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2024-03-29T11:26:37Z
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Death By Distance: Leaving No Seed Behind
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/death-by-distance-leaving-no-seed-behind
2023-09-04T06:18:00.000Z
2023-09-04T06:18:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12216478083?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>They called them <em>gli scappati</em> “the runaways,” hiding in Venezuela or finding refuge in Miami, drifting through New York, even in the lemon orchards of Monreale. Where they really ended up was New Jersey. At least the ones that were the major targets. The chosen ones that survived the matanza, the slaughter that opened the great Mafia war of the early 1980s in Sicily.</p>
<p>To be an Inzerillo was a stigmata in the eyes of the Corleonesi, the mob that was taking over the honored society. Short and squat of stature, Salvatore Riina, <em>u curtu</em>, their boss, had laid down his command:</p>
<p>“Not so much as a seed must be left of these Inzerillos.”</p>
<p>And so they killed them. Destroying the bloodline of the Passo di Ragano Family.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/in-search-of-the-corleonesi-how-the-mafia-changed-forever" target="_blank"><strong>In search of the Corleonesi.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12216471680,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12216471680?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="350" /></a>After the family head, Salvatore, known everywhere as <em>Totuccio</em>, leaves the apartment of his <em>goomah</em> in early May 1981, just meters short of his armored Alfa Romeo Aletta 2000, he is slaughtered (right) on Via Brunelleschi, and then, they go after everyone. Two months later, they murder his son, Giuseppe, seventeen.</p>
<p>The boy had sworn to avenge the death of his father, so they cut off his right arm, making it hard for him to do anything before being strangled to death.</p>
<p>Santo, one of four brothers of Salvatore, disappears into the darkness of <em>lupara bianca</em>, missing and not coming back. He and his uncle, Calogero Di Maggio, attend a meeting of the Mafia <em>cupola</em>, its ruling body, held in a farmhouse near San Giuseppe Jato and join the list of vanished. The murderers killed over twenty Inzerillos and their related families, which included uncles, cousins, nephews, sons.</p>
<p>Decimating lives, destroying families, creating nightmares; a purge that scours away enemies but in doing so, creates a generational Armageddon. A memento mori confirming the fragility of Mafia life. The tragedy that transcends time. A complex labyrinth of relationships where biological families submit themselves to Mafia families. Where nobody ever forgets anyone or anything. Above all, where blood washes blood. Even unto the states of America.</p>
<p>Like a thread running through a Cosa Nostra version of the Bayeux Tapestry, linking the lost and found, the good, bad, and very ugly. The vengeance trail. The manifestation of deadly sins. Greed and envy and fear being the triggers in this narrative of death and destruction.</p>
<p>Riina, in his climb to power, set his sights on decimating the Parlamitans, the Mafia clans that had not sided with him, especially two of the biggest-Santa Maria di Gelsù and Passo di Ragano. Apart from their size, and dominance, and their close connections, Riina had it in for these two for his own special form of reprisal.</p>
<p>Stefano Bontate who ran the Church family, along with his pal, Inzerillo, who controlled things a few kilometers to the north, near Uditore, in Passo di Rigano, enjoyed the massive wealth generated by the heroin trafficking that grew like wild-fire in the 1970s. While they were making a killing, most of the other clans, without the links with America, the major market, had to watch greedily from the sidelines. The Inzerillos were connected into the Gambino Family of New York, a criminal supply chain in waiting connecting a market that seemingly could never be satisfied.</p>
<p>Bontate had the chemists and the drug factories scattered around Sicily.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12216475501,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12216475501?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="161" /></a>Up in the hills of Corleone, watching and brooding, <em>u curtu</em> (left), the short one, waited. Jealous and greedy for the riches he was missing out on. He knew his enemies in Palermo thought of him as a country peasant, u viddanu, not worthy of the heroin deals and the rivers of money flowing from them.</p>
<p>He was the poor relative, getting the crumbs from their feasts. And just as important, these two crime families were powerful enough, especially if they joined forces, to stand in the way of his hegemonic ambitions to use the Corleonesi as his hammer to beat The Mafia into submission. Make it bigger than the state. Have everything in his hands.</p>
<p>But more than this, he also knew that Bontate and Inzerillo were plotting to murder him, so he beat them to it.</p>
<p>In America, Inzerillos have already settled there as early as the 1950s. Family ties linked them into the Gambinos of Sicily who migrated into the Eastern Seaboard, entering illegally in 1962.</p>
<p>A police report issued in Palermo in 1980 highlighted that “the four Mafia families (Gambino, Spatola, Inzerillo and Di Maggio) constituted a compact and homogeneous group, operating in Palermo and in the USA, a group… whose leader was the late Carlo Gambino. The latter, according to the report, had kinship ties with the Inzerillo brothers, Giuseppe, Pietro and Antonio, and naturally, with all their many children, as well as with Tommaso Gambino and his sons Giovanni, Giuseppe, and Rosario.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12216472478,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12216472478?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="350" /></a>Giuseppe (Joe), Rosario (Sal) and Giovanni (John) (right) form a crew based in and around Cherry Hill in Camden County, New Jersey. They open pizza restaurants and move deeply into the drug trafficking business.</p>
<p>Rosario will become a suspect in one of America’s biggest ever drug trafficking investigations and subsequent trials know as The Pizza Connection. John’s legitimate business grows to over 200 pizzerias, turning over more than $200 million annually.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/blood-and-money-when-they-fell-bringing-down-the-zips" target="_blank"><strong>Blood and Money.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>He is involved with Italian, Michele Sindona, one of the world’s largest international bankers, who wheels and deals his way through a forest of intrigue involving banks across the world, politics in Italy, the Vatican and all its myriad chicaneries, and for that extra spice in life, organizing money laundering for the mob.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/five-minutes-to-midnight-the-sicilian-and-new-york-mafias-the-cat" target="_blank"><strong>Five Minutes to Midnight.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The Cherry Hill Gambinos are cousins to the Inzerillos, as well as the Gambinos of New York, America’s biggest Mafia clan. For good measure, they have genealogical links to the Spatola and Di Maggio families with more cousins who are Mafia connected and heavy into the drug trafficking business back in the old country.</p>
<p>In the dynamics of power, greed and the dexterity to amass immense wealth, opportunity governs the escalation of change. For two men in America, terminal change will be a consequence of all of this.</p>
<p>Antonino Inzerillo is the uncle of <em>Totuccio</em> and the alleged capo, or skipper of the New York Gambinos South Jersey crew, along with John Gambino. His nephew, Pietro, is the brother of the slain Mafia boss in Sicily. They are both, according to the Senate Committee Hearing on Organized Crime in America, 1983, heavily involved in drug trafficking.</p>
<p>They are also both marked for death.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12216472899,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12216472899?profile=RESIZE_584x" width="423" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Pietro and Antonino Inzerillo</strong></em></p>
<p>It’s a complex story. Based almost entirely on information from government informants, with a little genuine law enforcement nonce thrown in for good measure.</p>
<p>Shakespeare, the master of treachery as a theatrical art construction, used betrayal as both a form and an action to illustrate how fragile human relationships evolve under certain situations. In the world of American Cosa Nostra as in its heritage Sicilian Mafia roots, the politics of evil always trump the rationality of decent human behavior. Those that inhabit this world live with betrayal and treachery as bedfellows.</p>
<p>Details conforming the double murders will come from direct courtroom testimony, informants in Sicily and America and Italian police wire taps on known Mafiosi carried out in Palermo.</p>
