Boston - Blog 2.0 - Gangsters Inc. - www.gangstersinc.org
2024-03-28T10:40:23Z
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/Boston
FBI offers $30,000 reward for information leading to arrest of fugitive Boston Chinatown’s Triad hitman
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/fbi-offers-30-000-reward-for-information-leading-to-arrest-of-fug
2021-01-13T13:54:41.000Z
2021-01-13T13:54:41.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/fbi-offers-30-000-reward-for-information-leading-to-arrest-of-fug" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237155686,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237155686?profile=original" /></a>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>Authorities are stepping up their hunt for Hung Tien Pham, a hitman of Boston Chinatown’s Ping On <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/triads-overview" target="_blank">Triad</a>, who is wanted for the brutal execution-style murders of five men at a Chinatown social club in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston" target="_blank">Boston</a>, Massachusetts, 30 years ago this week.</p>
<p>Pham (photo above) was known as a major associate of Asian organized crime at the time of his becoming a fugitive. If he is still alive, he would be 60 years old. He was born in Mong Cai, Quang Ningh Province, North Vietnam. He is a Vietnamese national of Chinese descent and is fluent in Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. At the time of the murders, he was a legal, permanent resident of the United States.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Boston’s Chinatown massacre</strong></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237155897,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237155897?profile=original" /></a>In the early morning hours of January 12, 1991, Hung Tien Pham (right) entered an illegal gambling den located at 85A Tyler Street in Boston, Massachusetts, and allegedly shot six men, execution-style, while they were playing cards. Of the six victims, only one survived the attack, and he subsequently identified Pham, along with Nam The Tham and Siny Van Tran, as the shooters. Six days later, on January 18, 1991, a warrant was issued for Pham’s arrest following his indictment by a grand jury in Suffolk County Superior Court on five counts of murder, one count of armed assault with intent to murder, one count of conspiracy, and one count of carrying a firearm without a license.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ:</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-deadly-battle-for-control-over-new-york-s-chinatown" target="_blank"><strong>The deadly battle for control over New York’s Chinatown</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Following the massacre, it is alleged that Pham left his two children and their mother and drove to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to gamble and then to New York, New York, where he boarded a flight for Hong Kong on February 1, 1991. A federal arrest warrant was issued for Pham on February 15, 1991, by a United States magistrate judge in the District of Massachusetts, charging him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for the crime of murder.</p>
<p>In addition to the quintuple homicide, Pham is also wanted by the Boston Police Department for another murder that occurred on January 8, 1991, four days before the massacre.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>International manhunt</strong></span></p>
<p>After a decade-long international manhunt, Tham and Tran were arrested in China and, following extensive diplomatic negotiations, returned to the United States in 2001. In 2005, Tham and Tran were convicted of murder in Suffolk County Superior Court and are currently serving five consecutive life sentences. Pham remains a fugitive and his last known location was Bangkok, Thailand, in the mid- to late-1990s.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: Asia’s Most Wanted Drug Lord - Profile of</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/asia-s-most-wanted-drug-lord-profile-of-triad-boss-tse-chi-lop-ni" target="_blank"><strong>Triad boss Tse Chi Lop, nicknamed “Brother Number Three”</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Investigators have determined that in the 1980s and early 1990s, Pham was a major associate of Asian organized crime, specifically the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/triads-overview" target="_blank">Ping On crime syndicate</a>, operating in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Toronto, Canada. He also has family in the San Francisco Bay area of California, South Korea, and North Vietnam, giving him various locations to find a hiding place or shelter.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=FBI" target="_blank">FBI</a> is offering a reward of up to $30,000 to anyone who can provide information leading to Pham’s capture and conviction. He should be considered armed and dangerous and an international flight risk. Pham has held a variety of jobs, including but not limited to, a cook, waiter, bicycle repairman, and floor sander. He was also known to be a big spender who liked flashy cars and cognac.</p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AkavBXrjCWw?wmode=opaque" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></p>
<p>The public is being asked to review Pham’s wanted poster which includes new photographs, including an age-progressed photo of him at 60 years old. An international publicity campaign launched this week includes the launch of a webpage on fbi.gov; social media outreach on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; and targeted publicity in the cities to which Pham has been tied. The public can play an active role in helping law enforcement find the subject by sharing links to the website and official social media content.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-chinese-godfather-profile-of-chinese-italian-crime-boss-zhang" target="_blank">The Chinese Godfather</a> - Profile of Chinese-Italian crime boss Zhang “Il Uomo Nero” Naizhong</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>“As alleged, this cold-blooded killer has been on the run for 30 years, and we’re hoping this reward will incentivize anyone with information on Pham’s whereabouts to come forward so we can we bring him to justice for his role in one of the bloodiest massacres in Boston’s history,” said Joseph R. Bonavolonta, special agent in charge of the FBI Boston Division. “The six victims and their families who suffered so much deserve nothing less, and we will not rest until Pham has been held accountable for these horrific crimes.”</p>
<p>“For those of us who were in the Boston area 30 years ago, the massacre is something that cannot be forgotten. Five families lost their loved ones that night, the one surviving victim’s life was changed forever, and an entire neighborhood was traumatized. Boston remembers these lives that were brutally taken. It took years to find Pham’s co-defendants, and we will not rest until Pham is brought to justice and held accountable. There is no statute of limitations on murder. We will not stop looking until we find him,’’ said Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Call the Feds</strong></span></p>
<p>The FBI is offering a monetary reward of up to $30,000 for information leading to the location, arrest, and prosecution of this individual. Anyone with information regarding his whereabouts should take no action themselves but should immediately call the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324), their local law enforcement agency, or their nearest American embassy or consulate. Tips can also be submitted at tips.fbi.gov.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/triads-overview">Triads 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>
<p> </p>
<p> </p></div>
The New England Crime Family
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family
2020-12-12T16:02:02.000Z
2020-12-12T16:02:02.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><strong>Estimate members</strong>: 30<br /> <strong>First Boss</strong>: Frank “Butsey” Morelli<br /> <strong>Primary activities</strong>: Involved in narcotics trafficking, video poker machines, robbery, extortion, loan sharking, gambling.<br /> <strong>Boss</strong>: Carmen DiNunzio<br /> <strong>Acting Boss</strong>: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mobsters-sentenced-to-prison-for-extortion-scheme">Anthony "Spucky" Spagnolo</a> (in prison)</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><strong><span class="font-size-4">ARTICLES:</span></strong></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/homicide-at-rough-point-the-billionairess-and-the-mobbed-up-polic">Homicide at Rough Point: The billionairess and the mobbed up police chief</a><br /> <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/former-mob-hitman-crashes-liquor-store-has-drink-and-cigar-then-p">Former mob hitman crashes liquor store, has drink and cigar, then punches cop</a><br /> <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/mobster-robert-gentile-dies-at-85-takes-secrets-about-isabella-st">Mobster Robert Gentile dies at 85</a>, takes secrets about Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art theft to grave<br /> Never lie to the feds – Profile: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/never-lie-to-the-feds-profile-of-boston-mafia-boss-francis-cadill">Boston Mafia boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mafia-family-s-violent-and-medical-secrets-discussed-in">Patriarca Mafia family’s - violent and medical - secrets</a> discussed in Street Corner Soapbox podcast<br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/former-new-england-mafia-family-capo-gets-66-months-in-prison-for">Former New England mob family capo gets 66 months in prison</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-italian-mafia-irish-gangs-chinese-tongs-bootleggers-gamblers">The Italian Mafia, Irish gangs, Chinese Tongs:</a> Welcome to Gangland Boston<br /> Profile: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-patriarca-mob-family-enforcer-frank-bobo-marrapese-jr">Patriarca mob family enforcer Frank “Bobo” Marrapese Jr.</a><br /> Profile: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-boss-peter-limone-dies-at-age-83">Boston Mafia boss Peter Limone</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-capo-bobby-deluca-admits-conspiracy-in-1992-mur">Bobby DeLuca admits conspiracy in 1992 murder of mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-patriarca-crime-family-capo-anthony-st-laurent-sr">Profile: Capo Anthony "The Saint" St. Laurent Sr.</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/camorra-still-possesses-stolen-rembrandt-art-hunters-say-could-bo">Could Boston heist painting have ended up in Italy with Camorra Mafia?</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mob-boss-frank-salemme-faces-hopeless-day-in-court">Boston mob boss Frank Salemme faces hopeless day in court</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/former-new-england-mob-boss-turned-snitch-francis-cadillac-salemm">Former mob boss Francis Salemme charged with murder of federal witness</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mob-family-capo-turned-snitch-charged-with-lying-about">Bobby DeLuca charged with lying about Boston club owner's murder</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mobsters-sentenced-to-prison-for-extortion-scheme">Boston mobsters sentenced to prison for extortion scheme</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mobster-goes-to-trial-for-hidden-interest-in-million-dolla">Boston mobster goes to trial for hidden interest in multi-million-dollar casino deal</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mobster-sentenced-for-drug-conspiracy">New England mobster sentenced for drug conspiracy</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-bosses-hit-the-streets-war-looming">Boston Mafia bosses hit the streets – War looming?</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/fbi-releases-audio-of-boston-mafia-induction-ceremony">FBI releases audio of Boston Mafia induction ceremony</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-bust-emphasizes-mob-s-decline">New England Mafia bust emphasizes mob’s decline</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian">Joe Barboza: Boston Barbarian</a></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><span class="font-size-3"><strong>VIDEO:</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/video-mafia-link-to-500-million-art-heist-discussed-in-new-episod" target="_blank">Mafia link to $500 million art heist discussed in Mob Talk</a></p></div>
Patriarca Mafia family’s - violent and medical - secrets discussed in Street Corner Soapbox podcast
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mafia-family-s-violent-and-medical-secrets-discussed-in
2020-12-12T15:32:58.000Z
2020-12-12T15:32:58.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mafia-family-s-violent-and-medical-secrets-discussed-in" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237145664,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237145664?profile=original" /></a>By <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a> Editors</p>
<p>Are you ready to listen to some stories about the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England Mafia family</a>? Then you’re in luck! The Street Corner Soapbox is a brand-new podcast presented by co-hosts Rob Falso and Lord Willin and recently sat down with two individuals who shed some light on the secretive world of La Cosa Nostra where omerta ruled supreme.</p>
<p>Falso and Willin are two self-proclaimed cultural outlaws who say they “will be unleashing a true perspective from the darker corners of society with plenty of street sense and comedic relief to balance the positive with the negative.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237146256,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237146256?profile=original" width="161" height="143" /></a>New England mob enforcer</strong></span></p>
<p>One of their first guests is Jerry Tillinghast (right), a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Providence" target="_blank">Providence</a> legend and alleged former mob enforcer. He came to talk about his autobiography “Choices: You Make Em, You Own Em: The Jerry Tillinghast Story”. On the podcast they discuss some of the highlights of the book and Tillinghast gives a riveting perspective on what it was like growing up in the streets of Providence during what some would call “The Golden Age of Organized Crime”. He also talks about befriending <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Gotti" target="_blank">“Dapper Don” John Gotti</a>.</p>
<p><strong><span style="font-size:14pt;">Mafia doctor</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-size:14pt;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237146286,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237146286?profile=original" /></a></span></strong>Another interesting guest is Dr. Barbara Roberts (photo above), who became New England Mafia boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Patriarca" target="_blank">Raymond Patriarca</a>’s cardiologist and even dated alleged future mob boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Manocchio" target="_blank">Louis “Baby Shacks” Manocchio</a>. She wrote a book about her shady patients and connections titled “The Doctor Broad: A Mafia Love Story”.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Listen to the podcasts <a href="https://streetcornersoapbox.com/" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></li>
</ul>
<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>
<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>
<p> </p></div>
“Freddy hated rats” – Meet the hitman who allegedly murdered mob boss Whitey Bulger behind bars
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/freddy-hated-rats-meet-the-hitman-who-allegedly-murdered-mob-boss
2018-10-31T08:47:59.000Z
2018-10-31T08:47:59.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/freddy-hated-rats-meet-the-hitman-who-allegedly-murdered-mob-boss" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237116101,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237116101?profile=original" width="600" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>After dodging bullets throughout his criminal career, Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger ultimately met his demise by being hit with a lock wrapped in a sock. The blows were too much for the 89-year-old as he died behind bars just a few years into a life sentence for racketeering and several murders. The FBI is investigating Springfield Mafia associate Fotios “Freddy” Geas and several other inmates for the murder.</p>
<p>51-year-old <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Geas" target="_blank">Freddy Geas</a> (photo above, left) is serving a life sentence as well, for the gangland killings of Springfield La Cosa Nostra boss – and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-genovese-crime-family" target="_blank">Genovese crime family</a> capo - <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-hit-how-the-genovese" target="_blank">Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno</a> and mob associate Gary D. Westerman in 2003. He already spent several years at Hazelton federal prison in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia when a new inmate by the name of James Bulger was transferred there.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ:</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mob-boss-james-whitey-bulger-killed-inside-federal-prison" target="_blank"><strong>Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger killed inside federal prison</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>General population</strong></span></p>
<p>Despite having been a longtime <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=FBI" target="_blank">FBI</a> informant, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Bulger" target="_blank">Bulger</a> felt safe enough to request he be housed in general population at the prison facility. Perhaps he thought his fame would earn him protection among the violent criminals locked up there.</p>
<p>Within a few hours of arriving, Bulger realized his mistake yesterday. According to multiple reports, multiple inmates confronted the infamous <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston" target="_blank">Boston</a> mob boss in his wheelchair and began beating him to death with a lock in a sock, a preferred weapon behind bars.</p>
<p>First responders were called to the scene for an inmate that was in cardiac arrest. No further details were released by authorities.</p>
<p>People familiar with the investigation told <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/10/30/freddy-geas-suspected-killer-whitey-bulger-didn-like-informants/McRR1z3xV6005dS3H6rTiL/story.html" target="_blank">The Boston Globe</a> “that Bulger was murdered by more than one of his fellow inmates, and that Geas didn’t dispute his role in the killing.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Feared Mafia enforcers</strong></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237115900,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237115900?profile=original" width="200" /></a>Fotios Geas and his younger brother Ty were feared enforcers for the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-springfield-mafia-crew-of-western-massachusetts-a-family-busi" target="_blank">Genovese crime family’s Springfield crew</a>. Both men had a propensity for violence. As a 17-year-old, Ty spent a year behind bars for firing an assault rifle into the air during a high school hockey game. While Fotios, as a 22-year-old, wrecked a car outside a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Springfield" target="_blank">Springfield</a> bar after a fight erupted inside. He also went to prison in 2006 for beating two men with a baseball bat at a strip club.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: Profile:</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-greek-crime-boss-alexandros-angelopoulos" target="_blank"><strong>Greek crime boss "The Greek Escobar" Angelopoulos</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Because of their <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Greece" target="_blank">Greek</a> roots they could never become inducted members of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mafia" target="_blank">Mafia</a>. But as associates they enjoyed the mob’s protection and status on the streets. They were close with <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Arillotta" target="_blank">Anthony Arillotta</a>, who became a made guy in 2003 after he and the Geas brothers had been involved in the shooting of Frank Dabado, a cement union boss in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Bronx" target="_blank">Bronx</a>, on orders from <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Genovese" target="_blank">Genovese family</a> capo <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Nigro" target="_blank">Arthur Nigro</a>.</p>
