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2024-03-29T12:46:27Z
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Louis Two-Gun: A Headline Gangster
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/louis-two-gun-a-headline-gangster
2024-03-23T06:27:47.000Z
2024-03-23T06:27:47.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12403600475?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>He was a most outlandish man.</p>
<p>Perhaps in the final moments, he had a fleeting glimpse of the horse he murdered, the men he had killed, his glorious days on the dude ranches in Colorado as he played at being a cowboy. The money, the jewels, the raucous lifestyle.</p>
<p>Maybe it was just the gathering darkness, the dull ache of end of life, and then it was all gone.</p>
<p>Born in California, he dies in Chicago, a city filled with a miasma of violence, lingering over the lake and across the avenues and streets, a storm always in wait. He’s there in the boom-town years, when boom literally means the sound of gun-fire and the noise of falling bodies.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601672,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601672?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="222" /></a>Alphonse Capone (right) and the gathering of gangsters, a cosmopolitan brocade of Polish and Irish and Italian and Jewish gunmen, all searching for their piece of the Windy City’s blanket of opportunity. For Louis Alterie in the gloaming of a confoundable life, Chi-Town will only bring the wrong comforter, heavy with noise and deadly with rhythm.</p>
<p>Before anything else, he was a headline gangster.</p>
<p>A man with so many nicknames it’s hard to keep up: Jack Verain, Diamond Jack, Two-Gun Louis, Clyde Hayes, State and Madison Alterie, Frank Ray, Lew Alteries, are some of them listed in documents and newspaper reports.</p>
<p>Leland Varaine, sometimes called Lee, maybe always yearned to be a cowboy. He was born in August 1886, (his death certificate claims August 1885 and the 1900 census 1891) to one, Charles W. allegedly of European descent, French, maybe a bit of Spanish, and a distant relative of Napoleon Bonaparte. His mother, Mary Lincoln Brown, of Irish descent, had nine other children with her husband who ranched in Hell Hollow, a valley in Mariposa County in Northern California.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403600864,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403600864?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="220" /></a>Leland attends schooling in Lodi and his early years are mostly a mystery. He’s a rodeo rider then he takes up boxing, having grown into a six-footer at about 200 pounds and adopts the name Louis Alterie (left) as his ring-name, although some sources claim he also boxed as ‘Kid Hayes.’ He’s a man growing into the casual use of violence, which will govern so much of his future actions.</p>
<p>Boxing on the California coast and sometimes in Hawaii, he then moves west to Denver, where he meets and marries a socialite, Mabel ‘Mamie’ Hayes, in 1920. They move back to Los Angeles, where his mother, divorced from Charles, had re-married and settled in Santa Monica.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of mystery about his period of his life as he allegedly joins the Venice police department and rises through the ranks to the position of lieutenant, before leaving it in 1916. It’s something his criminal pals will joke about in the years ahead. A small town south of Santa Monica, once independent, now absorbed by Los Angeles. With incorporation, records vanish, memories fade, leaving uncertainty.</p>
<p>In 1921, he’s heading east to a place becoming so unreflectively violent it was almost ingrained in its local constitution. According to Alva Johnson in <em>The New Yorker Magazine</em>, Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world.</p>
<p>Prohibition had arrived in 1920, a year after a bloody race riot involving black workers which overlapped the Alderman’s War between local politicians in the city’s Little Italy district. The worst was still ahead, but the rewards were incredibly enticing.</p>
<p>In 1926, Al Capone, the gangster of all Chicago gangsters, generated $70 million (about 1.5 billion in today’s money) through brewing, gambling, vice and distilling operations, according to Edward A. Olsen, U.S. District Attorney.</p>
<p>Alterie was thirty-five when he breezed into the winds of Chicago. Heading north into middle age, he was on the older side to be a hoodlum, but the city, to him, was a universe where cruelty and terror were the way people expressed themselves and this was an environment he knew. His time as a boxer had taught him that. Guns and murder seemed as normal as bacon and eggs.</p>
<p>Guilt was never a luxury he had time for in the years ahead.</p>
<p>One legend that clings to Varaine aka Alterie is that he introduced the Tommy Gun into Chicago’s underworld arsenal. Ranchers in the west had traditionally used them to control wolves, a constant hazard to stock breeding in places like Colorado where he had spent some time working and socializing with cowboys before moving east. The. 45 calibre Thompson sub-machine gun would become a lethal equalizer among the gangs fighting each other over the next ten years, generating a new craze in orchestrated murder. It became known to criminals and police as “The Chicago Typewriter.”</p>
<p>Another story about him that lingers like the scent of garlic is the one about murdering a horse.</p>
<p>For someone obsessed by the romance of the old west, killing the animal that epitomizes it more than almost anything, suggests that Louis was indeed “flaky,” a reputation that will haunt him through his years in Chicago’s gangland. His confrontation with the frisky young colt, called “Morvich” may or may not have happened, but it makes good reading.</p>
<p>The way news reports and writers have anthropomorphised the event suggests this is perhaps more fable than substance.</p>
<p>It’s supposed to take place two years after his arrival and then induction into the hierarchy of Chicago’s North Side that leads us into the murky world of Dashiell Hammett type memes- gangsters, crooked cops, speakeasies, bent politicians and perilous thugs.</p>
<p>Louis is first involved with a west-side mob under the leadership of Terry Druggan along with Frankie Lake, and then somehow ends up working with Dion O’Bannion, the leader of a gang on Chicago's North Side. He becomes so close to the boss, his pals refer to him as “Man Friday.”</p>
<p>One of its members is Samuel “Nails” Morton, a Jewish mobster who had served in World War One with distinction, returning to his Chicago neighbourhood a hero.</p>
<p>When he visited Colorado and socialized with Alterie, he was introduced to horses and became somewhat addicted to the animal upon returning to Chicago.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601466,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601466?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="132" /></a>On a Sunday in January 1923, Morton and a group are riding their horses in Lincoln Park. “Morvich,” apparently a skittish horse, throws Morton and one of the lashing hooves catches the gangster on the head, killing him instantly. The story then goes that Alterie and a group, including Earl Weiss and George Moran (right), other members of the North Side, had kidnapped the horse from its stables on North Clark Street, lead it to the scene of the crime, and shot it dead.</p>
<p>Or did they?</p>
<p>And maybe it wasn’t the first time a gunman in Slab Town killed a nag.</p>
<p>There’s another story featuring Salvatore “Samoots” Amatuna, a gunsel, perhaps more than that, in the gang lead by the terrible Genna Brothers, who operated west of the city's’ Loop, in Little Italy. Allegedly having having a beef with the Chinaman who did his laundry and scorched one of his silk shirts, when getting nowhere with a man who didn't speak English “Samoots” went outside the shop and in a fit of rage, shot dead the laundryman’s horse tethered to the delivery cart.</p>
<p>True or fiction, or simply a legend of Chicago’s great “Roaring Twenties?” When facts go astray, fantasy blooms. In the splendid garden of make-believe, the seeds of deception always flourish.</p>
<p>Chicago gangs waged constant war against each other and the law. In 1924, noted author Herbert Asbury claimed there were 15 of them scattered across a population of close to 3 million people in America’s second biggest city.</p>
<p>However, a sociologist at The University of Chicago, one Frederic M. Thrasher, claimed, with a detailed map to support his thesis, that between 1923 and 1926, the gangs numbered 1313, comprising over 25000 members. A lot of gangsters.</p>
<p>Louis Alterie (right), as one of them, was, in thirteen years, following his arrival in Chicago, involved in an impressive series of violent confrontations and discord in his life in Illinois and Colorado.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403600493,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403600493?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="285" /></a>A year after he arrives, drunk and obstreperous, after a night of heavy boozing, he gets into a scuffle with Charles Strauss at a nightclub and shoots him in the face. Arrested and taken to Stanton Street police station, he is soon free when Strauss, learning of Alterie’s connections, quickly drops any charges against his attacker. It’s the first of many arrests, but very few convictions, which will hassle him both in Chicago and in Colorado after he moves back and forward to the Denver area.</p>
<p>Six months later, in June 1922, the authorities arrested him, his wife, and Druggan in connection with a $25,000 jewellery robbery at Green Mill Gardens, a restaurant and nightclub at 4806 North Broadway. Subsequently, the law decides not to prosecute them.</p>
<p>In 1924, he is the president of Local 25 of the Chicago office of the Theatre and Amusement Janitor’s Union, a position he will hold on to until his death. It’s the same year he nearly kills a lawyer and his wife in an auto accident in Lincoln Park. He flees the scene but traced by his plate number. Everything goes away. As usual.</p>
<p>In August 1924, Alterie and a group of drunken friends, shoot up a bar on Broadway and Devon and try to kidnap two police officers called to the scene. Scared off by another police officer who is there in plain clothes and who kills one of the gang, the rest disperse. After years of legal disputes and witness amnesia, Louis walks away once again.</p>
<p>He’s involved the same year along with Johnny Torrio, Dion O’Bannion and other gangsters in aF scam at the Siebens Brewery on The Near North Side.* O’Bannion, a part owner, knew from his contacts in the Chicago Police Force that the brewery was soon to be raided. Knowing Torrio had a previous conviction for breaking the Prohibition Law, O’Bannion sells off his shareholding to him before the cops arrive on May 19. Police arrest Torrio and he goes to prison for nine months, paying a $5000 fine in addition. It was this act of treachery that almost certainly will cost O’Bannion his life.</p>
<p>A grand jury in Chicago indicts Alterie for his role in a kidnapping ring. He’s part of a plot that involves a former Cook County state’s attorney to embezzle half a million dollars.</p>
<p>On February 22, 1925, during another drunken display at The Midnight Frolics on Wabash Avenue, detectives arrested him. He seems to have spent a lot of his time, wherever he was, drunk and dangerous. Following bail arrangements, he leaves Chicago and sets up shop at his ranch in Sweetwater, west of Denver. It’s time to going back to being a cowboy.</p>
<p>He gets divorced from Mabel and remarries Ermina, the daughter of Denver underworld king, Mike Rossi. They wed in Philadelphia. In 1927, the same year, during a drunken argument on his ranch, his brother, Bert, blasts him with a shotgun. Louis recovers and refuses to press charges.</p>
<p>On November 7, 1932, in a drunken rage, he shoots, and injures two men, and beats up a third in The Hotel Denver, in Glenwood Springs.. Tried and convicted, Judge Shumate, instead of sending his to prison, exiles him from Colorado. Louis and his wife leave the state on February 1, 1933, presumably, never to return.</p>
<p>Towards the end of 1924, a gangland killing marks a milestone in the underworld conflicts raging in Chicago, the murder of Dion O’Bannion. It will set in motion events that change everything for Louis Alterie.</p>
<p>In retrospect, we can see that the murder played a pivotal role in the gangland history of Chicago during this period. Like almost all mob hits, it will go unsolved and his departure will shepherd leadership changes that will lead, almost inescapably, to a garage on North Clark Street and a mass murder of unbelievable proportion in a city seemingly immune to violence.**</p>
<p>At noon, on November 10, 1924, that is an abstract probability and far away. On this chill, overcast day, coloured like sea-gulls, there will be only one victim, but he will find out that death was a neighborhood with lots of well-known faces.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601271,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601271?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="159" /></a>At thirty-two, he was five years past the prime by gangland standards. Some wondered how he had lived that long. Charles Dean O’Bannion (right) had graduated from singing waiter, to petty theft, to hi-jacking and labor slugging in newspaper wars across the city, to the big-time hoodlum with the dawn of Prohibition.</p>
<p>It’s claimed he allegedly staged the city’s first liquor hijacking on December 19, 1921, stealing at gunpoint a truck loaded with Gromes and Ullrich whiskey waiting at a stop sign in The Loop, Chicago’s business district.</p>
<p>In his prime, it’s claimed he was earning one million dollars a year from his bootlegging activities and supplementing this with added revenue by hijacking other gangs’ booze shipments. Like his friend and bodyguard, Alterie, he carried three pistols in specially designed pockets of his clothing.</p>
<p>On this day, four men arrive in a blue Jewett sedan. Leaving the driver in the car, three of them walk into his business, Schofield's Flower shop, at 738 North State Street. They had come for wreaths for a funeral being held for Mike Merlo, who had recently died.</p>
<p>As head of the Unione Siciliana, a fraternal organization that may have been a front for a criminal cartel of extraordinary size and reach, he had, unusually, died a death of natural causes, cancer, two days earlier. Lots of people coming into the city to attend his committal. Lots of them known criminals. O’Bannion made lot’s of money selling flowers to gangsters. Earlier in the year, he had supplied wreaths and arrangements estimated to have cost north of $20,000 for the funeral of Frank Capone, brother of Al, shot dead by the police in April during a municipal election affray. It’s also been suggested that he created a serious side-line, killing gangsters and then looking after the flower department at their funerals.</p>
<p>O’Bannion greets the visitors as friends, and as one shakes his hands, the other two prove otherwise, drawing pistols from their belts they shoot the Irishman in the head and body, and one gunman carries out the traditional coup de grâce with a shot into the brain. Close enough to scorch the skin.</p>
<p>The Cook County coroner noted in the court's margin record:</p>
<p>“Slayers not apprehended. John Scalice, Albert Anselmi and Frank Yale suspected, but never brought to trial.” ***</p>
<p>Reports stated that 10,000 people either watched the O’Bannion cortège or attended his funeral, with all the trimmings: a casket costing $7500, a funeral bill totalling $10,000, and the exact number of tens of thousands spent on floral tributes remains unknown. Allegedly 40,000 had viewed his body, laid out in state at Sharbaro & Co funeral parlor at 708 North Wells Street. Louis Alterie is one of six men who were coffin-bearers. Five Municipal Court judges and at least one alderman attended his wake. There are 24 cortège cars, each stuffed with massively expensive wreaths and flowers. 124 funeral cars, leads literally, blocks of private cars bringing mourners to the church and funeral ceremony.</p>
<p>The killing of O’Bannion features a bunch of characters that seem to be everything, everywhere, all at once. And maybe, just maybe, one of them is Louis Alterie.</p>
<p>He will claim he was not at the shop that morning, but at home, recovering from a hangover. Which, for a man who seemed to spend half his life in an alcoholic haze, sounded like a reasonable excuse. Yet the killers knew he wouldn’t be there. Obviously, they had no concerns about walking into the shop ready to kill, having a plan, not worried about interference. From anybody.</p>
<p>Although Alterie makes threats against the murderers, raging like Lear on his blasted heath, offering to meet them with pistols for a show-down at State and Madison Streets, it’s perhaps smoke and mirrors rather than true intent. Is his outcry sprouting retribution or an act by a conspiratorial player in a complex charade?</p>
<p>On November 17, Alterie and George Moran have a meeting at The Friars Inn, a nightclub on Van Buren Street, and the next day Louis leaves town, by train. But not to Colorado, as some sources claim. His destination is New York. That same evening, Johnny Torrio also heads for New York by train. As they attempted to leave on another train headed for The Big Apple, the police arrested Frank Yale and another New York mobster, Saverio “Sam” Pollaccio.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><strong><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601076,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601076?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="271" /></a></strong><em><strong>Photo: Yale and Pollaccio.</strong></em></p>
<p>Pollaccio is the<em> consigliere </em>or counsellor for New York’s big Mafia boss, Giuseppe Masseria, and Yale is a <em>capo </em>or crew boss in the same family, based in Brooklyn. With strong ties to Chicago through Torrio and others, Yale is also a suspect in the murder of James Colosimo, who founded the Capone group as early as 1910 when Al was an eleven-year-old kid street thug.</p>
<p>Masseria and Capone have some sort of alliance; it’s even claimed Masseria promoted Capone into his New York Mafia family, making him a <em>capo</em>, which presumably was an honorary title as Al never operated in New York. As a young man, he had worked for Yale at The Harvard Inn, a speak-easy come nightclub the mobster owned on Coney Island. Mob politics power events and create relationships way beyond the scope of traditional parliamentarians.</p>
<p>The Italian gangs of Chicago come out of Calabria and Naples, not Sicily. Its members linked more by geography than kinship. They expand into multi-ethnic groups, and there are no traditional ceremonies or induction rites. No swearing of Omenta-silence or death. The only commonality between Italian-American gangs in New York and Chicago is that they are criminals.</p>
<p>We don’t know what, if anything, was taking place in New York, and how it features in the murder of O’Bannion. It’s just part of the never-ending mystery of Chicago’s gangland.</p>
<p>Early in 1925, Louis Alterie will leave Chicago, moving back to Colorado. His flaky actions following the murder of O’Bannion were causing concern among the North Side. It’s believed Moran urges “Two-Gun,” taking a break from business was advisable. His departure was in the same month as that of Torrio. Shot and seriously wounded, he retires from the Chicago mob and moves to New York, taking up with another one there, headed by a man called Charles Luciano.</p>
<p>Whether by design or good fortune, he will miss out on all the dramatic years to follow as Capone and The North Side Gang fight each other to the death culminating in that dark moment on North Clark Street.</p>
<p>His years in Colorado are eventful, often centred on his appetite for booze and his unstable temper. Previously known as “Two-Gun Louis” because of his propensity for carrying duel revolvers, (like O’Bannion, he actually mostly hefted three,) his new nickname became “Diamond-Jack” as he allegedly wore $15-$20,000 worth of them on belt-buckle, watch and chain and the many rings he wore. Which always came in useful when he was using his fists.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601099,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601099?profile=RESIZE_584x" width="406" /></a>He wore $100 Stetsons that were so big they imaged miniature dirigibles, drove a cream colored Cadillac sporting Longhorn Cattle horns on the hood, and flashed a roll of cash that looked like a beached whale.</p>
<p>Alterie sells his first ranch at Jarre Canyon, Moonridge, and buys the second, in April, 1926, at Sweetwater, near Glenwood Springs, two hundred miles west of Denver. In 1930 he’s arrested for shooting at men fishing on Sweetwater Lake, and is a suspect in several kidnapping cases in Colorado and Illinois, including the famous Lindbergh baby case which happens in New Jersey, far from his normal stomping grounds. Getting drunk in night clubs, shooting at people, breaking the law. It’s what he does.</p>
<p>A man for all seasons, except his behaviour is, if ever, appropriate, for any occasion.</p>
<p>He travels back and forth between Colorado and Chicago, although he keeps clear of The Northside. His main source of income seems to be the union he presides over, and it’s suggested he was showing too much interest in another, The Moving Picture Operators Union, which is controlled by Capone’s mob, although by the end of 1934, Al was spending his days in Alcatraz Prison, San Francisco after having been sentenced in 1931 to eleven years for tax evasion. He will die in 1947 at his home in Florida.</p>
<p>Police raid Alterie’s office on Wabash Avenue in October 1933 and arrest him, charging him with fraudulent labor malpractice, basically taking money off people looking for jobs, promising them, and never delivering.</p>
<p>The new boss of the South Side was Francesco Nitto aka Frank Nitti, cousin to Al, and the man who controlled the money flow when Capone ruled the roost. His early nickname, “The Enforcer,” earned him a place in the early days as a bodyguard to the boss.</p>
<p>Alterie, in his longing to expand his business empire, is tempting fate. And fate gets impatient.</p>
<p>We all know our birthday, but few of us know our death day. It’s always there, waiting. If life is the tenant of the room, death is the ruffian on the stair.****</p>
<p>On July 18, 1935, Alterie and his wife are living in a suite on the 6th floor of Eastwood Towers, an apartment building on the avenue of the same name in Uptown Chicago, on the North Side, having moved there on April 1.</p>
<p>On July 9, his killers are already setting up shop across the street at a boarding house directly opposite the front entrance of The Towers. They move there, renting a room by a man called “Sullivan”, on the first floor and start a stake-out. They are, in fact, following a procedure which became known as “The Rented Ambush,” and which may have been created ironically, or at least perfected by Alterie and Hymie West, another North Side gangster.*****</p>
<p>A stake-out crew would go through local newspapers and boarding houses and buildings looking to rent rooms in a location near the target’s home or place they frequent. Once the rooms were booked, gunmen would move in and essentially turn it into a sniper's nest. The assassins would wait patiently, possibly working in teams until they could get the perfect shot of their target, giving no warning and leaving enough time to escape before the police were arriving.</p>
<p>Some days earlier, it’s alleged Ermina received a telephone call, and a voice said, “The Angel of Death will call on you unless you get out. The Syndicate wants the union.” Whether this was a tip-off, some kind of veiled threat, or what, has never been established. It begs the question why Capone’s mob would show consideration to a man who almost certainly killed many of its members.</p>
<p>At about 8.30 am on a sunny Thursday morning, Alterie and his wife come down to the entrance of the building. Someone brought his car from the apartment building garage and parked it outside. As Ermina walks towards it, she would drive him to the union office, down town, and Louis leaves the entrance stepping to the car, gunshots boom across the street from the building opposite.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403812486,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="522" alt="12403812486?profile=RESIZE_584x" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Place of the ambush.</strong></em></p>
<p>According to witnesses, Alterie spins around, flapping his arms crazily around his head as though swatting at bees, and collapses on the street. Rushed to Lakeview Hospital, he dies on the operating table at 9.45 am without regaining consciousness, although some news reports claim his last words to his wife, as she held him in her arms, were, “Honey, I guess I’m through.” His fatal wounds were nine shotgun pellets to the head, along with six to his left shoulder.</p>
<p>When the hospital nurses empty his pockets, he’s carrying $23 and change. And no guns.</p>
<p>His killers leave their nest, escaping through their apartment building into the back alley and a getaway car. They leave behind a shotgun and an unfired. 351 Winchester rifle on the bed and the usual mystery, who were they?</p>
<p>We will never know.</p>
<p><em><strong><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601865,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601865?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="625" /></a></strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><em><strong>Photo: Murder scene today and the room killer’s used across street.</strong></em></p>
<p>Five days later, his body shipped west, family and friends gather for Alterie’s funeral service and burial at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Unlike some of the ostentatious ones in Chicago’s gangland, his is low key, only 39 attend of whom 16 are women. His eighty-six-year-old father is there, but not his mother, who apparently is too distressed by his sudden death. They bury him in an unmarked plot as Leland Deveraigne, another name in death, to add to the litany that accompanied him in life, leaving the usual mystery of who and why.</p>
<p>According to newspaper headlines in Chicago, a fight over control of the two unions is claimed to have triggered his murder. The one he commanded and the other he was allegedly lustring after. “They are rich properties for men who can handle them” claimed The Chicago Tribune in its edition on July 19, 1935. Although no one knew for certain what lay behind his killing, senior detectives in the police and state attorney’s office all claimed Alterie was “long overdue for the tragedy.”</p>
<p>Some believe his murder was in revenge for his testimony in 1931 in the IRD against Ralph Capone, brother of Al, although that had taken place years before. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, although this length of time suggests atrophia rather than retribution.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403602652,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403602652?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="273" /></a>There was a third, if somewhat tenuous, option:</p>
<p>Someone killed Alterie because he had become a government witness after trying to muscle in on the Denver rackets. Involving a man called Harry Schechtel, a broker under indictment for bond fraud along with 23 other suspects, who it’s alleged receives a telephone call the night before the shooting on Eastwood Avenue, and warned the same fate would befall him unless he could get the investigation squashed. There’s big money involved over $500,000, and the rumour floating that “Two-Gun” had squealed to the Feds to help him get rid of some of his competitors.</p>
<p>A trifecta of options, although a gambling man would lay odds on Frank Nitti and his thugs as prime suspects in the murder of Louis Alterie.</p>
<p>I leave it to Clement Quirk Lane, reporter and editor of Chicago newspapers, to have the last words:</p>
<p><em>“This is the story of ‘Two-Gun Louis’ Alterie (left), one-time pugilist, one-time policeman, one-time robber, one-time lieutenant of Dean O’Bannion. Erstwhile rancher and union business agent, and today the subject of a coroner's inquest as to who shot him and why not sooner.”</em></p>
<p> Clem Lane. Chicago Daily News. 1935.</p>
<p>* John Torrio, born near Naples, came with his mother to America at the age of two. Following a life of crime in New York, he moved to Chicago to work with his uncle, Giacomo Colosimo (some sources claim they were not related and met through a common interest in boxing,) who it’s been alleged he had murdered in 1920, taking over control of the rackets. Through his friend Frankie Yale in New York, he meets Capone who moves to Chicago and joins him, and the rest is history.</p>
