In a nondescript shopping mall in the industrial outskirts of Venice, a major new European drug route is taking shape. Antonino Vadalà, a hot-headed man who dominates the room, sizes up his potential partner, a local businessman he hopes will help him import hundreds of kilos of cocaine into northern Italy and Slovakia. The plan...
The Balkan mafias were the first major crime syndicates to come to Slovakia, following people from the region who had been invited to work and study there during the communist era. As their businesses spread across their new homeland, so did their influence, which they used to dominate the only organized criminal industries possible under...
When he was murdered by an unknown assassin earlier this year, Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak was part of an international team looking into foreign drug smugglers suspected of laundering money in his country. In the wake of his death, the team has continued reporting, uncovering more about the criminal group and how it operated. The...
The town of Poprad – a gateway to the region of the High Tatras in northern Slovakia – has been attracting the Italian underworld for many years. In March 2017 we went with Ján Kuciak to the most popular Slovak mountains to find out what lied behind. We started our investigation into the Italian organized...
Prague, the post-card perfect capital city of the Czech Republic, has long been hugely popular with tourists. But it’s also very popular with other, less desirable visitors: Balkan organized crime groups. Reporters for KRIK, working with the Czech Center for Investigative Reporting, discovered that dozens of companies established in the Czech capitol are directly linked to powerful...
OCCRP journalists conducted dozens of interviews with convicted criminals throughout Eastern Europe. The videos are an extension of the Jail Crunch visualization and provide a personal window into how crime works in the region. Every few weeks, OCCRP will release a new inmate interview shedding light on how common crimes work across Eastern Europe. All...