<p>Their capabilities for mayhem and murder well established, the trio was involved in two underworld slayings in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 2003, Fotios Geas hired a hitman for the execution of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-hit-how-the-genovese" target="_blank">Adolfo Bruno</a>, the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-springfield-mafia-crew-of-western-massachusetts-a-family-busi" target="_blank">Springfield crew</a>’s leader. That same year, Geas also got his own hands dirty when he shot Gary Westerman twice in the head under the pretense the pair was burglarizing a home together.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237117072,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237117072?profile=original" width="380" /></a><em>Photo: Adolfo Bruno (right)</em></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-springfield-mafia-crew-of-western-massachusetts-a-family-busi" target="_blank">The Springfield Mafia Crew of Massachusetts</a>: A Family Business</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>While the Geas brothers were dragging the presumed dead body of Westerman to a freshly dug grave, however, the wounded mob associate turned out to be very much alive and tried to break free. Arillotta and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Fusco" target="_blank">Emilio Fusco</a>, another made member of the crew, then finished him off by beating him with a shovel.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Surrounded by rats</strong></span></p>
<p>We know all these intricate details because several of the men involved in these crimes cooperated with the government. They flipped and testified about the crimes that were committed.</p>
<p>Geas suddenly found himself in court facing both the man who ordered him to commit a murder – Arillotta - and the assassin he had paid to execute the murder contract. “Freddy had called me earlier in the day and told me that Al was definitely going to be there,” the hitman told police. “I killed Al Bruno because I was paid to do it. Freddy Geas is the person who paid me to do it.”</p>
<p>Arillotta’s betrayal hit Geas the hardest. Here was the made man he looked up to. Who schooled him in the ways of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=LCN" target="_blank">La Cosa Nostra</a>. That man had broken and chosen to give him and his brother up to authorities. He was surrounded by rats.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-mob-family-turncoat-returns-to-old-stomping-grounds-in-s" target="_blank">Genovese family turncoat returns to Springfield</a> despite threats on his life</strong></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>“Freddy hated rats”</strong></span></p>
<p>But he was not one of them. “Freddy is a man's man,” Springfield attorney Daniel D. Kelly, who represented the Geas brother, told newspaper <a href="https://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2018/10/freddy_geas_whitey_bulger.html" target="_blank">The Republican</a>. “[He] is a dying breed. After <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-mob-family-turncoat-returns-to-old-stomping-grounds-in-s" target="_blank">Anthony Arillotta</a> flipped, there was a back channel for Freddy to try to persuade him to cooperate too. He didn't even blink an eye. He didn't flinch. He just said no.”</p>
<p>In 2011, the Geas brothers were sentenced to life in prison for murder and racketeering. They took their punishment on the chin without flinching. Inside, though, they were reaching a boiling point.</p>
<p>Was his anger enough to murder mob boss-turned-celebrity “Whitey” Bulger? “He has great disdain for informants,” Kelly <a href="https://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2018/10/freddy_geas_whitey_bulger.html" target="_blank">added</a>. “I'm not saying Freddy did this just because the media says so, I'm just telling you what I know about him.”</p>
<p>“Freddy hated rats,” private investigator Ted McDonough told <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/10/30/freddy-geas-suspected-killer-whitey-bulger-didn-like-informants/McRR1z3xV6005dS3H6rTiL/story.html" target="_blank">The Boston Globe</a>. “Freddy hated guys who abused women. Whitey was a rat who killed women. It’s probably that simple.”</p>
<p>Whether Fotios “Freddy” Geas actually was the man who killed Bulger remains to be seen. The investigation is ongoing and new details will no doubt be revealed in the coming weeks and months.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE - August 20, 2022</strong>: On August 18, Geas was <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/revenge-is-a-dish-best-served-cold-the-men-charged-with-killing-m" target="_blank">officially charged</a> with the murder of James "Whitey" Bulger. <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/revenge-is-a-dish-best-served-cold-the-men-charged-with-killing-m">Revenge is a dish best served cold - The men charged with killing mob boss Whitey Bulger know this all too well</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>
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Former New England Mafia family capo gets 66 months in prison for obstructing murder investigation
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/former-new-england-mafia-family-capo-gets-66-months-in-prison-for
2018-08-30T10:00:00.000Z
2018-08-30T10:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/former-new-england-mafia-family-capo-gets-66-months-in-prison-for" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237110273,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237110273?profile=original" width="420" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Former <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family" target="_blank">New England Mafia family</a> capo Robert DeLuca was sentenced to 66 months in prison in Boston federal court on Tuesday for obstructing a federal investigation into the murder of a Boston nightclub owner in the 1990s.</p>
<p>72-year-old <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=DeLuca" target="_blank">DeLuca</a> pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction of justice and two counts of making false statements in November of 2016. He was charged with lying to federal prosecutors and agents regarding the investigation into the 1993 disappearance of Stephen DiSarro, who operated The Channel, a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston" target="_blank">South Boston</a> nightclub. DiSarro remained missing until March 2016, when authorities discovered his remains behind a mill in Providence, R.I. </p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-italian-mafia-irish-gangs-chinese-tongs-bootleggers-gamblers" target="_blank">The Italian Mafia, Irish gangs, Chinese Tongs</a>: Welcome to Gangland Boston</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2011, DeLuca had agreed to cooperate with federal authorities after his arrest on racketeering charges. But he lied about his knowledge of DiSarro’s disappearance and other mob connected murders. As a result, DiSarro’s remains were not recovered until federal authorities received information from another source in March of 2016 regarding DiSarro’s burial site.</p>
<p>In June 2018, 84-year-old former <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family" target="_blank">New England mob</a> boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Salemme" target="_blank">Francis P. Salemme</a> and 63-year-old Paul M. Weadick were convicted of murdering DiSarro, who, at the time of his death, was a witness to crimes committed by Salemme and Weadick.</p>
<p>DiSarro had been approached by a federal agent and asked to cooperate with federal authorities. At the time, there were several ongoing federal investigations into Salemme and into his connection to The Channel. The crime boss had expressed his concerns to others that DiSarro might cooperate against him.</p>
<p>Salemme and Weadick are scheduled to be sentenced on September 13, 2018.</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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The Italian Mafia, Irish gangs, Chinese Tongs, bootleggers, gamblers, thieves and killers: Welcome to Gangland Boston
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-italian-mafia-irish-gangs-chinese-tongs-bootleggers-gamblers
2018-03-20T17:34:45.000Z
2018-03-20T17:34:45.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-italian-mafia-irish-gangs-chinese-tongs-bootleggers-gamblers" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237095470,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237095470?profile=original" width="600" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>In her latest book <em><a href="http://amzn.to/2IDgDx1" target="_blank">Gangland Boston</a>: A Tour Through the Deadly Streets of Organized Crime</em>, Boston Globe reporter Emily Sweeney details over a century of heists and killings involving the Italian Mafia, the Irish Mob, Chinatown Tongs, and brutal crews. “’Tis a small world!”</p>
<p>“Boston’s underworld is insular, and at times, surprisingly diverse,” Sweeney tells Gangsters Inc. “The criminal element in this city has been represented by many ethnicities. Over the years it’s had Jewish gangsters, Italian mobsters, and Irish gangs. <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian" target="_blank">Mob hitman Joe “The Animal” Barboza</a> was of Portuguese descent and then there were several Polish gangsters, Greeks, even Syrians.” </p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>The Rackets</strong></span></p>
<p>All these groups and characters vied for the same piece of the rackets, of which <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston" target="_blank">Boston</a> had plenty. “All the usual schemes,” Sweeney nods. “<a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Gambling" target="_blank">Gambling</a>, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Drugs" target="_blank">narcotics</a>, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Extortion" target="_blank">extortion</a>, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Loansharking" target="_blank">loansharking</a>, of course bootlegging liquor was big during <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Prohibition" target="_blank">Prohibition</a>, and old-fashioned robberies have never gone out of style. Some of the biggest heists in history have happened here. The Plymouth mail truck robbery of 1962 went unsolved and $1.5 million of stolen cash is still unaccounted for. The Brinks Robbery of 1950 was another huge score, and less than $60,000 of that stolen money was ever recovered. The rest disappeared without a trace.”</p>
<p>Sweeney: “That’s the one thing that really intrigues me about crime in Boston: The mystery of whatever became of the money that was stolen in the Brinks Robbery and other big heists. So much money just disappeared into thin air.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>The Neighborhood</strong></span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237095856,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237095856?profile=original" width="195" /></a>Folks in Boston knew how to keep a secret. Regardless of what came to light in recent decades, the code of silence was strong among the tight-knit working-class neighborhoods where many cops and hoodlums grew up alongside each other, creating bonds for a lifetime.</p>
<p>“Boston is smaller than <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Philadelphia" target="_blank">Philadelphia</a> and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=NYC" target="_blank">New York City</a>, both in terms of population and geography,” the longtime Boston Globe reporter explains. “Perhaps that’s why Boston seems like such a ‘small world.’ Just look at how former <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=FBI" target="_blank">FBI</a> agent John “Zip” Connolly grew up in the same housing project in <em>Southie</em> as mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/stranger-things-dropping-acid-with-boston-mob-boss-james-whitey" target="_blank">Dropping acid with Boston mob boss James Bulger</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>If friendships weren’t enough, take a look at all the familial connections between the underworld and politics and law enforcement, Sweeney offers. “I’ve always been fascinated by instances where a brother in one family lived a life of crime and another sibling went to work for the government. Whitey Bulger’s younger brother went on to lead a successful career in politics and served as president of the state senate. Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi’s brother Michael was a Boston police officer, and his other brother, Jimmy "The Bear" was a violent killer.”</p>
<p>The connections between the underworld and the one above even hit close to Sweeney’s job, she adds. “Two Irish mobsters -- Thomas Nee and Joe Murray -- once worked for the <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/" target="_blank">Boston Globe</a>. That’s where I work. Like I said, there are so many connections. ’Tis a small world indeed!”</p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Tour Guide</strong></span></p>
<p>Boston’s gangland was no different. When Sweeney first began writing her book, her publisher wanted her to write it around the geography of the city and focus on specific locations and neighborhoods. Sweeney: “At first, they suggested writing chapters for each neighborhood, but I said that would be impossible because there was so much overlap. Boston is a pretty small area, and gangsters covered a lot of ground and moved from neighborhood to neighborhood.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-blackfriars-massacre" target="_blank">The Blackfriars Massacre</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>To keep things orderly and exciting, she highlights historic stories that remain interesting even today. Of course, her main focus is on the many places where gangsters lived, worked, played, and in some cases, died. Sweeney compiled an interactive map of many of the locations featured in the book, which you can find on her website <a href="http://www.bostonorganizedcrime.com">www.bostonorganizedcrime.com</a> She has also shared many photos on her Facebook page <a href="http://www.facebook.com/BostonOrganizedCrime">www.facebook.com/BostonOrganizedCrime</a></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Rampant Crime</strong></span></p>
<p>Looking back to the late 1800s, it is interesting to analyze what made Boston such a greenhouse for a variety of crime groups. Sweeney: “Generally speaking, I think organized crime is shaped by whatever laws are on the books and criminals typically follow the money, taking part in the illicit activities that are profitable. For example, for many years street gambling was rampant all over Boston, but when the state lottery was introduced illegal betting operations and bookies took a big hit. Just like when Prohibition was repealed, licensed bars eventually replaced the speakeasies. I think the changing demographics of urban neighborhoods has also played a role in how organized crime groups around here operate.”</p>
<p>Law enforcement has a big influence on the rise or fall of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Gangs" target="_blank">criminal gangs</a>. Sweeney feels that local, state, and federal authorities are sometimes overlooked when covering the underworld. That is why she shares many of their stories in her book.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Buy: <a href="http://amzn.to/2IDgDx1" target="_blank">Gangland Boston</a>: A Tour Through the Deadly Streets of Organized Crime</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>“I included some amazing stories from Mike Swidwinski, a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=DEA" target="_blank">DEA</a> agent who was tasked with one of the most difficult assignments of all: To conduct surveillance on Whitey Bulger in South Boston. Another police officer featured is Daniel McDonald, who survived a violent attack by the Gustin Gang,” she says.</p>
<p>“Of course, while the majority of law enforcement officers have upheld the law and fought for justice, there have been some that have turned a blind eye to crime, or even worse, participated in it firsthand,” she adds. “One example that comes to mind is the infamous robbery of the Depositors Trust Co. in Medford over Memorial Day weekend in 1980. Reportedly $1.5 million in cash was stolen and God only knows how much jewelry. The heist took place in Medford and was orchestrated by a group that included a Medford police lieutenant, a Metropolitan police captain, a Metropolitan police sergeant and a fellow by the name of Arthur “Bucky” Barrett – who was later slain in 1983. Whitey Bulger was convicted of his murder.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian" target="_blank">Joe Barboza: Boston Barbarian</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>Boss of Bosses</strong></span></p>
<p>Talking about <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Bulger" target="_blank">Whitey Bulger</a>, he has grown into one of the most (in)famous mob bosses in not just Boston but around the world. Many in the media and public tend to equate this fame with genuine influence, but who is Sweeney’s pick for most powerful crime boss in Boston’s history?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237094892,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237094892?profile=original" width="222" /></a>“That’s a tough one,” she tells us. “It’s too difficult to choose just one! Phil Buccola was considered to be the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family" target="_blank">New England Mafia</a> don for a long time. Prior to Buccola, there was Gaspare Messina (photo right), who was picked to serve as a “capo di capi” – boss of bosses - during the Castellammarese War. He only held the title briefly, but it just goes to show you how respected he was by his peers. Then, later on, Jerry Angiulo became a formidable figure who built a tremendously profitable empire. Like I said, it's too hard to choose.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-boss-peter-limone-dies-at-age-83" target="_blank">Profile of New England Mafia boss Peter Limone</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Despite strong leadership in the past, however, currently organized crime families that date back to those days aren’t in great shape. “When it comes to the mob in Boston, I would say it’s nowhere near as strong or influential as it once was,” she says. “Just a few years ago, my colleague at the <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/" target="_blank">Boston Globe</a>, Milton Valencia, reported that there were no more than 30 made members left in the New England mob. That's pretty astonishing, when you consider that not too long ago there were upwards of 100 made men here. And if you go back even further, back to 1895, there were supposedly 200 Mafia members in and around Boston. How times have changed.”</p>
<p><strong><em><a href="http://amzn.to/2IDgDx1" target="_blank">Gangland Boston</a>: A Tour Through the Deadly Streets of Organized Crime</em> by Boston Globe reporter Emily Sweeney is now available online at <a href="http://amzn.to/2IDgDx1" target="_blank">Amazon</a> or at a store near you. You can read her reporting in the <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/" target="_blank">Boston Globe newspaper</a>.</strong></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>
<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>
<p> </p></div>
VIDEO: Mafia link to $500 million art heist discussed in new episode of Mob Talk
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/video-mafia-link-to-500-million-art-heist-discussed-in-new-episod
2017-11-08T06:30:00.000Z
2017-11-08T06:30:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/video-mafia-link-to-500-million-art-heist-discussed-in-new-episod" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237102066,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237102066?profile=original" width="600" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>It was one of the biggest art heists in the world, the largest one in the United States. $500 million worth of paintings were stolen from Boston’s Gardner Art Museum. Investigators soon found that the theft had the Mafia’s fingerprints on it.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/thief-who-sold-two-van-gogh-paintings-to-camorra-mafia-says-he-hi" target="_blank">Thief tells how he sold stolen Van Goghs to Camorra</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>The trail led authorities from <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston" target="_blank">Boston</a> to <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Connecticut" target="_blank">Connecticut</a> and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Florida" target="_blank">Florida</a>. But also to <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Philadelphia" target="_blank">Philadelphia</a>. For more on the Philly connection to this crime check out the new episode of Mob Talk in which mob reporters George Anastasia and Dave Schratweiser discuss all the alleged players.</p>
<p><strong>You can watch the episode below:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SjTrfuWAMBI?wmode=opaque" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></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>
<p> </p></div>
Profile: Patriarca mob family enforcer Frank “Bobo” Marrapese Jr.