<p>** The Valentine Day Massacre refers to the mass murder in a garage on North Clark Street on February 14, 1929. Seven members or associates of the North Side gang are lined up against a wall around 10.30 am and shot dead by four men, two dressed as police officers. Their obvious target, boss George Moran, arriving late for a meeting, due apparently to a severe cold, spots the fake police car outside the garage and beats a quick retreat. The garage was Moran’s headquarters, also used as a depot for storing and then distributing illegal alcohol.</p>
<p>*** Scalice and Anselmi were killers in the Capone organization who, in due course, will go the way of all gangsters who lead lives of quiet desperation. Their dead, mutilated bodies, turn up in a field on the outskirts of Chicago in May 1929.</p>
<p>**** With acknowledgment to the poem Madam’s Life a piece in Bloom by W. E. Hanley.</p>
<p>*****O’Bannion was assassinated on November 10, 1924. Hymie Weiss replaced him and was murdered on October 11, 1926. Vincent Drucci succeeded Weiss and was killed by police on April 4, 1927. George Moran assumed leadership of the gang, but after the 1929 massacre, he drifted away from Chicago and ended up dying of lung cancer in prison in 1957.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Sources:</strong></span></p>
<p>booktryst.com</p>
<p>Asbury, Herbert. <em>The Gangs of Chicago</em>. Hippo Books, Hammond, IN, U.S.A. 2002.</p>
<p>Thrasher, Frederick Milton. <em>The Gang</em>. The University of Chicago. Chicago, 1936.</p>
<p>Schoenberg, Robert J. <em>Mr Capone</em>. William Morrow & Co. New York, 1993.</p>
<p><a href="https://homocide.northwestern.edu">https://homocide.northwestern.edu>ICS.20</a></p>
<p>Keefe, Rose. <em>Guns and Roses. </em>Turner Publishing Co. 2003.</p>
<p><em>Hopewell Herald</em>. 24 August, 1932.</p>
<p><em>Urbana Daily Courier.</em> 18 July 1935.</p>
<p><em>Globe Gazette, Iowa</em>. 18 July, 1935.</p>
<p><em>North America Review.</em> 228. No. 3 (1929).</p>
<p>Los Angels Times. 24 July, 1935.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.uptownupdate.com/2009/02/more-notorious-uptown.htm">https://www.uptownupdate.com/2009/02/more-notorious-uptown.htm</a></p>
<p><em>Chicago Tribune.</em> 10 February, 1929.</p>
<p><em>San Bernardino Count</em>y. Sun. July 24, 1935.</p>
<p><a href="https://allthatsinteresting.com/frank-nitti">https://allthatsinteresting.com/frank-nitti</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.foundagrave.com/grave/louis-alterie/">https://www.foundagrave.com/grave/louis-alterie/</a></p>
<p><em>Chicago Tribune</em>. 13 May, 1935.</p>
<p><em>Chicago Tribune.</em> 12 June, 1935.</p>
<p><em>Chicago Tribune</em>. 19 July, 1935.</p>
<p>Chicago Tribune. 29 November, 1936.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.myalcaponemuseum.com/id204.htm">https://www.myalcaponemuseum.com/id204.htm</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/theirishmob/posts/6281157894307">https://www.facebook.com/theirishmob/posts/6281157894307</a></p>
<p><em>The Daily Sentinel.</em> March 5, 2024.</p>
<p><em>Chicago Jewish History.</em> Volume 13, No 1. October 1989.</p>
<p><a href="https://jonshistory.com/the-chicago-outfit-north-side-gang-war/">https://jonshistory.com/the-chicago-outfit-north-side-gang-war/</a></p>
<p>Andrews, Harold. <em>X-Marks The Spot</em>. Michael Dunkley (January 1, 1930).</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/the-chicago-outfit-overview">Chicago Outfit section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Thom L. Jones & Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
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Cleveland Mafia hitman “The Surgeon” dies in prison
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/cleveland-mafia-hitman-the-surgeon-dies-in-prison
2023-12-09T11:06:16.000Z
2023-12-09T11:06:16.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12311612678?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>Hartmut “Hans the Surgeon” Graewe, one of Cleveland’s most notorious Mafia hitmen, died behind bars on October 27, Cleveland.com reported last week. Graewe was 78. Before passing away in a federal prison in Texas, he was feared on the streets of Ohio. He was nicknamed “The Surgeon” because of his fondness for dismembering the bodies of his mob victims.</p>
<p>For more on Graewe, his brother "Fritz" and their life of crime read <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/trafficking-drugs-and-dismembering-bodies-with-the-graewe-brother" target="_blank">Trafficking drugs and dismembering bodies with the Graewe brothers, associates of the Cleveland Mafia</a> by Robert Sberna.</p>
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<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">Organized Crime in North America section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Dead Man Walking in Corleone
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/dead-man-walking-in-corleone
2023-10-03T05:46:15.000Z
2023-10-03T05:46:15.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12238467081?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>In 1948 when young Alberto dalla Chiesa, a captain in the carabinieri, the military police, arrives in Corleone, in the province of Palermo, one of the first things he organized is a census of all the families who live in the town of about 10,000. He discovers that every family has associations of some sort to the local Mafia clan, then under the control of one of the leading citizens, Doctor Michele Navarra. He runs a criminal fiefdom that stretched back generations.</p>
<p>It will be the benchmark for setting standards of evil, butchery and chaos as it kills its way to the top of the criminal underworld of Sicily over the last quarter of the twentieth-century.</p>
<p>On a cold, winter afternoon, January 26 in the year 1978, a man visits a tobacconist in the Piazza Garibaldi in this strange, unsettling town up in the hills above Palermo. His name is Ugo Triolo. Of slender build and average height, he is balding at the age of fifty-eight. A lawyer by profession, he has served as an honorary vice-magistrate for the town of Prizzi, which lies 24 kilometers to the south-east. He was returning home from a visit to a client, a certain Sabella, regarding legal work on an insurance contract.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12238464056,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="242" alt="12238464056?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>Triolo (right) is financially sound, with property investments and significant land-holdings. A distinguished gentleman and highly regarded solicitor serving the town and hinterland. Everyone would refer to him as “a decent person.”</p>
<p>After leaving the shop, he and his black poodle dog, Bull, walk up Via Roma for about 300 meters until they reach Piazza San Domenico, named after the ancient church which has stood there since 1554.</p>
<p>Leading off the square is a <em>viccolo</em>, a roofed alleyway, running into the street which lies to the south and parallel to Roma called Via Cammarata. As Hugo exits onto the road, he is facing his house at number 49, which butts onto a dingy, very narrow thoroughfare called Rua del Piano, almost opposite the alley.</p>
<p>At this time of the year 5.40, it is dusk and the streets are full of shadows, real and imaginary.</p>
<p>Hugo presses the intercom on his front door, and his wife, Lea Tamburello, hears his voice, then the sound of multiple gunshots. Her teenage son, Dario, who had been waiting to meet him at Piazza Domenico, after visiting his aunt nearby, hearing the gunshots, rushes down the <em>viccolo</em> and finds his father sprawled in a pool of blood.</p>
<p>Ovid saw the Greek word chaos as original disorder and formless mass. On that dark street, on that dark night in that dark town, nothing expresses what is happening, except chaos. Dario rushed to get help from a nearby Forestry Guard’s barracks, as his mother kneels to cradle her husband’s limp body. The first responders arrive and soon people crowd the area. Police cars are zipping about everywhere. They rush Hugo to Corleone's Bianchi Hospital, which is three minutes away, and at 6.05 that evening doctors there confirm his death.</p>
<p>Someone shot him seven times in the head and body with the gun or guns held just a few inches away. The killers were standing in the shadows of del Piano, and had simply to step out onto the street and fire. Even at that distance, they still apparently missed with two rounds. An autopsy carried out by Professor Caruso determined Triolo died because of extreme internal hemorrhage of the left lung and heart. It is apparent that two different weapons were used, as the bullets recovered had different striations.</p>
<p>His killing will link into the past and the future, like some Dostoevsky interpretation of the bewildering awareness of human cruelty. In a town where there have been dozens, even scores, perhaps hundreds of murders throughout the 20th century, the cruelty of the events are only matched by the realization that almost all will go unsolved. Whatever else can be written or said about the Mafia, the one really indisputable fact is that for the hard stuff, no one can match them.</p>
<p>One of the first reporters on the scene is Palermo-based Mario Francese. An investigative journalist for the <em>Giornale di Sicilia</em>, he was, perhaps, the first to realize how salient Salvatore Riina is. At this time, he is acting boss of the Corleone Mafia, regent for Luciano Leggio, in prison for life since 1974.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of" target="_blank"><strong>La Primula Rossa: The Story of Luciano Leggio (Part 1)</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12238463866,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="165" alt="12238463866?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>Francese (left) will work for years, researching and writing about the growing Mafia power emerging from the small town in the middle of nowhere, in the hills above Palermo, and how important Riina and his henchmen are within the criminal underworld. He will be the only journalist to interview Ninetta Bagarella, the girlfriend of Riina, in 1971, when she is working in the town as a schoolteacher. She has a brother, Leoluca, who will become one of the most infamous killers on the island.</p>
<p>On January 26, 1979, almost at the same time as the previous year, someone shot dead Francese outside his home in Via Campania, Palermo. His killer is Leoluca Bagarella, the same man who, without a doubt, murders Ugo Triolo. It’s not the first in his biological family.</p>
<p>In 1945, someone killed his uncle, Liborio Ansalone, a police officer, while he was crossing Piazza Niascè on his way home to Via San Martino, 600 meters away from the crime scene of Ugo Triolo. A murder that remains a cold case to this day, like almost all victims involving the Mafia in Corleone, where streets and squares and alleys form an endless pattern linking in the violent deaths of those that cross them.</p>
<p>There will be an exception, but that lies seventeen years in the future. It involves Leoluca Bagarella, as do so many murders in the Mafiaopolis of Sicily. He’s there that night in January, on the cold, rainy evening, in the penumbra of Via Cammarata. A keystone in a story with many options but few real disclosures.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/corleone-murders-in-a-small-town" target="_blank"><strong>Corleone: Murders in a Small Town.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>At first, investigators believe the murder of Triolo connects somehow to that of another homicide that had taken place in Corleone on January 16, the assumed murder of Marco Puccio. Investigation links his death into a series of killings and at least one disappearance, which happens over the previous year and appears to be connected to <em>abigeato</em>, the smuggling of livestock, a criminal specialty that plagued Sicily for generations. Giovanni Ferante, the boss of the Mafia clan in Prizzi, was involved, a man who had crossed swords with Triolo on more than one occasion.</p>
<p>The cattle rustling triggered a series of events resulting in the period from July 1977 to January 1978 in at least three murders and one disappearance. The dead were Giovanni and Antonino Palazzo and Salvatore La Gattuta, and the man who vanished was Puccio, almost certainly killed. La Gattuta was Mafia boss of the clan in Mezzojuso, a small town to the north and east of Corleone.</p>
<p>One gun used to kill Triolo is also linked to the death of Giovanni Palazzo, according to ballistics tests. They used the same gun in the double murder that took place in August 1977, when a quartet of Mafia killers murdered Colonel Giuseppe Russo of the carabinieri and teacher, Filippo Costa, as they walked through the square of Ficuzza, near Corleone, late in the evening. One shooter is Bagarella.</p>
<p>Puccio was being represented by Triolo, and it was suggested this might be the reason the murder took place, to silence any incriminating evidence, connecting to the Mafia of Corleone, who were almost certainly behind the attacks. One thing that was obvious to his family and colleagues was that the lawyer, conscientious in his duties and untainted by local criminals, on any level, was an honest man.</p>
<p>As law enforcement investigations drag on, it becomes obvious this is a murder with intent. Capitano Antonino Russo, in charge of the carabinieri's inquiry, realized that the killers had stalked their prey from the tobacconist, knowing his routine, and were ready, loaded and locked, when the target reached his destination. But who and why?</p>
<p>The answer to the first part emerges three months after the murder. It comes as part of a disclosure from a most unexpected source, the testimony of a Mafia boss.</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>Giuseppe Di Cristina was the capo of Reisi in the province of Caltanissetta, in the south-east of Sicily. The Corleone mob was after him, first framing him for the killing of the Catania Mafia chief, organizing his murder in Di Cristini’s territory, then in November 1977, ambushing and killing two of his men. The hit men were Giovanni Brusca, a made-man in the San Giuseppe Jato Family, Bagarella and a man called Antonino Marchese, a soldier in the Corso dei Mille Family of Palermo.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12238464862,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="127" alt="12238464862?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>Di Cristina (right) meets up on the night of April 16, 1978, with a captain in the carabinieri (military police) in a disused cottage out in the countryside, near Reisi, and lays down a story that confounds the veteran cop. The Mafia boss is known as “tiger” because of his irascible character. This evening he comes as a kitten scared of the dark.</p>
<p>Most men in the Mafia exist on the essence of gossip, as nothing gets written. Its perfume wafts them through their miserable lives, edging them along the dangerous roads they have to navigate. Their daily lives are filled with trivia and a lot of deadly information. The man at the top of the tree gets the most whispers and scandals of all.</p>
<p>As part of his unburdening of his life and sins, he let drop the lawyer shot dead in Corleone earlier in the year is a victim of the local clan. The killers were two mafiosi, Bagarella and Marchese.</p>
<p>They were waiting on the street that night, in the intersection of Cammarata and del Piano, which was the alley that housed the family home of Salvatore Riina, at this time, on the run from the law.</p>
<p>Bagarella’s sister, Antonietta, has married Riina the previous year. Nino Marchese’s brother, Giuseppe, is the driver and bodyguard for Riina. Their sister, Vincenzina, will marry Bagarella in 1991. It’s a lot to take in. But classic Sicily and Mafia relationship churn. The biological family attachments is often the glue that holds clans together.</p>
<p>The establishment of who is involved, although never developed into a legal investigation, makes it important to decipher the message by focusing on the why, because everything in Cosa Nostra is full of meaning. That will come, but not for some years.</p>
<p>One theory grows around land. And water.</p>
<p>Ugo Triolo had vast landholdings in the Poggia San Calogero Valley whose waters would feed a proposed dam. The Corleone mob aimed to receive a cut of any future profits that may arise from building and contracting. They wanted this land, so they could control the Piano Campo dam if construction went ahead.</p>
<p>All crimes other than street or domestic, in Sicily, if not executed, are controlled by Mafia influence. Imperceptibly linked, understanding one often depended on information gathered from another. Di Cristini’s revelations of the lawyer’s killers could lead police into a quantitative forward leap, provided they allowed themselves that freedom, which, regretfully, never happened. They did not act on his confession. Filed and forgotten.</p>
<p>It would take another <em>pentito</em>, a government collaborator, to open up a new direction. Another Mafia boss, this one with the most unusual distinction of dying, not by the sword, often the usual Mafia way, but from Covid, in a Paris hospital in April 2020.</p>
<p>Francesco Di Carlo was capo of his own little kingdom in Altofonte, a small town to the south of Monreale. He would also become a central figure in one of Italy’s biggest banking scandals, and the murder of Roberto Calvi, who was found dangling under Blackfriars Bridge in London, in 1982.</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>When he switched sides to work for Team Italy, among the small mountain of information he provided was the reason Ugo Triolo died that cold winter night in front of his home in Corleone.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12238465263,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="218" alt="12238465263?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>In May 2001, in his statement to the public prosecutor in Caltanissetta, Di Carlo (right) claimed he had been present in the office on Via Di Vinci, in Palermo, that belonged to Giovanni Vallone, a successful building and transport contractor, and witnessed a heated discussion between Bernardo Provenzano and Vallone, who requested that the Mafia kill Triolo.</p>
<p>Sixty-five-year-old Vallone was a Mafioso from Prizzi, the same town where Ugo had exercised his powers as an honorary magistrate. Provenzano was the number two under Riina, although one day in the future, would himself become the big boss of Corleone and the Mafias of Sicily.</p>
<p>The Vallones had been a power base in the small town, east of Corleone, for generations, a place regarded by law enforcement as always in the control of the Mafia. Since the reign of Don Silvestre ‘Sisi’ Gristina, murdered in Palermo in 1921, there had existed a legacy of unrest and terror among the six thousand inhabitants living under the control of literally a handful of mafiosi.</p>
<p>Across many decades in Corleone and Prizzi, there had developed familial reproduction of the mafia, and many surnames are repeated with a continuous regularity. It confirms the of hypothesis of Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa in drawing up his family tree that showed just how deeply ingrained the organization had become within the structure and society of the town.</p>
<p>According to the testimony of Di Carlo, Vallone demanded that Provenzano dispose of Triolo because he was causing him problems in his business activities, carrying out investigations into Vallone’s dodgy constriction activities. Di Carlo recalled Vallone saying, “He is a lawyer. He should do what the villagers say, not the law.”</p>
<p>Following Di Carlo’s testimony, Giovanni Brusca would also confirm that someone had tasked Provenzano with arranging the murder of Triolo. He claimed that Bagarella and Marchese almost always acted in pairs, and were the “go to” hit men used by Corleone in the late 1970s. According to Tony Calvarusso, a close aide, “Bagarella has always killed, doing the job with love. He often said to me, God knows they're the ones who want to get killed. And I'm not to blame.”</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12238465684,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="604" alt="12238465684?profile=RESIZE_710x" /></a><strong><em>Photo: Bagarella and Marchese.</em></strong></p>
<p>Brusca was as close as anyone could get to Riina. He was the one who pressed the button, detonating the bomb that killed Giovanni Falcone, his wife and his bodyguards in 1992. The infamous Capeci Massacre. After his arrest in 1995, he rolled like so many of his peers, disclosing details of his life and times, working as the boss of San Giuseppe Jato, Riina’s closest Mafia ally.</p>
<p>Within the world of the Sicilian Mafia, it regarded them as <em>canazzi da catena</em>, chain dogs.</p>
<p>Known as “The Christian Killer,” Brusca was one of the mob’s most prolific exterminators, admitting to murdering between one and two hundred victims.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/three-good-men-life-and-death-in-sicily-fighting-the-mafia" target="_blank"><strong>Three Good Men.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2003, Judge Giovanbattista Tona, in charge of preliminary investigation at the Court of Caltanissetta, carries out a review into the murder of Ugo Triolo, but after a thorough review, finds on July 7, lack of solid evidence to indict and prosecute the five suspects: Salvatore Riina, Bernardo Provenzano, Leoluca Bagarella, Antonino Marchese and Giovanni Vallone.</p>
<p>Everyone knew who did it and why, but after twenty-five years it was a case for the archives rather than verdict and appeal.</p>
<p>The fatal flaw, the dark crack running down the middle of life, that visits us all, would come to destroy Riina and Provenzano, Marchese and Bagarella, and their lives will end in prison cells, or hospitals, somewhere across Italy. Bagarella is the only one left, living out his days at eighty-three, under the strictest life sentence in Sassari Prison in Sardinia.</p>
<p>Tommaso Bedini Crescimanni, the nephew of the murdered lawyer, in paying tribute to his uncle, said,</p>
<p>“Ugo Triolo is one of those little-known victims who fought the cancer of the mafia by simply doing their job, without fanfare, sacrificing their lives and demonstrating that in the same territory that developed the disease, Corleone, there were also honest Corleonesi that fought the disease until the end.”</p>
<p>Thirty-eight years after the murder of Ugo Triolo, a federal commission dissolved and replaced the Corleone town council because of Mafia infiltration.</p>
<p>They are still there, in the shadows. Always ready. Always waiting.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Sources: </strong></span></p>
<p><em>La Repubblica. Corleone, the Lawyer who never gave up. 9 March, 2019.</em></p>
<p><em>Città Nuova. Corleone. Remember Triolo.</em></p>
<p><em>Vittimafia.it/26-gennaio-1978-corleone-pa-ucciso-ugo-triolo-ricepretetore-onorario-di-prizzi/</em></p>
<p><em>PalermoToday. The murder of the journalist Francese. 44 years ago. 26 January, 2018.</em></p>
<p><em>Cairn.Inf0, 2001. Volume one, issue one. The ethnologist and the magistrate.</em></p>
<p><em>Corte Di Assise. Di Appello. Palermo. 2nd Session, 13 December, 2002.</em></p>
<p><em>Tribune Di Caltanissetta. Dicreto Di Archiviazione, art, 409, 411 c.p.p. 7 July, 2003.</em></p>
<p><em>Stampacritica. The mystery of the unsolved murder of Ugo Triolo. 15 February, 2018.</em></p>
<p><em> Semplicemente Passioni Forum. Ugo Triolo. 11 April, 2012. </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>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Thom L. Jones & Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p></div>
Suicide Squad: The Mafia bosses, hitmen, and gangsters fighting Russia’s war in Ukraine
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/suicide-squad-the-mafia-bosses-hitmen-and-gangsters-fighting-russ
2023-06-25T03:10:00.000Z
2023-06-25T03:10:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10961124495?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Niko Vorobyov for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>Several months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it soon became clear to those in the Kremlin that their so-called “brother nation” was not going to sit still for target practice. What’s more, they were running out of professional soldiers. Russia hasn’t been releasing up-to-date body counts, but some estimates place their losses at over 10,000 KIA, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-troops-ukraine-deaths-9-year-afghan-war-ussrs-collapse-2022-4">more than</a> all those killed during the entire decade-long Soviet war in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>To keep their war machine running, the top brass had to search elsewhere for manpower. It might have come as a surprise to the convicts in a penal colony in the Mari El republic, central Russia, to be addressed on a gloomy September day by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s bald-headed crony and boss of the once-secretive Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit hired to do the Kremlin’s dirty work.</p>
<p>"If you serve six months [in Wagner], you are free," he <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62911618">told</a> the convicts gathered in their exercise yard, “[but] if you arrive in Ukraine and decide it's not for you, we will execute you."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10961124479,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10961124479?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a>It was a strategy lifted straight from the plot of The Dirty Dozen. The mercs have a gruesome reputation for smashing in traitors’ skulls with <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/02/02/wagner-group-violence-sledgehammer/">sledgehammers</a>.</p>
<p>The Wagner Group was founded after the first phase of the Ukraine conflict, which began in 2014. Mercenaries are officially illegal under Russian law, so for many years, on paper, Wagner didn’t officially exist. But the guns-for-hire have been secretly deployed in combat zones across the Middle East and Africa. It’s partly a PR move – mercenaries aren’t listed on the official death tolls, so the Russian government can <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/10/wagner-private-group-now-an-extension-of-russias-military">pretend</a> they haven’t lost so many boys to the meatgrinder.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/how-two-russian-mobsters-got-caught-up-in-the-iraqi-civil-war" target="_blank"><strong>How two Russian mobsters got caught up in the Iraqi civil war</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Prigozhin personally did the rounds of penal colonies on his own private helicopter, promising prisoners a pardon if they survived six months on the battlefield. His new recruits included robbers, hitmen and drug dealers. British intelligence believes 50,000 convicts have been pardoned by Putin for the war; American intelligence places the number closer to 40,000. On New Years’ Eve, Putin presented armed robber <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/82748bdd-5b34-4204-b3ad-d08da2c58982">Aik Gasparyan</a> with a medal for heroism.</p>
<p>Igor Kusk wasn’t so lucky. The 55-year-old crime boss had seen action before as a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. During the 1990s chaotic transition to capitalism, veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars became “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/23/how-organised-crime-took-over-russia-vory-super-mafia">torpedos</a>” (enforcers) for the racketeering organizations muscling in on the new, free-market economy. In 1993 a group of unhinged Afghan veterans <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=lq2aaG29EzYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=violent+entrepreneurs+book&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=tank&f=false">hijacked a tank</a> from a factory in the Urals and drove it to a showdown with some rival Azerbaijani gangsters, like a scene from Grand Theft Auto. The Azeris never bothered them again.</p>
<p><a href="https://kam.business-gazeta.ru/article/564650">Kusk</a> was the head of an organized crime group in the central Russian republic of Tatarstan. His gang was suspected of shooting dead a businessman outside his office in Kazan. He was serving a 23-year sentence when he volunteered for Wagner, and died in September 2022 when a piece of shrapnel lodged in his head during the battle of Bakhmut.</p>
