Albanian oil baron alleged to have ordered journo beating…

Last month, rumours were swirling of a bid to wrest AC Milan from the wandering hands of everyone’s favourite political liability, Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi. Albanian oligarch Rezart Taci was ready to lump €700m on the Rossoneri, claiming he’d been given first refusal by Berlusconi after putting the kibosh on a mysteriously failed takeover of Serie A side Bologna.

Fans may think Milan have it bad enough with Berlusconi - whose ‘Controversies’ section in Wikipedia is the longer than most people’s entire profiles - at the helm, but according to Spanish sports paper AS (one of the less mental ones), Taci could give him a run in the ’shady’ stakes.

Naughty gang attempted to use Serie A club for money laundering

A story is emerging today concerning a notorious crime gang - the Clan dei Caselesi - and their attempts to buy Lazio in 2006. Italian authorities claim that the family from the Camorra, the Naples version of the Mafia, tried to buy the club through a Hungarian pharmaceutical company using funds gained from violence, intimidation and lots of other naughty stuff:

[…] police in Rome made 10 arrests as part of an operation codenamed ‘Broken Wings’. The people being held are Italians and foreigners.In 2006, Lazio president Claudio Lotito was given police protection after receiving threats from ultras (club supporters group), who were allegedly trying to intimidate him into selling to a consortium led by former Lazio player and president Giorgio Chinaglia.

Chinaglia fled after being charged with market-rigging linked to his bid while Lotito has also faced similar charges over

England’s stern new gaffer has run into a little tax difficulty

The Italian tax detectives have been pointing their magnifying glasses at the bank accounts of Fabio Capello recently, reports Milan’s Il Giornale. Mr Capello, a one-time employee of Juventus, a club whose enthusiasm for football took a back seat to their love of corruption for many years, is being looked at for “suspected tax evasion.”

The manager’s lawyer son Pierfilippo said,