Italian authorities have seized assets and businesses worth more than €200 million as they tighten the net around money allegedly laundered from drug trafficking tied to a notorious mafia boss. Matteo Messina Denaro, arrested in 2023 after three decades as a fugitive, had long been one of the defining figures of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra’s violent campaign against the Italian state in the 1980s and 1990s, a period that included the murder of prosecutor Giovanni Falcone. Known as “U Siccu,” or “the skinny one,” Messina Denaro…

How a U.S. child‑nutrition fraud stretched from Minnesota to Nairobi — and what it reveals about pandemic-era crimes The U.S. Department of Justice’s recent indictment of two Kenyan brothers accused of laundering millions tied to a multimillion‑dollar scheme to steal federal child‑nutrition money reads like a study in how local corruption can quickly become transnational. At stake were dollars intended to feed children in American schools; according to prosecutors, some of that money ended up in apartments near Nairobi…