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/profile-patriarca-mob-family-enforcer-frank-bobo-marrapese-jr
2017-09-17T14:30:00.000Z
2017-09-17T14:30:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-patriarca-mob-family-enforcer-frank-bobo-marrapese-jr" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237091077,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237091077?profile=original" width="600" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>New England’s Patriarca crime family isn’t what it used to be, but as long as it can rely on the muscle and reputation of tough old-timers it will remain an underworld force. One of those hard men is longtime mob enforcer Frank “Bobo” Marrapese Jr., a man convicted of murder who refused to say farewell to <em>the life</em> by himself and had to be taken out in a coffin.</p>
<p>“People know about me. What I’m about,” Marrapese once was recorded saying. “People shit their pants when they hear my name.”</p>
<p>Indeed, he may be aging, heading well into his seventies, but the man nicknamed “Bobo” has a reputation dipped in blood. He was convicted of murdering mob associate Richard A. “Dickie” Callei on March 15, 1975 at the Acorn Social Club in Federal Hill, a place owned by his father. Police later found Callei’s dead body riddled with bullets near a golf course in Rehoboth.</p>
<p>Though he was a prime suspect in the gangland slaying, investigators weren’t able to charge him with the murder until 1984. While authorities kept digging for evidence, Marrapese rose up the ranks of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family" target="_blank">Patriarca crime family</a>, becoming a feared enforcer and big earner.</p>
<p>Before finding enough proof of his involvement in the Callei hit, prosecutors charged Marrapese in two other murders. Both occurred in 1982. Anthony “The Moron” Mirabella was murdered in Fidas Restaurant on Valley Street in May, followed by 20-year-old Ronald McElroy, who was beaten to death with a baseball bat in August after he inadvertently cut off Marrapese and a mob associate on Broadway in Providence.</p>
<p>Marrapese was found not guilty in both murders.</p>
<p>His legal troubles were a big headache for Marrapese. He was caught on a wire discussing his problems. “How do you think I feel?” he said. “I got three houses, five businesses, five kids, two girlfriends and a wife, and now I’m right there. I’m almost at the top, where I’m set for life.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-boss-peter-limone-dies-at-age-83" target="_blank">Profile of Boston Mafia boss Peter Limone</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>The killing of Callei, however, came back to haunt him, halting his rise in the mob. In September of 1987, three years after being charged and twelve years after the crime, Marrapese was finally found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was released in April of 2008.</p>
<p>With his reputation for violence intact, he went back to the streets. In May of 2011, Marrapese and 24 members and associates of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family" target="_blank">Patriarca mob family</a> were busted for running a large-scale sports <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Gambling" target="_blank">gambling</a> operation and hit with racketeering, extortion, conspiracy and gambling charges.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/fbi-releases-audio-of-boston-mafia-induction-ceremony" target="_blank">FBI releases audio of Boston Mafia induction ceremony</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Seeing the evidence against him, Marrapese threw in the towel and pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Extortion" target="_blank">extortion</a> conspiracy and loansharking. In 2013, he was sentenced to 9 years in state prison.</p>
<p>Last Friday, September 15, 2017, Marrapese applied for parole, but the state parole board turned him down. The 74-year-old enforcer would've been able to apply for parole again in a year and a half, but he never made it that far. <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mafia-family-enforcer-frank-bobo-marrapese-dies-behind" target="_blank">He died on December 22</a>, 2017, at the age of 74.</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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“He was a real man. He was old-school, a good guy.” - Profile: Boston Mafia boss Peter Limone
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-boss-peter-limone-dies-at-age-83
2017-06-21T16:00:00.000Z
2017-06-21T16:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-boss-peter-limone-dies-at-age-83" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237087892,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237087892?profile=original" width="600" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>The term standup guy is thrown around a lot in the underworld, sometimes deserved, other times not so much. But if you want to talk about standup guys, you can’t top Patriarca crime family boss Peter Limone. He was framed by the FBI and sentenced to life in prison for a murder he did not commit. And still he kept his mouth shut. No wonder they ended up making him boss.</p>
<p>Limone was born in Boston on May 7<sup>th</sup>, 1934 to Peter Limone and Antonia Lombardo. He grew up in the West End of Boston and later spent most of his life in Medford. As a youngster, Limone hooked up with the mobsters who ruled his neighborhood, showing much promise and quickly rising up the ranks thanks to his mob mentor and family underboss Enrico “Henry the Referee” Tameleo.</p>
<p>His rise was halted when Limone, Tameleo, Joseph Salvati, and Louis Greco were charged with the 1965 murder of Edward “Teddy” Deegan. Prosecutors based their case on testimony by Boston mob snitch <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian" target="_blank">Joseph “The Animal” Barboza</a>. After a trial, the four men were found guilty and sentenced to death – which was reduced to life in prison in 1970 when the state of Massachusetts abolished the death penalty.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian" target="_blank">Joe Barboza: Boston Barbarian</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Unbeknownst to the public, the judge, and the jurors, however, it turned out that Barboza had lied. He knew who the real killer was, but decided to point his finger at these four men because he had a beef with them. Salvati, Boston mob author Howie Carr writes, “refused to repay $200 he owed Barboza.”</p>
<p>Even worse, the FBI knew Barboza had lied. They knew the four men were innocent and would spend the rest of their lives in prison. They also knew who the real murderers were. But FBI agents H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condon didn’t care. They wanted to take down the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family" target="_blank">New England La Cosa Nostra family</a> at all costs. Also, they wanted to protect their star witness Barboza so he could wreck more havoc on his former colleagues.</p>
<p>Still, some men knew the truth. They knew Limone and company didn’t kill Deegan. But it would take years for them to open their mouths.</p>
<p>And so Limone and his pals sat in a cell. Year after year. On the streets of Boston things changed rapidly. An Irish gangster by the name of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-making-of-mob-boss-whitey-bulger" target="_blank">James “Whitey” Bulger</a> began taking over the rackets. No one seemed able to stop him. Those that tried either ended up dead or in prison.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family" target="_blank">Patriarca crime family</a>, especially, was hit hard by indictments as the FBI cracked down on the perceived greatest threat to law and order in the city. At that time no one could imagine that the FBI was scoring all these successes with the help of the big bad wolf, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Bulger" target="_blank">“Whitey” Bulger</a>, himself.</p>
<p>As the 1990s arrived, Limone had spent over two decades behind bars. By then, Tameleo had already passed away, in 1985. Greco had died behind bars as well. Only Limone and Salvati remained.</p>
<p>By the late 1990s, the unholy alliance between the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=FBI" target="_blank">FBI</a> and mob boss James Bulger had erupted onto the front pages of newspapers and was aired on primetime news shows. People wanted answers. Especially since Bulger had managed to escape his arrest with the help of his FBI handlers.</p>
<p>With the underworld realizing how they had been played by Bulger, it didn’t take long for more guys to flip and open their mouths. This proved to be the break Limone and Salvati were somehow, somewhere still hoping for.</p>
<p>In 1997, Boston hitman John Martorano told the FBI how <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian" target="_blank">Barboza</a> had called him in 1967 while he was already in protective custody. He told Martorano that he planned on framing Tameleo, Limone, Salvati, and Greco for the Deegan hit.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237088286,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237088286?profile=original" width="607" /></a>Martorano’s testimony and a largescale investigation into the FBI’s activities in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston" target="_blank">Boston</a> led to the discovery of documents that showed the FBI deliberately withheld evidence that the four men were innocent, then covered up the frameup for decades.</p>
<p>With this new evidence, the verdict against Limone and Salvati was overturned in 2001. After 33 years in prison they were finally able to live in freedom. They also filed a civil lawsuit and were rewarded a total sum of $101.7 million dollars, $26 million of which went to Limone.</p>
<p>You’d expect a newly released man with that much money in his bank account to take it easy and enjoy the rest of his life. You’d expect that, but that is not what Limone had in mind apparently.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/fbi-releases-audio-of-boston-mafia-induction-ceremony" target="_blank">FBI releases audio of Boston Mafia induction ceremony</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Whether he was bored, felt that he had earned it after doing 33 years in the slammer, simply did not give a fuck and wanted to stick up his middle finger to the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=FBI" target="_blank">FBI</a>, or whether he, despite all the egocentric mobsters out there, felt gratitude towards his crime family for sticking by him is unknown, but he decided to go back to “the life” and his colleagues in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family" target="_blank">Patriarca crime family</a>.</p>
<p>By the late 2000s, he had risen to the top administration in the family, becoming the boss in 2009.</p>
<p>The following year, he pleaded no contest to state charges of extortion, running illegal gambling operations, and loansharking, and was placed on probation for 5 years. A very light sentence, but what were prosecutors to do? The man had done his time and then some.</p>
<p>By now, he was in his late 70s. The last five years, Limone battled cancer and eventually lost. on Monday, June 19<sup>th</sup>, he died at age 83.</p>
<p>The man who helped him get out of prison told Howie Carr the following about Limone: “He was a real man. He was old-school, a good guy.”</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>
<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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New England Mafia capo Bobby DeLuca admits conspiracy in 1992 murder of mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-capo-bobby-deluca-admits-conspiracy-in-1992-mur
2017-01-19T12:16:47.000Z
2017-01-19T12:16:47.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-capo-bobby-deluca-admits-conspiracy-in-1992-mur"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237083892,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237083892?profile=original" width="420" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>New England mobster Robert “Bobby” DeLuca (photo above, left and right) has admitted shooting down an infamous Providence mob enforcer in 1992. The former Mafia capo pleaded no contest on Wednesday to a murder conspiracy charge and faces up to ten years in prison.</p>
<p>For a guy who seemed to have gotten away with it all, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England Mafia</a> capo Bobby DeLuca sure messed things up. Already in jail on charges that he lied to authorities about the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/former-new-england-mob-boss-turned-snitch-francis-cadillac-salemm">1993 murder of Steven DiSarro</a>, a Boston nightclub owner, he once made a deal to cooperate with authorities after they arrested him in 2011 in connection with a racketeering conspiracy. In return, they were very lenient, sentencing him to just one day in prison in the summer of 2014, giving him a second chance at life.</p>
<p>But then they found out he <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mob-family-capo-turned-snitch-charged-with-lying-about">had lied to them</a>. He lied about having any knowledge of DiSarro's disappearance or any other murders linked to the Boston Mafia, including the killing of enforcer Kevin Hanrahan outside The Arch Restaurant on Federal Hill on September 18, 1992.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/fbi-releases-audio-of-boston-mafia-induction-ceremony">FBI releases audio of Boston Mafia induction ceremony</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237084866,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237084866?profile=original" width="148" /></a>Hanrahan (right) was a beast, a man feared on the streets of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston">Boston</a> – which in itself says it all. The Italian Mafia frequently used him as muscle. If a deadbeat refused to pay, Hanrahan was sent in to collect what was owned. If that person still didn’t pay, he dished out a hell of a beating.</p>
<p>Until the tough guy started intimidating the wrong guy, someone who "knew a guy." A guy who made a phone call and got in touch with mob boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mob-boss-frank-salemme-faces-hopeless-day-in-court">Francis Salemme</a>. Upon hearing about Hanrahan's behavior, he ordered DeLuca and Rocco Argenti – who has since passed away – to get rid of him. They did. On the night of September 18, 1992, Hanrahan walked out of The Arch and was shot to death by two assassins. He was 39.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian">Joe Barboza: Boston Barbarian</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>His killers made sure he was dead. They shot him in the head three times. They knew his reputation and the stories. In 1975, Hanrahan had been shot as well. When police arrived on the scene, they found him with a bullet in his chest, fully aware of what happened, looking back at the cops and refusing to say who shot him.</p>
<p>Still in his early twenties, this incident cemented his reputation as a tough son of a bitch who kept his mouth shut. Little did people know, keeping one’s mouth shut would became such a rare occurrence among Boston gangsters.</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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Profile: Patriarca crime family capo Anthony St. Laurent Sr. - Died two weeks after release from prison
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/profile-patriarca-crime-family-capo-anthony-st-laurent-sr
2016-11-07T18:48:40.000Z
2016-11-07T18:48:40.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-patriarca-crime-family-capo-anthony-st-laurent-sr"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237075453,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237075453?profile=original" width="466" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Longtime New England mobster Anthony “The Saint” St. Laurent Sr. made quite the reputation for himself. Known for violence, a listing in Las Vegas' infamous Black Book, you could say he'd done well. On October 26, 2016, he was released from federal prison after serving seven years on a murder-for-hire beef. The 75-year-old mob capo died two weeks later.</p>
<p>“The Saint” has been a prominent player in the Rhode Island and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston">Boston</a> underworld for several decades. His arrest record goes back to 1959 and includes a staple of typical mob crimes related to illegal <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Gambling">gambling</a> and bookmaking.</p>
<p>St. Laurent’s criminal record combined with his reputation as a made member of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">Patriarca crime family</a> and an indictment charging him with illegal bookmaking in the summer of 1993 resulted in the Nevada Gaming Control Board placing him on its <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Casino">casino</a> exclusion list – also known as the Las Vegas <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/high-profile-philadelphia-mafia-boss-joseph-merlino-latest-gangst">Black Book</a> - in September of 1993.</p>
<p>He proved the Board correct in its judgement, when, in 1999, he was convicted in Rhode Island of extortion, loansharking, and operating an illegal sports book.</p>
<p>When it came to the Mafia and its criminal business, St. Laurent was tenacious and in for life. He even continued running his gambling operation from behind bars.</p>
<p>As he grew older, times changed. Gone were the days of “running the streets” and living above the law. The mob’s power had dwindled and the times of bold, brazen shakedowns were a thing of the past. Something “The Saint” was confronted with in 2006, when he pleaded guilty to conspiring to extort $100,000 each from two Massachusetts men.</p>
<p><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-bosses-hit-the-streets-war-looming">Boston Mafia bosses hit the streets - War looming?</a></strong></p>
<p>This wasn’t the way things used to go down for an old-school gangster like St. Laurent. And make no doubt about it, Anthony “The Saint” is definitely part of the old school.</p>
<p>Case in point: When his former associate and fellow mobster <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mob-family-capo-turned-snitch-charged-with-lying-about">Robert “Bobby” DeLuca</a> was talking behind his back and called him a rat, St. Laurent immediately sprang into action and began plotting to have DeLuca killed.</p>
<p>In April 2006, St. Laurent met a would-be hitman in a Johnston parking lot and drove into downtown <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Providence">Providence</a> to the Sidebar restaurant on Dorrance Street where DeLuca was working as a kitchen helper as part of his probation. He pointed out the restaurant to the man and offered cash if all went according to plan.</p>
<p>It didn’t, however, as St. Laurent was busted on extortion charges shortly thereafter. Still, bars could not hold back “The Saint” and he began recruiting a hitman from inside prison walls with the help of a fellow inmate.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237075495,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237075495?profile=original" width="300" /></a>This second plot fell through as well when authorities got in on the action and taped conversations between the elderly mob capo and the inmate. Prosecutors were able to charge St. Laurent with the murder-for-hire plot in 2011, while his intended target, DeLuca, became exactly that what he had publicly accused his former partner of: A government informant – better known in “the life” as a rat.</p>
<p>Seated in a wheelchair and using oxygen, a frail looking St. Laurent (right) admitted to the murder plot, but told the judge his “intention was just to scare Mr. DeLuca.” He conceded that he “made a grave mistake.”</p>
<p>After his release from prison, St. Laurent disappeared from view. He was welcomed home by his wife Dorothy and their son Anthony M. St. Laurent Junior, who both pleaded guilty in 2010 to shaking down several bookmakers in the Taunton, Massachusetts area for more than twenty years on behalf of “The Saint.”</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Update:</strong></span></p>
<p>Well, it wasn’t the Sicilian flu. When Boston mobster Anthony “The Saint” St. Laurent was wheeled into court in a wheelchair with oxygen tanks by his side, it was a necessity. Without them he’d die.</p>
<p>We know this, because two weeks after his release from prison, the notorious Mafia captain died of natural causes. Breathing his last breath of fresh air in freedom. When it comes to the mob, that’s a pretty good way to go.</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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Camorra still possesses stolen Rembrandt, art hunters say – Could Boston heist painting have ended up in Italy?
