Last month, Italian State Forestry police and the District Anti-Mafia Directorate (DDA) of Bari, Italy seized 7,000 tons of counterfeit olive oil. Branded as ‘100% Italian’ extra virgin, the oil was in fact lower quality oil blended from Syria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, according to The Olive Oil Times.

Italian journalists Emiliano Fittipaldi and Gianluigi Nuzzi, along with three former Vatican officials, have gone on trial charged with criminal misappropriation, among other offenses, in the wake of a Vatican leaks scandal.

Two Romanian men have been sentenced to 27 years each behind bars in Turin, Italy, for Mafia association, among other offenses.

Fabrizio Palenzona, vice-chairman of the Italian banking group UniCredit, is being investigated by Florence’s anti-Mafia department in connection with the alleged infiltration of the finance sector by Mafia figures.

Italian authorities have arrested 24 people they suspect of involvement in a cloned credit card scam that allegedly netted about € 3 million (US$ 3.36 million).

Italian police have finally frozen € 11 million (US$ 12.2 million) in assets belonging to a businessman accused of working for organized crime and importing arms from Yugoslavia during the civil war of the 1990s.

Gambling executive Mario Gennaro was arrested Wednesday by Italian police along with his associate Domenico Lagrotteria and 49 others accused in an online gambling tax evasion operation valued at € 2 billion.

A court in Italy has sentenced the human trafficker who helped cause the catastrophic 2013 shipwreck near Lampedusa in which 366 migrants lost their lives.

Nysret Gashi, a suspect in the caseAn operation involving police in Italy, the United States and Spain has resulted in the arrests of 33 people and arrest warrants for six more as they attempted to crack a drug ring that allegedly brought four tons of cocaine into Europe in the past two years.

The West Stand at Leyton Orient. Pic: Martin BelamProsecutors in the Albanian capital Tirana have issued arrest warrants for the Italian entrepreneur Francesco Becchetti – majority owner of London’s Leyton Orient football club – along with his mother Liliana Condomitti.

Italian police have arrested 44 people suspected of involvement in an underworld scheme that rigged tenders and skimmed off huge sums of money from public works contracts, including tenders aimed at helping a recent influx of refugees to the country.

Italy has passed a law that aims to tackle corruption, Reuters reports.

By Michael Mattson

World leaders continue the search for solutions this week to a human trafficking crisis in the Mediterranean.

Romanian authorities arrested a man thought to have been trafficking drugs and found he was a violent criminal wanted internationally for murder, according to police and local news sources.

Up to 700 migrants were killed when their boat capsized late on Saturday night in what has been called the Mediterranean’s worst tragedy in living memory.

In a two-month operation spanning 47 countries, Interpol and Europol have seized thousands of tons of fake food and drinks.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)is calling on the EU to step up its search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean after a drastic increase in deaths aboard smugglers’ boats.  The agency describes the current EU operation, Triton, as a “woefully inadequate” replacement for Italy’s Mare Nostrum, which ended in October 2014.

Italian police have cracked open a Camorra-type crime gang based in Rome, arresting 61 suspects linked to the group.

By Lorenzo Bodrero, of Investigative Reporting Project Italy, writing for OCCRP 

The Guardia di Finanza of Naples and the Carabinieri of Frosinone, Italy today issued 28 arrest warrants for members of an international drug-trafficking ring based in Italy and with ramifications in the Netherlands, Spain, Venezuela and Colombia.