<p>Another member of Russia’s real-life Suicide Squad was gang leader <a href="https://theins.ru/news/254656">Ivan Neparatov</a>. His crew carried guns and donned police uniforms for a string of stick-ups, home invasions and homicides, including three of his own men for holding out on loot. In 2013 Ivan was handed 25 years for five murders, three robberies, extortion, fraud and weapons charges. He died in August 2022 in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, posthumously receiving a medal from Putin.</p>
<p>"It's either private military companies and prisoners [waging this war], or your children – decide for yourself," Prigozhin <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62922152">once said</a>.</p>
<p>Prigozhin’s own biography reads like a screenplay to a mob movie. In 1981 a Soviet court sentenced the young tearaway and an accomplice to 13 years imprisonment for savagely <a href="https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/06/29/prigozhin-s-criminal-past-straight-from-the-source">mugging</a> a woman at knifepoint, along with a string of burglaries and "involving a minor in drunkenness".</p>
<p>In the 1990s, Prigozhin made a fortune from the gambling business in St Petersburg, at which time Putin was the chairman of the committee overseeing casinos. Back then, casinos, as almost all private enterprises in Russia, paid off or otherwise had ties to organized crime. According to the Russian independent newspaper <a href="https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2011/09/01/45715-kto-takoy-prigozhin">Novaya Gazeta</a>, Prigozhin’s partner in the casino was one Mikhail Mirilashvili, a “businessman” convicted of two kidnappings.</p>
<p>Since then, Prigozhin’s earned the nickname “Putin’s chef” for his restaurant and catering empire. And now a warlord as well, it seems.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10961124694,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10961124694?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Yevgeni Prigozhin.</strong></em></p>
<p>Traditionally, Russian convicts have shirked the call of duty. Historically, the underworld was dominated by the <a href="https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/02/19/from-stalin-s-camps-to-putin-s-laws">vory-v-zakone</a>, or thieves-in-law, a D&D-style thieves guild born in Stalin’s gulags in the 1930s with an almost monastic devotion to a life of crime. Among their principles was never cooperating with the authorities in any way. During World War II, a number of vory decided to enlist in the Red Army. When they returned, those who stayed true to the thieves’ code called them “suki” (bitches), and shunned them for breaking their vows. The Suka Wars which followed between the two factions of prison gangsters wiped out much of the old-schoolers and reshaped the structure of the criminal world. From then on, a certain degree of collaboration was allowed, particularly with crooked officials.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-billion-dollar-don" target="_blank"><strong>The Billion Dollar Don</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Thieves are traditionally supposed to be above politics. However, in the equally bitter Armenia-Azerbaijan war in the 1990s, Armenian vor <a href="https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-mobster-who-brought-armenia-and-azerbaijan-together-in-death/389053/">Svo Raf</a> hijacked arms shipments bound for Azerbaijan. But his right-hand man was an Azeri, and when Svo died in a Moscow prison in 1993, the Azeri blockade of Armenia’s capital Yerevan was briefly lifted to allow a delegation of mobsters from Baku to fly over and pay their respects. The outlaw brotherhood transcended ethnic and political divides.</p>
<p>With the advent of capitalism in the 1990s, the criminal world changed again: tracksuit-wearing ex-boxers wanted to get rich or die tryin’ and didn’t care much for the old rules. Now the criminal world might be changing yet again. Between August and November 2022, Russia’s prison population <a href="https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-russia-graves-wagner/">plummeted</a> by 8%, the same time as Wagner’s recruitment drive, leaving plenty of free bunks for dissidents.</p>
<p>Only one thief-in-law, <a href="https://lenta.ru/news/2022/04/19/vvz/">Sergey Lysenko</a> aka Lera Sumskoy from Ukraine, has openly spoken out against the war. In April last year a handwritten note circulated around Russian prisoners, urging them not to take up arms for Ukraine, and those who do will be severely sanctioned. One Wagnerite <a href="https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/08/24/thieves-swindlers-criminals-outlaws-killers-all-are-welcome">claimed</a> to Novaya Gazeta that even highly respected thieves are on the frontline, even though it’s supposedly against their principles (although he added they probably only enlisted looking for an easy way out).</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/cold-case-amsterdam-the-mystery-behind-a-dismembered-russian-art" target="_blank"><strong>Mafia or FSB: The mystery behind a dismembered Russian art smuggler</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>If the experience of Afghanistan and or even the 2014-15 Ukraine conflict is anything to go by, giving pardons, weapons and training to dangerous felons could come back to haunt the Motherland. In 2017 <a href="https://lenta.ru/articles/2021/08/31/baltika/">Alexander Litvinov</a> was arrested for robbing and beating an elderly woman to death in a village in the Kurgan region, and sent to a nearby prison camp. An ex-sniper in the Donetsk rebels’ militia, he used improvised weapons including homemade grenades in a showdown with camp authorities. In the end, one guard was killed in the dramatic escape attempt, as well as Litvinov himself, who was shot by a police marksman.</p>
<p>Last year, Wagner was <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1220">blacklisted</a> as a “transnational criminal organisation” by the US government for allegedly taking part in atrocities in Ukraine as well as Africa. Are they war criminals, or criminals at war?</p>
<p>Niko Vorobyov is the author of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51168908-dopeworld">Dopeworld</a>. Follow him on <a href="https://twitter.com/Narco_Polo420">Twitter @Narco_Polo420</a></p>
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<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/russian-mafia-overview">Russian Mafia section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
“A true menace to society” – Philadelphia contract killer gets 5 life sentences for 6 murders
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/a-true-menace-to-society-philadelphia-contract-killer-gets-5-life
2023-05-21T11:30:00.000Z
2023-05-21T11:30:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/11133960854?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>A Philadelphia hitman was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences this week in connection with his role in murdering four victims in Philly between 2017 and 2018, all in exchange for money. 43-year-old Ernest Pressley was also convicted for his role in the killing of two other victims in 2016 and 2017 and the attempted murder of a woman in 2018.</p>
<p>“Ernest Pressley is a hardened and chronic offender, a true menace to society,” said Jacqueline Maguire, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division. “For all the lives he took and families he affected, this contract killer has duly earned each of his life sentences.”</p>
<p>In late 2018, the Philadelphia Police Department joined with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate Pressley in connection with the murder of S.S., who was shot to death in the parking lot of a Philadelphia apartment complex near 7400 Malvern Avenue in the early morning hours of September 1, 2018.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/chester-wheeler-campbell-the-007-of-the-detroit-drug-mob" target="_blank"><strong>Chester Wheeler Campbell: The 007 of the Detroit Drug Mob</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Pressley was captured on video surveillance footage near the scene and in footage retrieved from a bar in Philadelphia the evening before when he was with S.S. and several other men. Pressley was arrested in connection with this crime on September 7, 2018.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Killing at random to cover his tracks</strong></span></p>
<p>Law enforcement's investigation revealed that Pressley was responsible for other murders in Philadelphia, including the killings of two tow truck drivers for A. Bob's Towing on January 12 and 13, 2017. Pressley agreed to kill tow truck driver K.F. in exchange for money to prevent K.F. from testifying as a witness at an assault trial in Philadelphia.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/music-label-or-violent-gang-original-block-hustlaz-provided-sound" target="_blank"><strong>Music label or violent gang? Original Block Hustlaz provided soundtrack while it flooded Philadelphia with drugs</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>In an effort to distract law enforcement from the true motivation for K.F.'s murder and to make it appear as though it was connected to a feud between rival tow truck companies, Pressley selected at random one of K.F.'s co-workers, E.R., and shot him to death as he left work on January 12, 2017, near 4500 Melrose Street.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}11133960673,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="11133960673?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="350" /></a>The next day, Pressley (right) approached K.F. as he left his home and entered his tow truck, which was being driven by a co-worker, at which time Pressley opened fire, fatally striking K.F. and injuring his co-worker, who was shot several times in his lower body. </p>
<p>As the investigation developed further, Pressley was also identified as the person who shot M.R. to death in Philadelphia on January 11, 2017, near the intersection of East Sharpnack and Baldwin Streets, while M.R. worked on his vehicle at a garage in the area.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/i-thought-my-dad-was-a-candy-man-daughter-of-harlem-drug-kingpin" target="_blank"><strong>“I thought my dad was a candy man” – Daughter of Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas talks about her father</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>In September 2022, during his guilty plea allocution before Judge Robreno, Pressley admitted that he murdered M.R., E.R., K.F., and S.S. in exchange for money and at the direction of a drug trafficker. Around the time of each crime, Pressley used his cellular phone to communicate with his co-conspirator to plan how and when each murder would be carried out.</p>
<p>Pressley also admitted to shooting C.Y. to death on July 19, 2016, as C.Y. sat on the porch of a residence near 1500 West Olney Avenue in Philadelphia. Pressley also admitted to his role in providing the location of a man he knew was wanted dead by a Philadelphia drug trafficker, which later resulted in the death of Y.H., who was killed as the result of mistaken identity near the intersection of 56th Street and Ithan Street on July 24, 2018.</p>
<p>Finally, Pressley admitted that he attempted to kill a woman when he shot her in the arm as she arrived at her Philadelphia home on North Woodstock Street on July 9, 2018. While the woman survived a gunshot wound, she later discovered that her home had been ransacked and several items, including money and jewelry, were stolen. Several hours later, Pressley was identified as having sold a Rolex watch belonging to the woman at a Philadelphia pawn shop.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">Organized Crime in North America section</a> or <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/black-organized-crime">Black organized crime</a> section on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
In the Company of Saints. The life and times of America’s oldest Mobster
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/in-the-company-of-saints-the-life-and-times-of-america-s-oldest-m
2023-02-03T06:17:32.000Z
2023-02-03T06:17:32.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10953562475?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>There has been plenty written about John “Sonny” Franzese: books, newspaper articles, stories in magazines, web-site reports. People who know nothing about the Mafia in America know about Sonny, especially over the last few years, as he gained media notoriety as the oldest prisoner in America’s penal system. A man who, in his later years, seemed to spend more time locked up than running free.</p>
<p>Although they occupied a landscape filled with danger from the law and each other, a lot of mob guys lived well beyond the traditional prescribed threescore and ten years. Under observation by a federal task force in Florida, one, a member of the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-genovese-crime-family" target="_blank">Genovese Family</a>, on a wiretap offers his service to carry out a hit for the boss. The <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/elderly-genovese-mobsters-ran" target="_blank">anxious shooter</a> was in his nineties.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/always-a-gangster-racketeering-at-the-nursing-home" target="_blank"><strong>Always a gangster: Racketeering in the nursing home</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Sonny will live to be over a hundred. In fact, that is his age when the government finally releases him from his last prison sentence. By then, relatively immobile, chronically deaf, with poor vision and multiple other health issues, it is hard to believe he is the same man who, for over seventy years, created so much terror and mayhem in his own corner of New York. Like someone holding a royal flush, minus the ace, he was shooting the moon. The keys to the kingdom only come to those who aim high.</p>
<p>There are tracers from this point in his life back to the beginnings where fate, destiny, kismet, call it whatever grew like some primal source making up the gemstones of his criminal profile. It started with his father, a man whose background and provenance are as elusive as his son’s would be clearly defined.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10953558263,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10953558263?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="591" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Sonny Franzese as a young man.</strong></em></p>
<p>From the region of Campania, somewhere in the teeming mass that is Naples, in Italy, Carmine Franzese, married to Maria Covola, raises a large family. Some sources claim eighteen, as he is part of a criminal family, this one called Camorra, a mafia-type criminal organization with its roots in Campania since perhaps the 18th century when the word first originated.</p>
<p>Sony is born in 1917, although his eldest son claims it was two years later. The baby arrives in a tenement, or on a steamship, en route to the Americas. It’s as vague and confusing as many stories of immigrants are, especially those whose future lies in the uncharted Saragossa Sea of the criminal underworld. Maria is the one who calls him Sonny, the name by which half of New York will come to recognize him by over the next one hundred years.</p>
<p>On their arrival in New York, the family eventually settles at 346 Leonard Street, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which will be home to Sonny in his formative years. Carmine, known also as “Tuttie the Lion” will open a bakery and then a social club on the corner of Leonard and Jackson Street, and almost certainly become part of the local Camorra gang.</p>
<p>Although relatively small numerically, compared to the sprawling, often inter-related Mafia groups in New York, lawmakers recognized them as a vicious group of criminals. Carmine probably linked into the nearest geographical clan, known as the Navy Street Gang, which eventually merges with another <em>‘ntrine</em> as they call their family unit in Naples, this one in Coney Island, and then at some stage, they all become redundant and members either die, move on or become part of the five Mafia families that are forming across the boroughs of the city, emerging like some social primal life force from the slums and ghettos of Americas fastest growing city as the 20th century begins.</p>
<p>Carmine, notorious for his barbarity, rumored to use his bakery ovens for more than creating bread but sometimes for disposing of bodies, has a brother, Onofrio, who is allegedly even more violent, stringing up a victim in the basement of the social club, and using a blowtorch on his feet. With a family like this, it’s hard to visualize Sonny growing up to be the family priest. Instead, a high school dropout, according to legend, at the tender age of fourteen, they brought him into the Mafia crime family under the control of <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/profile-original-new-york-mafia-family-boss-giuseppe-profaci" target="_blank">Joseph Profaci</a>, a South Brooklyn based arm of New York’s Mafia.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/profile-original-new-york-mafia-family-boss-giuseppe-profaci" target="_blank"><strong>Profile: Original New York Mafia family boss Giuseppe Profaci</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Selwyn Raab, a reporter for the New York Times, states Sonny was “brought” into the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family" target="_blank">Colombo Crime Family</a> in 1950. He was in fact sponsored by capo Sebastiano “Buster” Aloi when he was thirty-three, which sounds a lot more convincing.</p>
<p>He will stay a member until the day he dies, living by its rules, with the inflexibility of a crowbar, the weapon he no doubt used on more than one occasion to enforce his reasoning. Which would tremble the lips of the toughest bruiser.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10953564896,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10953564896?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="244" /></a>On one occasion, in a wiretap during 2006, he relates that the best way to dispose of a victim’s body is by chopping it up and feeding the parts into a garbage grade waste-disposal. What is wrong with a wood-chipper in a quiet place is an obvious reaction, however, the dialectic of Sonny Franzese, a mobster of a generation long gone, is perhaps understandable. It’s all about “hands on.”</p>
<p>With fingers in so many pies, he must have operated at almost the speed of light to keep up with himself. Generating money as though he had access to a printing press, he earned from extortion, illegal gambling, money-lending, scams involving flea-markets, pornography and drug-trafficking. He managed boxing promotions and became a significant force in the recording industry.</p>
<p>He is very close to Cristoforo Rubino, an active narcotics dealer in the Profaci Family, who dies one muggy night in a gutter at 130 Central Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn, July, 1958, courtesy of two bullets-head and heart. Rubino was about to give evidence in the forthcoming trial of <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/get-the-right-man-how-the-fbn" target="_blank">Vito Genovese</a> under indictment in a major drug dealing case. Dead witnesses always trump the other sort. Sonny will accept that dealing out the grim reaper and suffering it as a receivable are simply conjunctions in the endless narrative of New York’s underworld. His relationship with Rubino may have been the reason the Federal Bureau of Narcotics listed him in their records, although they never arrest Sonny for drug trafficking.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/get-the-right-man-how-the-fbn" target="_blank"><strong>Get The Right Man.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>By this period in his Mafia career, Carmine the Lion had died in 1957, and Sonny has married, a second time around, to a young woman called Christina Capobianco. They have three children, to keep her existing baby company; he will grow up and become as famous as his adopted father, but for all the wrong reasons. Another complicated story.</p>
<p>As the sixties emerge, no doubt to his utmost chagrin, Sonny becomes hot news in the media. Both <em>Life Magazine</em> and <em>Newsday</em>, bring out major articles about him, one called, “The Hood in our Neighborhood,” which must have done wonders for property values in his street in Roslyn, Long Island. Shrub Hollow Road would never be quite the same way again.</p>
<p>By then, he had moved there with his second wife. She came with a built-in family, a little boy called Michael, who may have been the son of Sonny. A coat-girl at The Copacabana, or a cigarette-girl at The Stork Club, history is vague on this, she meets Sonny when just seventeen. To avoid the ignominy of an illegal child, she marries a man called Frankie Grillo.</p>
<p>Then, in 1959, Sonny divorces his first wife, Anne Schiller, leaving her with their daughters and son, at their home in Jefferson Street, Franklin Square, and moves his new bride and her child to another part of Long Island, and starts a second family, adding a son and a two daughters. Grillo conveniently disappears from the scene.</p>
<p>All of this is setting the stage for a tragedy of King Lear proportions, a monumental mix of betrayal, misfortune, greed, jealousy and more kinks and blind corners than the average maze. A daughter of Sonny tells a friend on day, “My family isn’t normal. Were not normal.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10953561680,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10953561680?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="300" /></a>It will all unwind before court rooms and media scrutiny in the second, long half of Sonny’s life.</p>
<p>Pre the John Gotti era, hoodlums like Franzese lived their lives in shadowland. Publicity was anathema to their peculiar way of business, but he was about to become a media target, not because of his alleged lifestyle, but because the law was coming down hard on a man the police referred to as “the big comer in <em>Cosa Nostra</em>.” Arrested a dozen times since the age of eighteen on charges of rape, assault and attempted extortion, courts had found him guilty only twice, on minor gambling offences. Now, his past was catching him up with a vengeance.</p>
<p>Allegedly, the underboss of the Profaci family from 1964, they had bumped him from a crew chief to number two under the new leader, <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-two-sides-of-new-york-mob-boss-joe-colombo-and-how-his-murder" target="_blank">Joseph Colombo</a>, who had taken over running the family following the death of <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/profile-original-new-york-mafia-family-boss-giuseppe-profaci" target="_blank">Profaci</a> from cancer in 1962. When a gunman seriously wounds Colombo at a rally near Central Park in 1970, Sonny would have been favorite as the next boss, except he was in prison serving a life sentence for bank robbery. Everything had turned to custard for him three years before.</p>
<p>1967 would be his annus horribilus. A year for him to remember, for all the wrong reasons.</p>
<p>The law hit him with multiple cases-homicide, running a bank-robbery crew, a multi-million bookmaking ring in Manhattan, and the brains behind a home invasion of a wealthy jukebox operator who lived in Oceanside. Prosecutors for Manhattan, Queens and Nassau County were all gunning for him. By the time the year unraveled, they would find him innocent on three charges but guilty on the only one he probably never was involved with.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/being-ernest-the-life-and-hard" target="_blank"><strong>Being Ernest.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10953558484,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10953558484?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="314" /></a>A low-level street thug, fifty-two-year-old <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/being-ernest-the-life-and-hard" target="_blank">“Ernie the Hawk” Rupolo</a> (right), had snitched on Vito Genovese and five others for the murder in 1934 of Ferdinand Boccia. Genovese fled America in 1937 to avoid prosecution and returned to America in 1947. If revenge is a dish, best cold, with Rupolo, it is permanently congealed by the time someone murders him in 1964. Some sources allege Sonny had the killing carried out as a favor for Genovese, although there has never been evidence that the two men were close enough for that to occur.</p>
<p>After a long and complex trial, the jury didn’t think so either, and acquitted him on the charge. Of interest, John Cordero, the leader of the bank-robbery squad, is married to Eleanor, former wife or de facto of the late “Hawk.” Cordero and his gang give damning testimony against Sonny, and the court finds him guilty on two counts, sentencing him to fifty years in prison.</p>
<p>His appeals exhausted, Sonny enters Leavenworth Prison, Easter 1970. Somehow, he gets early release and is out by 1979. However, his parole conditions will haunt him for the rest of his life. He has forty years left of time unfulfilled and spends a large part of it in and out of the slams for violating the terms of his release, basically meeting with gangsters according to the federal agents or cops carrying out surveillance on his daily jaunts around his mob kingdom. Throughout his long life, he will spend many years behind bars. And yet, he keeps on doing it, driven by his own code. He was, according to one writer, “the real gel.”</p>
<p>With the dawn of the new centennial, Sonny is not only moving into the age of the octogenarian, he is also becoming the victim of the seismic shifts within his families, the biological and the criminal ones.</p>
<p><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/legendary-new-york-mafia-boss-carmine-persico-was-the-ultimate-su" target="_blank">Carmine Persico</a>, the family boss, is now in prison, since the famous Commission Trial of 1985, and will stay there forever. The <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family" target="_blank">Colombo Family</a> is unique in that it suffered the upheaval of not one internecine conflict, but three, stretching from 1960 until 1993. Sonny will weather storms that come and go, but not be so lucky in his biological family.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/legendary-new-york-mafia-boss-carmine-persico-was-the-ultimate-su" target="_blank"><strong>Legendary New York Mafia boss Carmine Persico was the ultimate survivor, up until his death behind bars</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>His eldest son, Michael, inducted into the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family" target="_blank">Colombo Family</a> and made a crew chief, calls it a day and resigns from the mob in 1989. This is relatively unheard of, as the Mafia owes its strength to its power. You stay in it until you die, or they shelve you and put you out to pasture. Just what effect this has on Sonny is hard to comprehend.</p>
<p>Just a few years earlier, <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/legendary-new-york-mafia-boss-carmine-persico-was-the-ultimate-su" target="_blank">Carmine Persico</a>, the boss of the family, had demoted Sonny down to soldier, claiming it was for his own good, to keep the heat off him. It was an open secret that Persico was doing this to protect his own flanks, well aware how dangerous Sonny could be even as an elderly man, on a continual escalator in and out of jail. Persico goes down for life on the famous Commission Trial of 1985, and Sonny goes back into the penal system the following year.</p>
<p>His daughter, Gia, dies from her drug habit in 1990, and Tina drifts away from a lifetime of strife, and endless battles with a man whose code of conduct makes him an endless target for the law. He lived by a set of rules that makes flexibility an oxymoron.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10953559887,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10953559887?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="360" /></a>John (left), his youngest son, becomes an associate within the Colombos, but is not built like his father and brother. The money and power fill him like a helium balloon and he drifts eventually into the world of drugs, and becomes infected with HIV. Trying to shake off his habit, he moves to California. Sometime around 2004, he becomes a CW, cooperating witness, for the FBI. Wearing a wire, he records conversations with mobsters over eighty times. Including his own father. He does so well, reintegrating himself into the mob, there was talk about him being sponsored into it, the step before induction.</p>