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/camorra-still-possesses-stolen-rembrandt-art-hunters-say-could-bo
2016-10-05T11:30:00.000Z
2016-10-05T11:30:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/camorra-still-possesses-stolen-rembrandt-art-hunters-say-could-bo" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237076673,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237076673?profile=original" width="509" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>The Neapolitan Camorra still possesses a stolen Rembrandt painting, Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported today. The daily paper talked to looted art hunter Arthur Brand and private detective Sander van Betten, both men claim the missing Rembrandt piece “remains hidden at one of the many hundreds of secret stash houses in and around Naples.”</p>
<p>Brand and Van Betten were tipped off by an underworld source, who told them about three stolen paintings, two Van Goghs and one Rembrandt. The two investigators immediately knew which Van Goghs, but it is harder to determine which painting of Rembrandt is in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Camorra">Camorra</a>’s possession as several of his paintings are currently listed as stolen.</p>
<p>Last week, Italian authorities <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/italian-police-bust-drug-trafficking-camorra-clan-and-retrieve-st">found two stolen Van Gogh paintings</a> in a house owned by the Camorra. Its owner is alleged to be fugitive Camorra drug boss Raffaele Imperiale, who is currently holed up in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Dubai">Dubai</a>.</p>
<p>The reason both Brand and Van Betten are pretty determined that Imperiale and his Camorra group own a stolen Rembrandt as well, is because Imperiale was in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Amsterdam">Amsterdam</a> during the time of the heist at the Van Gogh Museum - He ran several <em>coffeeshops</em> (legal marijuana stores) in the Dutch city.</p>
<p>According to their underworld source, Imperiale was very worried about having the stolen paintings in his possession and was eager to get rid of them, offering them to buyers at a discount. “These kind of works are like a hot potato,” Brand <a href="http://www.telegraaf.nl/premium/reportage/26743104/__Ook_Rembrandt_in_bezit_maffia__.html" target="_blank">told De Telegraaf</a>. “You can’t sell this type of art and can only use it as bond during drug or weapon transactions. And Imperiale didn’t even do that.”</p>
<p>Though it is difficult to determine exactly which Rembrandt the Camorra possesses, it is interesting to note that several Rembrandt paintings were stolen in a heist that is connected to the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">American Mafia</a>.</p>
<p><strong><span class="font-size-3">The $500 million dollar Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston</span></strong></p>
<p>On March 18, 1990, thieves perpetrated the largest private property theft in history, making off with thirteen stolen art works worth $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It was a well-planned and perfectly executed heist. The two thieves dressed up as police officers and were let into the museum by the security guards. They then spent a long hour plundering the museum.</p>
<p>No one has ever been charged with the burglary, but authorities have long had their eyes on members of the American Mafia, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=LCN">La Cosa Nostra</a>. At first they eyed Robert Donati, a member of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">Patriarcia crime family</a> of New England, which rules <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston">Boston</a>, but Donati was murdered in 1991 as a result of a mob war in Boston.</p>
<p>After Donati’s death, the art haul passed on from one mobster to the next with no one willing or able to get rid of the $500-million-dollar loot. As Brand said, a hot potato indeed. As each wiseguy was sent off to prison or the afterlife, authorities say the art collection eventually fell into the lap of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Gentile">Robert “Bobby the Cook” Gentile</a>, an aging mobster from Hartford, Connecticut, who was made into the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-crime-family">Philadelphia crime family</a> and was part of its New England crew.</p>
<p>As their suspicions rose, the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=FBI">FBI</a> raided Gentile’s home in 2012 and discovered a hand-written list of each of the stolen pieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum accompanied with their estimated values on the black market.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, that was all they found. The raid turned up none of the stolen artwork and Gentile remained silent about his criminal dealings and possible involvement.</p>
<p>Of course, that is not to say Gentile did not discuss the stolen art at all. Talking to a confidential informant who was wearing a recording device, Gentile said he had access to two paintings stolen during the Boston heist, one of them a Rembrandt. He offered the piece for $500,000 or more.</p>
<p>Could it be this Rembrandt painting that Dutch looted art hunters now think is in possession of the Neapolitan Camorra? Probably not. But if not this one, perhaps one of the other Rembrandt pieces that were stolen that night in 1990.</p>
<p>The American Mafia and the Mafia groups in Italy have always maintained close links, when possible. It is not unlikely that someone “knew a guy” who himself “knew another guy” who perhaps “knew a guy who would be interested.”</p>
<p>Little did that guy realize the trouble he would find himself in after buying such a hot potato.</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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Boston mob boss Frank Salemme faces hopeless day in court
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/boston-mob-boss-frank-salemme-faces-hopeless-day-in-court
2016-10-02T15:18:30.000Z
2016-10-02T15:18:30.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mob-boss-frank-salemme-faces-hopeless-day-in-court"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237070298,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237070298?profile=original" width="520" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Things are not looking good for Boston Mafia boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme. The mob leader-turned-rat faces federal murder charges and is currently behind bars awaiting his day in court. That day looks very hopeless, though, as four Rhode Island men were granted immunity on Friday by federal prosecutors and look set to testify against Salemme.</p>
<p>Salemme was indicted in August and charged with the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/former-new-england-mob-boss-turned-snitch-francis-cadillac-salemm">murder of federal witness Steven A. DiSarro</a>, the owner of South Boston nightclub The Channel, who disappeared in 1993. Witnesses claim Salemme and his son murdered DiSarro because they thought he either might become a government informant or because he was stealing money.</p>
<p>In March 2016, DiSarro’s body was recovered by federal authorities behind a mill in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Providence">Providence</a>, Rhode Island. On Friday, it became known that Joseph DeLuca, brother to imprisoned capo Robert “Bobby” DeLuca, mob associates Charles “Harpo” Garabedian, Richard Cinquegrana, and William Ricci, were all granted immunity so they can testify what exactly happened at the mill.</p>
<p><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">The New England Patriarca Crime Family</a></strong></p>
<p>Earlier witness accounts made clear that the DeLuca brothers met Salemme in North Providence in 1993 to pick up DiSarro’s body, which they then buried at the mill in Providence which was owned by William Ricci.</p>
<p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mob-family-capo-turned-snitch-charged-with-lying-about">Bobby DeLuca</a> was arrested in June at his home in Florida after being indicted in connection with allegations that he obstructed a federal investigation into the murder of DiSarro. According to the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office, DeLuca has said he will plead guilty to these charges at a hearing on October 25 in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston">Boston</a>.</p>
<p>With four men involved in helping Salemme dispose of DiSarro’s body willing and able to stand up in court to point their finger at the aging former mob boss, things are looking pretty damn hopeless for “Cadillac Frank.”</p>
<p>Not that he isn’t familiar with this scene. Hell, he was a mob boss in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston">Boston</a>, these kinds of treacherous setups are par for the course. Not just that, he himself stood in court pointing fingers and giving testimony about criminal acts committed by others. He just decided to leave out some parts when confessing his crimes to the FBI handlers who debriefed him.</p>
<p>He knew he had fucked up too. When authorities came for him at his new home courtesy of the Witness Protection Program, he was nowhere to be found. Again, typical Boston underworld, always one step ahead of the FBI. They eventually found him holed up in an Atlanta hotel room with plenty of cash.</p>
<p>“A search of defendant Salemme’s hotel room incident to his arrest revealed that he was in possession of a large sum of United States currency as well as numerous personal effects indicating that he was fleeing prosecution,” court documents stated.</p>
<p>Yeah, a pretty hopeless day in court for Salemme.</p>
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Former New England mob boss-turned snitch Francis “Cadillac” Salemme charged with murder of federal witness
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/former-new-england-mob-boss-turned-snitch-francis-cadillac-salemm
2016-08-11T05:31:45.000Z
2016-08-11T05:31:45.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/former-new-england-mob-boss-turned-snitch-francis-cadillac-salemm"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237070298,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237070298?profile=original" width="520" /></a>By Gangsters Inc. Editors</p>
<p>Frank “Cadillac” Salemme, the former boss of New England’s <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">Patriarca crime family</a>, is charged with the murder of federal witness Steven A. DiSarro. The 82-year-old former wiseguy was arrested in Connecticut yesterday morning and faces a sentence of death or life in prison, five years of supervised release, and a fine of $250,000. </p>
<p>In the early 1990s, Salemme was the boss of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">Patriarca family</a> until he was indicted on racketeering charges in 1995 and convicted in 1999. He flipped and cooperated with the government, giving information on his former cronies.</p>
<p>However, he held back on certain crimes he and others committed and was subsequently convicted of obstruction of justice in 2008 for lying to federal authorities about the murder of Stephen A. DiSarro.</p>
<p>DiSarro was the owner of The Channel, a South Boston nightclub, who disappeared in 1993. In March 2016, DiSarro’s body was recovered by federal authorities behind a mill in Providence, R.I. The indictment alleges that DiSarro disappeared after the involvement of Patriarca family boss “Cadillac Frank” Salemme and his son Frank Salemme, Jr. when The Channel became the focus of a federal grand jury investigation and the Salemmes feared DiSarro might cooperate with law enforcement. According to one informant, Salemme Jr. strangled DiSarro while his father watched.</p>
<p><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-bosses-hit-the-streets-war-looming">Boston Mafia bosses hit the streets - War looming?</a></strong></p>
<p>On June 27, authorities arrested <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mob-family-capo-turned-snitch-charged-with-lying-about">Robert DeLuca</a>, a former capo in the Patriarca crime family at his home in Florida after being indicted in connection with allegations that he obstructed a federal investigation into the murder of DiSarro.</p>
<p>Like Salemme, DeLuca had become a federal witness as well and chose to remain silent about the DiSarro murder.</p>
<p>After DeLuca’s arrest many speculated why Salemme had not been hit with more severe charges. Apparently, we were a bit impatient. As is usual for the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston">Boston underworld</a>, justice moves slow. Crime boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-making-of-mob-boss-whitey-bulger">James “Whitey” Bulger</a> was also already in his 80s when he finally faced the music after playing the FBI for several decades.</p>
<p>Better late than never.</p>
<p>In a weird familiar twist to the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Bulger">Bulger</a> situation, prosecutors allege that Salemme had gone on the run from these charges, leaving the Witness Protection Program and his home in Atlanta, Georgia, and fleeing to Connecticut, <a href="http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2016/08/feds_ex_mob_boss_salemme_nabbed_for_murder_was_on_the_run" target="_blank">The Boston Herald reported</a>.</p>
<p>Salemme's lawyer denies the accusations and told reporters his client was already on his way back home.</p>
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Patriarca mob family capo-turned-snitch charged with lying about murder of South Boston club owner
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mob-family-capo-turned-snitch-charged-with-lying-about
2016-06-29T08:00:00.000Z
2016-06-29T08:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mob-family-capo-turned-snitch-charged-with-lying-about"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237069452,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237069452?profile=original" width="420" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Robert DeLuca, a former capo in the Patriarca crime family in New England was arrested Monday at his home in Florida after being indicted in connection with allegations that he obstructed a federal investigation into the murder of a Boston nightclub owner in the 1990s. This, despite the fact that he spilled his guts after he became a government witness for the FBI.</p>
<p>The 70-year-old mob turncoat (photo above, left photo taken Monday) was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice and two counts of making false statements. According to the indictment, DeLuca lied to federal prosecutors and investigators investigating the 1993 disappearance of Stephen DiSarro, the owner of The Channel, a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston">South Boston</a> nightclub. </p>
<p>In March 2016, DiSarro’s was recovered by federal authorities behind a mill in Providence, R.I. The indictment alleges that DiSarro disappeared in May 1993 after the involvement of then <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">Patriarca family</a> mob boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme and his son Frank Salemme, Jr. when The Channel became the focus of a federal grand jury investigation.</p>
<p>DeLuca is also charged with lying to federal authorities about his knowledge of other organized crime murders. It is alleged that DeLuca made the false statements in connection with his cooperation with federal authorities in Rhode Island after he was arrested and charged with racketeering in 2011. </p>
<p>After reaching an agreement with prosecutors, he plead guilty to a single count of racketeering conspiracy. Part of this – and any such – agreement was that DeLuca was required to provide “complete and truthful” information about his colleagues in the underworld and all crimes committed in exchange for a recommendation for a lower sentence. Back in 2011, he claimed he was complete and truthful and as a result, in 2014, was sentenced to just one day in prison.</p>
<p>One would think that DeLuca and the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=FBI">FBI</a> had no secrets for each other. The FBI has had an eye and ear on DeLuca since he started out in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England family</a>. They even bugged his induction into <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=LCN">La Cosa Nostra</a>.</p>
<p><strong>READ: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/fbi-releases-audio-of-boston-mafia-induction-ceremony">FBI releases audio of Boston Mafia induction ceremony</a></strong></p>
<p>Furthermore, mob boss Frank Salemme had become a government witness as well, years earlier even. He too did not mention the murder and subsequent disposal of the body. Prosecutors indicted the former <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mafia">Mafia</a> boss in 2004, hitting him with the same charges DeLuca faces now. Salemme was sentenced to 5 years in prison. His son passed away in 1995.</p>
<p>If convicted, DeLuca faces a sentence of 10 years in prison for obstruction of justice and 5 years behind bars for making false statements. Both crimes could earn him 3 years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000. </p>
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Boston mobsters sentenced to prison for extortion scheme
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/boston-mobsters-sentenced-to-prison-for-extortion-scheme
2016-05-04T10:20:47.000Z
2016-05-04T10:20:47.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mobsters-sentenced-to-prison-for-extortion-scheme"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237064056,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237064056?profile=original" width="500" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Two alleged members of the New England Family of La Cosa Nostra were sentenced in U.S. District Court in Boston on Monday in connection with extortion. Anthony Spagnolo (74) - photo above - was sentenced to 20 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of $5,000. Earlier, in the same case, Pryce Quintina (76) was sentenced to 15 months in prison.</p>
<p>Both men pleaded guilty to conspiring to interfere with interstate commerce by extortion in December of last year. According to prosecutors, in November 2012, a social club in Revere named the Moose Lodge wanted to replace its existing video poker machines, supplied by Constitution Vending Company, with new video poker machines. </p>
<p>There was, however, a problem. Constitution paid Spagnolo and Quintina to protect their video poker machines in social clubs, including the Moose Lodge. If the Moose Lodge intended to replace Constitution’s aging machines with new ones they would decrease Constitution’s profits and potentially cause Spagnolo and Quintina to receive less protection money.</p>
<p>Fuggedaboutit! Spagnolo and Quintina thought, as they quickly <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-bust-emphasizes-mob-s-decline">sprang into action</a>. They met with the manager of the Moose Lodge and told him that Constitution’s machines “were not going anywhere.” The manager knew both men and their reputation. He knew they were part of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">Boston mob</a>. After their visit, he decided not to replace those machines.</p>
<p>The case was part of a multi-year investigation into La Cosa Nostra operations in Eastern Massachusetts, which resulted in the conviction of five members and associates of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England Mafia</a>.</p>
<p>Those busted include: Louis DiNunzio (29) of Medford, who the government alleges is a made member of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England crime family</a>, Joseph Spagnuolo-Kazonis (30) and John Woodman (43) were convicted of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute marijuana. In addition, John Evans (68) and Joseph Petrucelli (24) were convicted of conducting an illegal gambling business.</p>
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Boston mobster goes to trial for hidden interest in multi-million-dollar casino deal
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/boston-mobster-goes-to-trial-for-hidden-interest-in-million-dolla
2016-03-29T18:30:00.000Z
2016-03-29T18:30:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mobster-goes-to-trial-for-hidden-interest-in-million-dolla"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237068878,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237068878?profile=original" width="500" /></a>By Gangsters Inc. Editors</p>
<p>If only he’d kept his mouth shut. If he had done that then alleged <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England Mafia</a> associate Charles Lightbody (photo above) would’ve had a nice chunk of money and no legal problems. If only…</p>
<p>On Monday, Lightbody heard that a federal judge ruled that his financial interest in land scouted by Wynn Resorts Casino could serve as basis for fraud charges against him, the <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/28/gangster-interest-everett-casino-land-can-used-fraud-case-judge-rules/ykHFwH5CxpT3d04w9kk7GL/story.html" target="_blank">Boston Globe reports</a>.</p>
<p>Charles Lightbody goes on trial next month on wire fraud charges together with codefendants Anthony Gattineri and Dustin J. DeNunzio. The three men are accused of hiding Lightbody’s financial interest in the property that was being scouted by Wynn Resorts Casino.</p>
<p>Wynn Resorts Casino was awarded the casino license by the state Gaming Commission after it was confirmed that Lightbody had sold his interest in the property. As a convicted felon, Lightbody was prohibited from benefitting from casino-related business. The sale price was also reduced from over $70 million to $45 million.</p>
<p>But then Lightbody began blabbing about the deal to a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">fellow mobster</a> who visited him in prison. In that conversation, prosecutors allege, it became known Lightbody held a hidden interest in the land.</p>
<p>The two parties are expected to begin jury selection on April 11.</p>
<p>If this case makes one thing clear it’s that try as they might, the legitimate corporations and government will never keep their hands clean when they get involved in the casino business. It’s a dirty business. But the reward is worth getting your hands dirty for. The mob knew it and legitimate businessmen and politicians know it as well.</p>
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New England mobster sentenced for drug conspiracy
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/new-england-mobster-sentenced-for-drug-conspiracy
2016-01-22T07:54:42.000Z
2016-01-22T07:54:42.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mobster-sentenced-for-drug-conspiracy"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237058699,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237058699?profile=original" width="450" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Louis L. DiNunzio, an alleged member of the New England Family of La Cosa Nostra was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Boston this week for conspiring to traffic over 40 kilograms of marijuana. The 29-year-old mobster was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit $10,000. </p>
<p>In September 2015, DiNunzio, of Medford, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute marijuana from July 2013 to February 2014.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237030053,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237030053?profile=original" /></a>In 2013, law enforcement initiated a long-term investigation, known as Operation Excalibur, into drug-trafficking, illegal gambling, extortion, and other criminal activity by the members and associates of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England Family</a> of La Cosa Nostra. DiNunzio allegedly was a member of the crime family and is the son of former family boss Anthony DiNunzio - photo right, who is currently in federal prison for RICO conspiracy. As part of the conspiracy, DiNunzio and others purchased large quantities of marijuana and shipped them via UPS under fictitious names to Massachusetts. </p>
<p>Earlier this month, two other alleged <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England mob</a> associates involved in the conspiracy were sentenced. 30-year-old Joseph Spagnuolo-Kazonis, of Boston, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit $10,000. 43-year-old John Woodman, of Braintree, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison, and ordered to pay a fine of $4,000 and to forfeit $5,000.</p>
<p>In additional cases arising from this investigation, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-bust-emphasizes-mob-s-decline">Anthony Spagnolo</a> (67) and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-bust-emphasizes-mob-s-decline">Pryce Quintina</a> (75) both of Revere, pleaded guilty in December 2015 to conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce by extortion and will be sentenced in March 2016. On Jan. 13, 2016, John Evans, 68, of Middleborough, and Joseph Petrucelli, 24, of Winthrop, pleaded guilty to conducting an illegal gambling business and will be sentenced in April 2016.</p>
<p>The New England crime family is going through a tense period at the moment with several of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-bosses-hit-the-streets-war-looming">its bosses getting out of prison</a> around the same time and various law enforcement busts crippling the organization’s operations.</p>
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Boston Mafia bosses hit the streets – War looming?
