It may be flights to Charleroi are getting too cheap

Eastern European Gangs Fly to Belgium to Rob Shops

In a secret report by the National Detective Information Service (DNRI) of the Dutch police, it is noted that Polish gangs are regularly flown into Charleroi Airport in Belgium.

There they are given instructions, by SMS, navigation apparatus and even signs on shops, on where they should carry out robberies in the Netherlands. The annual theft amounts to about 220 million Euro. One center of these gangs is the Polish town of Wroclaw; others come from elsewhere in Poland and Lithuania. The gangs often consist of 10 or more people.

Mafia is Italy's biggest commercial business

The Mafia is now the biggest business in Italy, with organised crime netting Mob bosses more than £63bn a year, or 7 per cent of the country's gross domestic product, from drugs, extortion and prostitution.

Tano Grasso, the head of Italy's anti-racketeering commission, said the Mafia made £21bn from extortion last year, with 160,000 businesses, mostly in southern Italy, paying up. As a result, only one in 10 foreign investors set up companies in the south, he said. READ ON