<p>The killings will be officially authorized by the provincial commission of the Mafia in a meeting held in July 1981, in a villa on the coast at Trapetto, near Alcamo. Riina is first among equals but doesn’t always get his own way. They agreed to pardon gli scappati in return for the heads of Pietro and Nino. But the runaways have to stay just that, and never return to Sicily. A permanent exile, and one that needs arbitration and control.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12216473485,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12216473485?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="300" /></a>The bosses select Rosario Naimo (right), called Saruzza, to do this job, which will auger well for law enforcement in the years ahead. A veteran Mafioso, he moves between families and countries as he makes his bones in the honored society, ending up in San Lorenzo.</p>
<p>As in any Mafia killing, the Judas goat is someone the victims know and trust. How much more trust can you have than in family?</p>
<p>For Pietro Inzerillo, his own road to Golgotha ends in a parking lot in New Jersey.</p>
<p>Police are called to the Hilton Hotel at Mount Laurel on January 14, 1982, following a telephone call claiming a vehicle in the hotel car park contained a bomb. After confirming the car was safe, the police ring the owners, based on the plate number. It is a new Mercury Cougar, registered at Joe’s Pizza Restaurant in South Philadelphia. The place is owned by Erasmus Gambino, a soldier in the Cherry Hill mob, who sends two men the next day to collect it. When Ernesto Sicilia opens the car, he sees a pistol on the passenger-side floor, and when he opens the trunk, there is a body curled inside.</p>
<p>When police arrive, for the second time, they discover the corpse is handcuffed, behind, frozen solid. An autopsy reveals they had shot the victim six times with a 9mm pistol. The wounds were two in the neck, one in the center of the throat, and three in the head. A five-dollar bill was stuffed in the mouth and two one-dollar bills in the genital area.</p>
<p>A classic Mafia calling call for those whose greed exceeds their reach and wanted to eat too much and are less than a man.</p>
<p>As his wife, Urso Giacomo Inzerillo, waits for her husband in their Home at 6 Logan Drive, in Cherry Hill, the police identify the body found at the Hilton. He is Pietro (Peter) Inzerillo, a white male, 31 years old, 170 cm, weight 75 kilos, place of birth, Palermo, Sicily. He was involved in two construction companies and Genova Pizzeria in Audubon, all in New Jersey.</p>
<p>He is the younger brother of Salvatore, and is now added to the completed death list of Riina.</p>
<p>His cousin Tomasso <em>u musconi</em> Inzerillo will be one of the prime suspects in a family at war. Another drug trafficker, shipping from Mexico through the Dominican Republic into America he is the nephew of Nino Inzerillo.</p>
<p>Almost certainly by this point in time, uncle Antonino is gone. We don't know dates or times, but we can construct his murder from the words of informants and the spoken voice of Mafia leaders, caught by government recordings. And unlike his nephew’s killer, someone will pay the piper, although it will take thirty-two years to bring closure in a court of law for a family somewhere in America.</p>
<p>On February 2, 1982, Anna Gambino Inzerillo, sister of John Gambino, reports her husband, Nino, missing. She had last seen him on 19 October, the previous year at their home 3, Cornrow Road in Delran Township, New Jersey. Why she waited three months is a mystery.</p>
<p>There is another Salvatore in this story, albeit a minor one. The mob knew him as Sammy Bull, last name Gravano. In courtroom testimony, the number three man under John Gotti, leading the Gambinos of New York after having its sitting boss, Paul Castellano, is murdered in 1985, claimed that John Gambino had been the lead actor in the last curtain call on Nino Inzerillo. The hit went down in Brooklyn, Gravano claimed.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12216473693,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12216473693?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="169" /></a>Nino goes to a deli on Avenue U in Gravesend, South Brooklyn, which is owned by Filippo Casamento (right), part of the Boccadifalo Mafia Family, to the west of Palermo City. A long established drug trafficker, he had been indicted in 1973 in New Jersey for pushing drugs from the Pizza Palace in Piacona. Sentenced to seventeen years, he was out in seven.</p>
<p>He used his business Eagle Cheese Company and Casamento Salumeria, which he founded in 1968, as a front for his illegal activities. Provolone and mozzarella went out the front and heroin and cocaine out the back. By 1970, law enforcement estimated he was moving a ton of drugs each year. In June 1987, they had sentenced him to 30 years for his part in The Pizza Connection trial.</p>
<p>Waiting there with Casamento are several men, including, its alleged, Rosario Naimo along with Frank Di Ciccio and Joe Watts, of the New York Gambinos, John Gambino of Cherry Hill, and at least two other men. Killers using guns fitted with silencers shoot Nino dead, and then they make his body disappear.</p>
<p>In 2006, the DIA, Italy’s anti-mafia task force, bug the home of Antonino Rotolo on Via Michelangelo, up in the hills above Palermo. Law enforcement tracked down and arrested Bernardo Provenzano, the acting Boss of all Bosses, standing in for Salvatore Riina, who had been arrested and imprisoned for life in 1993, in April of this year after decades on the run. Rotolo and Salvatore Lo Piccolo, boss of Tomasso Natale Family, along with Provenzano, had been the de facto heads managing the Mafia and making key decisions.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/secrets-and-lies-bringing-down-the-mafia-and-the-italian-state" target="_blank"><strong>Secrets and Lies</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12216473881,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12216473881?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="173" /></a>On one of dozens of conversations recorded in a small cabin near the house, Rotolo (left), who is boss of the Pagliarelli Family, is talking to Giuseppe Sansone, (a soldier in the Uditore Mafia, a wealthy building contractor and a close friend of Riina,) in an apparent strange and senseless mumbo-jumbo language. In the world of the Mafia, people use words not only to communicate but also to imply meaning or the lack of meaning.</p>
<p>As they rarely send written instructions,* messaging by mouth is fundamental to the Mafia. Semiotics, the science of signs, is a natural part of their lifestyle. Words and their composition within any sentence can confuse an outsider.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-sound-of-silence-how-the-mafia-in-sicily-communicates" target="_blank"><strong>The Sound of Silence.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>This excerpt confirms for the first time to investigators in Sicily, just who is doing what to whom:</p>
<p>Rotolo: He made him the base for Totuccio's brother, (Tomasso,) to save himself, so you see what a man, ah in America... they made him switch or rather, he went over to the side of the corleonesi.</p>
<p>Then there's another thing: but can we trust this? He took his father's brother,(Nino, brought him to him and drowned him and shot his cousin (Pietro). can we trust him?</p>
<p>Rotolo is saying that Francesco, brother of the slain Salvatore, and his cousin Tomasso, conspired in the murders of the two men to whom they were both related by family ties. Of both kinds.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12216475473,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12216475473?profile=RESIZE_584x" width="478" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Francesco and Tomasso Inzerillo</strong></em></p>
<p>There will be other conversations from other Mafioso that help build a picture of the events in New York and New Jersey, and then, entering stage right, emerges Rosario Naimo, a man of many parts.</p>
<p>The New Jersey Commission of Investigation, in its annual report, 1989, claimed he was head of the Sicilian Mafia operating in America. Strangely, he became part of the New York Lucchese Family, rather than the Gambinos. And, of course, he dealt in drugs and was a significant connection between the Mafia of Sicily and the Medellín Cartel.</p>
<p>After fifteen years on the run, following a serious medical event in 2010, he becomes a government informant, and as part of his testimony, he confirms the murders of the two Inzerillos in America. He places Casamento at the killing scene, claiming he nudged Nino into the murder room where two killers do their job. He also points the finger at Tomasso Inzerillo, who also marked for death, trades his life for that of his uncle.</p>
<p>Naimo was no stranger to setting up targets in the mob. He was allegedly linked to the murder of Eustachio Giammona, a Sicilian born made man in the Lucchese Family who was shot-gunned to death in June 1988 while in his Toyota in Brooklyn.</p>
<p>By the early 2000s, the Inzerillos and their associates started drifting back into Sicily. One of the first is Francesco, then Tomasso, Rosario, then Giuseppe, son of the brother Santo. The disappeared one. Rosario was one of the last to come back after spending over fifty years in America, a significant part of it in and out of prison.</p>
