Journalists are risking all to expose the Italian mafia. They must be protected

The Italian mafia extended their tentacles into eastern Europe a long time ago. So anyone who was surprised by the death last month of the Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak was not paying attention.

Kuciak, the second journalist to be murdered in Europe in recent months, was found shot dead alongside his partner, Martina Kusnirova, at their home on 25 February. Like Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, Kuciak appears to have paid the price for his investigative reporting. At the time of his death, he had been working on a story on the influence of the Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, on business and politics in Slovakia.

Mafia organisations were the first western businesses to develop long-term relationships with communist regimes and used them to gain a foothold in the east. Although they could not buy property during communist rule, the mafia could rely on two other things: political corruption, to facilitate their illegal traffic, and a near monopoly of the black market in western goods illegally smuggled into eastern bloc countries.

Source: Theguardian