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-bosses-hit-the-streets-war-looming
2015-06-21T19:37:33.000Z
2015-06-21T19:37:33.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/boston-mafia-bosses-hit-the-streets-war-looming"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237029054,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237029054?profile=original" width="540" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Never a dull moment in the Boston underworld. After barely surviving an internecine war and the beatings Whitey Bulger and the FBI dished out, the New England La Cosa Nostra family has been working hard to rebuild. This year, several top mobsters will hit the streets, raising the ever-pertinent question: Who’s the boss?</p>
<p>The most senior mobster on the list of possible candidates is 87-year-old Luigi “Baby Shacks” Manocchio, who was released from a federal prison in North Carolina last month and sent to a halfway house to prepare for his release.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237029096,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237029096?profile=original" width="277" /></a>Manocchio (right) led the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England Patriarca Family</a> until he was arrested in January of 2011 in a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/will-historic-mob-bust-really">nationwide bust</a> together with 127 other mobsters from crime families in New York and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-decavalcante-crime-family">New Jersey</a>. In 2012, he pleaded guilty to shaking down Rhode Island strip clubs for protection money and was sentenced to over 5 years in prison. His sentence will officially end in November.</p>
<p>Despite his old age, Manocchio can hold his own and remains a capable wiseguy. Boston mobster-turned-author Mark Silverman tells Gangsters Inc. that “he keeps his mind and body sharp. He's still in great shape, physically and mentally.” Adding, “Rarely will he see anybody other than his trusted friends, guys that have been around since the Angiulo brothers’ days.”</p>
<p>However, despite his cautious manner, he had even retired to Florida at one point, the Feds snagged him in 2011. That is partly why Silverman is certain Manocchio will say farewell to the mob life. “I’m sure he’s retired. He's paid his dues and deserves a little freedom for the rest of his golden years.”</p>
<p>With Manocchio out of the picture, for now – you can never count out an aging mobster – we focus on another Patriarca Family powerhouse. Carmen “The Cheese Man” DiNunzio (57) became a free man on February 19 of this year and has been at the peak of the New England Mafia’s hierarchy for around a decade. When Manocchio’s successor, Peter Limone, was sent to prison on bookmaking charges, DiNunzio stepped up to fill the position of boss.</p>
<p>Together with his younger brother Anthony DiNunzio (56), Carmen ran a tight ship. Author Scott Burnstein describes DiNunzio as “a wiseguy peacemaker, someone who favors mediation over violence unless totally necessary.” A retired FBI agent familiar with DiNunzio told <a href="http://gangsterreport.com/big-cheese-boston-mob-headed-home-back-old-job/" target="_blank">Gangster Report</a>, “Carmen’s more a racketeer than a gangster, he doesn’t get off on the blood and guts like a lot of guys that rise as high as he has.”</p>
<p>He did, however, run with plenty of gangsters who did get off on violence and intimidation. When he had a falling out with Jerry Angiulo, the family’s underboss at that time, after he allegedly shook down an Angiulo underling named Vincent “Dee Dee” Gioacchini, DiNunzio and his brother fled to the west coast where they worked with <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-chicago-outfit-overview">Chicago mobsters</a>. One of the men they worked for was notorious hit man <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/chicago-soldier-anthony-the">Anthony “The Ant” Spilotro</a>. Portrayed by actor Joe Pesci in the movie <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-truth-behind-movie-classic-casino">Casino</a>, Spilotro was beaten to death with baseball bats and buried in a shallow grave by Chicago mobsters in 1986.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237030053,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237030053?profile=original" width="250" /></a>While, according to most sources, Spilotro’s <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/tony-spilotro-and-his-hole-in">violent streak</a> did not rub off on “The Cheese Man”, it did, apparently, rub off on his brother Anthony. Caught on wiretaps Anthony DiNunzio (right) is heard issuing many threats. During a meeting with an associate at My Cousin Vinny’s restaurant in Malden in June of 2011, he made clear what would happen if anyone disobeyed him. “I get to watch you die in the ground,” he said (un)knowingly conjuring up images of Spilotro’s gory demise. “I stay there ten fuckin’ hours until you’re dead. And I’ll dig you back up and make sure you are dead.”</p>
<p>With the DiNunzio brothers on top, the Patriarca crime family was rumored to be able to put behind many of the beefs that originated during the internecine war that took place in the 1990s. Despite their success both men did not enjoy a long run.</p>
<p>In November of 2008, Operation Mobbed Up in Rhode Island took down 25 mob guys and associates out of Providence. Carmen DiNunzio was charged with extortion, gambling offenses, and charged with bribing an FBI agent. In the fall of 2009, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison.</p>
<p>Upon his brother Carmen’s imprisonment, Anthony took over as leader until he too went down in 2012 when the Feds charged him with racketeering and extortion. He is due to be released in February of 2018.</p>
<p>While both DiNunzios were behind bars, Anthony “Spucky” Spagnolo took over. It was the first time in the history of the Patriarca family that the boss was from East Boston. The Boston faction’s center of power was always based in the North End of Boston.</p>
<p>Interestingly, Spagnolo was at the center of one of the more recent disputes within the family. One of the men he had a beef with, Vincent “Dee Dee” Gioacchini, was the same man Carmen DiNunzio had shaken down back in the 1980s. Mark Silverman was in close contact with many Patriarca mobsters at that time and tells Gangsters Inc. what happened in Boston during the early to mid-2000s.</p>
<p>“A street beef between Anthony Spagnolo and the East Boston mafia street duo of Frederick “Freddy the Neighbor” Simone and Vincent “Dee Dee” Gioacchini had reached its boiling point,” he says. “The two East Boston gangsters had served lengthy prison terms and wanted their old territory back. Spagnolo, who had since been promoted to capo of the Day Square Crew, was not about to let that happen. In traditional mafia style, the two gangsters reached out to Manocchio to settle the dispute. Fearing another all-out mob war, Manocchio dispatched his Rhode Island lieutenant, Matthew Guglielmetti (below), to Boston for a sit down. State Police wiretaps placed in the kitchen of Simone picked up some very damaging conversations alluding to the fact that Guglielmetti would be killed if the peace could not be brokered. Guglielmetti tried to convince Simone and Gioacchini that Spagnolo would back off and allow them to earn in his territory. It sounded good, but the duo did not believe him.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237029893,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237029893?profile=original" width="515" /></a>At that point, Silverman explains, they only had one option left: contact New York. That meant they sought help from the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-genovese-crime-family">Genovese crime family</a>. The Patriarca family had remained in frequent contact with the New York family for several decades. As authors Gerard O’Neill and Dick Lehr write in their book Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family, “[…] with New England divided along the Connecticut River. The Genovese family controlled such major cities as Hartford, Springfield, and Albany, while Patriarca had most of Worcester and exclusive control in Boston, Revere, and Maine.”</p>
<p>But despite the alleged advice from the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-hit-how-the-genovese">Genovese family’s crew in Springfield</a>, Silverman says, the beef continued. It wasn’t until State and Federal authorities arrested Simone and Gioacchini on extortion charges that it finally came to an end.</p>
<p>Spagnolo himself, meanwhile, was arrested in October of 2014 and charged with extorting $50,000 in protection payments from a video poker machine company located in Revere for the past seven years. <strong>(Read more about that bust in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-bust-emphasizes-mob-s-decline">New England Mafia bust emphasizes mob’s decline</a>)</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237030886,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237030886?profile=original" width="250" /></a>That means 400-pound Carmen DiNunzio (left) is the person out on the streets right now who is most eligible to be boss. With Manocchio presumably retired and 81-year-old Peter Limone semi-retired moving around behind the scenes, DiNunzio does not face much opposition.</p>
<p>Unless Manocchio’s trusted lieutenant, 65-year-old Matthew Guglielmetti, decides he wants to play a bigger role. Gugliemetti was released from prison last year after doing 11 years in prison on drug trafficking charges. Investigators alleged Guglielmetti pledged to protect a shipment of cocaine as it moved through Rhode Island.</p>
<p>Will there be a power struggle? Mark Silverman thinks not. <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">The Patriarca family</a> has learned from the war it fought in the 1990s: It’s bad for business and the freedom of its members. Still, you never know. “As of today, there has been some jockeying for position, but no clear cut leader has emerged,” Silverman says. “The once coveted position of boss now comes with price. According to Jeffrey Sallet, special agent in charge of organized crime in New England, the FBI will aggressively pursue their attack on leadership positions in New England organized crime.”</p>
<p>With the indictment of seven consecutive bosses the FBI has sent a clear warning indeed to anyone who might be interest in taking the crown. Besides, even if one becomes king is there still a kingdom to rule over? Are there enough knights to execute orders?</p>
<p>“I believe the mob is just as dangerous as it ever was,” Silverman says with confidence. “Today’s wiseguys have learned how to keep things quiet. The guys out there making noise are just gonna bring heat so they won't last long. People believe the cliché - there's strength in numbers - and that is true to a certain extent. In the mob it's more about talent. Guys who've been around know how to stay around and the guys that are a constant headache get dealt with one way or another. Naturally there is a power vacuum, but every high level guy knows that's just bait. I don't think you'll see another all-out fight for power. You may see some guys go down to prevent a repeat of the Salemme/Carozza war. The feds don't wanna clean up another mess like that - internally and on the streets.”</p>
<p><strong><em>Gangsters Inc. wants to thank Mark Silverman for providing valuable information for this article. Silverman is the author of two bestselling nonfiction books, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Marked-Card-Power-England-Mafia/dp/0979975611" target="_blank">Marked Card</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rogue-Mobster-Untold-Silverman-Boston-ebook/dp/B00WRV39CG/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8" target="_blank">Rogue Mobster</a>, which chronicle the Boston mob wars of the 1990s and early 2000s where over two dozen gangsters were killed over control of Boston’s underworld. Silverman writes about his personal experiences getting inside the mob and becoming an integral part of the war. Silverman’s books have been hailed as providing readers with the first inside glimpse into what went on at the street level, why people were killed, and what the stakes were. Silverman is a highly regarded public speaker who has made multiple media appearances. You can follow him on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/markymook" target="_blank">@markymook</a></em></strong></p>
<p><strong><em>We also recommend our readers to check out the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Money-Joe-LaFratta-ebook/dp/B00OKZ5AJC/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1434903118&sr=1-2&keywords=dirty+money" target="_blank">Dirty Money</a> by Joe LaFratta.</em></strong></p>
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FBI releases audio of Boston Mafia induction ceremony
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/fbi-releases-audio-of-boston-mafia-induction-ceremony
2014-10-30T17:30:00.000Z
2014-10-30T17:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/fbi-releases-audio-of-boston-mafia-induction-ceremony"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237033882,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237033882?profile=original" width="520" /></a></p>
<p>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>The ceremony in which the Mafia initiates new members is considered a sacred event by wannabe and seasoned mobsters alike. Pricking blood from the finger, burning the picture of a saint, swearing allegiance, and becoming part of a brotherhood dating back a century. So you can imagine their anger when they heard the FBI had bugged an entire ceremony from start to finish.</p>
<p>This week, authorities released an audio recording of an induction ceremony held by the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England La Cosa Nostra family</a> in Medford on October 29, 1989. It is the only recording of its kind and turned a ceremony that should have empowered the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mob">mob</a> into its worst nightmare.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237034481,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237034481?profile=original" width="177" /></a>For a sacred event, the ceremony’s location had a very unsacred feel to it. It was held at the Medford home of the sister of mobster Vincent Federico, who himself was to be inducted into the mob that day. He used his sister’s house without her knowledge. Federico had gotten a weekend furlough from prison after writing on his application that he was attending to “family business.”</p>
<p>Lying and cheating against everyone you know isn’t very honorable. Unless, of course, you are a career criminal.</p>
<p>New England family boss Raymond Patriarca Jr. (left) led the ceremony and began his speech with emphasizing that the warring factions within his family had made peace and that they had to “put all that’s got started behind us ... and bygones are bygones and a good future for all of us.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237035252,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237035252?profile=original" width="99" /></a>He continued, “We’re all here to bring in some new members into our family and more than that, to start maybe a new beginning.”</p>
<p>The four new members that would signal the new beginning were Vincent Federico, Carmen Tortora, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/patriarca-mob-family-capo-turned-snitch-charged-with-lying-about">Robert “Bobby” DeLuca</a> (right), and Richard Floramo. They all came highly recommended. The <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mafia">Mafia</a> is known to extensively vet its new members and see if they’ve got the right stuff to become a part of “our thing.”</p>
<p>Still, Patriarca did usher a warning to the new inductees, “You’ve all done everything you hadda do ... Stay the way youse are, don’t let it go to your head ... it’s not to be used to make money. It’s not an advantage, a ticket to abuse people, it doesn’t make you better than other people. The thing is you have all of us to protect you. If you don’t let it go to your head, and you don’t abuse it, you’ll have a happy, happy, happy life.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237035069,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237035069?profile=original" width="101" /></a>Apparently there had been some issues with guys letting their new “title” get to their heads. The mob has no use for guys like that. What they were looking for was made pretty clear as the four men were each asked specific questions by the family’s consigliere Joseph “JR” Russo (right).</p>
<p>“If I told you your brother was wrong. He’s a rat, he’s gonna do one us harm, you’d have to kill him, would you do that for me, Carmen?” Russo asked Carmen Tortora. After he answered in the affirmative, the consigliere continued, “Your mother’s dying in bed and you have to leave her because we called you, it’s an emergency. You have to leave. Would you do that Carmen?” Once again Tortora answered with “Yes.”</p>
<p>As did the other three men.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237035274,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237035274?profile=original" width="92" /></a>They all pledged their undying loyalty to La Cosa Nostra and repeated the oath in Italian as it was read aloud by the Sicilian-born capo Biagio DiGiacomo (left), “We get in alive in this organization, and the only way we gonna get out is dead, no matter what,” he said. “It’s no hope, no Jesus, no Madonna, nobody can help us, if we ever give up this secret to anybody, any kinds of friends of mine, let’s say. This Thing cannot be exposed.”</p>
<p>It cannot be exposed. The feds that were listening to the tapes must’ve felt like Christmas had arrived early. They were about to not only expose the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England mob</a>, but offer undeniable proof of the Mafia’s existence and its use of age-old rituals to induct new members.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237035690,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237035690?profile=original" width="96" /></a>And they had done so with the help of one of their own, a “made guy” in the New England Mafia. Mobster Angelo “Sonny” Mercurio (right) was an FBI informant all the while listening to his superiors asking questions about truth, trust, and loyalty.</p>
<p>Omerta was dead, but it would take a few more years until the Mafia and public got the memo. In 1989, Salvatore Gravano had not yet betrayed John Gotti and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-making-of-mob-boss-whitey-bulger">James “Whitey” Bulger</a> still had <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Boston">Boston</a> trembling in fear.</p>
