International arms dealer Viktor Bout, who’s been in a Thai jail since a US-led sting operation two years ago, faced a new indictment last week – for after the US banned him from doing business in the country six years ago. The indictment also charged Bout associate Richard Chichakli, an American citizen who’s lived in Moscow since the US Treasury Department seized his assets in 2005.

By Beth Kampschror

Police and last week, aiming to shut down an organized crime group suspected of racketeering, prostitution, drug trafficking, money laundering, tax evasion and siphoning money from a now-defunct steelmaker. The group’s wide-ranging activities show how Bulgarian organized crime has evolved over the past decade, Bulgaria’s interior minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov .

By Beth Kampschror

at the start of their trial last week in the capital Zagreb. The court is trying two other men in absentia. ( and will likely be extradited to Croatia; the other is being held in Serbia, which doesn’t extradite its citizens.) Ivo Pukanic, editor-in-chief of Croatian weekly , and marketing head Niko Francic were killed when a radio-controlled bomb went off in Pukanic’s car in October 2008. According to the indictment, . The men charged were themselves allegedly part of a criminal gang that received €1.5 million from Serbian mob boss Sreten Jocic to eliminate the Nacional editor.

By Beth Kampschror

Experts have called West Africa the for the past few years. poor, corrupt and war-ravaged countries, using them as . What better place in which to unload and repackage hundreds of kilos of cocaine for onward shipping than a region that has and judiciaries that are toddling at best? (And in the case of Guinea-Bissau, .)

By the time this is posted, the end-of-the-year top ten list mania, thankfully, will be over. Among the tedious roundups of the best and worst of the past year and past decade, however, was a list that included one of our perennial topics in 2009: The links between cybercrime and organized crime. According to , Russian organized crime was involved in two of those nightmares. The top nightmare, cyberwar, was pinned on Russian criminal gangs’ involvement with distributing denial-of-service attacks on Georgian government websites during the 2008 war there. And at number 4 was the involvement of Russian and other organized crime in virus and spam attacks.