Italians With a Cement Company: A Family Tradition?

New Hope, Pennsylvania — Human remains are being discovered in a 12+-foot grave dug on the 90-acre Bucks County property of Antonio and Sandra DiNardo, owners of a cement and construction company.

Their son "Cosmo" DiNardo has been arrested on suspicion of murder.

One body has been identified as 19-year-old Dean Finocchiaro. Still missing are three other young men between 19 and 22.

The son was arrested on the charge of stealing and attempting to sell the vehicle of Thomas Meo, another of the missing men.

SEE: "Team keeps digging after 1 of 4 missing Pennsylvania men found dead"

'Poet Boss' Nabbed

Camorra boss Aldo Gionta arrested in Pozzallo, Italy

Italian police have arrested a fugitive mafia boss Aldo Gionta, whose reputation for cross-dressing
and eloquent notes to his son earned him the nickname 'the poet boss'.

Gionta, fugitive boss of a Naples Camorra mafia clan, was cornered by plain clothes police at the Sicilian port of Pozzallo as he tried to board a ferry for Malta using false papers. The 42-year-old son of revered boss Valentino Gionta, Aldo was believed to have risen to prominence while his father served hard time.

While on the run, Gionta wore wigs and dressed in women's clothing to avoid capture, leading one investigator to claim "Camorra mobsters aren't what they used to be." Earlier in his career the crime chief earned a reputation as a 'poet' thanks to secret notes he wrote his son from a jail cell, though hardly the stuff of classic verse. ("Learn to shoot with a machine gun, shotgun and Kalashnikov" read a note seized by
investigators.)

His lyrical reputation was garnished when Tony Marciano, a Naples singer*, used some of Gionta's messages in the lyrics to his song 'Nun ciamm arrennere' (We Must Not Surrender) which criticizes
mafiosi who talk to the police.

SOURCE: Telegraph Media Group Limited 2014

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*Marciano was a staple of the Naples Neomelodic scene, crooners who sing passionate love songs in the Neopolitan dialect.

Russia’s reputed top criminal boss killed

MOSCOW--Aslan Usoyan, Russia’s top criminal boss was shot dead by a sniper in broad daylight in the center of Moscow on Wednesday, in what law enforcement officials said was a dispute with a rival Georgian gang.

Usoyan, who went by the nickname “Grandpa Hasan”, was leaving the Karetniy dvor (Carriage House) - which he used as his "office" - when an assassin opened fire with a rifle from a stairwell of a building across the street. He was hit with a single shot to the head, dying a few minutes later at the same hospital where his life was saved after he was shot in a similar 2010 attack.

Usoyan was an ethnic Kurd of the Yezidi faith who hailed from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. He was the highest-ranking vor v zakone – literally “thief in law” or code-bound criminal – in Russia. The vory are a caste of professional criminals formed in the Soviet gulags of the 1930s. The highest rank is given to men of respect who sit at the top of Russia’s criminal hierarchy, follow the thieves’ common code of ‘law’, and act as unofficial adjudicators of disputes.

“They are dinosaurs, the old Soviet gulag-era crime lords,” says Mark Galeotti, professor at New York University - and expert on the Russian underworld - adding the vory had been steadily giving way to more agile and less principled criminal “authorities” since the fall of Communism.

In 2006, in the only television interview Usoyan ever gave, he said: “I am a pensioner, I live on a pension. I live modestly, I don’t touch anyone, I just mind my own business.”

SOURCE: Charles Clover, Financial Times; January 16, 2013.