusively political demands, Colombia s guerilla groups became involved in drug trafficking, which transformed them into lethal institutional monsters, one part subversive organization and one part criminal mafia.

This inevitable process poisoned political life and the media, which led to a strange state of limited freedom and a mafia like environment. The shadings differed from country to country in the post communist world, but the new generations rising in these societies now seem to be fed up with it.

In a world haunted by visions of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and unscrupulous mafia like gangs, it is about time attention was paid to the danger posed by the continued and uncontrolled exploitation of the uranium that is so abundant in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In an already fragile region, a major Arab country like Iraq would most likely prompt interventions by its nervous neighbors of which there is no shortage if it turns into a failed state. Instead of the rule of law, there would be the law of the mafia, of terrorist groups, and of tribal militias.

And while we could try and figure out new ways to use those capacities such as cooking or making ice sculptures or even a mafia hit what we probably will find is that, in fact, turning those products into services that we have access to when we want them, is a far smarter way to go.

It turns out, however, that Indian politicians are not the only ones vulnerable to seduction by the Indian miracle mafia. Former Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh reveals in a recent memoir that no less a personage than Margaret Thatcher was fascinated by an Indian godman, Chandraswami, whom she received in her office shortly after becoming Conservative Party leader.

But the fact that, particularly in India s northern states, voters elect people referred to openly in the press as mafia dons, dacoit leaders, and anti social elements is a troubling reflection on the way the electoral process has served Indian democracy. In the last four parliaments, at least a hundred members have had criminal cases pending against them.

First and foremost, the US generates the huge demand for illicit drugs that sustains the entire Latin American mafia, just as the US experiment with alcohol prohibition in the 1920 s fueled the rise of gangsters like Al Capone. No one knows precisely the Mexican drug cartels annual profits, but they certainly amount to billions of dollars.

Backed by an enraged public, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) recently searched some 30 sites, including a raid on a major Sumo stable, or training center. The move was made in an effort to seize material evidence about the nexus between Sumo wrestling and the Yakuza, Japan s Mafia like organized crime groups that date from the seventeenth century.

Property, construction, and land are the common currencies of power in mafia societies in China and Russia no less than in Sicily. One reason China has been transformed into a gigantic building site, with huge new cities emerging almost overnight, is that this drives a red hot and highly corrupt economy, ruled by a Leninist party that has monetized political power by asset stripping and construction.

India s parliamentarians increasingly embody the qualities required to acquire power rather than the skills needed to wield it for the common good. Many cynics regard democracy in India as a process that has given free rein to criminals and corrupt cops, opportunists and fixers, murderous musclemen and grasping middlemen, kickback making politicos and bribe taking bureaucrats, mafia dons and private armies, caste activists and religious extremists.

For many years after Lukashenko was first elected, in 1994 (he has ruled without interruption ever since), most Belarusians did perhaps tolerate the regime, because they believed that it protected them from the worst excesses of neighboring Russia s Wild East capitalism corrupt privatization, job losses, and mafia rule. But, over time, and with more Belarusians traveling to the West, belief in Lukashenko s leadership has become unsustainable.

This means that he will be accountable to and dependent on those who raised him to power, not in a symbolic sense, but in the quite real sense of fulfilling promises and facing sanctions if he does not. This narrow circle comprises not only very rich and resourceful people, but also members of informal but very effective organizations (which are often, perhaps not entirely correctly, called mafia ).

To her equally frantic detractors on the left and increasingly in the center she is a frightening harbinger of a theocratic America, a mafia style executrix of state business who lies about the connection of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to Iraq, mocks Barack Obama for his opposition to torturing prisoners, and defies subpoenas. Think of her as George W. Bush II, but in designer pumps.

If, as appears increasingly likely, Mockus becomes president, his agenda promises to be prudent neither a leap into the void nor immobilized by the need for profound changes. Three issues will hold his attention initially the potent mafia subculture that has arisen over the last decade, the need to redirect a development model marked by extensive inequality, and avoidance of isolation and overreaction in the country s foreign relations.

The moral authority that Francis exudes makes his interventions in controversial contemporary issues such as his condemnation of the Armenian genocide, Islamic jihadi violence, Mafia criminality and corruption in Italy, and the deaths of African and Middle Eastern migrants in the Mediterranean extremely powerful. Before and during his visit to the US, his views on three issues none of which is without controversy in the US will have a particularly strong impact.