<p>They reopened the family home at 345 Via Castellana for Giovanni; the son born in New York. He returns in 2000 and is one of many arrested during Operation Old Bridge in 2008 in a joint task force involving Italian and American law enforcement.</p>
<p>Ironically, the man who is his godfather is Casamento, who will go on trial in Palermo in 2013 for the murders of Giovanni’s brother and his uncle. Everyone knows Casamento, as Tizzio who the court will find guilty of killing Nino in January 2014 but will acquit of the other charge. They discharge Rosario Naimo as a collaborator of justice and excuse him from the murder charges of Giovanni's brother and uncle. They acquitted both of killing Pietro Inzerillo. That one stays a mystery. Kind of.</p>
<p>Filippo Casamento is eighty-eight years old.</p>
<p>At this time, John Gambino is in prison in America, serving out a fifteen-year sentence on charges of racketeering. Francesco and Tomasso Inzerillo are back in Palermo, doing what they have always done, running on the wrong side of the law. Francesco and his wife Olympia Caruso, according to their tax returns, have little to no money, but have access to loans from well-known banks. Tomasso and his wife run a business out of the Inzerillo family home compound in Passo Di Rigano. Family ties are back in business.</p>
<p>Their future will not be bright.</p>
<p>The return of the Inzerillos and their associates creates a tsunami among the Palermo clans, and their presence almost trigger's a third Mafia war. Law and order prevail; there are lots and lots of arrests, including Tomasso and Francesco, and the prisons fill up with mobsters. Court cases, verdicts and appeals will go on forever.</p>
<p>It has never been explained why Riina hated the Inzerillos to the extent he wanted them all destroyed. The Bontates, with a family twice as large numerically, was a much bigger threat, and yet once the boss and his close associates were eliminated, biological family members were left in peace. </p>
<p>The Bible is filled with examples of betrayal, beginning with Adam and ending with God.</p>
<p>Riina’s scorched earth policy against the Inzerillos will generate treachery on a scale which fills the years with mourning, haunting those who survive, endlessly. <em>Totuccio</em> is betrayed, then his son Giuseppe and his brothers Santo and Pietro, and then uncle Nino and many more.</p>
<p>And for what? In the end, Riina dies in a prison hospital after almost a quarter of a century behind bars, and almost everyone else, not stopping, go straight to jail.</p>
<p>If it is true that there are truths in hell and lies in paradise, being a Mafioso and wondering which is which, is not for the faint-hearted.</p>
<p><em><strong>*</strong> The exception to this is the use of pizzini, literally, little messages. Senior mob bosses such as Bernardo Provenzano, Matteo Messina Denaro, and Salvatore Lo Piccolo sent coded messages on small papers folded for easy concealment, to each other and contacts during the period up to the arrest of Provenzano.</em></p>
<p><em>My thanks to Fabien Rossat, host at: <a href="https://unehistoiredecrimeorganise.blogspot.com/">https://unehistoiredecrimeorganise.blogspot.com/</a> </em></p>
<p><em>for pointing me to a place I had forgotten about.</em></p>
<p><em><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Sources:</strong></span></em></p>
<p><em>Quotation recorded in court document, Palermo, Trial No 2474/05. Antonino Rotolo +5. 20 June 2006.</em></p>
<p><em>Courier Post. Camden New Jersey, February 20, 1983.</em></p>
<p><em>Bolzoni, Attilio and D’Avanzo, Giuseppe. The Boss of Bosses. Orion Books, London, 2015.</em></p>
<p><em>Rapporto Squadra Mobile, Palermo August 2008.</em></p>
<p><em>L Éspresso. August 22, 1964.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://meloniclaudio.wordpress.com/tag/antonio-inzerillo/">https://meloniclaudio.wordpress.com/tag/antonio-inzerillo/</a></em></p>
<p><em>Corriere della Sera. February 7, 2008.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.tni.org/en/publication/the-rothschilds-of-the-mafia-on-aruba">https://www.tni.org/en/publication/the-rothschilds-of-the-mafia-on-aruba</a></em></p>
<p><em>La Repubblica. October 29, 2010.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.poliziadistato.it/statics/29/casamento.pdf">https://www.poliziadistato.it/statics/29/casamento.pdf</a></em></p>
<p><em>Sterling, Claire. The Mafia. London. HarperCollins, 1980.</em></p>
<p><em>Live Sicilia. October 17, 2012.</em></p>
<p><em>Live Sicilia. January 27, 2014.</em></p>
<p><em>La Repubblica. February 7, 2008.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://mafieitaliane.blogspot.com/search/label/Cosa%20nostra">https://mafieitaliane.blogspot.com/search/label/Cosa%20nostra</a></em></p>
<p><em>Stille, Alexander. Excellent Cadavers. London. Jonathon Cape Ltd, 1995.</em></p>
<p><em>Bolzoni, Attilo. White Shotgun. Milano. Libri. S.p.A. 2008.</em></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/thom-l-jones-mob-corner">Thom L. Jones' Mob Corner</a> or the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Sicilian Mafia section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Thom L. Jones & Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
A Funeral in Brooklyn
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/a-funeral-in-brooklyn
2022-03-02T17:24:13.000Z
2022-03-02T17:24:13.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10165230496?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>Historians describe the Mafia underworld of Gotham as fraught with complexities, uncertainties, frustrations and terrors. (1)</p>
<p>In 1951, there were 243 recorded homicides in the city of New York (2).</p>
<p>One of them was Philip Mangano. What makes his violent death memorable are his family ties, both genealogical and criminal. His brother, Vincent, was the boss of what is today referred to as <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview" target="_blank">The Gambino Family</a>. Part of the Mafia of America. Although never confirmed, some sources claim Philip was his brother’s underboss, although most Mafia researchers maintain this was a man called Albert Anastasia and that Philip was <em>consigliere</em>, or counsellor to his brother. Either or. We don’t really know.</p>
<p>Hidden to the public, and even many law enforcement agencies, the brothers had a brief claim to international fame in 1940. In Italy, the Treasury Police compiled a document and forwarded it to a U.S. Customs Supervisor in New York, who sent it to his boss in Chicago. From there, it found its way to The Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The report outlined details showing there was a Grand Council of the Sicilian Mafia in <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in" target="_blank">America</a>, made up of nine men, two of whom were Vincent and Philip Mangano. Five of the nine were from New York, showing the powerhouse it was within America’s Italian-American underworld.</p>
<p>Although it mentions nothing about how this council operated, it confirmed the existence of a Mafia in the United States, and that it was organized enough to have a board of governors. And there were Vincent and Philip at the top of the list. This was years before senate hearings into organized crime in America disclosed the existence of the secret society and the general public became aware of the phenomena. (3)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10165257494,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10165257494?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="139" /></a>Joe Bonanno, the boss of <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family" target="_blank">his own Mafia family</a>, and a close friend of Vincent, once referred to Anastasia (left) as “Mangano’s number two,” which could be on the mark, although Bonanno was writing his memoir over thirty-years after the events surrounding the murder of Philip Mangano, and his book was referred to as “an exercise in self-deception and revisionist history.” So how accurate is accurate, is hard to say. (4).</p>
<p>Another source based on the so-called history of one of New York’s first alleged big Mafia bosses, Giuseppe Balsamo, whose stamping ground was Red Hook, states, “Vincent Mangano and his brother Philip, picked as co-bosses.” However, this account of the formation of early Mafia families riddled with inaccuracies, is written more as a novel than a historical interpretation of the events that were taking place among Mafia clans in the first half of the 20th Century in America’s biggest city and should be treated with caution as a reliable source. (5).</p>
<p>Anastasia is a man who will reappear in this story.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10165255490,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10165255490?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="300" /></a>His family waked Philip (right) in a closed coffin. The damage to his face and head by heavy calibre pistol bullets was too much for even the most experienced embalmer. Gunshot wounds at close quarter are catastrophic examples of the frailty of the human body.</p>