<p>By 2008, the government pulls John from the field, and he joins the Federal Witness Protection Program. In 2010, he is living in Indianapolis when he is called to testify in the last trial his father will face in a criminal life that has stretched across almost eighty years. Racketeering and extortion. Sonny has been shaking down yet again, this time, two Manhattan strip clubs. For extra juice, he went after a Long island pizza place.</p>
<p>Sex and Pizza, the two things New Yorkers can’t allegedly live without. We may say whatever else about Sonny, but he knew his market, and always did his research.</p>
<p>Of interest, in an always interesting parade of fact and fiction that merges the make believe with the unbelievable when covering the New York Mafia, this is only the second time Sonny has actually been in a courtroom in almost fifty years.</p>
<p>Asked to identify his father, John points to a man sitting in a wheelchair, dressed in a yellow shirt.</p>
<p>Addressing the court, John says: “I’m not talking about my father as a man. I’m talking about the life he chose…. This life absorbs you. You only see one way.”</p>
<p>His brother had done the unimaginable and walked away from the mob, and now it was his turn to do something, perhaps even more disturbing, by Sonny’s code, breaking the oath of silence and testifying against his own father.</p>
<p>After a scene in the men’s bathroom, when Tina physically abuses Sonny for not pleading guilty, and so allowing John the chance of mitigation on his testimony, he mutters in the courtroom, “Nothing matters to me. My own son turned on me.”</p>
<p>Someone later alleged that Sonny puts a hit out on John for testifying, although this is never confirmed.</p>
<p>Found guilty, he goes back to the place that he has known for home for so many years. A prison cell. This time, because of his age and infirmities at a prison hospital.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10953560656,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10953560656?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="300" /></a>In February 2017, he celebrates his 100 birthday. Four months later, he leaves the judicial system for the last time, discharged from the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts. Coming home to Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, where it had all begun. Staying with a daughter after his release, he finally moves into The Regal Heights Nursing Home, in Jackson Heights and dies in February 2020. He had been a free man for almost three years.</p>
<p>His lifetime is filled with conflict, endless danger, betrayal and treachery, and a family narrative that would leave most soap operas for dead. It is hard to comprehend how Sonny Franzese could live through a normal lifespan yet alone achieve the status of a centenarian, considering the chances are 0.004%****</p>
<p>Tina had gone on Easter Sunday, 2012. The grim reaper came for her carrying a bag marked cancer.</p>
<p>At least once source claims she had become so destitute towards the ends of her life, she was living in her car.</p>
<p>They held the funeral for Sonny at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Brooklyn.</p>
<p>In line with the simple, somewhat plain surroundings, the funeral ceremony for Sonny Franzese was brief. Monsignor David Cassato blessed the coffin, and claimed, addressing the few people who were attending the ceremony, “Sonny died with Christ and he will rise with Christ,” asking only that the congregation pray they would forgive the mobster his trespasses along with the endless litany of other reproachable things he’d done in his life, so escaping Hell and joining “the company of saints” in God’s Heaven.</p>
<p>Following the service, his family buried him in Saint John Cemetery, in Middle Village, Queens, the last resting place of some of America’s most notorious gangsters.</p>
<p>If a fashionable synonym for saint is angel, in the great beyond, being Sonny Franzese, the only angels he will probably meet will be the ones on motor bikes.</p>
<p><em>You’re alone. And slowly you begin to discern the queer outline of what’s to come: the bend in</em></p>
<p><em>the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up (you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.</em></p>
<p>- A Matter of Timing by Lauris Edmond.</p>
<p><em>**** <a href="http://www.insider.com">www.insider.com</a></em></p>
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><em>Sources:</em></span></strong></p>
<p><em>Cantalupo, Joseph and Renner, Thomas C. Body Mike: St. Martins Press. 1990. New York.</em></p>
<p><em>Capeci, Jerry. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to The Mafia: 2002. Indianapolis.</em></p>
<p><em>Salerno, Ralph. Tompkins, John S. The Crime Confederation: 1969. Doubleday & Co. New York.</em></p>
<p><em>Cage, Nicholas. Mafia USA: 1972. Playboy Press. Chicago.</em></p>
<p><em>Franzese, Michael and Makra, Dary. Quitting the Mob: 1992. Harper Collins. New York.</em></p>
<p><em>Life. August 30, 1968. Volume 65, No 9, Pages 30-57.</em></p>
<p><em>Jacobson, Mark. His Lips Are Sealed: 2020. <a href="https://pleasekillme.com">https://pleasekillme.com</a></em></p>
<p><em>Robbin, Tom. The Franzese Mob Rat Themselves Out: Village Voice. June 15, 2010.</em></p>
<p><em>Zeman, Ned. John Franzese Jr. Flipped on One of History’s Most Notorious Mobsters—His Father—And Lived to Tell the Tale <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com">https://www.vanityfair.com</a> › contributor › ned-zeman. June 23, 2022</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/the-colombo-crime-family">Colombo crime family section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Thom L. Jones & Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
The Real John Wick: Separating fact from fiction in Hollywood’s violent gangster vengeance blockbuster
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-real-john-wick-separating-fact-from-fiction-in-hollywood-s-vi
2022-11-15T14:27:22.000Z
2022-11-15T14:27:22.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10882875292?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>John Wick is back! Chapter 4 of his bloody blockbuster movie franchise is upon us. It raises the question: Is John Wick indestructible? It sure seems so after watching every chapter starring Keanu Reeves as the skilled assassin placed on a universal hit list by the Italian and Russian Mafias, the Chinese Triads, and the Japanese Yakuza. But how realistic is this highly coordinated underworld?</p>
<p>The world of John Wick is one dominated by a shadow government consisting of powerful crime syndicates, merciless hitmen, and a gangland economy based on the business of murder, with parties offering safe haven, weaponry, armory, communications and intel, and a financial system that runs on gold coins. It’s clear to the viewer that this is a world steeped in tradition. Its inhabitants follow ancient rules and those who don’t get killed.</p>
<p><strong><span style="font-size:14pt;">The Real World</span></strong></p>
<p>The real world of organized crime is diverse and ever changing. Each decade new groups and crime bosses rise and fall to disappear forever. Several organizations, however, have managed to survive and hold on to century-old traditions and rituals. These groups can provide us with an answer regarding the realism of John Wick’s underworld.</p>
<p>In the United States, the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in" target="_blank">Italian-American Mafia</a>, known as La Cosa Nostra, is the organization that comes closest to the all-powerful octopus we see in the John Wick franchise. After its members got rich during Prohibition, they were able to infiltrate legitimate businesses and politics at the highest levels.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong><strong>READ: </strong></strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/famous-movie-star-and-respected-gangster-profile-of-14k-triad-bos" target="_blank"><strong>Famous movie star and respected gangster - Profile of 14K Triad boss Michael Chan</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>They managed to do so while also bringing structure and a strict hierarchy to their criminal organization. In the 1930s, the various crime clans in New York City officially organized themselves into five separate families, each with its own boss, laying the foundation for the decades to come.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;">T<strong>he Commission versus the High Table</strong></span></p>
<p>Making sure all these clans from across the nation would remain safe, the mob formed the Commission, a governing body which settled disputes between various families to ensure no wars would break out between them. As Selwyn Raab wrote in his book <em>Five Families</em>: “The survival of each family and the combined national Mafia overshadowed the needs and safety of the individual Mafioso.”</p>
<p><iframe title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JQ99sgVDIx8" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></p>
<p>The Commission in John Wick’s world is known as the High Table, which is comprised of 12 seats, each belonging to a crime clan. Unlike the Commission, the High Table also offers a seat to Mafia syndicates from other countries. This makes it a global powerhouse, whereas the Commission primarily held sway in the United States.</p>
<p>As a governing body, the Commission was used by the Mafia to approve high-level murders and crimes affecting all crime families. Anyone deemed a threat to its safety or sovereignty would meet his or her maker.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Whacking a boss</strong></span></p>
<p>In the film, John Wick is an outlaw, hunted for breaking the rules set by the High Table. He murdered one of its 12 members and thus must pay with his life. Not to mention that he committed murder at The Continental, which functions as a safe haven for traveling assassins. As we settle into our theater seats to watch John Wick 3, our dog-loving hitman must fight a full army of killers out to murder him.</p>
<p>In reality, however, the murder of a member of the Commission never resulted in such harsh penalties. More frequently, the Commission was used by its members as a tool to acquire more power and influence. It’s how bosses like Albert Anastasia and Joseph Bonanno met their demise. One by cold-blooded murder, the other when an intricate power play blew up in his face and saw him stripped of his influence and position and living in exile in Arizona.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-irishman-teamsters-boss-jimmy-hoffa-s-friend-and-the-man-who" target="_blank">The Irishman</a>: Jimmy Hoffa’s friend and the man who put two bullets in the back of his skull</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Also, when families decide to oust their own boss from the inside, the Commission rarely punishes the masterminds. John Gotti orchestrated the execution of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview" target="_blank">Gambino crime family</a> boss Paul Castellano and his underboss Tommy Bilotti, but felt secure knowing he had the backing of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family" target="_blank">Bonanno</a>, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family" target="_blank">Colombo</a>, and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-lucchese-crime-family" target="_blank">Lucchese</a> crime families.</p>
<p>Though he openly broke the founding principles that one was not to murder a boss, the Commission let it slide. Only <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-genovese-crime-family" target="_blank">Genovese crime family</a> boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-boss-vincent-chin" target="_blank">Vincent Gigante</a> felt Gotti had gone too far and began plotting his murder without he himself seeking the Commission’s approval. All of this illustrates how power and influence outrank rules and codes.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Snitches get stitches or worse</strong></span></p>
<p>So killing a boss who holds a seat on the Commission is an offence that can be overlooked. No army of mob hitmen will come looking for you. But what about the biggest rule breaker? Which, in the real world of organized crime, is the rule of silence, omerta. It is strictly forbidden to violate this rule. There is to be no snitching. Snitches get stitches. So much so that the rule is universal, from the United States to Sicily and from Europe to Asia. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237131054,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237131054?profile=original" /></a>In China, the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/triads-overview">Triads</a> have been around for several centuries. Their code and structure are steeped in tradition. New members take oaths on a variety of topics, several of which relate to the code of silence. “I shall not disclose the secrets of the Hung society to my parents, brother or wife,” one such oath begins. “I shall not disclose the secrets for money. I must never reveal Hung society secrets or signs when speaking to outsiders.”</p>
<p>The penalty for breaking one’s oath is clear: “I will be killed by a myriad of swords if I do so.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Slit his throat</strong></span></p>
<p>The <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/russian-mafia-overview" target="_blank">Russian Mafia</a>, known as the Vory v zakone, also adhere to a strict code when it comes to cooperating – or even dealing – with authorities. One thief who had sold out his comrades was simply given the choice of “by cutting or by hanging” by senior mobsters inside a Russian prison, author Mark Galeotti wrote in his book <em>The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia</em>. One of the bosses then slit the informant’s throat and calmly alerted the guards to accept his own fate.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: “For him, I am a god” – Profile of</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/for-him-i-am-a-god-profile-of-russian-mafia-boss-and-vor-v-zakone" target="_blank"><strong>Russian Mafia boss, and vor v zakone, Razhden Shulaya</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Omerta or burn</strong></span></p>
<p>The Italian Mafia’s loyalty to omerta, the code of silence, is widely known. It is driven home when youngsters show an eagerness to join that lifestyle and reiterated once they join the organization as a made member. During their induction ceremony they hold a burning card of a saint in their hands and are told to obey all the rules set by the organization and its leaders and that if they disobey or break these rules that their “flesh would burn like this saint”.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/yakuza-boss-busted-by-dea-trying-to-buy-surface-to-air-missiles-p" target="_blank"><strong>Yakuza boss busted by DEA trying to buy surface-to-air missiles, plotting to flood New York with meth and heroin</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Those that do break omerta are sentenced to death and spend their lives looking over their shoulders. In Italy, even women and children were harmed when a father, brother or son had decided to become an informant. Though less common, in the United States there have also been instances where female relatives of a snitch were targeted in order to get him to recant his testimony.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Postcards from the Yakuza</strong></span></p>
<p>In Japan, the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/yakuza-overview">Yakuza</a> also has a way of dealing with those who break the rules of their organization. “Short of death, the heaviest punishment was expulsion” Alex Dubro and David Kaplan wrote in <em>Yakuza: The Explosive Account of Japan’s Criminal Underworld</em>. “After banishing the transgressor, the [Yakuza boss] notified other [gangs] that the [person] was no longer welcome in his group. By general agreement, the outcast could not then join a rival [clan].”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10882879498,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10882879498?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a>To make certain other <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/yakuza-overview" target="_blank">Yakuza</a> groups don’t let this person into their inner circle, “the gang sends a volley of open-faced postcards via regular mail to the various underworld families. The cards comprise a formal notice of expulsion and ask that the gangs reject any association with the formal member.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/norman-s-cay-from-notorious-cocaine-pipeline-of-the-medellin-cart" target="_blank">Norman’s Cay</a>: From cocaine pipeline of the Medellin Cartel to a fraudulent festival for rich millennials</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Such strict adherence to the code combined with the fact it is spread among other clans is eerily similar to the world of John Wick. Though all the rules are in place to paint a very organized and violent picture, the reality is a lot more chaotic.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Killing rats or making them boss</strong></span></p>
<p>It is undeniable that snitching on organized crime is bad for your health. Especially back in the old days when a hit squad like <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-did-the-infamous-mafia-hit-squad-murder-inc-get-its-name" target="_blank">Murder Inc.</a> roamed the streets and made it its full-time occupation to hunt and kill those who were placed on its list. But for those expecting that the underworld would pull out all the John Wick splendor in its hatred for snitches: You are about to be disappointed.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Willie the Pimp</strong></span></p>
<p>More often than not, the murder of a snitch happens by a combination of pure luck and stupidity. Take the case of “Willie the Pimp” Bioff, a union racketeer who testified against a long line of powerful Chicago mobsters, including bosses Frank Nitti and Paul Ricca. His words earned them a guilty verdict and several years in prison after they had <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-the-chicago-outfit-made" target="_blank">extorted millions of dollars from Hollywood</a>’s biggest movie studios in the 1930s and 40s.</p>
<p>Despite getting a new identity, Bioff decided not to seek new surroundings. Instead of avoiding areas and regions with a heavy Mafia presence, he settled in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/las-vegas-sin-city" target="_blank">Las Vegas</a>. Of all places he decided that Sin City, with its mob casinos and glitter and glamor, was the place to law low and start a new life.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ:</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sometimes-the-most-obvious-is-the-best-way-the-kansas-city-mob-an" target="_blank"><strong>The Kansas City Mob and the skimming of Las Vegas casinos</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Known as William Nelson he got himself a job at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino run by his friend Gus Greenbaum, managing workers and trying to help keep their salaries down. Greenbaum had taken over operations at the casino after the murder of the Flamingo’s former manager, crime boss Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.</p>
<p>How they expected to keep this a secret remains a mystery, but despite the lack of Instagram and Facebook it didn’t take long for people to start recognizing the man who ratted out the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-chicago-outfit-overview" target="_blank">Chicago Mafia</a>’s leadership.</p>
<p>On November 4, 1955 “Willie the Pimp” got in his car. When he turned the ignition, a bomb ripped his body apart and blew it all over the driveway of his Phoenix home. Three years later, Greenbaum and his wife were found with their throats slashed, bleeding all over the floor of their Phoenix residence.</p>
<p>It’s what you call a typical John Wick ending to a racketeer's life.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Sammy the Bull</strong></span></p>
<p>Informants don’t always end up as Hollywood as that though. Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano is probably the most famous rat alive. After turning on his boss, Gambino family leader John Gotti, he made all the front pages and primetime news shows. His testimony got him an extremely lenient sentence and a shot at a new life under the name of Jimmy Moran in sunny Arizona with his family.</p>
<p>But what’s a shot at a new life when you can’t flaunt it in people’s face? Hell, what’s the use of your old life if you can’t use it to impress people? So, the former New York Mafia underboss didn’t try to hide who he was and pretty soon was outed by the press.</p>
<p>When word got back to his old stomping grounds, his former associates were incensed. John Gotti had already made it crystal clear how he felt about his former colleague. “That’s a bill that’s gotta be paid some day, just like every other bill, you know what I mean,” he told his brother Peter in a taped conversation in prison.</p>
<p>Peter Gotti knew what his brother meant and remembered those words when the news of Gravano’s life in Arizona surfaced in the media. With the imprisonment of John and recent legal troubles of John Junior, Peter had become head of the crime family. As such he now had the authority to set in motion the murder machine.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sammy-the-bull-gravano-is-a-free-man-but-more-importantly-a-poste" target="_blank">Sammy the Bull Gravano is a free man</a>, but also a poster boy for the dangers of dealing with gangsters</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>In 1999, he ordered Gambino family soldiers Thomas “Huck” Carbonaro and Edward “Cousin Eddie” Garafola to go to Arizona and whack Gravano. He gave them unlimited funds to handle this problem. For over six months, the mobsters surveilled Gravano and scouted for locations to take him out. Carbonaro even began dressing up as an outlaw biker as to not draw attention to himself as a Mafioso, growing a beard and getting tattoos.</p>
<p>All the efforts turned out to be in vain when Gravano was taken down by law enforcement in February of 2000 for his involvement in running a multi-million-dollar ecstasy ring with a local youth gang called The Devil Dogs. He was eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison and was recently released.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Shrimp Boy</strong></span></p>
<p>Still, though the Mafia didn’t get their guy, they spared no expenses and went hunting, right? Just like in John Wick. Though that is technically true, recent events show that things have changed.</p>
<p>Take the case of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-rat-who-became-king-triad-boss-raymond-chow" target="_blank">Raymond Chow</a>. In the 1970s and 1980s he made a big name for himself in the underworld of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Under the wing of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/triad-boss-peter-chong" target="_blank">Triad boss Peter Chong</a>, he had big plans for creating a nationwide criminal organization that was comprised of all Asian Triad gangs. But when it was time to face the music in the 1990s, Chow opted to testify against his former partner-in-crime instead.</p>
<p>Thanks to his testimony, Chow was released from prison in 2003. He claimed he was a reformed man and turned his focus on helping young kids stay away from gangs and crime. To do so he went back to the same streets in San Francisco’s Chinatown. A pretty ballsy move for someone who had snitched. One would expect him to be welcomed by a volley of bullets.</p>
<p>In a John Wick movie, perhaps. But in reality it was Chow doing the firing. Rather than being shunned, his old gang welcomed him back. Apparently, there is no “stop snitchin’” movement in Chinatown. Using their muscle, he even took back his spot atop of the throne by arranging the murder of his successor.</p>
<p>Once again, it came down to authorities to take the snitch down. In 2016, he was sentenced to <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/san-francisco-crime-boss-shrimp-boy-chow-gets-two-life-terms-in-p" target="_blank">two life sentences</a> for various racketeering charges.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>My old hometown</strong></span></p>
<p>Though it totally contradicts the mantra of organized crime – as well as many of the gangster movies made in Hollywood – snitches tend to get away quite often nowadays. In 2017, former Genovese family mobster Anthony Arillotta chose to <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-mob-family-turncoat-returns-to-old-stomping-grounds-in-s" target="_blank">return to his old stomping grounds</a> in Springfield, Massachusetts. After climbing to the top of the city’s mob crew by arranging the 2003 murder of his predecessor, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-hit-how-the-genovese" target="_blank">capo Adolfo Bruno</a>, he left town with his tail between his legs after he became a witness for the government and testified against the Springfield and New York mobsters below and above him. But apparently, that does not mean he needs to keep a low profile or pick a new hometown.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Welcome, Mr. Wick</strong></span></p>
<p>In the world of John Wick there is a highly structured underworld with connections around the world and all particles moving as one. In the real world things don’t work like that. As the Bioff hit illustrates, despite there being a formidable organization, these groups rely on the right people making the right connections. Someone needs to recognize the snitch and communicate it up the chain. And even then, it remains within that chain.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237131296,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237131296?profile=original" /></a>If a member of the Yakuza is branded as a rat and is blacklisted in Japan, what stops him from setting up shop in the United States? Or other parts of Asia even? There is no global communications hotline that these groups check in on. They rather not communicate about sensitive subjects for fear of authorities listening in.</p>
<p>And if shit does hit the fan, and someone needs to be taken out, most of these groups tend to weigh the pros and cons first. Going hunting or fighting a war costs a lot of money and hinders business. Money is why these groups do what they do. If you make them money, then they tend to overlook stuff like you breaking certain rules. If you cost them money, however, you end up dead quicker than you can ask for the check after a nice dinner.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10882879673,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10882879673?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a>In the real world of organized crime money comes first. Honor comes second. If honor was placed first, then there is no doubt that a person placed on a hit list would be in a very dire situation and would need all the skills of a John Wick to survive till the end of the film – let alone for three sequels.</p>
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Southwest Baltimore NFL gang hitman sentenced to 29 years in federal prison
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/southwest-baltimore-nfl-gang-hitman-sentenced-to-29-years-in-fede
2022-11-04T06:45:15.000Z
2022-11-04T06:45:15.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10862526673?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>A hitman for Southwest Baltimore’s NFL gang was sentenced to 29 years in federal prison on October 28, 2022. 24-year-old Bobby “Freaky” Cannon admitted participating in a violent racketeering conspiracy and committing two murders on behalf of the gang.</p>
<p>The term NFL stands for Normandy, Franklin, and Loudon, which are three adjacent streets that run through the Edmondson Village. Members of NFL have social and familial ties to the Edmondson Village neighborhood in southwest Baltimore.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10862526692,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="710" alt="10862526692?profile=RESIZE_710x" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Baltimore, Franklin street</strong></em></p>