<p>After New England mobsters were confronted in court with the audio tapes of their sacred and extremely secretive induction ceremony, reality set in. The good old days were over. A new era had begun and they were looking a lot like dinosaurs.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-5"><strong>You can listen to the audio tapes <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/10/29/fbi-tapes-from-mafia-induction-ceremony-medford/LyT90vPW3DP0gijKxbJw3M/story.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </strong></span></p>
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New England Mafia bust emphasizes mob’s decline
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-bust-emphasizes-mob-s-decline
2014-10-03T18:30:00.000Z
2014-10-03T18:30:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-england-mafia-bust-emphasizes-mob-s-decline"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237040870,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237040870?profile=original" width="520" /></a></p>
<p>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Two New England mobsters stood before a Boston judge, yesterday, and pleaded not guilty to conspiracy charges. Both men have links dating back to the good ol’ days of the American Mafia, yet as their charges were read one couldn’t help but think of the dismal state the once powerful crime syndicate is in today.</p>
<p>According to the indictment, both men are charged with “conspiracy to interfere with commerce by extortion.” Fancy words for extorting $50,000 in protection payments from a video poker machine company located in Revere for the past seven years.</p>
<p>That’s 7,142 dollars and 86 cents a year.</p>
<p>I think you can make more begging for change on certain street corners.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237041267,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237041267?profile=original" width="250" /></a>The two alleged masterminds behind this extortion are reputed New England acting boss Anthony “Spucky” Spagnolo (72 - an old photo of him on the right) and made member Pryce “Stretch” Quintina (74). According to the indictment the racket had been going on for decades and both mobsters were only carrying on what must’ve begun to feel like a tradition. The new owner was afraid that if he did not continue to make the protection payments, the Mafia would force him to remove his company’s machines from the bars and social clubs that hosted them and permit other vendors to install their own video poker machines.</p>
<p>So he contacted the feds.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/02/revere-man-identified-alleged-acting-boss-new-england-mafia-federal-indictment/lBXG8fvQqihepC5yeIJr0I/story.html" target="_blank">The Boston Globe</a> writes that both men “reputedly represent the old guard of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">Patriarca crime family</a>, their service dating back to the Mafia’s glory days, when the late boss Gennaro Angiulo controlled the Boston underworld from the 1960s to the early 1980s.”</p>
<p>Spagnolo was allegedly involved in narcotics and a capo in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England family</a>, while Quintina’s uncle was also a capo. Furthermore, <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/02/revere-man-identified-alleged-acting-boss-new-england-mafia-federal-indictment/lBXG8fvQqihepC5yeIJr0I/story.html" target="_blank">the Globe writes</a>, “Spagnolo and Quintina have served prison terms themselves. Spagnolo pleaded guilty to numerous racketeering and drug dealing charges in 1991 and was sentenced to nine years. Quintina was sentenced in 1995 to 7½ years. He was charged with setting up Angelo Patrizzi for murder in 1981, though he pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in an agreement with prosecutors.”</p>
<p>As stand up as they come. Especially in Boston.</p>
<p>Irish crime boss and infamous rat <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-making-of-mob-boss-whitey-bulger">James “Whitey” Bulger</a> played a big role in helping the FBI decimate the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-england-crime-family">New England La Cosa Nostra family</a>, his biggest rival for control of the city’s rackets, during the 1980s and 1990s. With turncoats like Bulger, news about a stand up gangster in Boston always comes as a surprise.</p>
<p>Spagnolo and Quintina face 20 years in prison if convicted. Two decades in prison for $7,142.86 a year for seven years.</p>
<p>This ain’t <a href="http://amzn.to/1pxsprn" target="_blank">The Godfather</a>. It isn’t even <a href="http://amzn.to/10prKCA" target="_blank">Goodfellas</a>. This resembles the mob family portrayed in <a href="http://amzn.to/1sRVZ1M" target="_blank">Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai</a>. An <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rml5ehAl7SM" target="_blank">excellent</a> movie starring Forest Whitaker as a black hit man who works for the Italian Mafia. A Mafia that operates out of the back of a Chinese restaurant where its members are hounded by people left and right because they are late with their rent and face eviction.</p>
<p>Why bring up the movies?, you may ask. Well, because movies are the only thing that is keeping the Mafia’s reputation for violence and untold riches alive. Though there remain several powerful crews and families in New York, Chicago, Detroit, New Jersey, and, perhaps, Philadelphia, in most cities the Mafia is but a shell of its former self.</p>
<p>In most places, the Mafia has become like an old boxing champ. Someone who was once feared and powerful, someone whose name still carries weight because of replays of his old fights. But also someone who is now nothing more than an old, fat, mumbling has-been who no longer resembles the man on the television screen.</p>
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Irish gang has its own “supermarket” with dope & guns
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/irish-gang-has-its-own-supermarket-with-dope-guns
2013-11-29T16:26:58.000Z
2013-11-29T16:26:58.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/irish-gang-has-its-own-supermarket-with-dope-guns"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237020488,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237020488?profile=original" width="520" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>With the festive Holiday season upon us, we at Gangsters Inc. felt it was time to point our readers in the right direction when it comes to the best presents. Everything from great deals to enormous steals. Irish organized crime gave a good example as they offered its members a “supermarket” stocked with shelves full of drugs and guns.</p>
<p>Irish newspaper The Independent broke the news yesterday, <a href="http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/gang-supermarket-with-shelves-of-drugs-and-guns-found-by-gardai-29790884.html" target="_blank">reporting</a>, “On the 'supermarket shelves' they found quantities of drugs ranging from heroin to cocaine, cannabis resin and herbal cannabis, as well as a sawn-off shotgun and a couple of hundred rounds of ammunition for two firearms.”</p>
<p>Dublin police are questioning the suspected 58-year-old owner of the “supermarket” who, The Independent writes, is “a former associate of Derek 'Maradona' Dunne, who was one of Ireland's most notorious underworld figures and was shot dead in a row at his home in Amsterdam in 2000.” They also suspect him of being a key player in a Dublin trafficking gang.</p>
<p>For more on this interesting story check out <a href="http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/gang-supermarket-with-shelves-of-drugs-and-guns-found-by-gardai-29790884.html" target="_blank">The Independent</a>.</p>
<p>A supermarket filled with drugs and guns. That scene from the film <a href="http://amzn.to/IwzkTu" target="_blank">The Boondock Saints</a> in which the main characters go shopping for an arsenal of guns (and rope) in a gun-filled room run by an Irish gang suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all! (<em>Scroll to the end of this article for a video clip of the scene.</em>)</p>
<p>Because guns and drugs are kind of a touchy (illegal) subject, Gangsters Inc. will provide you with a different type of ware. The best books and movies dealing with the colorful and brutal world of gangsters and mobsters.</p>
<p>Let’s kick off with the Irish since they were so nice to give me the inspiration for this piece.</p>
<p>Irish organized crime in Europe is well represented. Irish gangsters are operating all over Britain and mainland Europe, from rainy The Netherlands to sunny Spain. One of the most infamous chapters in Irish gangland history is the murder of journalist <a href="http://amzn.to/18bzaH4" target="_blank">Veronica Guerin</a>. Her investigative work got her in trouble with several Irish drug lords who ordered her killed. The story was turned into two movies: <a href="http://amzn.to/IqH6O4" target="_blank">When the Sky Falls</a>, (2000), starring Joan Allen as Sinead Hamilton and <a href="http://amzn.to/18bzaH4" target="_blank">Veronica Guerin</a> (2003), starring Cate Blanchett.</p>
<p>There have also been many books dealing with the murder of Guerin, the Irish mob, and crime boss <a href="http://amzn.to/18bz3ey" target="_blank">John Gilligan</a> who ordered the murder. Books like <a href="http://amzn.to/IqGGXP" target="_blank">Gangster</a>: The Biography of International Drug Trafficker <a href="http://amzn.to/IqGGXP" target="_blank">John Gilligan</a>.</p>
<p>In the United States, the past year was all about the trial and conviction of Boston mob boss <a href="http://amzn.to/180QVxY" target="_blank">James “Whitey” Bulger</a>. Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill wrote a more in-depth follow-up to their 2001 book <a href="http://amzn.to/13wcDmw" target="_blank">Black Mass</a> titled <a href="http://amzn.to/180QVxY" target="_blank">Whitey</a>: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss which offers readers more insight into his childhood while also detailing his criminal career and eventual capture.</p>
<p>Boston and the Irish are (or should I now say were?) the favorite topics of Hollywood producers and writers. Every film set in Boston seems to have a little bit of gangster flavor. Be it masterpieces such as <a href="http://amzn.to/1adzZPh" target="_blank">Gone Baby Gone</a> and <a href="http://amzn.to/1b16NQc" target="_blank">Mystic River</a> or a laugh-your-ass-off-funny movie like <a href="http://amzn.to/1cLLbKF" target="_blank">The Heat</a> in which Sandra Bullock takes on a Boston drug boss.</p>
<p>On television <a href="http://amzn.to/1adANUl" target="_blank">The Brotherhood</a>, loosely based on the <a href="http://amzn.to/IqI2Ss" target="_blank">brothers Bulger</a>, did okay, but was never able to capture audiences like <a href="http://amzn.to/14FCJUi" target="_blank">The Sopranos</a> did.</p>
<p>Ah yes, <a href="http://amzn.to/14FCJUi" target="_blank">The Sopranos</a>. What a show! No matter what the current situation of organized crime is, on the silver screen the Italian-American Mafia still reigns supreme. We’ll see what offers we can present to you for Christmas. And you better not refuse!</p>
<p>All products you buy at Amazon.com via Gangsters Inc. help keep this site up and running. So we thank all of you who have contributed with a few cents here and there. Keep coming back!</p>
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Joe Barboza: Boston Barbarian
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian
2012-01-11T12:00:00.000Z
2012-01-11T12:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001674,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237001674?profile=original" width="500" /></a>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>The alliteration is perhaps inexcusable. The description however, is almost as perfect as you will get.</p>
<p>A man who allegedly bit off part of another man’s ear in a bar brawl. Who terrified a family as he tried to destroy their car- with them in it. Someone who apparently actually frightened some members of the Boston police department to the point that they would walk away rather than confront him. So feared by the city’s newspaper photographers they would often attach a note to the back of their shots of him: NO CREDIT ON PHOTOGRAPHS. A hit-man who quite possibly murdered at least twenty men or more. This was according to the testimony of his lawyer, given at a Congressional Hearing in 2001.</p>
<p>And deeply and darkly hinted, a man who once chewed on a piece of skull from one of his victims, Carlton Eaton, shot dead by Joe in September, 1964.</p>
<p>Edmund H. Maloney writing about Barboza in the <em>Hartford Courant</em>, claimed that Barboza had a thing about chewing. Maybe it stemmed from his oddly shaped incisors that curved like fangs, rather than teeth.</p>
<p>In his relatively short life as a criminal on the streets of Boston, Joe Barboza created a reputation for violence and uncontrolled brutality that is hard to match anywhere in the records of American organized crime.</p>
<p>Attorney Victor Garo said about him:</p>
<p><em>He was a loan shark, a receiver of stolen goods, a leg-breaker. He’d shoot you in the head, puncture your ear-drum with an ice-pick or dismember you with a knife.</em></p>
<p>His own lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, called him:</p>
<p><em>One of the worst men on the face of the earth.</em></p>
<p>A memorandum from the Special Agent in Charge of the Boston Office of the F.B.I. John J. Kehoe Junior to J. Edgar Hoover, referred to Barboza as:</p>
<p><em>A professional assassin, responsible for numerous homicides and acknowledged by all professional law enforcement representatives in the Boston area to be the most dangerous individual known.</em></p>
<p>On one occasion when he was planning to kill a target, he decided to set up an ambush at the victim’s home. His plan was to set fire to the building and when the man fled, he would be shot down. When someone pointed out the man’s mother lived there and could die also, this apparently caused no concern to Barboza, who stated it was not his fault that the mother would be present, and he would not care whether the mother died or not.</p>
<p>He stood about five eight or five ten according to which records are consulted, and looked almost like a cartoon impression of a Neanderthal Man with enormous shoulders and upper body, balanced on undersized legs. His upper and lower halves did not balance, and linked into his block of a head and huge, jutting jaw he came across as some kind of cave-man lost in a time warp. Someone once said of him:</p>
<p><em>He walked like a Silverback Gorilla</em></p>
<p>Sensible people would avoid him, and even those close to him never knew what might trigger his fierce and at times uncontrollable temper. Joe came across as a wild, unhinged hot-rod, burning on all four tyres, revving in overdrive on all shifts. He went through his maleficent life like a hound dog searching for its prey. An insatiable appetite for violence fuelled by an egregious temperament made him a textbook example of an anti-social misfit layered with evil and dangerous tendencies. He once murdered a man a week after he had attended Joe’s wedding.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002060,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002060,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237002060?profile=original" width="254" /></a>Vincent Teresa writes in his book, <em>Vinnie Teresa’s Mafia</em>, the following regarding Barboza:</p>
<p><em>Take Joe Barboza (right). He was one of the toughest enforcers around in New England before he became a federal informer. He had a reputation on the street of being a violent, violent guy with a terrible temper. The cops were afraid of him, street people were scared of him, even me - as close as I was to the guy, I’d never so much as cross a bridge alone with him in a car. You never knew what would set the guy off.</em></p>
<p><em>There was one incident I remember in particular involving Joe. This happened on Bennington Street in East Boston. It was about one in the afternoon, and I was standing on the corner. Barboza was in a car with Guy Frizzi, a street guy that Joe was close with at the time. They were driving along Bennington Street when some poor guy with his wife and two little kids cut Barboza off by accident. Joe went wild. He started chasing this guy, blowing the horn and yelling out the window: ‘You mother . . . you son-of-a-bitch . . . I’ll get you.’</em></p>
<p><em>Finally, Joe caught up with the guy and cut him off. The driver was smart enough to lock all his windows and doors. Barboza and Frizzi pounded on the windows and then jumped up on the hood of this guy’s car, smashing at the windshield. At the same time, Barboza was yelling nasty things he planned to do to the guy’s wife. I remember seeing the poor little kids, crying their eyes out, hanging on to their father while their mother is screaming her head off. Now, while all this was happening, there was a cop standing on a nearby corner, just watching. Finally, the cop turned away and walked down the street. He was scared to death of Barboza himself. Joe wasn’t through though. He ran back to his car and got out a baseball bat and started pounding on the car. He smashed the fenders, the windows, everything. He almost destroyed the car before some cops finally came over and tried to calm Joe down. While they were trying to cool Joe, they told this poor driver who’s sitting there in his smashed-up car to get the hell out of the area fast and forget about the damage. I was standing there all the time watching it, laughing my head off. At the time it was funny. Now I think back and it ain’t so funny. The driver would have been killed if Joe had got his hands on him, and all because he accidentally cut Joe off in traffic.</em></p>
<p>And again, further testimony, still from Teresa:</p>
<p><em>…..That’s why he was so dangerous. He was unpredictable. When he tasted blood, everyone in his way got it. Barboza went into the club [searching for a member of the McLaughlin mob named Ray DiStasio] and caught DiStasio cold. The trouble was, a poor slob named John B.O’Neil, who had a bunch of kids, walked in to get a pack of cigarettes. Barboza killed them both because he didn’t want any witnesses. DiStasio got two in the back of the head and O’Neil got three. It was a shame. I mean, this O’Neil was a family man—he had nothing to do with the mob. Barboza should have waited. That’s why he was so dangerous. He was unpredictable.</em></p>
<p>There were however, some people who Joe didn’t scare. There's the time in 1965 when Joseph Elmer McCain, one of the toughest cops ever in Boston, arrested Joe Barboza, for beating up a patron at <em>The Ebb Tide</em> bar in Revere Beach. In the jail, Barboza insulted McCain, saying he wasn't so tough without his gun. On the spot, the cop unbuckled his gun and nightstick, stepped in the cell, and invited Barboza to <em>take a shot</em>. He declined, and McCain said, <em>I thought so.</em></p>
