"There must be, everywhere people have gangs and crime groups!"
There's also a Polish Mob that survived to this day.
"Of course pre-war crime in Cleveland had not been wholly from the Italian and Jewish
element. There were at least two major Polish-led gangs of robbers. One was the Flatheads led by Paul Jawarski.
On 13 September 1928 when Jawarski and Frank "whitey" Kraft were caught in a restaurant, "whitey"-Kraft ran out
the back but Jawarski holed up in Chambers Avenue. He was driven out by tear gas and was shot. It was not
thought he would survive, but he did so. He has already shot a prison guard escaping from Pittsburgh, and was
said to have killed up to 26 people including a former gang member who was also a drug addict. Jawarski, rather
than see him suffer, threw his body in the river. Returned to Pennsylvania where he was electrocuted on 2
January, Jawarski declined the services of the prison chaplain, saying:
'I preached atheim since the day I quit singing the choir. A man is yellow if he spends his life believing in
nothing and then comes crawling to the church because he is afraid his death is near.'
Shorty before his execution, Jawarski sent his friends a postcard with his future address - 45 Hellsfire Road,
6/14 miles from Hell. Father Pat O'Brien would not have used him as an example. Frank "Whitey" Kraft was later
killed by police in Detroit.
The other main Polish group, the Flats Mob, was led by Joseph Filkowski. In October 1930 he and two colleagues
were suprised by a patroling policeman when they held up the Dixie Shoe Company, and then relieved him of his
gun and uniform. This was not an action which endeared them to the police, but Filkowski's friend Joseph Stazek
was shot dead by detectives on 7 December 1930. A day earlier, Filkowski had escaped a police trap. Worse was
yet to come, for on 9 December Joseph Fortini, district circulation manager of the Plain Dealer, was shot by
Patrolman Patrick McNeely in mistake for Filkowski, so beginning a long-drawn-out and effectively unresolved
inquiry into use of police firearms. Filkowski was later caught and executed. Others in the gang received life
imprisonment. Filkowski, known as John Blake, has his death mask in the Cleveland Police History Museum."
From "Gangland International: The Mafia and other Mobs" by James Morton.
And a modern Polish mob (mostly immigrants) also in Baltimore, USA, still active in 2004...
And well-known Polish gangsters in Poland:
"Polish mafia chief accused of having corrupted former president's aide
Tuesday, 07-Oct-2003 2:43PM PDT
Story from AFP
Copyright 2003 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
WARSAW, Oct 7 (AFP) - The public prosecutor in Warsaw has charged a ringleader of one of Poland's biggest mafia-style groups with giving an unidentified aide of former president Lech Walesa a 150,000-dollar backhander to stay out of jail, a spokesman said on Tuesday.
The ringleader, Andrzej Zielinski, was pardonned in 1993 under a decision signed by Walesa, when he was on the run from a six-year prison sentence for armed robbery and theft.
A spokesman for the public prosecutor's office stressed that Walesa himself was not under suspicion of wrongdoing.
"The former president is out of suspicion. The witness accounts received have never implicated him, as a potential guilty party," the spokesman was quoted as saying by the PAP news agency.
The public prosecutor has not managed to identify the aide who gave Walesa the pardon to sign.
Poland, the biggest of 10 countries on course to join the European Union on May 1, came half way down a corruption index published by Transparency International on Tuesday, coming 64th out of 133."
http://quickstart.clari.net/qs_se/webnews/wed/ax/Qpoland-corruption.RgYq_DO7.html And to let you know Walesa and Zielinski are Polish names not Italian.
And co-operation between Polish and Russian gangsters.
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg109924.html "February 13, 2000 No. 7 (590)
POZNAÑ TRIAL
Poland's New Anti-Gang Weapon
The trial of a band of suspected truck thieves will be the first in Poland to use a witness granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for testimony.
"At the moment, the only people who have anything to say about the key witness are Poznañ drivers forced to take long detours," jokes Andrzej Siemaszko, the director of the Institute of Jurisdiction.
