It's amazing how far Cosa Nostra infiltrates the Italian Goverments,but they never seem to get to deep into the U.S goverment,apart from the Kennedys etc..


Salvatore ``Toto'' Cuffaro, president of Sicily's regional government, resigned today following a public outcry after he celebrated a five-year prison sentence against him by handing out pastries in his office.

Cuffaro was found guilty of obstruction of justice and sentenced on Jan. 18. A picture of him handing out cannoli the day after the conviction was published Jan. 20. Cuffaro, a member of the Union of Christian Democrats who previously said he wouldn't step down, is appealing the verdict. In Italy, the appeals process must be exhausted before sentences are served.

``I've seen growing hostility toward me personally in the last few days,'' Cuffaro told Sicily's regional assembly today. Repeating that he was innocent of all charges, Cuffaro announced his ``irreversible resignation.''

The day of the conviction Cuffaro said he wouldn't resign, a decision most of his political allies supported. It wasn't until a picture was published that showed him handing out cannoli -- a crunchy, cinnamon-flavored Sicilian pastry filled with sweet ricotta cheese and dusted with powdered sugar -- that his political supporters attacked him.

``A conviction and a five-year prison sentence shouldn't be cause for celebration,'' said Gianfranco Micciche, president of Sicily's general assembly and a member of the Forza Italia party, the day the picture was published. Forza Italia had been Cuffaro's main supporter.

Cosa Nostra

Palermo prosecutors had accused Cuffaro of tipping off Sicily's Cosa Nostra mafia about police surveillance. The court said that there no evidence Cuffaro favored all of Cosa Nostra, only individual mobsters he may not have known were criminals.

Two days ago, Cuffaro tried to diffuse the controversy by telling the regional assembly that the sweets had been gifts.

``Regarding the cannoli, I repeat that I was simply moving the trays that had been given to me as gifts,'' Cuffaro said.

Sicily will have to hold elections to select a new regional president within three months.

Francesco Campanella, a low-ranking member of the Villabate, Sicily, mob family, testified in court on Jan. 16, 2006, that Cuffaro told him that investigators had photographs and recordings of him with Nicola Mandala, a convicted mafia boss. Mandala was in direct contact with ``boss of bosses'' Bernardo Provenzano, who was arrested in April 2006 after 43 years on the run.

Before being arrested in 2005 and turning state's witness, Campanella was a politician in Cuffaro's party and president of Villabate's city council. Cuffaro and Clemente Mastella, who caused the collapse of Romano Prodi's government two days ago by withdrawing from the ruling coalition, were groomsmen at Campanella's wedding.

The European Commission will threaten Italy Wednesday with court action if the authorities there do not resolve the rubbish crisis in Naples, an EU official said.

Commissioners, at their regular weekly meeting in Brussels, are due to issue a "reasoned opinion" on the matter, the final step before turning to the European Court of Justice, which could impose fines, the official said Tuesday.

The southern Italian city and surrounding region has been under mounds of rubbish since late last month when landfill sites reached capacity and garbage collectors went on strike.

Just over 3,500 tonnes of uncollected garbage still clogged the streets of Naples on January 22, -- slightly down from 7,100 tonnes the previous week, when the army first began intervening in the strike.

EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas has been particularly scathing about Rome's handling of the crisis, which sparked protests and clashes with police.

"What we are witnessing these days in Naples is not a crisis coming out of the blue," he told members of the European Parliament on January 15.

"It is the culmination of a more than 14-year-old process of insufficient implementation of European waste legislation for which Italy has repeatedly been condemned by the European Court of Justice."

He said the EU's executive body "is ready to pursue its legal proceedings against Italy. Continuing breaches of (EU) environmental law in Campania must be brought to an end."

Many of the landfills in Campania are controlled by the regional Camorra mafia, who make a lucrative business out of subverting waste-handling procedures and shipping in industrial waste from the north.

Since 1994, when the government decreed an "emergency situation" in the region, several dumps infiltrated by the mafia have been closed and companies investigated, though none has been convicted.

The Rome flying squad, working alongside those of Naples, Caserta, Perugia and Macerata, with activities coordinated by the central anti-crime headquarters of state police and the central anti-drugs headquarters, is in the process of arresting a large number of members of a vast criminal organization, made up of Italian and Nigerian citizens involved in international drug trafficking. Two hundred and fifty state police are working in several Italia cities, backed by helicopters and dog units. The operation, name "Black Shoes", led by the Naples anti-mafia district headquarters, has reconstructed the route of drug trafficking from South America to Europe, with traffickers attentive to ever single detail of drug imports. Receivers for the drugs were organizations with links to the Camorra, who then distributed the "goods" across the Italian peninsula. From Suriname and Guyana cocaine and heroin were brought into Italy with Nigerian runners who hid the drugs in false soles of their shoes or swallowed capsules filled with it. The leaders of the organization whose purpose was that of international drug trafficking and which has been dismantled by the Rome flying squad acted in Campania. The 2-year operation, which was collaborated in by the police of the following countries, made it possible to identify the operative cells in Guyana, Suriname, Holland, Romania, India, Pakistan, Uganda, and Ivory Coast. The role played by women whose relatives are involved in the Camorra played an essential role, making it possible to maintain contact between the bosses in prison and their accomplices by way of "pizzini" (small slips of paper) hidden in the seam of clothing and coded with elementary codes to decipher. At the end of lengthy investigations, the Rome flying squad managed to identify the connections between Nigerian traffickers and those at the head of organized crime in the Campania region. Some members of the "Scissionisti" clan supplied themselves with the drugs to then distribute it over the Campania market. Among the crimes with which those arrested are being charged is that of mafia-related criminal association