<p>According to his guilty plea, from at least 2016 through March 26, 2020, Bobby Cannon was a member of the NFL gang, which engaged in a pattern of criminal racketeering activity including murder, narcotics trafficking and smuggling, illegal firearms possession, bribery, witness intimidation, and witness retaliation.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>ALSO READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/boss-of-baltimore-s-nfl-gang-admits-racketeering-drug-trafficking" target="_blank"><strong>Boss and member of Baltimore’s NFL gang admit racketeering, drug trafficking and ordering murders</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Cannon admitted that he participated in illegal activities with other NFL members, including committing two murders and an attempted murder, and distributing large quantities of heroin, fentanyl, and cocaine.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Murder contract</strong></span></p>
<p>As detailed in Cannon’s plea agreement, in 2018, co-defendant James Roberts and other NFL members offered money for the murder of an individual who was believed to be a federal witness cooperating with law enforcement regarding NFL.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/baltimore-eight-tray-gangsta-crips-boss-admits-to-bunch-of-crimes"><strong>Baltimore Eight Tray Gangsta Crips boss Trayvon "Tru G" Hall</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>On June 16, 2018, Cannon walked up to the porch of a house in Edmondson Village, where the individual and his girlfriend were sitting. Cannon shot them both multiple times, killing them. Cannon was subsequently paid by Roberts for committing the murders, which Cannon agrees was in furtherance of the NFL.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Back at it</strong></span></p>
<p>In late 2018, Cannon was recruited by NFL to murder another individual in exchange for money. Cannon planned the murder for several weeks and learned that the individual resided in a halfway house in East Baltimore.</p>
<p>On January 4, 2019, Cannon borrowed a car from a female associate in southwest Baltimore and later drove the car to the vicinity of the halfway house, where Cannon waited for the individual. After several hours, Cannon saw the individual on the street and shot the individual multiple times in the arm, back, neck, and buttocks. The individual sustained life-threatening injuries but survived the shooting.</p>
<p>Following the shooting, Cannon abandoned the car and notified the female associate, who then falsely reported to the Baltimore Police that her car was stolen. Cannon then notified the NFL that he attempted to murder the individual but failed to kill him.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Handling drug business as usual</strong></span></p>
<p>In April 2019, the FBI arrested members of the NFL, but not Cannon. On a recorded jail call following the arrests, incarcerated NFL members instructed Cannon to continue distributing narcotics for the NFL. Cannon took over a drug phone used by the NFL so that he could continue to sell narcotics to drug customers of the organization.</p>
<p>On December 28, 2019, Baltimore Police officers say they found Cannon unconscious in a parked van. During their interaction, officers saw that Cannon had a gun, which they recovered from his jacket pocket. Officers then searched Cannon’s van and recovered over 98 grams of fentanyl, which Cannon agrees he possessed with the intent to distribute it.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/nathan-barksdale-inspiration-for-the-wire-dead-at-54"><strong>"Bodie" Barksdale, inspiration for The Wire, dead at 54</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Cannon admitted in his plea agreement that over the course of the racketeering conspiracy, Cannon and his co-conspirators distributed over one kilogram of heroin, more than 400 grams of fentanyl, and more than 280 grams of crack cocaine.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Taken down</strong></span></p>
<p>More than 30 defendants in this and related cases have pleaded guilty and been sentenced to between 15 years and time served. NFL member <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/boss-of-baltimore-s-nfl-gang-admits-racketeering-drug-trafficking" target="_blank">James Henry Roberts</a>, a/k/a “Bub,” age 32, of Baltimore, Maryland, pleaded guilty on October 3, 2022, along with gang leader <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/boss-of-baltimore-s-nfl-gang-admits-racketeering-drug-trafficking" target="_blank">Gregory Butler</a>, a/k/a “Gotti,” “Sags,” and “Little Dick,” age 31, also of Baltimore, to conspiracy to participate in a racketeering enterprise related to their activities in the NFL gang. They are expected to be sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. On October 7, 2022, the final defendant in the case, D’Andre Preston, age 26, of Baltimore, pleaded guilty to his participation in the NFL racketeering conspiracy, including a murder, and is expected to be sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. Judge Grimm has scheduled sentencing for all three defendants on December 9, 2022.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs" target="_blank">Street Gangs section</a> or <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/black-organized-crime" target="_blank">Black organized crime</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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Barrio Azteca hitmen who murdered US Consulate employee & 2 others in Ciudad Juarez get life in prison
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/barrio-azteca-hitmen-who-murdered-us-consulate-employee-2-others
2022-10-26T08:10:27.000Z
2022-10-26T08:10:27.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10855306671?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>The Barrio Azteca gunmen directly responsible for the March 2010 murders in Juarez, Mexico of a U.S. Consulate employee, her husband, and the husband of another U.S. Consulate employee were sentenced to life in prison on Monday.</p>
<p>43-year-old Jose “Zorro” Guadalupe Diaz Diaz and 54-year-old Martin “Popeye” Artin Perez Marrufo, both of Chihuahua, Mexico, were found guilty of all 11 counts after a 13-day jury trial on February 3.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/there-is-no-hiding-place-for-such-a-man-profile-of-mexican-drug-l"><strong>“There is no hiding place for such a man” - Profile of Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The jury found Diaz and Marrufo guilty of conspiracy to commit racketeering, narcotics trafficking, narcotics importation, money laundering, and murder in a foreign country; three counts of murder in aid of racketeering; and three counts of murder resulting from the use and carrying of firearms during and in relation to drug trafficking.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Murdered after a child’s birthday party</strong></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10855307488,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10855307488?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="351" /></a>Evidence presented at trial demonstrated that on March 13, 2010, Diaz and Marrufo served as gunmen on the hit teams that murdered U.S. Consulate employee Leslie Enriquez, her husband, Arthur Redelfs (both pictured on the right), and Jorge Salcido Ceniceros, the husband of another U.S. Consulate employee. The victims were targeted by the hit teams after leaving a child’s birthday party in Juarez because they were mistaken initially for rival gang members. Diaz shot and killed Enriquez and Redelfs. Marrufo shot and killed Ceniceros.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/mexico-s-el-padrino-of-narcos-miguel-angel-felix-gallardo-leaves"><strong>Mexico’s “El Padrino” of Narcos, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, leaves prison after serving 33 years</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The hitmen were sentenced to life in prison on 10 counts and 20 years in prison on the remaining count. Three of the life in prison sentences will run consecutive to the sentences imposed on all other counts. Both men were also sentenced to five years of supervised release and ordered to pay restitution.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Barrio Azteca and the Cartel Wars</strong></span></p>
<p>Barrio Azteca is a transnational criminal organization engaged in money laundering, racketeering, and drug related activities in El Paso, Texas, among other places. The <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs" target="_blank">gang</a> allied with other drug groups to battle the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/drug-cartels" target="_blank">Sinaloa Cartel</a>, at the time headed by <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-end-mexico-narco-kingpin-joaquin-el-chapo-guzman-sentenced-to" target="_blank">Joaquín “Chapo” Guzman</a>, and its allies for control of the drug trafficking routes through Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. The drug routes through Juarez, known as the Juarez Plaza, are important to drug trafficking organizations because it is a principal illicit drug trafficking route into the United States.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10855306686,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10855306686?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a><strong><em>Photo: Scene of the crime.</em></strong></p>
<p>A total of 35 defendants were charged in the third superseding indictment and are alleged to have committed various criminal acts, including the 2010 Juarez Consulate murders in Juarez, Mexico, as well as racketeering, narcotics distribution and importation, retaliation against persons providing information to U.S. law enforcement, extortion, money laundering, murder, and obstruction of justice. Of the 35 defendants charged, all have been apprehended. Of those apprehended, 28 have pleaded guilty, three (including Diaz and Maruffo) have been convicted by a jury following trial, one committed suicide before the conclusion of his trial, and three are awaiting extradition from Mexico.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Holding them accountable</strong></span></p>
<p>“The gunmen who viciously shot and killed Leslie Enriquez, Arthur Redelfs, and Jorge Salcido Ceniceros will now deservedly spend the rest of their lives in prison,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement. “This prosecution demonstrates the Department’s commitment to combating violent transnational criminal organizations and holding accountable those who may harm Americans, whether at home or abroad.”</p>
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<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/drug-cartels">Drug Cartels section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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Rochester mob hitman had 1 year to serve before prison escape, now sentenced to 3 more years
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mob-hitman-had-1-year-to-serve-before-prison-escape-now
2022-10-21T14:43:23.000Z
2022-10-21T14:43:23.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10846867697?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>Convicted Rochester Mafia family hitman Dominic Taddeo was sentenced this week to 3 years in federal prison for his escape from a half-way house in Orlando, Florida. Despite being one year away from his release, 65-year-old Taddeo decided to flee. He will serve his latest sentence consecutively to his remaining term of imprisonment on other federal convictions.</p>
<p>What exactly went through Taddeo’s mind on March 28, 2022, will remain a mystery for the foreseeable future. On that day he was granted a community pass to leave the half-way house where he had been staying after his transfer from the Coleman Correctional Institution for a medical appointment.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/prison-breaks-from-mobsters-and-hitmen-to-serial-killers-and-drug"><strong>Prison Breaks - From mobsters and hitmen to serial killers and drug lords: The men who escaped from jail</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Instead of returning as required, Taddeo <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-family-hitman-escapes-from-federal-custody-in-flo" target="_blank">vanished</a> without a trace and made headlines on several news stations throughout the country. Who could blame them? This wasn’t your average convict.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Killing for the Rochester crime family</strong></span></p>
<p>Taddeo was a deadly hitman for the Mafia in Rochester. He murdered three men in the early 1980s and was also involved in two separate failed hit attempts on a Rochester crime family capo during the internecine mob war between two factions within the Rochester family.</p>
<p>He hit the capo with six shots from a .22-caliber as the mob captain left an apartment in April 1983. Miraculously, he survived. In November of that year, Taddeo did a second attempt. This time he fired ten bullets into the mob capo. Again, the mob leader survived.</p>
<p><strong><span style="font-size:14pt;">The fugitive</span> </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10846867876,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="300" alt="10846867876?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>After making bail in 1987, Taddeo disappeared, a preamble to his antics this year. That time he remained a fugitive for two years, while moving around and using various aliases. He was arrested in 1989 and pleaded guilty in 1992 to racketeering charges that included the three Mafia slayings. For this, he earned a sentence of 54 years behind bars.</p>
<p>With that sentence almost over, just one more year to serve, he went on the lam again. This time, it took authorities one week to catch him. He was <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-family-hitman-caught-after-escaping-from-federal" target="_blank">arrested</a> on April 4. At the time of his arrest Taddeo was in possession of over $5,000 cash and a driver license of a deceased individual.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>INTERVIEW: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-life-of-a-u-s-marshal-hunting-down-fugitive-mobsters-and-alwa"><strong>The life of a U.S. Marshal: Hunting down fugitive mobsters and always staying one step ahead of cunning gangsters</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Still up to his old tricks, it seems.</p>
<p>Taddeo <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-hitman-pleads-guilty-to-escape-from-halfway-house" target="_blank">pleaded guilty</a> to his escape on May 17 resulting in his sentencing this week. Why he fled no one knows. Instead of being out of prison in a few months, he will now be sitting in a cell for several more years.</p>
<p>It’s a damn mob mystery if ever there was one.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">Organized Crime in North America section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
One of highest-ranking MS-13 bosses in US gets life in prison for acts of deadly violence
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/one-of-highest-ranking-ms-13-bosses-in-us-gets-life-in-prison-for
2022-10-05T14:35:08.000Z
2022-10-05T14:35:08.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10835009893?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>One of the highest-ranking leaders of MS-13 in the United States was sentenced last week to life in prison for his role in multiple violent crimes. 33-year-old Andy Tovar is seen as the one who ordered a murder in Charlottesville in 2017 and two attempted murders in Prince William County in 2019.</p>
<p>Tovar was the First Word or leader of the Guanacos Lil Cycos Salvatruchas (GLCS) clique of MS-13. In this role, he authorized several underlings to travel from Prince William County to Charlottesville in July 2017 to murder an individual the GLCS clique believed was a rival gang member.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Stabbed over 140 times</strong></span></p>
<p>At Tovar’s direction, on or about July 3, 2017, four members of the GLCS clique stabbed the target to death. They cut him over 140 times using a machete and knives before they dumped his body in a river, burned his car, and fled back to Prince William County.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/ms-13-bosses-planned-to-unite-all-its-us-gangs-under-one-leadersh"><strong>MS-13 bosses planned to unite all its US gangs under one leadership</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The victim was struck so hard by the machete that the machete’s handle broke. The following day, Tovar celebrated the Fourth of July with two of his hitmen and congratulated them on what they had done for the clique.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>The driver</strong></span></p>
<p>In March 2019, 22-year-old Roberto “Solo” Cruz Moreno, who was a “chequeo” or soldier in the GLCS clique under Tovar, picked up three other GLCS gangsters while a fifth man drove them to an isolated area in Bristow.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/dominating-behind-bars-ms-13-gangsters-shank-member-of-feared-mex"><strong>Dominating Behind Bars: MS-13 gangsters shank member of feared Mexican Mafia</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>There, one associate of GLCS, using a firearm supplied by Tovar, shot the driver multiple times and another associate of GLCS attempted to slit the driver’s throat and stabbed him because members and associates of GLCS believed he was disrespecting MS-13.</p>
<p>Following the attempted murder, Cruz Moreno fled the scene with the three other GLCS participants and drove them to his residence. Tovar informed MS-13 leadership in El Salvador of this attempted murder and mocked the GLCS associate who shot the driver for being unable to kill him.</p>
<p>In April 2019, local law enforcement officers in Fairfax County found Cruz Moreno in possession of the same firearm used to shoot the driver, and several grams of packaged cocaine in his vehicle with three other associates of GLCS. Cruz Moreno obtained the cocaine from Tovar and had been selling the cocaine on behalf of the clique.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Another hit</strong></span></p>
<p>In July 2019, 21-year-old Marvin “Trance” Torres, a chequeo in GLCS, identified an individual as a rival gang member living in GLCS-controlled territory, provided photographs of his target to GLCS members, including Tovar.</p>
<p>On August 3 and 4, 2019, 27-year-old Jose “Gears” Rosales Juarez, a “paro,” an entry level member of the GLCS clique, surveilled the target at a restaurant in Manassas, and discussed plans to kill him with Tovar.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-new-american-mafia-ms-13-member-admits-extorting-langley-park"><strong>The New American Mafia: MS-13 member admits extorting Langley Park, Maryland business owners</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>On August 12, 2019, Tovar’s co-defendant, 21-year-old Kevin “Nocturno” Perez Sandoval, an “observacion”, or lower level soldier in the GLCS clique, and two other GLCS gangsters observed their target at a laundromat in Manassas and sought Tovar’s permission to kill him there. After Tovar granted permission, Perez Sandoval drove the two MS-13 gangsters to retrieve a firearm, and back to the laundromat area, where the individual was shot twice before Perez Sandoval drove them from the scene of the shooting.</p>
<p>Tovar then directed his men in evading law enforcement detection by relaying information from Torres, who was watching law enforcement at the site of the shooting, and helping the hitmen find new transportation and a hotel room with the assistance of Rosales Juarez.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Pleading guilty</strong></span></p>
<p>Earlier, Tovar had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in aid of racketeering activity, attempted murder in aid of racketeering activity, assault with a dangerous weapon in aid of racketeering activity, and using and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence, all in relation to the shooting of the person at the laundromat. He also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine and marijuana.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs">Street Gangs section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Baltimore Eight Tray Gangsta Crips boss admits to bunch of crimes including murder & conspiracy to kill snitch
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/baltimore-eight-tray-gangsta-crips-boss-admits-to-bunch-of-crimes
2022-09-06T09:05:08.000Z
2022-09-06T09:05:08.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10804618873?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>The leader of the Eight Tray Gangsta Crips in Baltimore pleaded guilty last Friday to racketeering and drug conspiracy charges. 31-year-old Trayvon “G-Tru” Hall led the Baccwest Eight Tray Gangsta Crips in Baltimore and had traveled to California to get official permission from West Coast bosses to establish his Baltimore set.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>History of the Eight Tray Gangsta Crips in Baltimore</strong></span></p>
<p>The Eight Tray Gangsta Crips is a violent subset of the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs">Crips gang</a> that originated in California in the 1970s. Starting in the 2000s, it began operating on the streets and in correctional facilities in Maryland.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: “The system of America is scared when they see us unite” – </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-system-of-america-is-scared-when-they-see-us-unite-profile-of"><strong>Profile of devil-worshipping East Coast Crips boss Paul Wallace</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>For many years, the Eight Tray Gangsta Crips controlled the drug trade in particular territories in Baltimore City, including the area around the intersection between West Baltimore Street and South Hilton Street in West Baltimore (the “Baltimore Hilton neighborhood”), the area around the intersection between West Lexington Street and North Fremont Avenue (the “Lexington Terrace neighborhood”), and the area around the intersection between Frankford Avenue and Sinclair Lane in North Baltimore (the “Frankford Sinclair neighborhood”).</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10804618701,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="543" alt="10804618701?profile=RESIZE_584x" /></a>The Eight Tray Gangsta Crips members from the Baltimore Hilton and Lexington Terrace neighborhoods referred to themselves as the Baccwest Eight Tray Gangsta Crips —modeling themselves after the Baccwest Eight Tray Gangsta Crips in Los Angeles—and Eight Tray Gangsta Crips members from the Frankford Sinclair neighborhood called themselves the Nutty North Side Eight Tray Gangsta Crips . The two groups worked together closely in criminal activities.</p>
<p><strong><span style="font-size:14pt;">“G” and social media poison</span><br /></strong></p>
<p>Trayvon Hall was the leader of the Baccwest Eight Tray Gangsta Crips in Baltimore, and was referred to as the “G” of the gang. He flew to California in 2013 to meet with West Coast leaders of the Eight Tray Gangsta Crips and gain their official approval for his Baccwest Eight Tray Gangsta Crips set in Baltimore.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: “Corey Hamlet is as smart as any CEO we’ve prosecuted” - </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/corey-hamlet-is-as-smart-as-any-ceo-we-ve-prosecuted-profile-of-g"><strong>Profile: Grape Street Crips leader Corey Hamlet</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The Baccwest Eight Tray Gangsta Crips operated street-level drug distribution “shops” primarily in the Baltimore Hilton neighborhood, the Lexington Terrace neighborhood and the Franklin Sinclair neighborhood, distributing heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, and marijuana. Outsiders who attempted to sell drugs in the Eight Tray Gangsta Crips’ territories were targeted for violence by the group.</p>
<p>The Eight Tray Gangsta Crips used social media to assert their claim to drug territories, enhance their status, and intimidate <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs">rival gangs</a> and witnesses against gang members. They posted photos and rap videos to social media flaunting weapons and threatening to kill those who stood in the way of the gang.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>War with the Black Guerilla Family</strong></span></p>
<p>Hall admitted that he and his co-defendants sold drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine, and committed robberies to earn money for the gang. From May 2016 through November 2016, Hall and other Eight Tray Gangsta Crips conspired to murder members of the Black Guerilla Family gang who operated a rival drug shop in the Lexington Terrace neighborhood.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>INTERVIEW: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/california-crip-went-from-selling-drugs-to-funding-his-own-career"><strong>California Crip went from selling drugs to funding his own career as an author</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>On June 23, 2016, Eight Tray Gangsta Crips members attempted to murder two <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs">Black Guerilla Family gang</a> members. For some reason they shot two victims who happened to be in the area at the time.</p>
<p>If you want something done right, you got to do it yourself, Hall must’ve thought. So, on July 18, 2016, Hall himself murdered Black Guerilla Family member Albert Pittman, shooting him to death in the 4800 block of Midline Road.</p>
<p>On November 11, 2016, in the 800 block of West Lexington Street, Hall was at it again as he opened fire on members of the rival Black Guerilla Family gang, killing Black Guerilla Family member Shyheim Brown and wounding two other victims.</p>
<p>Immediately afterward, Hall sent a fellow gang member a series of text messages about the shooting, saying he had “Jus bashed the monkeys” (a derogatory term for members of Black Guerilla Family), and they “Wasn’t exspecting [sic] me be out early lmGCao [laughing my Gangster Crip ass off].”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Turf wars and snitches</strong></span></p>
<p>After the Black Guerilla Family was dealt with, Hall and his gang shifted their focus to the Abington Avenue drug trafficking organization. From July 2017 through July 2019, Hall and other members of the Eight Tray Gangsta Crips conspired to murder members of this crew, whose territory the Eight Tray Gangsta Crips had taken over.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/strangling-your-cellmate-just-to-gain-respect"><strong>Strangling your cellmate just to gain respect</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Hall directed the Eight Tray Gangsta Crips to use violence to retaliate against anyone who refused to respect the boundaries of their newly claimed turf. Hall admitted that on July 6, 2018, he opened fire on members of the Abington Avenue organization who were playing dice in the unit block of Abington Avenue, killing Steven McKnight and wounding an additional victim.</p>
<p>With so many bodies dropping, law enforcement began taking an interest. They began applying pressure and people began talking about certain crimes. Feeling the heat, Hall and other Crips conspired to murder an individual who they believed had cooperated with law enforcement and threatened a witness who testified against a fellow gang member in a state murder trial.</p>
<p>After pleading guilty, Hall faces 40 years in federal prison.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs" target="_blank">Street Gangs section</a> or <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/black-organized-crime" target="_blank">Black organized crime</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/about-gangsters-inc">About Gangsters Inc.</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Revenge is a dish best served cold - The men charged with killing mob boss Whitey Bulger know this all too well
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/revenge-is-a-dish-best-served-cold-the-men-charged-with-killing-m
2022-08-20T17:53:21.000Z
2022-08-20T17:53:21.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10779328857?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>Mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger terrorized the streets of Boston for decades. He murdered his way to the top of the underworld and kept himself there by ratting on everyone else. His enemies and victims yearned for justice. They were in for a long wait.</p>
<p>Revenge is a dish best served cold, the saying goes. Whether true or false, it is applicable in the case of Bulger. After ruining countless lives - either due to his drug and gun trafficking or his deadly violence aimed at anyone, guilty and innocent, men and women, standing in his way – Bulger simply vanished from the stage before facing any kind of punishment.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-making-of-mob-boss-whitey-bulger"><strong>The Making of Mob Boss Whitey Bulger</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>As a prized FBI informant, he had managed to evade arrest for years. His corrupt FBI handler John Connolly tipped him off to his impending indictment. Bulger told his wife to pack their bags. Together they went on the run.</p>