<p>Although he had dreams of joining the New England Mafia, known by its members outside of Boston as the Office, and within the city as <em>In Town</em>, behind his back, these people referred to Barboza as <em>the nigger</em> because of his dark skin. As neither of his parents were of Italian descent, membership into the mob was never on the cards for Joe.</p>
<p>Like so many criminals, Barboza was downright ugly. The word ugly is Middle-English in origin, deriving from a Norse word meaning unpleasant or repulsive. It can also mean threatening or dangerous, adjectives that aptly describe so many of the people who populated the American underworld.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was definitely one such man.</p>
<p>A killer for hire and a thug by nature and inclination, there seems at first glance, little about Barboza that justifies his importance in the history of the criminal underworld of America. Many of its members were ugly; many were mean and vicious and deadly killers. But Joe was different and for three reasons:</p>
<p>He was the first person ever to enter <em>The Witness Protection Program</em>. It was actually set up and created to protect him and manage his safety and that of his family.</p>
<p>He was one of only two East Coast mob-connected criminals to ever escape the wrath of a Mafia crime overlord, eloping to California to secure safety and freedom, to be then tracked down and murdered thousands of miles from his hometown. Peter Poulus is often fitted into this category, but his murder by Stevie Flemmi in Nevada was not Mob ordained.</p>
<p>However, Joe’s real claim to fame as a malcontent swimming around the edges of organized crime in Boston was to be the man who cost the United States Government over $100 million dollars as a result of his illegal actions which sent four innocent men into prison on life sentences. When he was ultimately exposed, it resulted in the uncovering of one of the most scandalous examples of corrupt behaviour that has ever occurred within the Federal Bureau of Investigation.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was born of Portuguese immigrants, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on September 20th 1932. He grew up a lawless child and in 1945, at the age of thirteen, he and his brother were arrested for vandalising streetcar signs in the town. By the time he was seventeen, he was leading a pack of young thugs who became known as The Cream Puff Bandits, when after robbing a restaurant they pelted each other with pastries across the dining room.</p>
<p>He went to prison for the first time in December, 1949. Three years later, at the age of twenty, he led a prison break-out from the Concorde Reformatory of himself and six other inmates, the biggest in the prison’s seventy-five year history. Re-captured within twenty-four hours at an East Boston subway station, he was given an additional sentence, to be served this time, at the maximum security facility in Walpole.<br /> He was paroled from here in 1958.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001890,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001890,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237001890?profile=original" width="208" /></a>It was in Walpole, one of the toughest prisons in Massachusetts, that Joe Barboza’s (right) criminal career would take a quantum shift. There have been suggestions that he met up with prisoners who were either Mafiosi or certainly associates of the New England mob, and through this link, he became known to Raymond Loreda Salvatore Patriarca, the boss of the New England mafia.</p>
<p>Patriarca had put in a long apprenticeship during the Prohibition period, getting his first criminal conviction at the age of seventeen, and three more times before he was twenty. This would be followed by numerous other arrests on charges ranging from white slavery to breaking and entering and armed robbery.</p>
<p>During his lifetime Patriarca was arrested or indicted 28 times, convicted seven times, imprisoned four times, and served 11 years in prison.</p>
<p>He masterminded a jailbreak in which a prison guard and a trustee were killed and in between learning the ways of the mob, first as an associate then a member of a New York Mafia crime family which he allegedly joined in 1929, although this has never been substantiated, spent ten years in prison. It was more than likely that his career in the Mafia began in the crime family of Frank Iaconi, the head of the Worcester clan.</p>
<p>Raymond Patriarca allegedly worked as muscle on rum-running launches operated by Iacone during the Prohibition period. Virgil W. Peterson the famous lawmaker, confirmed this at the Kefauver Committee Hearings that ran from 1950-1951. Because of Iacone’s manipulation of the political and police machinery that ran Worcester, it was a strong part of the triangle-Boston/Rhode Island/Worcester-that controlled organized crime in the state of Massachusetts. Patriarca had been born in Worcester and always had a soft spot for the city. He and his family had moved to Providence, Rhode island, when he was three. His father, Eleuterio, had been offered a good job there as a manager of a packing store and they lived in a house on Atwells Avenue, in the Federal Hill neighbourhood, just across from the building where Raymond would make his business headquarters in the years ahead. Eleuterio at some stage opened a bar on the Avenue and his wife found work as a nurse.</p>
<p>Patriarca lived in Worcester during 1920s and 1930s and maintained his ties with friends and business associates there. He was the senior man attending at the Little Apalachin conclave held at the former Bancroft Hotel there, in 1959. By 1956, Iaconi was dead of natural causes, and Patriarca had assumed control of the New England Mafia.</p>
<p>He was pure Mafia-through and through.</p>
<p>In an illegal wiretap of his office in 1966 he was heard reminiscing:</p>
<p><em>In this thing of our, your love of your mother and father is one thing, your love for the Family is a different kind of love.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002673,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002673,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237002673?profile=original" width="350" /></a>Patriarca (right), referred to by his peers and mob associates as The Man, or George, and who lived in a modest white, clapboard house on the corner of Lancaster Street in Providence, had taken over the mob of Boston based Philip Buccolo when he himself relinquished his position as the boss and retreated to his birthplace-Sicily-in 1954. There, he developed a successful poultry business on a five acre site next to his luxurious home on Piazza Marie Consolatrice, in Palermo city, where he lived until he died aged 101, in 1987.</p>
<p>With his departure, the power base of the New England Mafia shifted south to where Patriarca would run his business from the Mafia sewer that was Providence, Rhode Island.</p>
<p>A vicious, brutal man himself, who was overheard on a law enforcement wiretap saying the happiest days of his life were when he was on the street clipping people, he was once described by a Massachusetts State police officer as <em>just the toughest guy you ever saw.</em></p>
<p>Raymond Patriarca perhaps recognized the potential in Barboza. He would be useful for the mob’s street activities-enforcing loan payments, protecting shylocks, intimidating potential extortion targets, collecting on gambling debts-the staples of mob activity, the grease that kept the cogs from slipping, and which helped feed and fuel the major activities, union control, political manipulation, drug trafficking, distribution and management of illegal poker machines and control of prostitution rings. So much crime, so little time.</p>
<p>Once Patriarca established himself as the Czar of organized crime in the region, he handed over control and management of the Boston area to Gennaro Angiulo. This sub-division of territorial rights would operate in the years to come not so much as a satellite, but more a stand-alone unit, coughing up a monthly tribute to Providence. Angiulo on his return from military service in 1945, had quickly established himself in the tough, Italian enclave of Boston called ‘The North End.’ and by the late 1950s had struck the deal with Patriarca for the right to run Boston. According to Barboza, at any one time, Angiulo had over a million dollars out on the streets in shy lock money. And this was only one of his income earners.</p>
<p>Patriarca ran his criminal empire from a ram-shackled building at 168 Atwells Avenue on the corner of Dean Street, in Federal Hill, which housed the <em>National Cigarette Service Company</em> and <em>Coin-O-Matic Distributors</em>, a vending machine and pinball business. The business officially opened in 1956. In his dingy office he had an old leather couch and a black and white television set. There were there thirty years later when he died. His brother Joseph, worked alongside Raymond, and would be his surrogate when he went to prison in the late 1960s. This district within the city of Providence has always attracted a large Italian migrant population, and even to-day, 20% of the city’s ancestry connection is still from Italy. From here, he and Agiulo, (who according to O’Neil and Lehr in their book The Underboss, Patriarca had quickly seen as the pepper pot needed to shake Boston out its backwater doldrums,) would for the next thirty years like <em>The Odd Couple</em>, control organized crime in the state.</p>
<p>Patriarca had strong ties to the New York Genovese Mafia crime family who had a foothold in Connecticut, was allegedly a partner in illegal gambling operations in Philadephia with their mob boss, Angelo Bruno, and apparently had a hidden interest in the famous Berkshire Downs race track, one of whose owners was Frank Sinatra.</p>
<p>It is not entirely clear who Barboza reported to in the New England Mafia, although Vincent Fat Vinny Teresa, the Mafia associate, swindler thief and gambler, often called The New England Joe Valachi for the information he disclosed about the Mafia, claimed Joe Barboza was retained by Patriarca on a fee of $900 a week, to be on call to carry out killings when required.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was also available for hire to another group of thugs and killers in New England: the non-Italian underworld.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003085,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003085,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237003085?profile=original" width="203" /></a>Before the Italians dominated the crime scene in Beantown, there were the Boston Irish gangs. Criminal mobs developed over the years across South Boston, Charlestown, Somerville, Dorchester and Roxbury, many of them working for the Gustin Gang (named after a street in South Boston) under Frank Wallace (right), until he was gunned down on the streets of North End by Italian gangsters. He and Bernard Doddy Walsh were invited to a sit-down with Joe Lombardi and Philip Bucculo at the C and F Importing Company on Hanover Street, (some sources refer to this as CK Importing) on December 22nd and were shot dead as they entered the premises and made their way upstairs to the office. It was the last time an Irishman was to run the rackets in Boston until the early 1960s.</p>
<p>By then, many of these criminals had coalesced into two main groups, one that included James Buddy McLean which became known in 1972 as The Winter Hill Gang, based in Somervile, and the other headed up by George McLaughlin working from its territory to the east, in Charlestown.</p>
<p>Up until the time a drunken day out at a beach party went wrong, the McLeans and McLaughlins were the best of friends. Peat from the same bog, as the Irish say.</p>
<p>On Labour Day 1961, at a picnic near the New Hampshire border, McLaughlin, blind- drunk and belligerent, made a pass at a girlfriend of Andy Petricone, a close friend of McLean’s. (Petricone subsequently left Boston, moved to California, changed his name to Alex Rocco and became a movie star. Best known for the part he played of Moe Green in the Godfather.)</p>
<p>The two men gave McLaughlin a good beating that hospitalized him for two weeks. George’s brother Bernie, who headed the Charlestown gang demanded an apology which was refused by Buddy Mclean.</p>
<p>On October 29th, McLean, late in the evening, noticed three men hanging around his car parked in the street. They scattered as he went after them, shooting off his .38 revolver. Checking the car, he found it had been wired with three sticks of dynamite.</p>
<p>Within a few days, Bernie McLaughlin was dead. Reports give different days and different places of his killing; shot at close range with a .45 semi he was just as dead. Allegedly, the shooter was McLean, although he was never indicted for the murder. Effective that day, the infamous McLaughlin-McLean War began. It went on for years, before winding down towards the end of 1967.</p>
<p>Under the washed-out and faded blue sky of eastern Massachusetts, light reflecting off the dingy gunmetal greys of the roads and the rusted reds of the bricked buildings of Boston, the dead piled up. The back alleys, car parks and wastelands of Somerville and Charlestown became the killing fields in what might have been perhaps the bloodiest gang war in American criminal history. Perhaps as many as fifty men or more would die before the killings stopped.</p>
<p>Supporting McLean were a group of hard-case killers including Stephen Flemmi and his brother, Vincent, and Joe Barboza, who was undoubtedly responsible for a lot of the war’s casualties. Teresa claimed that Joe Barboza handled more hits than any one guy during the war.</p>
<p>Barboza told author Hank Messic who ghost-wrote his 1975 biography, Barboza, that he had murdered seven men, although he also allegedly bragged to his friends that the tally was closer to thirty.</p>
<p>Most of the victims of the war were shot dead. One was beheaded. Another dismembered. One was drowned. Four were beaten to death. One of the victims, John O’Neil was simply an innocent bystander at a christening party. No one really knows for sure just how many bodies fell. Somewhere between forty and fifty is believed to be a reasonable estimate.</p>
<p>To the media and any interested observer, the Boston underworld in the 1960s was a cesspit of warring factions-Irish-American, Italian-American and just plain old Americans fighting each other and among each other to grasp a share of whatever legal and illegal opportunity presented itself</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was not just killing people however. He had a business to run. He and his crew of street thugs would congregate at JB’s Bar on the corner of Bennington and Brook Streets in East Boston to work out their daily doses of criminal intent. They used it so much, it eventually became better known as simply <em>Barboza’s Corner</em>. His crew consisted of:</p>
<p>Joe Amico<br /> Patrick Fabiano<br /> James Kearns<br /> Arthur Bratsos<br /> Thomas De Prisco<br /> Joe and Ronald Dermondy-father and son.<br /> Carlton Eaton <br /> Edwrad Goss<br /> Nicholas Femia</p>
<p>All of them would ultimately be murdered.</p>
<p>Henry Skinny Man Tameleo from Cranston, Rhode Island, was a senior figure in the Patriarca crime family. Some sources claim he was the under boss, others that he carried the position of consigliere, or advisor. Either way, he was a senior part of the family’s administration.</p>
<p>He ran his operation in the Boston area from a club in Revere Beach. Five miles north of Boston city, it is the site of America’s first ever public beach, established in 1896. In the 1960s it was also the home to clubs and bars that were often frequented by Boston’s mob. <em>The Ebb Tide Lounge</em> on the Beach Boulevard, belonged to Richard Castucci, a member of the Winter Hill Gang. It turned into such a bucket of blood, the name was changed to <em>The Beach Ball</em> in the late 1960s. Joe Barboza was a frequent visitor here as he was to the old, three-story Victorian <em>Pleasanton Hotel</em>, further south down the road.</p>
<p>Legend has it that Barboza’s nickname <em>The Animal</em> was given him by Henry Tameleo. One afternoon drinking in the bar at the <em>Ebb Tide</em>, some old Italian guy started to remonstrate with Joe about something, and he responded by hitting the man. Tameleo interceded. Barboza as an ex-boxer, was accredited with hands as <em>dangerous weapons</em>.</p>
<p><em>I don’t want you to touch anybody with your hands again</em>, Tameleo shouted, Barboza sat brooding at the bar and then, suddenly leaned over and bit off part of the old man’s ear.</p>
<p><em>See</em>, he shouted back, <em>I didn’t touch him with my hands.</em></p>
<p>Sometime in 1963, according to Teresa, Tameleo hired Joe and his crew on a monthly retainer organizing a protection racket on clubs and bars in the Boston area. Barboza and his men would go into the places, start a fight and create havoc. Henry would then approach the owners, offering them protection. Apparently, it never failed to work. Joe had learned his apprenticeship in the protection racket business working for Edward Fishbein, an infamous Jewish loan shark, working-out of his office in Batterymarch Street, in Boston’s Wharf District.</p>
<p>So, through the late 1950s and early 1960s Joe had his hands full-stealing, scamming, extorting, cruising the city of Boston like a great white shark, breaking legs-and of course, killing people. He had also found the time to marry a Jewish woman, Philomena Termini in July 1958, on his release from Walpole, divorced her, re-married a woman called Claire and fathered a son by one wife and a daughter and a son by the second. He bought himself a new house in a well-to-do Jewish neighbourhood in Swampscott, a small town in Essex county, about fifteen miles north of Boston, and for a period between 1964 and 1966 he worked at legitimate jobs as a salesman and clerk at the Shawmut Insurance Company in Boston and moonlighted as a payroll clerk at $100 a week for the <em>Blue Bunny</em> and <em>Duffy’s Lounges</em>. By the end of 1968, he saw his second wife drift away.</p>
<p>By this time he was living under the care of the U.S. Marshals, as a protected witness, giving testimony against the New England Mafia. The program to secure his safety was set in place under the control of marshal John Partington. Barboza was at first held on Thatcher’s Island, off Cape Cod, then moved to a private estate at Freshwater Cove, near Gloucester and finally, near the end of the year, to Fort Knox, Kentucky.</p>
<p>He was the first person to become a ward of the government in what became known as <em>The Witness Protection Program</em>, a concept created by U.S. Attorney, Raymond Pettine and former attorney general, Robert Kennedy, although it was not ratified as such until 1970.</p>
