Remember Giorgio Chinaglia? The Italian soccer star who came to play with the New York Cosmos in the 1970s and proceeded to make everyone from Pelé on down hate his guts? "Every time I breathe, I insult someone," he once told David Hirshey. "If a dog chokes on a bone around here, they blame Chinaglia."

It seems Chinaglia left more than a few choking dogs in his wake this week in Italy. He's wanted on extortion and insider trading charges after allegedly trying to influence the share price of Lazio, a publicly traded Serie A club where Chinaglia made his name in the 70s, so that it could be sold to a consortium that reportedly used laundered money supplied by the Naples-based Camorra crime syndicate.

Yes, Lazio, a club that was docked points in 2006 in a match-fixing scandal, was almost sold to the mafia. That's just how doomed Jose Mourinho's mission of saving Italian soccer really is.

Chinaglia, who currently lives in the New York, denied the charges in a satellite interview on Italian television. He reportedly went out with his family and ate onion rings after the interview.