<p>This photograph, supplied by a member of the family, is the one posted by the author some years ago on the web. It was the one that stood on his coffin at his wake and funeral service. Prior to this, an image of Lawrence Mangano, a member of the Chicago Outfit was advertised as him. Interestingly, they may have been distant paternal cousins.</p>
<p>Philip’s nephew, Vincent, who everyone called Jimmy, or by his nickname, Tootie, decided to keep his uncle’s body an undisclosed centre for the mourners who would attend. His uncle Vincent, who was also his godfather, as well as the <em>Godfather</em>, did not attend the wake or the funeral. Patronyms fill Italian families like bees searching for honey.</p>
<p>At first, it was believed he had gone into hiding to avoid the same fate as his brother; was perhaps hiding out at his farm in up state New York, fled to Florida, but this was gradually determined to be a false hope for his family. Ten years after he vanished, on November 15, 1961, his son, a lawyer, officially had him declared dead. For tax purposes. The date of death is shown on his wife’s gravestone as though he was laid alongside her twenty years after Carolina’s passing. Wherever his remains lie, it is not in a graveyard in Brooklyn next to the woman he had rushed back to Sicily in 1911 to marry when he learned she had another man chasing after her.</p>
<p>He brought his 20 year old bride back first class on the <em>SS Guglielmoon</em> September 13. He was listed as carrying $1000 in cash, about $30,000 in today’s money. For a twenty-four-year who had arrived in New York as a teenager on the <em>SS Gerty</em> on July 5, 1905, with $10 declared, life had changed dramatically in his six years in America.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10165231901,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10165231901?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="300" /></a>Both the biological and criminal families were no doubt shocked by this sudden episode of violence that had taken place as spring was thrusting its way through a city eager to forget its winter. For Philip and his brother, there would be more than just showers in this April 1951.</p>
<p>Jimmy and his family cared for Agatha, Philip’s wife, and supported her son, in the weeks of questionings they faced from the police and other law enforcement agencies who were trying to make sense out of something beyond their capabilities. The media were getting it wrong as usual, with <em>The New York Times</em> claiming Philip as an aide to Joe Adonis, who was, in fact, one of the <em><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gangsters-inc-s-mafia-speak" target="_blank">capi</a></em>, or crew bosses in the Mangano Family. Technically, way out of Philip’s league in the pecking order. (6)</p>
<p>Mafia stories most times don’t turn out good-someone almost always dies. The great paradox is, of course, the players are often ordinary people doing the bad stuff. Men with wives and families trying to navigate their way through the complexities of a Machiavelli way of self-destruction driven by greed and jealousy.</p>
<p>Murray Kempton, an iconic figure in the newspaper reporting world, once claimed, “Mobsters didn’t control the world, that they were mostly just truck drivers without jobs.” Another famous New York reporter, Jimmy Breslin, called them “grammar-school dropouts who kill each other....”</p>
<p>Every source tells us that Philip’s funeral was sparsely attended. All of them are wrong. The whole Mangano family waked and mourned him prior to his burial at Holy Cross Cemetery in East Flatbush, in a graveyard as flat as an Illinois plain. There would have been north of twenty, plus family friends. Maybe both families. (7)</p>
<p>Four of the eight Mangano children and their mother, Serafina, came to America, settled permanently, and lived good lives, contributing their atoms of decency and effort to the elemental molecule we know as New York. The vast majority of Italian immigrants were honest, hard-working people searching for the American dream. The exception that proves the rule manifests itself in outliers like Philip and his brother Vincent.</p>
<p>The two became powerful figures in the world of New York’s Mafia, although significantly unimposing in the physical sense. Philip was small in stature, standing barely five feet one. Vincent was by far the tallest in their biological family at five six or seven. The whole family, boys and girls, were on the short size, with some females not even making five feet. Growing up in the harsh world of nineteenth-century Palermo, there was a lot more to worry about than how tall they might come to be.</p>
<p>The funeral is held on April 23, four days after his body was discovered about ten in the morning, sprawled face down in marshland near Avenue Y and East 72nd Street in the Bergen Beach marshes area known today as McGuire Fields, in south-east Brooklyn. Mary Gooch, who lived on Avenue X, about 300 yards away, found the body as she was heading off to her boat nearby. Not the first time for her. In 1949, close by, she had discovered the strangled body of a police officer’s wife. Another crime that was never solved. (8)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10165259686,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10165259686?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="300" /></a>Philip was wearing a shirt, tie and clip, under-shorts and socks. There was no jacket and no trousers or shoes. His socks underneath were clean, which showed the body (left) had been carried or dragged to the spot and dumped. Police found a rope near the body which may have been used for this purpose. He had died from three gunshot wounds to the neck and each cheek.</p>
<p>There was nothing to identify the body, except a large diamond ring on one finger, but his fingerprints revealed him as a man with a substantial police record of eight arrests, including one for murder, in 1923, when he was twenty-five. He was a lead suspect in the March killing of Giovanni Pecoraro, a Mafioso from Palermo Province, who was a member of another New York Mafia family. Police surmised it was part of a dispute involving rival boot legging gangs. It may have been a much complicated incident involving the Mafia gang the Mangano brothers had become part of and a man called <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/kill-the-chinaman-1" target="_blank">Giuseppe Masseria</a> who was creating his own underworld pack of thugs and killers, and spreading his wings across the city.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/kill-the-chinaman-1" target="_blank"><strong>Kill The Chinaman</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Philip is a person of interest in a gangland killing in Buffalo the year after. The Mangano brothers and the mob bosses of up-state New York were close friends. The law can not find enough evidence to prosecute him in both cases. He turns up again as a major suspect in the shotgun murders of Joe Amberg and Morris Kessler, gunned down in a garage in Brownsville, Brooklyn in September 1935. Slides away from this one as well.</p>
<p>His autopsy report assumed death sometime on the day before his body is discovered. If this is accurate, it shows he was probably kidnapped and held somewhere for maybe as long as a day before his execution. His wife, Agatha, last reported seeing him on the morning of April 17.</p>
<p>The day of his funeral, the winds were blowing from the south with a slight drizzle of rain coming in from the Atlantic. It might have reached 15 degrees as the mourners huddled around the graveside under a bleak, grey sky filled with clouds drifting like rags soaked in dirty chalk.</p>
<p>No one was ever remotely a legal suspect in his murder. Whoever killed him, may well have also killed his brother, Vincent, who disappeared about the same time-frame. They did not find his body. Claiming to be a real estate dealer, he ran his business from a building in the 300 block of Clinton Street near Degraw, called The City Democratic Club, and the ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association) meeting room at 33 President Street, both in Brooklyn.</p>
<p>Why Philip is discovered minus his shoes, pants, and coat has never been explained. If the killer was sending a message, it was heavily coded, and so far, never solved. Was there a reason he had to be found but not his brother?</p>
<p>Maybe his killer simply took the clothes and shoes because of their obvious high quality, but drew a line at stripping the body naked. Mafia killers are rarely chosen for their moral compass.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10165333473,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="300" alt="10165333473?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>Legend tells us that the murders were organized by Albert Anastasia (right), the possible underboss of the family since it arose out of the turmoil of the 1930-1931 New York Mafia underworld war. It’s as good a speculation as we will get.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-gunman-a-mafia-story" target="_blank"><strong>The Gunman. A Mafia Story.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The killers may have been Gioacchino “Jack” Sparacino and Jimmy Squillante, both subsequently murdered themselves. Interestingly, Squillante was the same height and build as Philip Mangano. The history of the Mafia is filled with assumptions and theories. There is a lot of alleging in Mafia land. The dead litter its recorded pages like coffee stains spilt by someone lost in a dream as they flip the pages.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-little-king-of-garbage-new-york-mobster-vincent-squillante" target="_blank"><strong>The Little King of Garbage</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The brothers had, through their crime family, exerted a stronghold on the Brooklyn docks, especially in the Red Hook area for many years. Anastasia was their muscle as was his brother, Anthony, through their control of the International Longshoremen’s Association along with Emil Camarda, the Mangano’s cousin, and Gus Scannavino, their brother-in-law. Providenza, one of Philip’s sisters, had married Constantino (Gus) in June 1920 and he became part of both the families.</p>
