© Irish Times
Vincent “Vinny” Asaro, the reported head of the Bonanno crime family, is escorted by FBI agents out of a New York federal building yesterday.
Vincent “Vinny” Asaro, the reported head of the Bonanno crime family, is escorted by FBI agents out of a New York federal building yesterday.
Several organised crime figures have been arrested as part of a federal investigation into a series of unsolved crimes, including the infamous 1978 Lufthansa heist at Kennedy International Airport, according to a racketeering indictment unsealed Thursday.
The indictment reads like a greatest hits collection of the Mafia: armoured truck heists, murder, attempted murder, extortion and bookmaking. But the crime that garnered the most attention was the Lufthansa robbery, where a group of robbers stole about $5 million in cash and nearly $1 million in jewels from a Lufthansa cargo building in December 1978 - the largest cash robbery in the nation's history at the time.
The robbery, a key plotline in the movie Goodfellas, was also infamous for how it frustrated investigators; the only person ever convicted in the heist was a Lufthansa cargo agent, described as the "inside man" in the plot. Other suspects were found slain, or disappeared; the man thought to be the mastermind of the robbery, James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke, died in 1996 in prison, where he was serving a life sentence for an unrelated murder.
Some of the alleged crimes in the indictment predated even the airport heist, including a homicide committed in 1969. The federal investigation first became public in June, when FBI agents descended on a home in Queens owned by Burke's daughter, and began digging in the basement, soon finding human remains, a person familiar with the investigation said.
Comment: From Coup in western Ukraine: The Arab Spring unleashed in Europe
Ukraine has long been the focus of Western meddling as part of a larger geo-strategic game aimed at countering Russia. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1994 that "it cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire." A little over a year ago, the US implicitly released a statement via then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that it would do whatever is within its means to roll back Russia's economic integrationist efforts. After describing Russia's Eurasian Union plans as "a move to re-Sovietize the region", she proceeded to threaten that "we know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it."
Undoubtedly, the world is now witnessing what the US had in mind when it threatened to "slow down" and "prevent" economic cooperation between Ukraine and Russia. With Ukrainian stability cracking under the pressure of continued chaos and the economy on the brink of near-total collapse, the lie of EuroMaidan's 'pro-EU integrationist' goals have been revealed. Either the EU will in no way accept a future failed-state Ukraine, licking its wounds from prolonged civil strife, to enter into the organization, or it, in coordination with its NATO overseers, had it planned all along to collapse the country and profitably rebuild it under the aegis of the West. Either way, the fabled 'path to Europe' has been exposed as the sham that it is, and absolutely nothing of positive value can come to the average citizen from what the militant participants have done to their country in the name of 'Euro-integration'.
And Ukraine's fascist Neo-Nazi color revolution backed by U.S.