<p>It was December 23, 1994.</p>
<p>It would take authorities over 16 years to find and arrest the fugitive crime boss and his beloved wife.</p>
<p>16 years and 6 months. Over 6000 days.</p>
<p>All those days Bulger’s victims and enemies underwent a variety of emotions. Anger. Fear. Despair. His disappearance deprived all of them of justice. Of revenge.</p>
<p>They must’ve rejoiced when Bulger and his wife, Theresa Stanley, were finally <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/mob-boss-whitey-bulger" target="_blank">caught</a> living in an apartment near the beach in Santa Monica, California, on June 22, 2011.</p>
<p>By now one of the most notorious gangsters in American history sported a full white beard and looked more like Santa Clause than a mobster or hitman. At 81 years old he could hardly be considered a threat. Still, you never knew.</p>
<p>Bulger was tried and convicted. Justice was served on November 14, 2013, when he was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment, plus five years.</p>
<p>Almost 900 days after his arrest, his victims and enemies got their revenge. To say the dish was cold is an understatement. To say this was justice served might be somewhat of an overstatement.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Sweet revenge</strong></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10779328698,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="10779328698?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="300" /></a>Several inmates doing time at the United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, in West Virginia, agreed. In their opinion justice was to be served in the biblical way. An eye for an eye. When an 89-year-old, wheelchair-bound Bulger arrived at their prison on October 29, 2018, they made sure he never lived another day.</p>
<p>They <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/boston-mob-boss-james-whitey-bulger-killed-inside-federal-prison" target="_blank">beat him to death</a> hours after he got settled in. Bulger’s eyes were nearly gouged out. His attackers had allegedly even tried to cut out his tongue. The symbolism was obvious. You don’t snitch.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/freddy-hated-rats-meet-the-hitman-who-allegedly-murdered-mob-boss"><strong>“Freddy hated rats” – Meet the hitman who allegedly murdered mob boss Whitey Bulger behind bars</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Over 1800 days after his arrest, Bulger was dead. Slaughtered. His dead corpse wrapped in prison sheets. Was it justice? Revenge? Both or none?</p>
<p>On August 18, 2022, almost 1400 days after Bulger’s killing, prosecutors charged three men in his murder. 55-year-old Mafia hitman <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/freddy-hated-rats-meet-the-hitman-who-allegedly-murdered-mob-boss" target="_blank">Fotios “Freddy” Geas</a>, 48-year-old Paul J. “Pauly” DeCologero, and 36-year-old Sean McKinnon were all charged with conspiracy to commit first degree murder.</p>
<p>Geas and DeCologera are accused of striking Bulger in the head multiple times and were charged with aiding and abetting first degree murder, along with assault resulting in serious bodily injury.</p>
<p>They had been identified as suspects right away, but for some reason authorities needed several years to find out what exactly had gone down behind bars at Hazelton penitentiary.</p>
<p>All that time, Geas and DeCologero spent locked up in solitary confinement.</p>
<p>Justice and revenge are often lumped together. They are different yet feel similar to many people. Especially those roaming the underworld. Bulger’s murder was years in the making. When it finally happened it must have been a sweet moment for his enemies and, some of, his victims. The man that had ruined their lives was dead.</p>
<p>But was it justice? Wasn’t it better to let him rot away in a cell? Lacking the care an elderly man with his health issues would require. Slowly getting worse with each day. </p>
<p>Perhaps.</p>
<p>But perhaps his assailants saw his eyes as they beat him. Saw his fear. Saw his terror. Maybe his enemies and victims think about those last moments and what went through Bulger’s mind as he was beat to death.</p>
<p>Does it give them solace to know that he at least felt even a tiny bit of what they felt during his time as Boston’s criminal overlord? Maybe it does. And if it does then that must be a sweet moment. A moment long overdue, but still sweet as sugar.</p>
<p>At that point, the dish was indeed best served cold. Like ice cream.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">Organized Crime in North America section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
MS-13 hitman gets 35 years in prison for execution-style killing in 2015
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/ms-13-hitman-gets-35-years-in-prison-for-execution-style-killing
2022-07-29T06:47:43.000Z
2022-07-29T06:47:43.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10732306268?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>A member of MS-13 was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Tuesday for committing the execution-style killing of a man in 2015, 26-year-old Juan Garcia-Gomez (photo above), who goes by the nickname “Scooby” and hails from El Salvador, had already pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy.</p>
<p>Garcia-Gomez conspired to participate in the illegal activities of MS-13, a violent criminal gang also known as Mara Salvatrucha, which was founded in Los Angeles and, since then, has spread to other states as well as abroad into El Salvador, Mexico and Central America.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/there-is-no-hiding-place-for-such-a-man-profile-of-mexican-drug-l"><strong>“There is no hiding place for such a man” - Profile of Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>MS-13 is governed by a core set of rules, including a standing order to kill rival gang members and a strict rule against cooperating with law enforcement. MS-13 is organized into a series of sub-units, or “cliques,” that operate in specific geographic locations, and each clique is typically controlled by a single leader, sometimes known as the “First Word.” Two cliques active in and around Hudson County, New Jersey, were the Pinos Locos Salvatrucha clique, of which Garcia-Gomez was a member, and the Hudson Locos Salvatrucha clique.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Execution and drugs</strong></span></p>
<p>In July 2015, Jose Urias-Hernandez, then 19, was shot and killed execution-style by Garcia-Gomez with a single shot to the back of his head as he entered his apartment building. Garcia-Gomez participated in the murder because he was ordered by MS-13 leadership to commit the murder to achieve membership in the gang.</p>
<p>The victim was not a rival gang member.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/locked-up-but-still-hustling-oklahoma-drug-trafficking-crew-opera" target="_blank"><strong>Locked up, but still hustling: Oklahoma drug trafficking crew operated from behind prison walls</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>In addition to murder, MS-13 members, including Garcia-Gomez, trafficked drugs and threatened witnesses to prevent cooperation with law enforcement, and others extorted a restaurant operating in the gang’s turf.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>“Donkey”</strong></span></p>
<p>Garcia-Gomez and nine defendants were charged in New Jersey. Among them, 42-year-old Christian “Donkey” Linares-Rodriguez, who is a high-ranking MS-13 member currently incarcerated in El Salvador. He is awaiting extradition to the United States.</p>
<p>All other defendants have been convicted, including Juan Pablo Escalante-Melgar, aka “Humilde,” Elmer Cruz-Diaz, aka “Locote,” and Oscar Sanchez-Aguilar, aka “Snappy,” who were convicted at trial in November 2021 and are awaiting sentencing. At sentencing, Esclante-Melgar, Cruz-Diaz, and Sanchez-Aguilar each face a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Brutal</strong></span></p>
<p>“Garcia-Gomez committed a brutal and violent crime to gain membership in a criminal organization known for its brutality and violence,” U.S. Attorney Sellinger said. “He wasn’t even out of his teens when he complied with MS-13’s orders and snuffed out another young man’s life, ruining the lives of his victim’s family and friends and ending any chance at a decent life for himself. This sentence will keep this violent criminal off of our streets.”</p>
<p>“Cases like this are a reminder of the deadly brutality involved with drug activity,” Acting Special Agent in Charge Terence Reilly said. "We aggressively pursue MS-13 activity because of the high threat they pose to the citizens of our area. Long prison terms are the one sure method for getting these dangerous criminals off our streets."</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs">Street Gangs section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/about-gangsters-inc">About Gangsters Inc.</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Another Chicago Mob Story: The German and The Outfit
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/another-chicago-mob-story-the-german-and-the-outfit
2022-07-05T15:15:11.000Z
2022-07-05T15:15:11.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10622903656?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>It’s hard to know about Chicago. Was it a Mafia city or was it something else? Maybe just a gangland in America’s mid-west?</p>
<p>One acknowledged expert in the field, Dr. Wayne A. Johnson, claims, “I want to be clear on this point: The Chicago Outfit is just that, traditional organized crime. It is not the Mafia; it has always been very diverse and operates under the principals of Southern Italian organized crime.” 1</p>
<p>Others say it emerged around the turn of the 20th century as a Mafia clan and involved a man called James Colosimo, best remembered today as the mentor of a young thug imported into the city from Brooklyn around 1919. His name was Alphonse Capone.</p>
<p>Prior to Colosimo, there were many others from Italy, who found themselves in the mid-west, fighting and killing each other to establish some kind of territorial criminal enclaves in and around Chicago: Joe Morici, Mariano Zagone, Rosario Dispenza, Tony Dándrea. Michele Mero, The Genna Brothers and Joseph Aiello. They all came and went by natural or unnatural causes, until Colosimo is murdered, possibly on the instructions of his right-hand man, Johnny Torrio. Who then beget his throne to Capone. And the rest, as they say, is history.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/chicago-mob-story-the-man-who-loved-being-a-gangster"><strong>A Chicago Mob Story: The Man who loved being a Gangster</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The group never referred to itself by this name, Mafia, but tagged themselves, <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-chicago-outfit-overview" target="_blank">The Outfit</a>. They were one of several street gangs that emerged as Chicago grew into the 20th century as a major city in North America.</p>
<p>Then again, other Mafia families across America used similar nicknames such as Shopfront, Office, West Side, Combination, Arm, and never called themselves by the noun which emerged in Sicily, and came to be used, world-wide, to describe something still really never understood in terms of its origin and complexity.</p>
<p>Sometimes referred to as <em>Cosa Nostra</em>, and <em>The Honored Society</em>, defining something that is almost as elusive as this is hard going. Finding a common denominator maybe helps to understand the nexus of a criminal organization where the one given is violence and death.</p>
<p>This perhaps helps us to an understanding of the structure of a force that is the sum of its many parts.</p>
<p>If made men, the ones brought into the society by a system of selection and then ritual induction, are the backbone, the outer limbs are the associates, men who often cannot be formally Mafioso because of their heritage. Their lack of Italian. There are more of these serving a crime family than inducted men.</p>
<p>Each soldier in the Mafia clan has associates working under him. The number can vary from family to family, and in a major city like Chicago, depending on the era, it could be five or ten or even more. Even if it’s not the Mafia, it’s a lot of criminal support. Earning. Bringing in money. The blood that keeps the arteries of Cosa Nostra pumping. Or any mob.</p>
<p>If <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-chicago-outfit-overview" target="_blank">Chicago</a> was not a Mafia town, simply a street gang place, its member’s lineage was irrelevant. Crooks are crooks and recognize each other as such.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10622894892,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="253" alt="10622894892?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>Francis John Schweihs (right) was a criminal who earned his master’s degree in gangsterism on the mean streets of The Windy City. By 1962, he had been arrested as often as his age, which was thirty-two, for crimes ranging from burglary to homicide. He was a well-established hood in the neighborhood.2</p>
<p>Because of his heritage, always the bridesmaid, never the bride, Frank the German, as he came to be known in the underworld, presumably due to his ancestry, developed a special talent for violence that would fill his adult life. He was described by a federal prosecutor as one of the most violent people ever to come before this court.3</p>
<p>One of many deadly fish in a big pond of unlawful opportunity, he was known only to the law and students or followers of the crime genre, until his daughter hit the headlines in a bleak, uncompromisingly grody television reality show.</p>
<p>His career would intersect with characters that sound like bit-players of a Broadway comedy show - <em>Jackie the Lackey, <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/longtime-chicago-mob-boss-john-no-nose-difronzo-dead-at-89" target="_blank">No Nose</a>, The Mooch, Milwaukee Phil, <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/chicago-boss-antonino-accardo" target="_blank">Joe Batters</a>, <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/chicago-soldier-anthony-the" target="_blank">The Ant</a>, <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/chicago-soldier-mad-sam" target="_blank">Mad Sam</a>, Gumba </em>and<em> the Indian</em> - to name only a few. Except these are men who steal and extort and murder for a living.</p>
<p>There seems little doubt that Schweihs was a psychopath, by deed and attitude. Maybe it was the striatum that caused all the problems. Science has recently discovered, using MRI scans, that psychopathic people have a 10% larger striatum, a cluster of neurons in the subcortical basal ganglia of the forebrain, than regular people. This represents a clear biological distinction between psychopaths and non-psychopathic people.4</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>WATCH: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/watch-chicago-mobster-frank-calabrese-jr-s-dad-would-strangle-you"><strong>Chicago mobster’s dad “would strangle you, cut your throat from ear to ear”</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>It’s a place where skills and habits meet. All the wrong kinds in a man like Frank the German.</p>
<p>His first hit may have been in 1962, the year he celebrated a birthday and an arrest record.</p>
<p>At five-eleven and one eighty, there was nothing dramatic about him except his stare. Mug shots in later life show receding grey hair, and a mess with me if you dare stare. He looks like a killer should look, and almost certainly lived up to this image. He often linked with another mob associate, Wayne Brock, a towering ex-football player, and they were allegedly partners in many hits for the Chicago Outfit. On mob wiretaps, law enforcement heard Schweihs referred to by his peers as <em>Hitler</em>.</p>
<p>He was, according to one source, the default killer for the Grand Avenue Crew, lead by <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/chicago-boss-joseph-lombardo" target="_blank">Joey Lombardo</a>. This was one of at least six factions that made up <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-chicago-outfit-overview" target="_blank">Chicago’s mafia</a>. Which, like all similar organizations, also had a default setting: murder. Every dangerous link to them would go. Trunk Music the mob called it. Two in the head, body in the car trunk. Frank and others would make sure the jobs were done, wherever they had to go on their missions.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10622895867,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="494" alt="10622895867?profile=RESIZE_584x" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Mugshot of Joseph Lombardo.</strong></em></p>
<p>The German’s first job is as controversial as the “Flat Earth Theory.” He and another man, sometimes referred to as <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/former-mafia-hitman-frank-cullotta-dies-at-81-story-was-immortali" target="_blank">Frank Cullotta</a> or perhaps it was Anthony Spilotro, travel to California and murder movie star Marilyn Monroe, on the orders of Outfit boss, Sam Giancana. It’s a myth, based on a legend supported by hearsay and dream-walkers. But it gets a gunman who craves obscurity a lot of publicity in the years to come.5</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/from-violent-to-loving-in-a-heartbeat-the-two-sides-of-infamous-c" target="_blank"><strong>From violent to loving in a heartbeat: The two sides of infamous Chicago Outfit mobster Tony Spilotro</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>In a city of killers, there were plenty of them, as Frank earned his spurs.</p>
<p><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-hook-life-and-bloody-crimes-of-feared-chicago-mafia-enforcer" target="_blank">Harry Aleman</a> and Wayne Bock and <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/former-mafia-hitman-frank-cullotta-dies-at-81-story-was-immortali" target="_blank">Frank Cullotta</a> and Sam De Stefano and <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/watch-chicago-mobster-frank-calabrese-jr-s-dad-would-strangle-you" target="_blank">Nicholas Calabrese</a> and Felix Alderisio, and Charles Nicoletti. On and on, an almost never-ending catalogue of evil waiting to be browsed by those who came and went as the boss man of Chicago’s premier criminal cabal.</p>
<p>Never convicted of homicide in a court of law, the one of public opinion has Schweihs as the hit-man in cases so multiple, it’s hard to absorb. They start, maybe in Los Angeles, with the killing of Gerald Covelli in Encino, California, in June 1967.</p>
<p>Part of the Rush Street crew under skipper Ross Prio (Rosario Priolo,) he’d become an informant after arrest and imprisonment on car-theft charges. His testimony helped convict several Outfit’s gang in 1962, and on release, he had moved to live in Encino, California.6</p>
<p>He was killed in June 1967 by a remote-controlled bomb in his car as he drove away from his home. In the same year, Alan Rosenberg is gunned down on St Patrick’s Day and left in his Cadillac on Ainslie Street on Chicago’s North Side.</p>
<p>Richard Cain, an ex-cop shot-gunned to death in December 1973, may have been the next victim.</p>
<p>In 1975, it’s goodbye to Carlo De Vivo. </p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-hook-life-and-bloody-crimes-of-feared-chicago-mafia-enforcer"><strong>The Hook: Life and bloody crimes of feared Chicago Mafia enforcer Harry Aleman</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>In July, 1976, Johnny Roselli disappeared. A long-time member of Chicago’s mob, he had looked after their interest in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His decomposing body was found stuffed into a steel barrel in swampland in Florida. According to an FBI informant, code-named Achilles, he was murdered by Schweihs and another Outfit killer, Vincent Insero. A hit personally approved by Anthony Accardo, then boss of The Outfit. The notorious Joe Batters, who as a young hoodlum had worked under Capone.</p>
<p>March, 1977, it’s the turn of Charles Nicoletti and in 1978, James Catuara.</p>
<p>Allen Dorfman, an official in the Teamsters Union, is shot dead in an elevator in 1983 and then dentist, Burton Isaac in 1984. Charles English goes in 1985.6</p>
<p>These may have been just the tip of the iceberg, although the alleged killing that distinguishes this Chicago North Side gunman from his peers, is the one that destroys not only the victim but also his family, for years to come.</p>
<p>On September 27, 1974, Daniel Seifert, his wife Emma and their little boy, Joe, left their home in Bensenville, near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, and drove to Dan’s business where he ran Plastic-Matics Products at 810 Foster Avenue. In a bland landscape of single-storied brick warehouses, his small factory fronted the highway, next to a car park serving it and adjoining premises. They arrived there just after 8:30 that morning.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10622896868,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="710" alt="10622896868?profile=RESIZE_710x" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Seifert and his two sons.</strong></em></p>
<p>In a previous business venture, he became locked into The Outfit through an investor who turned out to be Alderisio, an underboss to Sam Giancana, boss in the 1960s. As a young man, Daniel had sometimes socialized with some of the Grand Avenue crew, although never crossing paths with the law. When his other partner, Irwin Weiner, sold out his shareholding, Seifert found himself surrounded by gangsters such as Joey Lombardo, Anthony Spilotro and Frank Schweihs, all wanting a piece of the action. Realizing he was getting in too deep, Dan sold out his shareholding and started the new company in 1973.</p>
<p>The mob came after him, burrowing away, looking for opportunities-no show jobs, money laundering, a place to hang out-until Seifert realized he had to do something serious to dislodge them. Approached by the FBI, who were laying down a fraud charge against Lombardo involving the Teamsters Union, he agreed to cooperate with the Feds. The Outfit found out, of course, and then it was only a matter of time.</p>
<p>Which became a Tuesday in the first month of autumn.</p>
<p>That morning, after the family was in the factory office, two masked men, carrying revolvers, burst in, one pushing Emma and her child into a nearby bathroom. She heard the sounds of men yelling and then a gunshot. As she cautiously left the small room, she noticed blood smeared around the front-door frame, and through a window, saw her husband staggering away towards the road.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10622897075,RESIZE_192X{{/staticFileLink}}" width="187" alt="10622897075?profile=RESIZE_192X" /></a>One gunman was now hefting a shotgun, which he fired at Daniel, at least twice, then there was a third shot, and after a few moments, the killers were gone. When Emma and her son found Seifert, he was sprawled on the grass verge, fronting the car park (right).</p>
<p>He had been shot once by a .38 revolver, and three times by a 12-gauge shotgun.7</p>
<p>Although he was only four years old, little Joe remembered, “The trees were brown, the grass was green, the blood was red.”8</p>
<p>He and his brother Nick spent much of their early and adult lives trying to accept and come to terms with their father’s murder. Growing up, the elder son had idolized Lombardo, who he looked upon as an uncle. The family thought so much of the gangster, they named their youngest boy after him.</p>
<p>Their mother and sister also struggled for years with the sudden violence that came into their lives from such an unexpected source.</p>
<p>In fear of their lives, Emma never confirmed her belief that the killer of her husband was at one time a close family friend.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10622901077,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="177" height="181" alt="10622901077?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>In 2007, following a major Department of Justice investigation, code named <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/chicagos-family-secrets" target="_blank">Operation Family Secrets</a>, that brought down fourteen of The Outfit, for racketeering and related crimes, including 18 previously unsolved murders, Joey Lombardo was found guilty of the murder of Daniel Seifert.</p>
<p>Nicknamed <em>Lump</em> or <em>Joey the Clown</em>, Lombardo would die in a Colorado prison at 90 from throat cancer. Schweihs, who was perhaps the other gunman that Tuesday, was in hospital during this trial period and had yet to face his jury of peers.9</p>
<p>Nick Calabrese, an Outfit member who triggered the government’s attack on the Chicago mob, claimed that one of their killers, a man called John Fecarotta, had told him Lombardo and Schweihs murdered Daniel Seifert. Ironically, Fecarotta would be killed by Calabrese. One of fourteen, he had admitted carrying out when giving evidence against his former gang members.</p>
<p>Frank the German (right), who it seemed beat everything except his health, would die in Thorek Memorial Hospital, on Chicago’s upper north side, under guard, in July 2008 of complications from lung cancer and a brain tumor. He was seventy-seven, and had been due to go on trial in October of that year facing charges as part of the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/chicagos-family-secrets" target="_blank">Family Secrets prosecution</a>, that included taking part in the ambush hits on federal witnesses Daniel Seifert in Bensenville in 1974 and Emil Vaci in Phoenix in 1986.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10622901287,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="300" alt="10622901287?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>Frank’s daughter, Norah, appeared on a television reality series called “Mob Wives Chicago.” With an ex-husband who was a connected bookie and a nephew of an Outfit boss, she was obviously well qualified for the part in a follow-on to a similar series examining the wives and families of New York’s Mafia. It was, it seems, about as low as junk television can go. In two of America’s major cities, the ghosts of mob bosses were no doubt grinding their teeth and whatever else a revenant might do under the circumstances.</p>
<p>Sigmund Freud, the renowned Austrian psychoanalyst, wrote about the death instinct and the human proclivity towards destruction and self-destruction. In an organization like The Outfit, it manifested itself through men like Schweihs.10</p>
<p>Did he live on a border between the enigma of life and death, or was he essentially only a vacuum, someone born to kill but fulfil no other purpose?</p>
<p>We know simple truths. Occam’s Razor, the concept that generally, the obvious solution is the right one, suggests The German in America was nothing more than a version of evil we all hope, in the safety of our mundane lives, never to cross paths with, under any circumstance.</p>
<p><em>I acknowledge as a source of information, The American Mafia website hosted by Tom Hunt at <a href="https://www.onewal.com/about/">https://www.onewal.com/about/</a></em></p>
<ol>
<li><em><a href="https://themobmuseum.org/blog/the-chicago-mob-vs-chicago-street-gangs/">https://themobmuseum.org/blog/the-chicago-mob-vs-chicago-street-gangs/</a></em></li>
<li><em>starcasm.net/did-chicago-mob-wives-cast-member-nora-schweihs-dad-frank-schweihs-</em></li>
<li><em><a href="https://ipsn.org/">https://ipsn.org/</a> FBI records show he was born February 3, 1932. Chicago PD claim 1930 the year of his birth.</em></li>
<li><em><a href="https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-have-established-a-key-biological-difference-between-psychopaths-and-normal-people/">https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-have-established-a-key-biological-difference-between-psychopaths-and-normal-people/</a></em></li>
<li><em>Crypt 33: The Stunning Never Before Seen Account of the Death of Marilyn Monroe. Adela Gregory. Milo SperiglioKensington Publishing Corp., 2012.</em></li>
<li><em>http://gangsterbb,net>threads.uberthreads.</em></li>
<li><em>Chicago Tribune. 28 September, 1974. Page 131.</em></li>
<li><em>Chicagomagazine.com/chicago-magazine/May2009/in-the-name-of-the-father.</em></li>