<p>The good one and the bad one.</p>
<p>Family members recall him as “Uncle Gus,” a kind, old grandfather-type who told them stories and fed them candies when they visited as small children at his home in Carroll Gardens which butts onto Red Hook, where quaint streets filled with terraces of brownstones stand lined with ash and maple and plane trees, shading gardens of roses and lilac and forsythia.</p>
<p>They never knew that he was a suspect in the kidnapping and murder in 1939 of Peter Panto, a young, trade union activist fighting for better pay and conditions on the Brooklyn docks. He left a meeting at 33 President Street, got into a car that contained three men, including “Uncle Gus,” about 7.30 that evening of July 14, and is never seen alive again. (9)</p>
<p>His decaying remains are found in marshland in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, in December 1940. Emanuel Weiss, a member of the infamous Brownsville Troop of Jewish thugs and killers sometimes used by Anastasia to clear the streets of bothersome problems, had murdered him.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/yidfellas-the-kosher-nostra" target="_blank"><strong>Yidfellas: The Kosher Nostra</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>On weekends, Phil and Vince would take the children, the cousins and nieces and nephews, the whole gang, to the movies on Saturday to see the latest film at the Westend Theatre on the corner of West Beach Street and Tennessee Avenue in Long Beach, then afterwards, to the ice-cream parlor. Sundays they would go boating and swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, then load up on the food that Phil’s wife, “Aunt Aggie,”Agatha Trovato, would keep coming from her endless kitchen at their weekend home near the beach.</p>
<p>On Mondays, the brothers Mangano would go back to work running their other family, the criminal one, screwing the Brooklyn docks, and, when necessary, killing people.</p>
<p>They were gangsters or hoodlums or mobsters, but above all, in the panorama of life, they were men with wives and children. In the bleak uncertainty of their existence, their only paradigm was their family. The true compass they needed to follow. Their proper family, not the strange, unnatural world of <em>Cosa Nostra</em>, an expression Vincent sometimes used when describing their criminal life. It was a term that would come to haunt the anthology of Mafia literature in the decades to follow. In America and Sicily. Our Thing or This Thing of Ours becomes a synonym that will forever be inextricably part of Mafia lore.</p>
<p>Anastasia, often referred to as “The Mad Hatter,” in the underworld of New York, was apparently soft clay in the hands of his Canadian-born wife, Elsa Barnesi.</p>
<p>Agatha Mangano will live on long after her husband’s death, until her time comes in a New Jersey care home, when she is bordering on a century. Almost 50 years after her husband was taken from her, she goes to join him. Their only son, like Vincent’s boy, was a lawyer. A power maker on the right side of the law. The first generation that came from the immigrants, escaping the poverty and restrictions of a sometimes medieval Europe, would surely be the right example for the next generation.</p>
<p>There would be more funerals in Brooklyn for the Mangano family, but none of them were like the one in April, 1951.</p>
<p>As time, with its comet tail, takes us through the decades since the killing of Philip Mangano, it’s worth remembering what Chilean author Roberto Bolaño believed:</p>
<p>“In the vast night, the same night in which all of us will be lost, the stars twinkle and beyond them the moment extends its mantle of orbs and lights.” (10)</p>
<p>Maybe that is where all the answers are to be found. All the mysteries explained.</p>
<p><em>Some of the background for this story was provided to me by a member of the Mangano family, whose identity I agreed not to disclose.</em></p>
<p><em>I also acknowledge <a href="http://www.writersofwrongs.com/2017/04/66-years-ago-mangano-murder.html">http://www.writersofwrongs.com/2017/04/66-years-ago-mangano-murder.html</a></em></p>
<p><em>Tom Hunt’s story about the killing of Philip Mangano as a source of information.</em></p>
<p><em>1) Block, Alan. East Side-West Side. Cardiff University Press, 1980.</em></p>
<p><em>2) Wnyc.org</em></p>
<p><em>3) The document is located in The George White Papers, housed by History San Jose Research Library at 1661 Senter Road, San Jose, California 95112.</em></p>
<p><em>4) Bonanno, Joseph and Lalli, Sergio. A Man of Honour. Andre Deutsch, London. 1983.</em></p>
<p><em>5) Balsamo, William and Carpozi Jr, George. Crime Incorporated New Horizon Press, 1988.</em></p>
<p><em>6) The New York Times. April 20, 1951.</em></p>
<p><em>7) The Mangano Biological Family looks like this. All born in Palermo City to Vincenzo and Serafina Simonetti. In ascending order of age:</em></p>
<p><em>Rosalia born February 28, 1876. She never visited America.</em></p>
<p><em>Francesco born 1882. He moved to America in March 1905, but at some point, returned to Italy permanently.</em></p>
<p><em>Venera born January 6 1884. Died in New York September 4 1969.</em></p>
<p><em>Lorenza born January 4 1886. Died in New York. Unknown date.</em></p>
<p><em>Vincenzo (Vincent) born December 14 1888. Date of death unknown, probably on or around April 17-19 1951.</em></p>
<p><em>Girolamo born November 11 1892. Died Brooklyn 1983.</em></p>
<p><em>Providenza born September 19 1895. Died Brooklyn 1972.</em></p>
<p><em>Filippo (Philip) born September 9 1898. Died, probably in Brooklyn, between April 17-19 1951.</em></p>
<p><em>8) Reavil, Gil. Mafia Summit. Thomas Dunne Books. 2013.</em></p>
<p><em>9) Labor Noir: transportworkers.org/node/1618</em></p>
<p><em>10) Bolaño Roberto. Cowboy Graves. Penguin Press. New York, 2021.</em></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/thom-l-jones-mob-corner">Thom L. Jones' Mob Corner</a> or the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview">Gambino crime family section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Thom L. Jones & Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
“You gotta get it out” – Profile of Gambino Mafia family consigliere Frank Locascio
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/you-gotta-get-it-out-gambino-mafia-family-consigliere-frank-locas
2021-10-06T11:53:31.000Z
2021-10-06T11:53:31.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9650688071?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By David Amoruso for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>Gambino crime family consigliere Frank Locascio remained a loyal Mafioso until the end. That loyalty earned him a life sentence and praise from the man who ratted him out and helped put him there. Cosa Nostra is funny like that.</p>
<p>Locascio had been locked up since his arrest on December 11, 1990, when he was busted on racketeering charges along with his boss John Gotti Sr. and <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview" target="_blank">Gambino family</a> underboss Salvatore Gravano.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>See me at the Ravenite</strong></span></p>
<p>Gotti wanted to emphasize his importance by making his underlings show up at his headquarters, the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/another-mob-social-club-bites" target="_blank">Ravenite social club</a> in Manhattan’s Little Italy, at least once a week. Who cared if the FBI was watching, he said. What was wrong with friends meeting each other?</p>
<p>So, Locascio and Gravano dutifully spent five evenings each week at the Ravenite, drinking espressos and discussing business. Until the evening of December 11, 1990. Locascio arrived around five o’clock that day, accompanied by a bodyguard. Gravano arrived an hour later with capo Louis Vallario. Then, one hour after that, the boss himself arrived in his black Mercedes driven by Jackie D’Amico.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>INTERVIEW: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/interview-john-gotti-jr-sits-down-with-gangsters-inc" target="_blank"><strong>Former mob boss John Gotti Jr. sits down with Gangsters Inc.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Then the FBI pounced. “FBI! You know why we’re here! We’re here for John, Sammy, and Frankie,” FBI agent George Gabriel yelled. Gotti walked towards him with his hands forward, welcoming the handcuffs. “I knew you were coming tonight,” Gotti said.</p>