Indeed, the scene around the Poznañ district court building looked like a siege in an American action movie. The building was protected by three explosive detectors. All surrounding streets were closed to traffic. Dozens of policemen, including snipers from anti-terrorist units, patrolled the streets and nearby rooftops. In this atmosphere, the witness immunity program was introduced to the Polish court system.
There is not much known about the witness himself. But he will be facing down his former accomplices in the gang of Jacek N. a.k.a. "Gruby" (Fat Man), whose specialty was robbing trucks. Thanks to this testimony against the defendants, the ex-gangster will avoid prosecution for his own crimes.
"From the legal point of view this is the most critical moment of the case," says Siemaszko. Without the witness immunity program, the fight against organized crime would be impossible, he says. "This has been proved by experience not only in America but also in Europe."
Work on the program started in 1993, as gangland crime in Poland became a top problem for police. Under its terms, a criminal who testifies against his or her accomplices in exchange for immunity becomes a key witness. The witness must give evidence not only during the investigation phase but also in court. If he or she breaks one of the strict conditions, the public prosecutor's office is entitled to retract the agreement.
The role of this special witness can only be offered to co-defendants in certain crimes committed by organized gangs or criminal groups. These include common or aggravated manslaughter, illegal production or trade of explosives or fissionable (nuclear) materials, weapons and narcotics, causing of disasters in land, air or water traffic, taking hostages for
money, armed robbery, and participation in a gang.
The leader of a gang or the actual perpetrator of a killing cannot become a key witness subject to immunity from prosecution. In the case of the gang of "Gruby," the witness began his cooperation by claiming that the robbery of a German truck transporting clothing from Odessa to Berlin was faked, and the driver was an accomplice. When one of the perpetrators was arrested, he in turn disclosed the location of the loot and implicated his accomplices in over a dozen other robberies.
"I am not sorry I'm not handling this case," said Judge Barbara Piwnik, who has frequently presided over proceedings against well-known Polish gangsters and believes it may take time to iron out the bugs in the program. "Adopting institutions from other legal cultures is always problematic." She notes problems have occurred in earlier cases where charges were based on anonymous testimony by witnesses whose identity was not even known to the defendants. One such case, concerning an arms robbery in a military unit, was returned to a Warsaw court after the Supreme Court ruled the rights of the accused were violated.
But both Piwnik and Siemaszko believe the program should be given a chance to work. "We are dealing with an experiment; the institution of crown's witness was introduced by lex specialis (special law) for three years," Piwnik says. "I hope that during this period we will have enough experience to allow the legislators decide either to recall the institution or to introduce it into the penal code." But she also noted time is running out: the experimental period began Sept. 1, 1998, and this month's case is the first to make use of the program.
On the other hand, police are gaining experience in handling such witnesses. "There are already over a dozen of gangsters under arrest thanks to testimony from key witnesses," says the spokesman of the National Police Headquarters, Pawe³ Biedziak. "We have also prevented other crimes, including paid assassinations. For zl.2.5 million we are `buying' something priceless: safety. And we are also protecting those people who could become victims of revenge by the gangsters."
Most of the program's funding goes to protect the key witnesses and their families. The police officers responsible for this were trained in the United States and Italy, where they learned procedures for transporting witnesses to court and other safety rules. The program also provides for new identities for witnesses to protect them from their former colleagues in crime, and even re-location to foreign countries. "At this point we have not yet entered what I call the social phase, including the purchase of homes or help in changing occupations or arranging trips abroad or plastic surgery," Biedziak says.
So far about a dozen criminals have accepted offers from the public prosecutor's office and are under police protection, with their families. Poland is negotiating with several countries that could provide refuge to criminals who join the witness immunity program on a reciprocal basis."
http://www2.warsawvoice.pl/old/v590/News02.html
Not that I'm bored, it's just that I thought these mobsters live their lives a little too dangerously.