<li><em><a href="https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2007/october/famsecrets_100107">https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2007/october/famsecrets_100107</a></em></li>
<li><em><a href="https://www.researchgate.xn--netpublication-7p3h">https://www.researchgate.net›publication</a> 342610778_SIGMUND_FREUD_AN_PSYCHOAN</em></li>
</ol>
<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/the-chicago-outfit-overview">Chicago Outfit section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/about-gangsters-inc">About Gangsters Inc.</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Thom L. Jones & Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Alleged Gangster Disciples charged with murder and racketeering after one killing leads to couple more
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/alleged-gangster-disciples-charged-with-murder-and-racketeering-a
2022-06-20T16:14:48.000Z
2022-06-20T16:14:48.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10583631891?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>Five alleged members of the Gangster Disciples in Georgia were charged last week with murder and racketeering related to the gangland killings of three people, as well as drug trafficking and obstruction of justice.</p>
<p>The Gangster Disciples are a <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs">national gang</a> with roots in Chicago, Illinois, dating back to the 1970s, and are now active in at least 25 states, including Georgia. Among the crimes alleged in this indictment are three gang-related murders triggered by the murder of a Gangster Disciple member.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Revenge</strong></span></p>
<p>After that murder, other Gangster Disciples allegedly tried to identify and retaliate against those responsible for the victim’s death. 33-year-old Philmon “Dolla Phil” Deshawn Chambers, of Atlanta, was allegedly a leading figure within the gang, in charge of the group’s enforcement or “Elimination” team, also known as the E-Team.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/president-obama-gives-gangster-disciples-leader-a-sentence-reduct"><strong>President Obama gives Gangster Disciples leader a sentence reduction</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Despite being the man in charge, Chambers preferred getting his own hands dirty. Or maybe he just didn’t trust his associates to handle business. Because for whatever reason, Chambers allegedly followed Rodriguez Apollo Rucker to his Athens residence where he shot and killed him. Rucker was a relative of a suspect of the first murder.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Cleaning house</strong></span></p>
<p>After learning that police suspected Chambers of Rucker’s murder, Chambers and 27-year-old Andrea “Light Brite” Paige Browner, an alleged member of the “Sisters of the Struggle” or “SOS,” a parallel female component of the Gangster Disciple organization, fled from Georgia to Texas.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/black-organized-crime"><strong>Black Organized Crime: From Nicky Barnes & Frank Lucas to Crips & Bloods</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>In order to cover up his crime, Chambers allegedly ordered that fellow gang members Derrick Ruff and Joshua Jackson, whom he suspected of cooperating with law enforcement, be killed.</p>
<p>Alleged E-Team member Lesley “Grip” Chappell Green and alleged fellow Gangster Disciples members Shabazz Larry “Lil L” Guidry and Robert “Different” Maurice Carlisle allegedly shot and killed Ruff and Jackson and left their bodies in a storage unit in Lawrenceville, Georgia, where they were discovered four months later.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs" target="_blank">Street Gangs section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/about-gangsters-inc">About Gangsters Inc.</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Rochester Mafia hitman pleads guilty to escape from halfway house when he had less than 1 year to serve
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-hitman-pleads-guilty-to-escape-from-halfway-house
2022-05-20T18:35:52.000Z
2022-05-20T18:35:52.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10503541474?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>Imagine being locked up since the early 1990s. As 2022 rolls around you are nearing the end of your sentence and stay at a halfway house. Just one more year to go. Would you do the year or would you make a run for it and become a wanted man? Rochester mob hitman Dominic Taddeo felt the fugitive lifestyle was the best choice for him.</p>
<p>Taddeo pleaded guilty on Tuesday to an <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-family-hitman-escapes-from-federal-custody-in-flo" target="_blank">escape</a> from a federal halfway house in Orlando, Florida, at a time, March of this year, when he had less than a year to serve. He vanished after leaving the house for a scheduled medical appointment and made headlines in the United States.</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>It is not every day that a bona fide Mafia assassin escapes from custody and becomes a wanted fugitive after all. He “made his bones” during a volatile period in the Rochester underworld and eventually pleaded guilty to several gangland murders.</p>
<p>It took authorities just one week to capture their runaway prey. Taddeo was <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-family-hitman-caught-after-escaping-from-federal" target="_blank">arrested</a> in Miami. His failed escape means he now faces 5 extra years in prison when he is sentenced.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Institutionalized</strong></span></p>
<p>The question on everyone’s mind is: Why did he do this?! Only he knows.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-time-i-hurt-mobster-henry-hill-s-feelings" target="_blank"><strong>The Time I Hurt Mobster Henry Hill’s Feelings</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Did he have some business to attend to that couldn’t wait? Was it worth risking 5 more years behind bars for? Or did he fear being out and about? At 63 years and after several decades behind bars, he is alien to our current society. With smartphones and social media dominating people’s lives how is he supposed to fit in?</p>
<p>Perhaps, he felt a cell would be a better fit. Institutionalized, it is called. Maybe he will share his reasons one of these days, now that he has the entire nation’s attention. </p>
<p><iframe title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/293YCA1Llko" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">Organized Crime in North America section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/about-gangsters-inc">About Gangsters Inc.</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
No Way Out: The Life and Death of Mafia Killer Mario Prestifilippo
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/no-way-out-the-life-and-death-of-mafia-killer-mario-prestifilippo
2022-05-02T07:49:49.000Z
2022-05-02T07:49:49.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10453815478?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><em>“For the world is Hell and men are, on the one hand, the tormented souls and, on the other, the devil in it.”</em> - <strong>Arthur Schopenhauer</strong></p>
<p>He had not reached thirty when he died, and although he crammed a lot into his brief life, it was all the wrong stuff. In a playhouse of madness where all the players outdid themselves in their levels of depravity, he had a starring role that lasted over half a decade. A killer who never had time for the luxury of guilt. Years of lead and death to all the targets his Mafia chiefs pointed out. Police officers, magistrates, politicians, a doctor, an old man in the street. No one is safe from the Kalashnikov he brandished like a club of power. And lots of men of the Mafia went down as well. Maybe fifty or more victims between 1980 and 1987.</p>
<p>If sorrow is cold like a winter night, just as long and no way out, and death is black like a raven’s wing, this <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Mafia</a> hitman from Palermo was a full realization of just how dangerous it is to be a terminator working for men who treated truth, and conscience and loyalty with as much fealty as they showed for a stray dog scavenging in an alley. Everything he did counted for nothing when he became too influential and a perceived threat to men who were even more deadly than he was.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10453816288,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="315" alt="10453816288?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>Mario Giovanni Prestifilippo (right) was born on December 7, 1958 and died September 29, 1987. This much we know for a fact.</p>
<p>Almost everything we perceive about his Mafia life comes from the testimony of informants, who came out from the cold in the 1980s and 1990s. Although tried and convicted for multiple murders, they killed him before any wheel of justice could turn his acts into reparation though sentence.</p>
<p>Tall and slim, his long hair tied in a knot, he was born in Ciaculli and grew up a normal young man. His friends called him by his nickname, <em>Mariuzzu</em>. Good grades at school, intelligent, personable, but his fate was destined at birth. His father, Giovanni, was a Mafia capo, or boss, of the Croceverde Giardini Mafia family, a suburb in the south-east of Palermo. He and his father, Salvatore, were involved in the Mafia war of the early 1960s. It was a road Mario had no choice but to follow, it seems.</p>
<p>The biological family owned citrus orchards that also doubled as a hiding place for heroin labs and as a graveyard for many of the crime family’s victims. His was to be a life of crime, and he started his apprenticeship as an armed robber, targeting banks and betting shops in the Corso dei Mille area to the south of Palermo central district towards the end of the 1970s.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-two-doctors-of-corleone" target="_blank"><strong>The Two Doctors of Corleone</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>All four sons of Giovanni become part of Palermo’s Mafia, a dozen or more clans spread across the city and suburbs, which had been their breeding ground for generations. Many become part of a co-operative of power that becomes known as <em>The Corleonesi</em>.</p>
<p>The inexorable rise to power of <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-boss-toto-riina-dead-at-87" target="_blank">Salvatore Riina</a> from a Mafia enforcer in the small, provincial town of Corleone, to the boss of all bosses on the island of Sicily, is made possible because of a group of men he called his <em>canazzi da catena</em>. His chain dogs. Death squads made up of Mafia soldiers and sometimes captains from different families. Their names crop up, over and over again, in investigations and reports and newspaper articles that cover the endless murders that stretch across the late 1970s into the early 1990s. The most tumultuous years in the history of <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Sicily’s Cosa Nostra</a>.*</p>
<p>Prestifilippo is one name that shows up repeatedly.</p>
<p>Giovanni Falcone, a judge murdered on Riina’s orders in 1992, claimed, “The real strength of <em>The Corleonesi</em> is their almost complete control of the providence of Palermo. They’ve got men everywhere and we don’t know them. That allows them to have at their disposal a real and proper ghost army which arrives in the city, shoots and leaves undisturbed.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10453818274,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="300" alt="10453818274?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>Giovanni Brusca, one of them, remembers that when his boss Riina (right) would talk about killings, he would refer to it as “another big bang.” There were so many of them. And Mario Prestifilippo was there so many times, pulling the trigger.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/mafia-math-calculating-italian-organized-crime-s-illicit-income" target="_blank"><strong>Mafia Math: Calculating Italian organized crime’s illicit income</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>On September 10, 1981, along with six others, he ambushed and killed Vito Levolella as he waited in his car for his daughter to finish her driving lessons. It’s about eight-thirty in the evening. He had parked in the Zisa quarter of Palermo, on Piazza Principe di Camporeale. A senior detective in the carabinieri, he was investigating a drug trafficking ring in the Kalsa, a district on the city’s waterfront, headed by Mafioso Tommaso Spadara, and getting too close for comfort. Levolella may have been the first police officer Prestifilippo murdered.**</p>
<p>Mario’s favorite weapon was allegedly a .38 caliber revolver, especially for the up close and personal stuff like the time he shot dead another officer, Calogero Zucchetto, on November 14, 1982.</p>
<p>Zucchetto, a member of the state police, stopped late in the evening at the Collica Bar on Via Notarbartolo, in Palermo, and went inside for a sandwich. As he returned to his Renault, parked nearby, two men on a motorbike drew up alongside him and the pillion passenger shot the detective five times in the head. One killer was almost certainly Prestifilippo, although the law convicted no one for the killing. The other one was allegedly Giuseppe Greco, another top killer for Riina.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/three-good-men-the-second-one-antonino-cassara" target="_blank"><strong>Three Good Men. The Second One: Antonino Cassara.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>These were possibly the first two police officers that died at the hand of Prestifilippo and his gang. There would be more in the years ahead.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10453818854,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="300" alt="10453818854?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>Zucchetto had been investigating the mob in Ciaculli. A semi-rural suburb on the outskirts of Palermo. Prestifilippo and Giuseppe Greco (on right photo that is allegedly him) were the street leaders of the clan, although officially within the Mafia, it was recognized that Michele Greco (a distant relative of Giuseppe) was the official boss. Branches of the Greco family had ruled the Mafia in this area since the late 1800s, or even earlier.</p>
<p>1981 was a busy year in the life of a mob killer.</p>
<p>Among his other known victims were Stefano Bontade in April and Salvatore Inzerillo in May. Two powerful and allied Mafia chiefs of Palermo, Riina, wanted them dead and out of the way so he could continue his slaughter in what became another Mafia war. At least the third in the twentieth century.</p>
<p>Early in the evening of November 6, 1981, Sebastiano Bosio and his wife, Rosaria Patania, were leaving an office building on Via Simone Cuccia in Palermo, when a man stepped out of the shadows and killed the doctor, who was head of vascular surgery at the Civic Hospital. Shooting his victim six times with a revolver, before he disappeared into the night, the doctor’s wife saw his face clearly.</p>
<p>He had, she reported later to Judge Falcone, “an icy look, cold, icy eyes.” She identified the gunman as Mario Prestifilippo.</p>
<p>He and his killers murder the head of the Sicilian Communist Party, Pio La Torre, on April 30, 1982. Along with his bodyguard, they are killed in their car in a Palermo street. La Torre was instrumental in introducing into the Sicilian parliament a bill that would have long-lasting consequences, all of them bad, for the Mafia.</p>
<p>On December 25, Prestifilippo is part of a gang of shooters who kill two Mafiosi, kidnap two and accidentality kill an old man, Onofrio Valve, standing on the Via Lanza, in Bagheria, a city to the south of Palermo.</p>
<p>A botched ambush that went wrong, the gunmen still manage to get their targets. Eight months later, in August, 1982, another squad shoots dead Paolo Giaccone, a forensic specialist and pathologist, as he arrives at his office at the Villa Sofia Hospital in Palermo. He had identified a fingerprint found at the scene of the shootings as that of Giuseppe Marchese, a member of the Corso Dei Mille Mafia, and although under pressure, had refused to alter his testimony. His murder, in front of his workplace, was seen as a warning by the Mafia to those who opposed it.</p>
<p>The shooters were Salvatore Rotolo and Prestifilippo.</p>
<p>A month on, the Mafia claims their most important victim, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the Prefect of Palermo. He had been at the job for just four months and two days. The number one police officer on the island, and they shot him and his wife and bodyguard into bloody rags late in the evening of September 3. Mario is there along with Giuseppe Greco, their Kalashnikov's echoing through the night as six or more killers converge on the general's car.</p>
<p>August, 1985, Mario is one of a team who ambush and murder Ninni Cassarà, a senior officer of The Palermo Flying Squad, along with his bodyguard as they arrive at the commissioner’s apartment building.</p>
<p>A month earlier, on July 25, Prestifilippo, along with Agostino Marino Mannoia and Giuseppe Greco, gun down police commissioner Giuseppe Montana of the Palermo Flying Squad.</p>
<p>About two months later, Giuseppe Greco is himself the victim of his own gruppo di fuoco hit squad. Known to his fellow Mafiosi as “Little Shoe,” he was perhaps the worst of the worst in the hit men hierarchy of <em>The Corleonesi</em>, to the point his own father disowned him on his death-bed. A man with a lot of charisma, “Shoe” inspired many of the young men of honor in his own and other Mafia families.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/in-search-of-the-corleonesi-how-the-mafia-changed-forever" target="_blank"><strong>In search of the Corleonesi: How the Mafia changed forever</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Believing himself bigger and better than his bosses, especially Riina, he made the fatal mistake of boasting about his power and fame within the organization.</p>
<p>Joseph Conrad once said, “Thinking is the enemy of perfection.” Greco thought too much about how perfect he was, and then he was gone. Sometime in September, two of his closest aides, Vincenzo Puccio and Giuseppe Marchese, shot him dead in his own house, and he became one of the many who disappeared during the war and the years that followed. When the Mafia kill, they either leave the bodies on display, or hide them. It’s all about politics and control.</p>
<p>Riina spread the word he had fled to America to escape the law. No one knows where his body is. Maybe in a citrus orchard in Ciaculli? Prestifilippoo takes over the running of the crime family, while the titular boss, Michele Greco, is in hiding from the law.</p>
<p>Mario is frequently in Bagheria, a town of 50,000, towards the end. His big boss, Riina, visited the area often, especially to lunch at a famous seafood restaurant, Francu ’u Piscaturi, on the nearby beach of Santa Flavia. Here, he would meet his associates and killers and discuss the next “big bang” over shrimps and lobsters and pasta and lots of red sauces. Red, the same color that would stain roads, and footpaths and walls and car interiors and bodies. Most of all, bodies.</p>
<p>The great Mafia War of the 1980s created lots of them. Some sources suggest over a thousand. Most of them are in or around <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Cosa Nostra</a>. Killers like Greco and Prestifilippo worked hard to fill their quotas.</p>
<p>The victims of the Ciaculli gunman died for reasons as diverse as the people they were.</p>
<p>A doctor because he would not give preferential treatment to a Mafia boss. A politician who dared to introduce a tough new law against them into parliament. Another doctor who would not bend to their wishes. An old man who walked outside his house on Christmas morning to see what all the noise was about. Police officers who stood up to them as part of their pledges to fight crime, and mobsters who represented a threat to <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-mafia-boss-toto-riina-dead-at-87" target="_blank">Salvatore Riina</a> and his allies.</p>
<p>One of the many penitents, (police informants,) that testified against Riina and his shadow state, Leonardo Messina, told his handler:</p>
<p>“They took power by slowly, slowly killing everyone … We were kind of infatuated with them because we thought that getting rid of the old bosses we would become the new bosses. Some people killed their brother, others their cousin and so on, because they thought they would take their places. Instead, slowly, (<em>The Corleonesi</em>) gained control of the whole system. … First they used us to get rid of the old bosses, then they got rid of all those who raised their heads, like Giuseppe Greco ‘Little Shoe’, Mario Prestifilippo and Vincenzo Puccio … all that’s left are men without character, who are their puppets.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-rules-of-the-game" target="_blank"><strong>The Rules of the Game</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>On his last day, Mario Prestifilippo was in Bagheria for some reason, and then heading south on his motorbike in the evening towards Baucina, a commune about 25 kilometers south-east of Palermo.</p>
<p>For months he had been on a mission to stay alive. He had openly criticized the murder of Giuseppe Greco, and even though he had assumed his position as family street boss, he knew his days were numbered.</p>
<p>He maintained a “safe house” here, which was one of several hideouts he used. Not far from the town, taking the old rural highway, he passes by the Enel power station. Dressed in a canvass jacket and blue jeans. A heavy gold chain hung around his neck, under the crash-helmet he wore. The .38 on his hip as always.</p>
<p>Up ahead, he sees the cross-roads and in that last eclectic moment, the moon clears the grey clouds, highlighting the stage where he will be the last act. A pack of gunmen, about ten, waiting in the shadows of the night, blow him off the bike like leaf-blowers blasting their target.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10453817284,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="277" alt="10453817284?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>Riddled with bullets, he ends up sprawled in the dirt, one shoe torn away, helmet still on. One of the killers, Giovanni Drago, confirms the murder by poking a shotgun under the crash-helmet and blowing a hole in the victims throat.</p>
<p>It’s Tuesday, about 7:30 pm, September 29, 1987.</p>
<p>Because he was carrying a driving license in the name of Giovanni Gammauto, it was after midnight before the police final identify him by a fingerprint match.</p>
<p>At the time of Mario’s death, Palermo was the epicenter of The Great Mafia Maxi-Trial which had begun in February 1986. It’s possible Riina wanted him gone in case he was arrested and turned as a government informer. Perhaps the boss is worried about Mario’s ambitions. Then again, maybe his killers were part of some of the losing clans in the war with <em>The Corleonesi</em>. At this point in time, we don’t know the answer.</p>
<p>The leader of the hit squad was almost certainly Drago, who himself had been part of the fire-teams working under Riina. He was a member of the Mafia clan of Brancaccio, numerically, the biggest in Sicily, and very staunch allies of Riina.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/to-kill-a-dream-the-sicilian-mafia-and-the-murder-of-a-priest" target="_blank"><strong>To Kill a Dream</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>On September 30, a pathologist examined the shattered body in the examination room at the autopsy unit of the Institute of Forensic Medicine of the Palermo Polyclinic. Along with doctors and police and judges, Mario’s mother is brought to identify her son, accompanied by one of her daughters. Someone in the group huddled around the body whispered, “This time, the right eyes are crying.”</p>
<p>Dressed in black, the woman stood by the table. She suddenly produced a square of brilliant white cloth, caressing the wounds of her son and then washing her face, screaming, U sangu du miu sangu! “Your blood is my blood.” No Hollywood movie could ever quite match that for the sheer melodrama.</p>
<p>An investigative magistrate who was present, Lorenzo Matassa, later claimed, “ ......that image often comes back to my memory to tell me about Sicily and the ferocity of those days.”</p>
<p>It’s almost impossible to understand the forces that drive a man like Mario Prestifilippo. Attilio Bolzoni, an expert on the Mafia, claimed he was “greedy for money and thirsty for violence.” Another master writer, this one of fiction, says it differently:</p>
<p>He was from the kingship of men who would “make a conscious choice to murder the light in their souls. They never come back from that moment.” ***</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10453817857,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="710" alt="10453817857?profile=RESIZE_710x" /></a><em>Research for this story covers newspaper articles, court documents, books and internet sources. A special thanks to the works of journalist, author, and Mafia expert, Attilio Bolzoni.</em></p>
<p><em>* The terms Mafia and Cosa Nostra- our thing- appear to be interchangeable in Sicily. Originally believed to describe an Americanized version of Mafia, Tommaso Buscetta, arguably the most significant informant during the 1980s, and a major witness at the Palermo Maxi Trial, claimed the term had been in use during his years as a soldier in the organization, following his induction into it during the late 1940s.</em></p>
<p><em>** There are five federal police forces in Italy. The oldest established is the military police, the carabinieri, formed in 1814.</em></p>
<p><em>*** Another Kind of Eden. James Lee Burke. Simon and Schuster, New York, 2021</em></p>
<p><em>The fire-teams that Salvatore Riina had at his disposal during and after the Mafia war of the 1980s comprised the following. There could have been more:</em></p>
<p><em>Giuseppe Greco</em></p>
<p><em>Giuseppe Lucchese</em></p>
<p><em>Mario Prestifilippo</em></p>
<p><em>Antonino Madonia</em></p>
<p><em>Giuseppe Giacomo Gambino</em></p>
<p><em>Agostino Marino Mannoia</em></p>
<p><em>Giovan Battista Pullara</em></p>
<p><em>Salvatore Rotolo</em></p>
<p><em>Giovanni Drago</em></p>
<p><em>Giuseppe Marchese</em></p>
<p><em>Giovanni Brusca</em></p>
<p><em>Leoluca Bagarella</em></p>
<p><em>Antonino Marchese</em></p>
<p><em>Filippo Marchese</em></p>
<p><em>Vincenzo Pucio</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>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
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</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Thom L. Jones & Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Rochester Mafia family hitman caught after escaping from federal custody
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-family-hitman-caught-after-escaping-from-federal
2022-04-05T10:13:30.000Z
2022-04-05T10:13:30.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10263010887?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>U.S. Marshals arrested fugitive Rochester crime family hitman Dominic Taddeo on Monday one week after he had fled federal custody. The 64-year-old convicted killer was apprehended in Hialeah in Miami-Dade County and surrendered without any problems.</p>
<p>Taddeo made national headlines last week when it was reported that he <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-family-hitman-escapes-from-federal-custody-in-flo" target="_blank">had escaped</a> from the halfway house where he was finishing up his sentence for racketeering and several gangland murders in Rochester in the 1980s.</p>
<p>Exactly why the mobster decided to flee is unknown. He was a year away from being released.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>The hunt is on</strong></span></p>
<p>Fugitives are confronted with eager U.S. Marshals hunting them down. In 2021 alone the U.S. Marshals arrested over <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/u-s-marshals-arrest-over-84-000-fugitives-in-2021" target="_blank">84,000 wanted individuals</a>.</p>
<p>Gangsters Inc. interviewed former <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-life-of-a-u-s-marshal-hunting-down-fugitive-mobsters-and-alwa" target="_blank">U.S. Marshal Mike Pizzi</a> about tracking down mobsters who decide to go on the run. Pizzi once told prosecutors that “mob guys don’t jump bail and run away.” When he was proven wrong by Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, the brother of <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family" target="_blank">Colombo family</a> boss <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/legendary-new-york-mafia-boss-carmine-persico-was-the-ultimate-su" target="_blank">Carmine “The Snake” Persico</a>, who decided to go on the lam. “I was wrong but I made it right,” Pizzi concludes.</p>