<p>“At least you and Frankie dressed up for it, but you forgot to tell Sammy,” Gabriel joked.</p>
<p>“Fuck you, fuckin’ agent,” Locascio snarled at Gabriel.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Climbing the ranks of La Cosa Nostra</strong></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9650690253,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9650690253?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="135" /></a>Born on September 24, 1932, Locascio was made an official member of the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview" target="_blank">Gambino crime family</a> in the 1950s. Involved in typical mob crimes such as gambling and loansharking, he proved a good earner and was moved up to the rank of capo of a crew operating in the Bronx.</p>
<p>When John Gotti seized power by brazenly hitting Gambino family boss Paul Castellano and his underboss Thomas Bilotti in the week before Christmas 1985 there were a lot of new openings and shifting alliances. Those who were loyal to Gotti were rewarded. Locascio was one of them.</p>
<p>Two years after becoming boss, Gotti needed a new underboss to replace Joseph “Piney” Armone, who was looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. Locascio was named acting underboss and, as Gotti moves his pawns, is later named acting consigliere.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>A bug and some mob chit chat</strong></span></p>
<p>The Gotti years are a rollercoaster ride compared to the previous years under Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano. The feds are turning up the heat and Gotti is not one to back down. The outcome is inevitable.</p>
<p>After being arrested, Gotti, Gravano, and Locascio are housed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) as they await trial. The trio is confronted with the mountain of evidence the prosecution has collected. Chief among them Gotti’s own words. A bug caught them discussing extremely sensitive business. It also caught Gotti badmouthing Gravano and other mobsters.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: The boss his son – Profile of </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-boss-his-son-profile-of-gambino-mafia-family-associate-joseph" target="_blank"><strong>Gambino Mafia family associate Joseph Gambino</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Locascio is present during most of these conversations, but hardly said a word. While Gotti raged about other mobsters, perceived acts of disrespect, and street gossip, Locascio would offer words of agreement or encouragement.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9650690458,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9650690458?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="139" /></a>In one instance, Gotti shares his paranoid thoughts about his captains. “They break my fucking heart,” Gotti said. “Who the fuck wants to be up here? We got nothin’ but troubles. I got cases coming up. I got nothin’ but fuckin’ trouble. I don’t feel good. What the fuck, am I nuts here? If I go to jail, they’d be happy. ‘Minchia, we finally got rid of him. Hah! I’m getting sick myself, Frank, sick.”</p>
<p>“You gotta get it out,” Locascio answers to soothe his boss. During each conversation Locascio let his boss vent and sometimes tries to calm him down before he makes a deadly decision.</p>
<p>But Gotti was also caught on tape complaining about Gravano and even linking him to several murders, claiming he (Gotti) only ordered them based on Gravano’s comments.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/did-a-serial-killer-frame-mob" target="_blank"><strong>Did Serial Killer Frame Mob Rat Gravano For Cop's Murder?</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>When Gravano heard these taped conversations, they were the push he needed to flip and become a government witness. It was a huge coup for the feds to flip such a high-ranking Mafioso. To use him to bring down their biggest nemesis was the cherry on top.</p>
<p>Between the bug filled with Gotti’s words and Gravano’s testimony Gotti and Locascio didn’t stand a chance. Both men were convicted on racketeering charges and sentenced to life in prison in 1992.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>“It’s not personal”</strong></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9650689268,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9650689268?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="94" /></a>At his sentencing hearing, Locascio decided to become the poster boy for omerta, the mob’s code of silence, by stating: “First, I would like to say emphatically that I am innocent... I am guilty though. I am guilty of being a good friend of John Gotti. And if there were more men like John Gotti on this earth, we would have a better country.”</p>
<p>Locascio then went into the system and served his time. He was respected by all as a standup man. Fellow mobsters who were imprisoned in the same facility would take pictures with him. He was revered both behind bars and on the streets, but he wasn’t free.</p>
<p>His former pal-turned-enemy <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-underboss-salvatore" target="_blank">Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano</a> meanwhile was out and about making podcasts and vlogs and appearing in various documentaries about “the life”. Now branded a rat and snitch, Gravano was working hard to get back some of his street cred.</p>
<p>In February of 2020, Locascio <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/ex-gambino-mafia-family-underboss-sammy-gravano-is-trying-to-get" target="_blank">made a filing</a> in Brooklyn federal court to overturn his conviction for the murder of wiseguy Louis DiBono in 1990 in a World Trade Center parking garage. Included in the filing is a statement by none other than Gravano, who states: “Frank Locascio had no role in the planning of, nor did he participate in any way in the murder or conspiracy to murder Louis DiBono.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-guys-that-do-more-than-killing-gambino-mafia-family-mobsters" target="_blank">The Guys That Do More Than Killing</a>: Gambino Mafia family mobsters busted for large variety of crimes</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Despite the kind words from Gravano, the play failed and Locascio remained locked up. He tested positive for COVID-19 as 2020 came to a close, but managed to beat that nasty bug. His old age was catching up though. Various medical complications proved too much for his body to handle.</p>
<p>Locascio passed away on October 1, 2021. He was 89.</p>
<p>In response to news of his death, Gravano, the man whose testimony landed Locascio in prison for life, shared a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/salvatore.gravano.thebull/posts/252934953507738" target="_blank">message</a> on his social media:</p>
<p>“Frank Locascio, true Cosa Nostra til the day you died… This news truly broke my heart.. I’ve come across many men in my walk of life, but you will forever be someone I keep close to my heart. You will be remembered as a true man of integrity.. my deepest condolences to your Family. They say the people we love never truly go away – they will be by our side every day. Rest Easy Brother you are free now.”</p>
<p>I guess the saying is true: “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.”</p>
<ul>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
The Little King of Garbage: New York mobster Vincent Squillante
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-little-king-of-garbage-new-york-mobster-vincent-squillante
2021-10-03T10:24:10.000Z
2021-10-03T10:24:10.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9638302056?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>Vincent Squillante and his part in the Mafia underworld of New York is a snapshot of a time long gone and unlikely to be repeated. As he came into adulthood, Cosa Nostra was reaching its zenith.</p>
<p>There is little written about significant events occurring in Italian-American organized crime after 1931 until the Kefauver Hearings, a United States Special Committee on Organized Crime that carried out its investigation during 1951. It produced an 11000 page report and introduced millions of Americans to real gangsters, not the ones they had watched in movies and on their black and white television sets.</p>
<p>Assuming the five Mafia crime families that came to dominate New York were emerging in the early 1900s, the 1950s was not only a midway point in the 20th Century but also a half-way point in the growth and development of this criminal organization that had essentially remained hidden from the public until the senator, Estes Kefauver, from Tennessee, faced up to the gangsters in cities across the country.</p>
<p>By the time Squillante fell in with Cosa Nostra, joining a <em>regina</em> or crew in The Bronx, his crime family had already gone through three leaders at least, and there would be three more in his short lifetime. One would be murdered, one bring him wealth and power and the other would kill him.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9638302095,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9638302095?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a><strong><em>Photo: Vincent Squillante <br /></em></strong></p>