<p>It took Pizzi and his fellow U.S. Marshals seven years to catch him. “My office was the lead investigation of the case,” Pizzi tells Gangsters Inc. “Persico had an organized crime family behind him and a ton of money to spend hiding. We also suspected that the New England mob was running an underground railroad for fugitive wise guys and something similar to a witness protection program for their members who were on the run. We eventually found him in Hartford, Connecticut.”</p>
<p>For more of Pizzi's stories on fugitive gangsters, read <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-life-of-a-u-s-marshal-hunting-down-fugitive-mobsters-and-alwa" target="_blank">our interview</a>.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">Organized Crime in North America section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/about-gangsters-inc">About Gangsters Inc.</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Rochester Mafia family hitman escapes from federal custody in Florida
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-family-hitman-escapes-from-federal-custody-in-flo
2022-04-01T14:04:14.000Z
2022-04-01T14:04:14.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10254819500?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>A deadly Mafia hitman for the Rochester crime family escaped from federal custody in Florida on Monday. 64-year-old Dominic Taddeo (photo above) was recently moved to a residential halfway house after doing time in a medium-security prison. He admitted killing three mob rivals in a gangland war in the 1980s.</p>
<p>The Bureau of Prisons website lists Taddeo’s current status as “Escaped On: 03/28/2022”. A highly unusual status, to say the least. Unusual because we don’t often see ageing mobsters escape from prison. But especially since his release date was just one year away and his time at the halfway house was to get him ready for his return to society.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/prison-breaks-from-mobsters-and-hitmen-to-serial-killers-and-drug" target="_blank"><strong>Prison Breaks - From mobsters and hitmen to serial killers and drug lords: The men who escaped from jail</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>“Records show that Taddeo went to an approved medical appointment on March 28 and did not return. Information was not immediately available about the security for the appointment,” the <a href="https://eu.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2022/04/01/dominic-taddeo-notorious-rochester-ny-mob-hitman-escapes-federal-custody-florida/7237703001/" target="_blank">Democrat and Chronicle reports</a>.</p>
<p>He was denied a compassionate release from prison in 2021 because of his violent history involving the Rochester crime family. Taddeo felt he earned it due to health issues like hypertension and obesity, which made him vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prosecutors and the judge disagreed.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Rochester mob war</strong></span></p>
<p>As a hitman for the Rochester mob, Taddeo murdered three men in the early 1980s. He shot to death Nicholas Mastrodonato, Gerald Pelusio, and Dino Tortatice. However, prosecutors would not find out until an informant told them about it.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/knowing-the-way-to-san-jose-the-mafia-family-of-san-jose" target="_blank"><strong>Knowing the Way to San Jose: The Mafia family of San Jose</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Taddeo was also involved in two separate failed hit attempts on Rochester Mafia family capo Thomas Marotta during the internecine mob war between two factions within the Rochester family. He hit Marotta with six shots from a .22-caliber as the mob captain left an apartment in April 1983. Miraculously, Marotta survived.</p>
<p>In November of that year, Taddeo did a second attempt. This time he fired ten bullets into Marotta. Again, the mob leader survived.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>On the lam</strong></span></p>
<p>Wily as a fox, Taddeo had vanished in 1987 after making bail on federal firearm charges. Using dozens of aliases, he moved around a lot and stayed on the run for two years. He was arrested in 1989 and pleaded guilty in 1992 to racketeering charges that included the three Mafia slayings.</p>
<p>He was sentenced to 54 years in prison.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>INTERVIEW: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-life-of-a-u-s-marshal-hunting-down-fugitive-mobsters-and-alwa" target="_blank"><strong>The life of a U.S. Marshal: Hunting down fugitive mobsters and always staying one step ahead of cunning gangsters</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Now, this old school shooter is out again. Impatient as he was, he could not wait one year until his release. Apparently, he had some pressing business to attend to. One can only wonder what he’s up to and where he’s at.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE</strong> - April 5, 2022: <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/rochester-mafia-family-hitman-caught-after-escaping-from-federal" target="_blank">Taddeo was arrested</a> by U.S. Marshals on April 4, 2022.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">Organized Crime in North America section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
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</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Former mob hitman crashes into liquor store, has drink and cigar, then punches cop
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/former-mob-hitman-crashes-liquor-store-has-drink-and-cigar-then-p
2022-01-10T15:46:32.000Z
2022-01-10T15:46:32.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9997486079?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>The beginning of 2022 ushered in many of the same old New Year’s resolutions. Some people want to exercise more, others want to meditate or do yoga. A lot of folks want to stop smoking. Then there are a select few who never stopped celebrating New Year’s Eve. Like former mob hitman John Bacigalupo.</p>
<p>54-year-old Bacigalupo allegedly crashed his car into a Stoneham, Massachusetts, liquor store, on Saturday, got out and smashed the store’s windows. After entering the store he got himself a beer, smoked a cigar, and ate a bag of chips. To top it off he then hit a police officer who arrived at the scene.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9997486896,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9997486896?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a>Quite the way to enter the second week of 2022!</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Sipping a Budweiser and opening a bourbon</strong></span></p>
<p>“Bagicgalupo sipped from a Budweiser and opened a bottle of bourbon while inside, and was standing at the front of the store when police arrived,” the store owner told <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/01/08/metro/man-once-convicted-mob-slaying-96-arrested-after-crashing-car-into-stoneham-liquor-store-police-say/" target="_blank">the Boston Globe</a>. After he attacked one of the cops, they had to taser him before they were able to take him away for booking.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9997488869,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9997488869?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Casually eating some chips.</strong></em></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Mafia murder</strong></span></p>
<p>In 2001 Bacigalupo was convicted of the murder of alleged mob muscle Robert Nogueira and the attempted murder Vincent “Gigi” Portalla and Charles McConnell outside a Revere nightclub in November 1996.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9997489865,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9997489865?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="588" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Cheers to the weekend!</strong></em></p>
<p>His conviction was overturned in 2009.</p>
<p>Bagicgalupo was charged with breaking and entering, assault and battery on a police officer, larceny, two counts of malicious destruction of property and resisting arrest.</p>
<p>Maybe he should try some yoga?</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England Patriarca crime family section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Coney Island West End Enterprise hitman sentenced to 32 years for murder and extortion of public works
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/coney-island-west-end-enterprise-hitman-sentenced-to-32-years-for
2021-12-01T13:44:15.000Z
2021-12-01T13:44:15.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9867729262?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>A member of Brooklyn street gang West End Enterprise was sentenced to 32 years behind bars on Monday. 35-year-old Michael Liburd (photo above) had pleaded guilty on November 18 to racketeering conspiracy, which included a 2016 murder and extortion of public works employees.</p>
<p>Liburd was known on the streets as “Mike Mike” or “Mitty”. The gang he was a part of, the West End Enterprise, was composed of individuals residing in and around the Sea Rise Apartments, the Gravesend Houses and Surfside Gardens, also known as the “Mermaid Houses,” located in Coney Island. </p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>“Sex Money Murder”</strong></span></p>
<p>Gang members committed multiple crimes, including the extortion of public works employees at a Brooklyn construction site, violent robberies, witness intimidation and retaliatory shootings against members of rival gang “<a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sex-money-murder-the-violent-rise-and-fall-of-deadly-bronx-gang-i" target="_blank">Sex Money Murder</a>”. </p>
<p>All this violence resulted in the January 17, 2016 murder of Antwon Flowers. Liburd murdered Flowers in retaliation for the victim’s purported role in the killing of a West End Enterprise leader the previous day. </p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sex-money-murder-the-violent-rise-and-fall-of-deadly-bronx-gang-i" target="_blank">Sex Money Murder</a>: The violent rise and fall of deadly Bronx gang ingrained in New York underworld’s history</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>As captured on surveillance video, Liburd and other gang members followed Flowers as he exited the Mermaid Houses, at which point, he pulled out a gun and shot Flowers in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Liburd’s co-defendant Maurice Washington was previously sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment for his role in the racketeering conspiracy and murder.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs" target="_blank">Street Gangs section</a> or <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/black-organized-crime" target="_blank">Black organized crime</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
Gangster Disciples hitman and regional chief enforcer convicted of several stone-cold murders
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangster-disciples-hitman-and-regional-chief-enforcer-convicted-o
2021-11-06T06:29:04.000Z
2021-11-06T06:29:04.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9773340098?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>An enforcer for the Gangster Disciples operating in Tennessee was convicted Wednesday of racketeering charges, including murder and other violent crimes. 35-year-old Brandon Durell Hardison, who goes by the nicknames “Creep” and “Creeper da Reeper,” was one of the group’s premier hitman.</p>
<p>Hardison was a member of a Gangster Disciples set called the “Clarksville deck,” and committed various crimes on behalf of the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs" target="_blank">gang</a>, including shootings, attempted murders, and murders. According to prosecutors, “Hardison conspired to participate in the affairs of the Gangster Disciples, a violent criminal gang founded in Chicago and now active in numerous states across the United States, including Tennessee.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gang-rules-growing-up-inside-the-la-gang-life" target="_blank"><strong>Gang Rules: Growing up inside the LA gang life</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>They describe the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs" target="_blank">Gangster Disciples</a> as “a highly organized enterprise, operating under the national leadership of a corporate board-style group that was responsible for gang decisions at a national level, and the state and regional leadership of “governors” and other subordinate gang members, who were responsible for the gang’s activities in specific geographic regions.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9773340474,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="300" alt="9773340474?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>Becoming a regional chief enforcer</strong></span></p>
<p>To reach such a dominant position in the underworld, an organization needs muscle and firepower. Hardison provided it in plenty. On January 6, 2012, he murdered a Gangster Disciples’ associate for failing to repay a drug debt. He then shot and killed the man’s girlfriend, who was a witness to the murder, to prevent her from talking to law enforcement. He then enlisted other Gangster Disciples members to dispose of the murder weapon.</p>
<p>Following these murders, Hardison was rewarded with a promotion. He was made a regional chief enforcer and a member of their notorious hitman group called the “Blackout Squad.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/president-obama-gives-gangster-disciples-leader-a-sentence-reduct" target="_blank"><strong>President Obama gives Gangster Disciples leader a sentence reduction</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Hardison and several other gang members also plotted to assault members of a rival gang. On September 26, 2012, he participated in a shooting of residence belonging to a member of the Bloods gang in Clarksville, Tennessee. Additionally, on November 3, 2012, Hardison and other gangsters shot and killed a member of the Bloods gang inside a nightclub in Clarksville, Tennessee.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Business</strong></span></p>
<p>These killings weren’t committed just for the sake of it. They were to protect the criminal enterprise and expand its lucrative illicit activities, such as drug trafficking. Hardison is the last of 12 defendants indicted by a grand jury in this investigation against the Gangster Disciples. Five Gangster Disciples were previously convicted after trial in April 2019, of RICO conspiracy, drug trafficking, and other offenses. Six other members had previously pleaded guilty.</p>
<p>Hardison faces life in prison for his deadly crimes.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/street-gangs" target="_blank">Street Gangs section</a> or <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/black-organized-crime" target="_blank">Black organized crime</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>
“He feared nothing.” - Daughter of Mafia boss Carmine Galante talks about her infamous father
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/he-feared-nothing-daughter-of-mafia-boss-carmine-galante-talks-ab
2021-09-13T14:31:30.000Z
2021-09-13T14:31:30.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9562638694?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>New York Mafia boss Carmine Galante was one of the most ruthless mobsters in the world. But he was also a loving husband and doting dad. His daughter Angela talked about her father and what it was like growing up with a man aiming to take over the underworld.</p>
<p>“My dad told me a story once,” Angela told the producers of documentary series Narco Wars: The Mob. “His father tried to sell him. He was so appalled. I'm sure that this made him get into the wrong company.”</p>
<p>She believes it also gave her father a mindset that helped him overcome any obstacle he faced in the violent environment he moved in. “Even in the early stages he feared nothing, and I think that that was a big part of him becoming what he was and who he was.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Muscle & boxing in the basement</strong></span></p>
<p>Galante got into trouble at an early age. By the time he was a teenager, he led his own gang on New York’s Lower East Side. Petty gang crimes led to a career in bootlegging and connections to powerful figures in the Mafia.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-shoot-out-on-troutman-street-the-mafia-at-war" target="_blank"><strong>The Shoot-Out on Troutman Street: The Mafia at War</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>He was primarily active as an enforcer. At 5’ 5” tall, some people might not see the brute force that Galante was capable of. Angela: “He was stocky, but it wasn't fat, he was all muscle. And he had a punch that you wouldn't believe. He put up one of those punching bags in the basement and I used to watch him and it would just blow my mind. He was so fast, so strong. When he hit you, he hit you.”</p>
<p>By now, Galante had established himself as a capable and reliable hitman. He did contract murders for some of the biggest names in the New York underworld of the 1930s and 1940s. Among them Vito Genovese, who allegedly ordered the death of anti-fascist newspaper publisher Carlo Tresca.</p>
<p>Tresca was shot to death, allegedly, by Galante in front of his office in Manhattan on January 11, 1943. Galante was arrested as a suspect, but no charges were ever brought against him or any one else.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9562640066,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9562640066?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="200" /></a>Montreal business</strong></span></p>
<p>Galante was now moving among the elite of the underworld. Powerful bosses relied upon his areas of expertise. Chief among them, Joseph Bonanno, the leader of the <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family" target="_blank">Mafia family</a> Galante had become a member of and would one day come to lead himself.</p>
<p>In the 1950s, Bonanno sent Galante to <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-mafia-of-montreal-a-short" target="_blank">Montreal</a>, Canada to oversee the family’s drug business there. Angela has fond memories of these trips. “Montreal to me was a very glamorous city,” she says. “At that time it never felt like anything but a vacation to me. In [my father’s] passport it said ‘restaurant owner’ as his occupation. So even when I was younger I knew my daddy owned a restaurant in Canada. It never dawned on me ‘Oh this is a great place for dad to bring in his drugs.’ I didn't know any of that.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Secret agent</strong></span></p>
<p>There was a lot she didn’t know. Her father didn’t have a job working 9 to 5 and it was cause for a lot of guesswork. “We were so excited when daddy would come home. Because he wasn't home a lot. I was under the impression that he worked for the CIA or FBI and that he was on these missions.”</p>
<p>Galante did lead the life of a secret agent. Traveling the world, surrounded by beautiful women, driving the fanciest cars, and always looking over his shoulder. In 1957, he accompanied his boss to Palermo, Sicily, where both men attended the infamous meeting of American and Sicilian Mafia bosses at the Grand Hotel et des Palms.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Heroin Don</strong></span></p>
<p>It was at this meeting that the old and new Mafia divided the lucrative heroin trafficking routes and roles each clan would play. Bonanno and Galante would play a significant part in flooding the United States with their product.</p>
<p>“He saw drugs as his opportunity to almost take over the world,” Angela says. “What he did might be wrong, but he excelled at it. He knew that this was gonna be his big shot.”</p>
<p>The heroin pipeline that now flowed from Europe to North America was dubbed the Pizza Connection. This was based on the practice by many of the participants to use pizza parlors as fronts for their drug business. Galante was no different, his daughter says.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9562639701,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9562639701?profile=RESIZE_584x" width="475" /></a>“My father started opening up pizza restaurants. I remember he opened up one not far from my house in Broadway. Why he chose pizza places I'll never know, but it was nice getting free pizza all the time.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/how-the-sicilian-mafia-flooded" target="_blank"><strong>How the Sicilian Mafia flooded the US with heroin</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Besides dope, Galante also began importing Sicilian Mafiosi. He surrounded himself with them, using them as bodyguards. Though he loved and trusted Sicilians and both his parents were from Castellammare del Golfo, he himself was not born there. He was a born and raised New Yorker.</p>
<p>Angela: “My father should have been born on Sicily. That's how Sicilian he was. He trusted the Sicilian people more than he trusted anyone else. Because like the mob, you're all intertwined, you're all family.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>“He had that God complex”</strong></span></p>
<p>The mob might be intertwined and some might even call themselves a family, but in reality they are a business. A cut-throat business, literally. Galante found this out when he was betrayed by his Sicilian bodyguards and allies on July 12, 1979.</p>
<p>After enjoying lunch on an open patio at Joe and Mary's Italian-American Restaurant, Galante was confronted by three men wearing ski-masks. They aimed their guns at the cigar-chomping mob boss and <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/death-in-the-afternoon-the" target="_blank">gunned him down</a>. He died with his cigar still in his mouth. He was 69.</p>
<p>“My mother called me screaming,” Angela recalls. “’They killed him! They killed him! They killed him!’ My mother was destroyed. She was just destroyed, because she loved him. She never stopped loving him. She loved this man. It amazed me, but it was true.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: Death in the Afternoon, The shadow of a Dream: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/death-in-the-afternoon-the" target="_blank"><strong>The Story of Carmine Galante</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>“It was surreal. I don't think he thought he would ever die. He had that God complex. He didn't think anything would ever happen to him. I was very surprised he wasn't killed earlier, much sooner, and that's probably why I was so shocked when he died. Because now I wasn't expecting it anymore, cause it didn't happen for such a long time.”</p>
<p>Looking back on her father’s life and criminal career, Angela thinks his is a true American story. “He followed the American dream. At least what he thought was the American dream: you start at the bottom and work your way up and eventually you're gonna be at the top. He just went about it the wrong way.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family">Bonanno crime family section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
<p> </p></div>
Getting one’s hands bloody - Profile of Camorra Mafia boss Raffaele Mauriello
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/getting-one-s-hands-bloody-profile-of-camorra-mafia-boss-raffaele
2021-09-04T08:33:16.000Z
2021-09-04T08:33:16.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9532880698?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>Raffaele Mauriello is the perfect example of a mobster who worked his way up the chain of command by getting his hands dirty. Well, maybe dirty isn’t the word. Bloody is more apt. Either way, he went from being surrounded by drug fiends to living it up in Dubai with the rich and infamous.</p>
<p>His career was built on dead bodies. Prosecutors have linked him to several, but who knows how many more hits he has under his belt. He raked up a nice body count as part of what was known as the third Scampia vendetta.</p>
<p>Scampia is the notorious Naples neighborhood made famous by the movie and hit television series Gomorra. Its apartment buildings modeled after sails became a popular and lucrative drug market. <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/camorra-overview" target="_blank">Camorra</a> clans have fought over the territory ever since.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: “I’m not crazy” - Profile of </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/i-m-not-crazy-profile-of-camorra-boss-michele-the-madman-zaza" target="_blank"><strong>Camorra boss Michele “The Madman” Zaza</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2011, Fabio Cafasso was shot to death there. Allegedly by Mauriello.</p>
<p>Three years later, in 2014, he allegedly murdered Andrea Castello and Antonio Ruggiero at Casandrino near Naples.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Most wanted</strong></span></p>
<p>Authorities were hot in his trail and issued three warrants for his arrest in September 2018. He is wanted for murder, Mafia association and drug trafficking. Rather than face justice, Mauriello disappeared and became one of Italy’s most wanted gangsters.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: "Camorra dei bimbi" - </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/fugitive-camorra-boss-pasquale-sibillo-captured" target="_blank"><strong>Profile of Camorra boss Pasquale Sibillo</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>By then, Mauriello had moved up the ranks, becoming an important link in the drug trafficking chain of the Amato-Pagano <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/camorra-overview" target="_blank">Camorra</a> clan. Authorities claim he arranged large shipments for the clan. He apparently did this while living in the sunny desert city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.</p>
<p>It was there that police managed to locate and arrest him on August 14, 2021. Just ten days after the arrest of another Camorra boss, <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/camorra-mafia-boss-raffaele-imperiale-arrested-in-dubai" target="_blank">Raffaele Imperiale</a>. The two men reportedly were close. Mobsters got to stick together when in foreign lands, no?</p>
<p>32-year-old Mauriello now faces an extradition back to Italy where he is looking at a long stay at a lodging a lot less luxurious than the one he had in Dubai.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/camorra-overview">Camorra section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
<p> </p></div>
T&A Crips hitman gets 30 years for murdering man who was thought to “disrespect” the gang
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/t-a-crips-hitman-gets-30-years-for-murdering-man-who-was-thought
2021-08-19T11:02:40.000Z
2021-08-19T11:02:40.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9446438664?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>A member of the Trevitt and Atcheson Crips gang known as T&A was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Tuesday. 26-year-old Charles Carson pleaded guilty in February 2020 and admitted to the murder of Quincy Story. Carson shot and killed Story on S. James Road in Columbus, Ohio, on January 24, 2015.</p>
<p>Carson and 18 other members and associates of the T&A Crips gang were charged with a variety of crimes, including murders, attempted murders, drug trafficking, firearms trafficking, witness tampering, robbery, and assault.</p>
<p>The group was named after the Trevitt and Atcheson streets in the King-Lincoln District of Columbus. Most of its members live here. The gang controlled the neighborhood through intimidation, fear and violence. Members were expected to retaliate with acts of violence when their members and associates were disrespected, threatened, intimidated or subjected to acts of violence.</p>
<p>Quincy Story was one such person who was perceived as having disrespected a fallen associate of the T&A subgroup Waun Gang. For that, he had to die. On the streets respect is everything.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Check out the <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/street-gangs" target="_blank">Street Gangs section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>For more news check out the <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc. News feed</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p></div>