<p>Luigi Squillante and Bedelia Alberti, who had settled in The Bronx, had at least ten children, seven girls and three boys. What happened to the sisters is unknown. One brother, Nunzio, lived until he died of natural causes, cancer, aged sixty-seven in 1990, in a hospital in Catskill, New York.</p>
<p>One disappeared, assumed dead. That was Vincent. William, the third brother, ran The Bluebird Pizzeria on Burke Avenue in The Bronx that was a suspected hangout for drug traffickers and mobsters.</p>
<p>Vincent was born in June 1917, and at some stage in his late teens or twenties was part of the Mafia in The Bronx, working in a crew under Frank Scalice, who had at one time ruled the Mangano Mafia crime family before stepping down in the early 1930s. Some sources claim Scalice proposed Vincent into the mob, which, if true, would make later events almost like a Greek tragedy.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9638306457,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9638306457?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="175" /></a>In the early 1940s, the underboss of the family was a man called Albert Anastasia (right). He had accepted the role when Scalice stepped aside and handed the leadership of the family over to Vincenzo Mangano. He was from Palermo. Albert from Calabria. They were in a fiercely partisan organization, like fire and water. It would not turn out well for one of them.</p>
<p>The Mafia family we know today as The <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview" target="_blank">Gambinos</a> had at least four crews operating in The Bronx and Harlem when Squillante entered their world, or in the years immediately following, led by David Amodeo, Rocco Mazzie, Arthur Leo and Joe Zingaro. Vincent would mix and mingle with a lot of strange men with names like Pasta Fazula, Joey Surprise, Nanny the Geep, Shats, The Sidge, Foongy and Joe Stutz. In the Mafia underworld, men would know each other for years only by their nicknames. In a landscape where no one trusted their own shadow, it made sense from a security angle.</p>
<p>Squillante generated a criminal record from the early 1950s for income-tax evasion, extortion and drug trafficking, although the tax rap was the only one he fell victim to. The 58K fine the courts issued him was paid for its alleged, through levies imposed on cartage companies that came under his control. He euchred his association members into effectively bailing him out of a federal crime.</p>
<p>He was in the sights of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) who registered him as a major target, although his main forte became control and manipulation of labor unions, especially in the field of garbage removal.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: “I’m in waste management!” - </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/i-m-in-waste-management-genovese-mafia-family-soldier-frank-giovi" target="_blank"><strong>Genovese Mafia family soldier Frank Giovinco</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>At the 1957 McClellan senate hearing into organized crime****, FBN agent Joe Amato, a founding member of what was referred to in the bureau as “The Italian Team” a squad of four, based in New York, stated before the committee members that “Squillante and his nephew, Gennaro Mancuso, were the kingpins of a secret society specifically organized for narcotic smuggling.”</p>
<p>Dramatic as it sounded, the agency could never pin a charge on Squillante for peddling drugs.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview" target="_blank">Gambino Family</a> throughout their ninety years of changing names and leaderships, have concentrated on three main commercial areas to generate cash revenue through their control of legitimate sources-construction, the waterfront docks and the garbage industry. Vincent Squillante would make his bones for the family not by killing people but by making a lot of money for it, by controlling the trash industry, or at least a significant part of it, especially on Long Island.</p>
<p>He operated from offices in Manhattan and Long Island City and shared the control of Teamsters Local 813 formed in 1951 whose approximately 2000 members were self-employed garbage truckers operating in New York and Long Island, with a crooked Jewish con man called Bernard Adelstein who had been with the union since its inception, manipulating the union for his and the Mafia’s benefit.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9638306675,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9638306675?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="175" /></a>The senate McClellan Committee reported in 1958:</p>
<p>“Bernard Adelstein (left), secretary and treasurer of Local 813, the dominant union in the New York carting industry, served as a tool in all the empire-building activities of Vincent Squillante.......</p>
<p>..... Adelstein was able to put his union at Squillante’s complete disposal in enforcing monopolies, punishing trade association critics of Squillante and engaging Squillante-favored non-union firms. We find that garbage collection industry men banded together in associations which eventually invoked monopoly and restraint of trade arrangements with a system of punishments for nonconforming members.</p>
<p>In Vincent Squillante we have presented the picture of a man who traded on his association with key underworld characters and his ability to “handle” Local 813, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to parley himself into a position where he was the absolute czar of the private sanitation industry in Greater New York.”</p>
<p>The chairman of the committee’s concluding statement focuses on Squillante, whose “only previous qualifications were in the New York policy rackets and as a pusher of narcotics.... [and who] traded on his associations with the under-world and the union to create a monopoly and the racketeers also set up ‘whip’ companies to discipline nonconforming carters by bidding away their customers with artificially low prices.”</p>
<p>The committee also claimed Squillante traded on his links into the Mafia to establish himself as executive director of Grand Sanitation Company, Corsair Carting Company and Carters Landfill Company. That he forced people into various associations and Local 813, and created a monopoly in the collection of cartage in the greater New York area.</p>
<p>He also refused to answer questions 120 times, quoting his rights under the 5th Amendment, which gives a person a right not to answer questions that may incriminate themselves.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9638311072,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9638311072?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Vincent Squillante</strong></em></p>
<p>Chief Counsel Robert Kennedy tried every which way, but could not get Squillante or Adelstein to disclose anything. The little mobster even checked with his lawyer before admitting his name.</p>
<p>So, he was acknowledged as a powerhouse in graft and corruption, controlling a labor union, and the waste disposal industry. But.</p>
<p>Was he a killer?</p>
<p>History has written about him being a hit-man for Anastasia, although it seems more sound than fury.</p>
<p>A tiny man physically. An FBI report lists him as five two, some sources claim below five feet, and weighing, in the shower, wet, about one twenty. About the size of a jockey. Doesn’t mean he could not be deadly. Although the claims made by writers about him being a killer are not born out by any evidence. The law never arrested him in connection with a murder.</p>
<p>Although he was allegedly connected to two notable killing-one in 1951 and the other one that occurred on a hot, sunny day in the summer of 1957.</p>
<p>Vincent Mangano, the boss of the family, was constantly fighting with Albert Anastasia. On one occasion, it’s alleged, they almost came to blows.</p>
<p>In April 1951, Vincent and his brother Philip disappeared. They found his body in a salt-marsh in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, shot repeatability in the face. Vincent was gone forever. Rumors that circulated afterwards claimed he was part of a housing complex foundation on Long Island.</p>
<p>Their murders have been a cold case since day one.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9638312089,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9638312089?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Vincent (left) and Philip Mangano</strong></em></p>
<p>In 1968, a man called Jim Carra, in an interview in Parade Magazine, claimed Vincent Mangano was lured to a house somewhere on Long island, killed and his body ground up in a garbage truck and dumped somewhere. The killer, according to Carra, was Vincent Squillante. There has been much debate that Carra was actually Alfonso Attardi, a soldier under the family boss Salvatore D’Aquila, who himself was murdered in 1928.</p>
<p>Jim never told us who killed Philip. Someone did. Badly. Shot repeatedly in the face, his funeral was a closed coffin affair. His nephew, Vincent Greco, helped to organize the send off, ensuring his uncle’s body remained a memory only by his photograph on display in the funeral parlor.</p>
<p>Frank Scalice, the underboss to Anastasia, was killed one afternoon in June 1957, while shopping for peaches in a fruit store on Arthur Avenue in The Bronx. Two men, identically dressed in white shirts and wearing sunglasses, walked up to him and shot him dead. They then left the store, climbed into a waiting car and disappeared into the shimmering heat of a dog-day afternoon.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-sun-was-shining-the-hit-on-new-york-mafia-underboss-frank-sca" target="_blank"><strong>The Hit on New York Mafia Underboss Frank Scalice</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Squillante may have been one of the shooters, we don’t know for sure. If not hefting a gun that afternoon, he probably set up the killing, managing it for Anastasia. Only a family boss could authorize a hit of this magnitude. And he would have used someone close to organize it.</p>
<p>Squillante’s relationship with Anastasia was tight enough that they shared the barbershop on that historic October morning in 1957, when Albert was blasted out of his chair by two gunmen.</p>
<p>Sitting in chair number five, as the bullets flew and ricocheted, according to a manicurist, Jean Weinberger in her statement to detectives from the 18th Precinct, Vincent yelled “I’m outta here.” and was gone in a New York minute.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/mob-meeting-at-apalachin-the" target="_blank"><strong>Mob Meeting at Apalachin</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9638318695,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9638318695?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="143" /></a>Carlo Gambino (right), a long-serving member of the crime family, almost certainly orchestrated Anastasia’s murder. By the time the dust settled and the other family's heads knew what was what, he had taken over the reins and was guiding its destiny for the next twenty years.</p>
<p>While all this was fitting into place, Vince Squillante was nervously preparing for his future. He probably knew fate was sliding around him like a hungry anaconda and a month after the sensational rub-out of his boss, the law came looking for him.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9638327286,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9638327286?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="117" height="183" /></a>On November 19, 20 or 22 (different sources give varying dates), along with brother Nunzio (left) and Adelstein, he was arrested and charged with extortion linked to garbage removal contracts for the U.S. Air Force base on Michael Field, Long Island. Their trial in 1958 at Nassau County Supreme Court found them all guilty, and they received various sentences: Vincent up to 15 years, Nunzio up to 5 years, and Adelstein up to 10 years. They released Vincent on bail of $50,000 while his appeal process wound its way through the judicial system.</p>
<p>While being held in prison, Squillante shared a cell with a Russia spy called Rudolf Abel. His real name, which was never disclosed while he was in American custody, was William August Fisher, and he had been born and raised in Benwell, a suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north-east of England. America eventually exchanged him for Gary Powers, the famous U-2 spy pilot shot down over Russia.</p>
<p>Squillante protested the cell arrangement as “being cruel and unusual punishment,” claiming it was ruining his good name.</p>
<p>On or about September 30, 1960, he disappeared.</p>
<p>While some claim the mob killed him over his ties to Anastasia, it seems more likely, based on the timing, that Carlo Gambino acted to head off at the pass something that could’ve been a major problem. By taking Squillante out, Gambino eliminated the scenario of a media spotlight on a potential Mafia-linked scandal involving the waste removal industry.</p>
<p>Joseph Valachi the mob informant, claimed when under questioning on September 25, 1963, in a U.S. Senate Investigation into organized crime, “Squillante when he lost Albert, he was not worth a nickel.” The soldier in the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-genovese-crime-family" target="_blank">Genovese Family</a> also started the rumor that Anastasia had made Squillante his godson. Considering there was a mere fifteen years difference in their ages, Valachi probably meant it in the Italian padrino way rather than a biological one. </p>
<p>There was also the ever possible chance Squillante might turn cop and become an informant to get a lighter sentence. Otherwise, Gambino did not seem to be in a rush to kill a lot of Anastasia’s close associates.</p>
<p>One that went was Armand Rava, who worked with the same crew as Squillante. He had been close to Anastasia and died because of his defiance towards the new family head. According to an FBI informant, someone murdered him sometime in 1959, ironically, in a funeral home in Florida, and his body dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. Sleeping with the fishes, the mob called it.</p>
<p>Another was Johnny Robilotto, who had come in with Anastasia after being rejected as a member of the Genovese Family because his brother was a police officer. His dead body, with multiple gunshots wounds to the head, was found on Utica Avenue, Brooklyn, in the late afternoon, on September 7, 1958. According to different sources, he was either murdered by Rava along with Aniello Dellacroce, or the brothers Eppolito, Ralph and Jimmy.</p>
<p>Years into the future, Dellacroce would become the underboss to the notorious John Gotti, and the Eppolito’s nephew, Louis, will go down in history as one of the most infamous New York cops, ever.</p>
<p>The shifting sands and tortuous maneuverings that always result after a mob boss is murdered, and the vacuum filled triggered both murders. Almost always by the man who orchestrated the coup. The politics of Cosa Nostra make the “Hill” in Washington D.C. a monastery in comparison.</p>
<p>How Squillante died and who killed him remains a mystery, as expected. He disappeared sometime after September 21, 1960. The FBI had an informant they registered as T-174 and he passed on to his handler that the hoodlum was murdered by Frank Troia along with three others, his brother Leo, Nick Rattenni, and Joe Fiorello, aka Joey Surprise, at a garbage dump in Hopewell Junction, New York. The body was compacted and buried in the tip. Or so the snitch claimed.</p>
<p>An apocryphal story that did the rounds for many years claimed Squillante was invited to a party in a house somewhere in New York, where, when suitably drunk and helpless, he was attacked and murdered by a bunch of women who were girlfriends, wives, mothers or sisters of men he had killed.</p>
<p>Stabbing him repeatedly, they then chopped up the body that was carted off to some unknown place.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9638499280,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="163" alt="9638499280?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>Perhaps the closest to the truth which might link into the theory of Gambino approving the hit to ensure no problems with Squillante becoming a liability as his trial loomed, is the version offered by Jerry Capeci, the Mafia expert, in his book, “Murder Machine.”</p>
<p>It’s claimed Antonino Gaggi, a Brooklyn-based criminal, had hated Squillante (right) for years for his alleged part in the murder of Gaggi’s relative, Frank Scalice. He and an associate murdered Squillante somewhere in The Bronx and disposed of the body at a place on 10th Street. All neat and tidy, except there are nine 10th Streets across New York, and none of them in The Bronx. This act of vendetta may have promoted Gaggi into the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview" target="_blank">Gambino family</a> as a soldier. Getting a “button” for carrying out a hit would be the ultimate aim for any would-be Mafioso.</p>
<p>Often, when trying to understand the Mafia, the difference between fact and fiction is self-delusion. So much written about it is rumor, heresy or speculation. Even the hard facts have, at times, the consistency of Camembert cheese.</p>
<p>Vincent James Squillante was a hoodlum; a tater-tot one, but still, a bad guy. He lived and died in a society where mistakes almost always resulted in bad stuff. He ended up a particle in the quantum world of something as dazzling as theoretical physics, provided you prefer your crime as noir as it gets.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Acknowledgment:</strong></span></p>
<p><em>The American Mafia at <a href="http://mafiahistory.us" target="_blank">mafiahistory.us</a> hosted by Tom Hunt was a source of reference and I acknowledge his website and the invaluable contribution he makes to help researchers understand the complexities of a criminal phenomenon that has puzzled and intrigued so many of us, for so many years.</em></p>
<p><em>Other provenances for this story are various books, newspaper articles, reports from government hearings and FBI records available on-line.</em></p>
<p><em>****The McClellan Committee was formerly titled: United States Congress Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. Formed on January 30, 1957, it published its final report on March 11, 1960.</em></p>
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