<p>How all this happened came about this way:</p>
<p>Barboza drove around in a flashy auto, a <em>James Bond</em> car as the cops referred to it. A gold, 1965 Oldsmobile, with a 360 horsepower engine, white wall tyres and a hidden panel on the driver’s door which held a stash of hand guns. To the Boston P.D. it was akin to a red rag to a bull. From time to time, he was pulled over by those police officers brave enough to face up to him. It happened on the night of October 6th 1966.</p>
<p>Cruising the Red Light district of Boston which borders on Chinatown and was known as <em>The Combat Zone</em>, Barboza was stopped by a passing patrol car. Following a search of the Olds which disclosed an M-1 Carbine, a .45 semi-automatic and a hunting knife, the four occupant-Barboza and three of his crew, Arthur C. Bratsos, Nicholas S. Femia and Patrick J. Fabiano-were arrested. Joe and Femia were out on bail in connection with a stabbing that had occurred three months earlier. Because of this, and the serious weapons charge, bail for Barboza was set high at $100,000.</p>
<p>According to Vincent Teresa:</p>
<p><em>This was when the law began applying a squeeze that was to force Raymond Patriarca to make fatal mistakes.</em></p>
<p>Desperate to get out of jail, and unable to raise the money, Barboza instructed two of his crew to start hitting up people in the underworld for money to meet the bail requirements. It was then that the mob sent Joe a message.</p>
<p>Having raised a substantial amount, some sources say $60,000, others as much as $80,000, the two men, Bratsos and Thomas J. DePrisco were then shot dead on the night of November 1st. Their bullet-riddled bodies were found in Bratsos’s black Cadillac abandoned in South Boston. The money disappeared.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was sent for trial in January, 1967, found guilty on illegal weapons charges and sentenced to four to five years in Walpole State Prison.</p>
<p>And this is when crime and justice begin to unravel in a big way.</p>
<p>The Federal Bureau of Investigation had made a decision in their Boston office to target and cultivate potential underworld sources. Two of their operatives, Dennis Condon, a homeboy from Charlestown, and his partner H. Paul Rico, from Belmont, Middlesex County, who worked together in Boston for four years from 1966 to 1970, had been trying for months to make headway through the murky swamp of North End that surrounded Gerry Angiulo and his Mafia mobsters. Their chief, J. Edgar Hoover, had created a <em>Top Hoodlum Program</em> following the infamous 1957 Mafia concave that was held at an Apalachin property in upstate New York owned by mobster Joseph Barbara,</p>
<p>Hoover instigated this program that was to be effected in every city which had an F.B.I. field office, irrespective of whether or not the mob was represented. Butte, Montana, for example went hard to work and produced damming evidence against ten juvenile delinquents. For this, they received high praise from their boss.</p>
<p>The Boston office was struggling through the late 50s and earl 60s to come up with anything that was concrete. They gathered Intel on names and places, raided gambling dens, rousted street criminals, stuff like this. But the harder they worked, it seemed the more elusive Angiulo and Patriarca and the other major figures became. It seemed a no-win situation until Joe Barboza came along.</p>
<p>Following the murder of his two crewmen, the agents visited Joe in prison, on March 8th 1967 for the first time, talking to him, trying to turn him, edging him into a sea of insecurity. They told him Patriarca had washed his hands of him, and for evidence brought along a copy of a tape from the bureau’s electronic surveillance of the mob boss’s office on Atwells Avenue. This had been bugged between March 1962 and July 1965, creating twenty-six volumes of logs. On it, Patriarca is heard cursing Joe:</p>
<p><em>Barboza’s a fucking bum. He’s expendable.</em></p>
<p>Joe Barboza eventually rolled over and testified at three trials, starting in January 1968. The first against Patriarca and Tameleo. The second against Angiulo and four other mobsters. And the third, which began in May. It was this trial that would in due course expose a level of federal law enforcement corruption on a level unheard of until this time.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003493,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003493,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237003493?profile=original" width="187" /></a>It was all about the killing of a low-level Boston criminal called Edward Teddy Degan (right). His body was found in an alley off 4th Street in Chelsea, in the early hours of March 13th 1965. He had been lured to this spot in the belief that he would be part of a gang breaking into the offices of the Beneficial Finance Company, which was located on the second floor of the Goldberg Building. A man called Roy French had approached Deegan with the offer of the job. As they gathered in that dingy back lane- French, Barboza, Ronald Casessa, Romeo Martin and Vincent James Flemmi- sometime between nine and eleven that night, Deegan was shot multiple times in the back and the head and died on the spot.</p>
<p>William Landay the author, writes:</p>
<p><em>In 1967, Barboza became a cooperating witness for the FBI and later became the first man to enter the federal Witness Protection Program.</em></p>
<p><em>His false testimony in a 1968 murder trial would ultimately unravel a story of unimaginable corruption in the FBI’s Boston office, a story in which crooked FBI agents actually protected gangster-informants while they went right on murdering people in the street. Imagine: a select few mobsters were effectively above the law, protected by the federal government. There is a straight line from the feds’ protection of Joe Barboza in the 1960s to its infamous marriage with Whitey Bulger in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. It is as if, in Chicago, Al Capone had cut a deal with Eliot Ness for FBI protection. It is the defining story of the Boston crime world.</em></p>
<p><em>The whole story is told in a congressional report called “Everything Secret Degenerates.” If the story interests you, I highly recommend it. The prose is dry and lawyerly, and there is a lot of detail, still the story leaps off the page. There are many other, less authoritative versions out there on the web.</em></p>
<p><em>Briefly, the story is this. On March 12, 1965, Barboza and a small crew murdered a small-time hood named Teddy Deegan. Six men were indicted for the Deegan murder. At trial, Barboza — by then a protected state witness — testified in detail about how the murder was planned and carried out. On July 31, 1968, after a two month trial, all six defendants were convicted. Four got the death penalty, two life in prison, all on Barboza’s word.</em></p>
<p><em>The trouble was, Barboza lied — and the FBI knew it all along. Four of the men he named — Louis Greco, Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, and Joseph Salvati — had nothing to do with the crime. And one he did not name, Jimmy “The Bear” Flemmi, was actually one of the ringleaders and may well have been the triggerman. The day after the murder, Flemmi admitted to an FBI informant that he was in on it.</em></p>
<p><em>Why did the FBI keep silent? To protect a valued informant-witness in Barboza, no doubt. But it is also true that Jimmy The Bear had been an FBI informant for awhile, a fact the feds were eager to cover up. Flemmi was nearly as volatile as Barboza. He had told an FBI informant that he hoped “to become recognized as the No. One ‘hit man’ in this area as a contract killer.” In 1964, as the congressional report dryly puts it, “Flemmi killed an FBI informant by stabbing him fifty times and then, in a surfeit of enthusiasm, shooting him.” The FBI knew Jimmy The Bear was out of control. In September 1965, he shot another man and was charged with ABDW with intent to murder, and the feds dropped him as an informant — not because of the murder but because, according to an internal FBI memo, “any contacts with him might prove to be difficult and embarrassing.”</em></p>
<p><em>Of the four innocent men Barboza framed in the Deegan trial, two died in prison after serving almost thirty years, two others were finally released in the 1990s. The legal battle to free those men was one of the threads that ultimately unraveled the FBI’s corrupt alliance with the Boston mob, most notoriously Whitey Bulger.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003690,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003690,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237003690?profile=original" width="348" /></a>What is even more unbelievable is that the F.B.I. knew two days before the hit went down that Deegan was to be murdered. On March 10th, an underworld informant had told Agent Rico that Raymond Patriarca had ordered Flemmi to kill Deegan. And one week after the hit, a memo to Hoover from the S.A.C. in Boston confirmed that Flemmi had been present when the killing went down. Hoover tacitly approved not to prosecute Flemmi for the murder <em>as his potential outweighs the risks.</em></p>
<p>Of all the innocent men who were wrongly convicted of this crime, perhaps the most tragic is Joseph Salvati. A truck driver and a minor figure in the underworld, more of a gopher than a real criminal, he went to prison for thirty years, simply because he refused to pay back a loan of $400 to Barboza who had been acting as a loan shark in the transaction. In prison, Joe, desperate to collect owed monies to go towards his legal defence, had one of his associates demand the loan back. Salvati is alleged to have replied:</p>
<p><em>Tell Joe to go fuck himself.</em></p>
<p>He spent five years in prison for each of those words!</p>
<p>Salveti and his wife, Marie, kept their relationship going through all the long years. She poignantly described her life <em>as existing in a shoebox</em>. She said her husband did his time on the inside, she and the children on the outside.</p>
<p>Jack Zalkind, the prosecutor in the Deegan case said:</p>
<p><em>I must tell you this, that I was outraged—outraged—at the fact that if [the exculpatory documents] had ever been shown to me, we wouldn’t be sitting here . . . I certainly would never have allowed myself to prosecute this case having that knowledge. No way. . . . That information should have been in my hands. It should have been in the hands of the defence attorneys. It is outrageous, it’s terrible, and that trial shouldn’t have gone forward.</em></p>
<p><em>Barboza’s FBI handlers knew from the beginning that Joe Barboza was lying. . . . They have a witness that they knew was lying to me, and they never told me he was</em><br /> <em>lying. . . . [The FBI] figured, well, let’s flip Joe, and let Joe know that we’re not going to push him on his friend Jimmy Flemmi. So they let Joe go on and tell the story, leaving out Jimmy Flemmi; and then Jimmy Flemmi is allowed</em><br /> <em>to go on and be their informer.</em></p>
<p><em>The evidence is overwhelming that Barboza should not have been permitted to testify in the Deegan murder prosecution. Nevertheless, it was his uncorroborated testimony that was used in the Deegan prosecution that led to four men being sentenced to death and two others receiving life sentences.</em></p>
<p><em>J. Edgar Hoover crossed over the line and became a criminal himself</em>, said Vincent Garo, Mr. Salvati's lawyer. <em>He allowed a witness to lie to put an innocent man in prison so he could protect one of his informants.</em></p>
<p>And the Federal Judge who ultimately heard and determined damages on behalf of the men wrongly convicted for the killing of Deegan was equally forthright in her condemnation of the behaviour of the bureau:</p>
<p><em>I find that both men (Rico and Condon, photo right) lied in fundamental ways about their relationships with the Flemmi brothers and Barboza, about the information they had concerning the Deegan murder at the time of the trial, and their actions afterwards.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004277,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004277,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237004277?profile=original" width="239" /></a>When Barboza was originally released on parole in April, 1969, the F.B.I. sent him and his family (Joe was now reunited with Claire) to Santa Rosa, California, in the wine country, above San Francisco, where they <em>cared</em> for him. They enrolled him into the Marine Cooks and Steward’s Training School, on Mark West Spring Road, in Sonoma County. There, he trained along with others, under European cooks, to qualify to work as chefs on passenger ships and freighters.</p>
<p>It was not the first time he had been involved with cooking and maritime ventures. Sometime in the late 1960s he had shipped out on a vessel the <em>SS President Wilson</em> on a trip to the Orient, as a ship’s cook.</p>
<p>Under the alias <em>Joseph Bentley</em> which he had been allocated by the W.P.P., he worked and socialized with people in the city of 170,000. One group, included a twenty-six year old man called Clay Ricky Wilson and his wife Dee Wilson, nee Mancini, and their friends.</p>
<p>However, relocating Barboza from one part of America to another did nothing to change his attitude or temperament. In the dark nights of his soul, he carried on committing crimes-and murder.</p>
<p>Barboza bragged to this group about his true identity and how he had been responsible for sending Salvatit to prison for crossing him over a loan. He told Wilson that he had the government wrapped around his little finger, and he could manipulate them any time he wished. He told them that he could do this any time he was in trouble because all he would have to say was that he was going to change his testimony in prior trials. To him, this was merely a game of chess and he would always counteract the government’s future moves on him. He said that he could continue his violent lifestyle and get away with it.</p>
<p>Wilson was a bulldozer driver, and seemingly a couple of ants short of a picnic . In his spare time, he moonlighted as a criminal. A tall, skinny, drop-out, who still lived with his parents at1069 Emerald Court in Santa Rosa, he made the mistake in confiding in Barboza that he had robbed a home in Petaluma, of antiques and jewellery and a bundles of stocks and bonds worth about $250,000.</p>
<p>Following a dispute with Wilson, Barboza shot him dead- two in the back of the head- around the 5th or 6th of July 1970, close to midnight, and buried him in a grave in a forest near Glen Ellen, fifteen miles south-east of Santa Rosa. Two women, Dee Wilson and Paulette Ramos, witnessed the killing, but were too terrified of the killer to notify the authorities.</p>
<p>Not long after, Barboza for some reason, travelled back to Massachusetts. One theory suggests that he actually went back to sit down with the Mafia and discuss recanting his trial testimony in return for money and favours. Although in fact he had no intention of carrying out his side of the bargain. He was in essence, going to shake down the mob!</p>
<p>In typical Barboza fashion, while back in New Bedford, he became involved with a group of people in a car over a traffic dispute, produced a gun and threatened them. They notified the police of Bristol County, who quickly tracked Barboza down and found him in possession of a loaded firearm and a quantity of marijuana. He was arrested and incarcerated in Walpole State Prison.</p>
<p>He was held in a cell next to William Geraway. A forger and convicted murderer, who had killed David Sidalauskas in Quincy in April 1966, he had a memory so powerful, he would entertain Barboza by reciting Oscar Wilde's epic-length <em>Ballad of Reading Gaol</em>, a poem that runs to over four thousand words!</p>
<p>Geraway said it was not long before Barboza opened up about his time in California and described Wilson's death down to the least detail. Geraway remembered everything, from the colour of Wilson's pants to the exact description of his burial site and a description of the stump above his grave which Barboza had placed to cover up the site. A stump which was so big, it took three men from the sheriff’s department to move!</p>
<p>Geraway also claimed that Joe had told him <em>he had whacked out six people since his release by the government</em> following his trial testimony and the minimum sentence that had been imposed by the judge for his cooperation.</p>
<p>Geraway passed the information onto the local authorities in a hope of mitigating his sentence, but they showed little interest. He then, through his lawyer, had the information passed to the Santa Rosa police department on October 1st. Detective Sergeant Tim R. Brown of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office carried out an investigation and the grave and the body, under the huge tree stump, were found in the exact place specified by Geraway, on October 12th and in due course, in February 1971, Joe Barboza was extradited back to California to face trial for yet another murder he had committed.</p>
<p>Another prisoner at Walpole, Lawrence Wood, claimed in a statement he made to the FBI on November 2nd 1970 that Barboza had also told him he had killed six people since his release in 1969, including two on the West Coast.</p>
<p>When Barboza eventually went into court, charged with first-degree murder, a crime then punishable by death in the state of California, on October 19th 1971, to say the trial was weird would be an understatement. His own public defender, Marteen Miller, claimed it was bizarre to say the least.</p>
<p><em>Here he was</em>, Miller later stated, <em>with all kinds of evidence against him in a death penalty case, and he acted like he was in small claims court. He wasn't concerned at all. I've been in that business for 34 years and I've never seen anything close to it. It was uncanny.</em> (Photo below: Miller and Barboza.)</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004861,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004861,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237004861?profile=original" width="529" /></a>Miller flew to Massachusetts to see if he could find anything of an exculpatory nature that would act in Barboza’s favour. While he found little in the way of evidence, he did discover help and assistance from an area he least expected. Rico and Condon the F.B.I. agents agreed to come to the trial and offer testimony in defence of his client. And that was not all. In addition, Edward Harrington, the chief of the Massachusetts Organized Crime Task Force, also agreed to offer support.</p>
<p>At some stage, Harrington had mentioned in an internal memorandum that F.B.I. agent Rico had told Barboza that he should leave Massachusetts because the Mafia knew he was there and that two killers had been set up to get him. The problem with this admission of course was that Barboza’s presence in Massachusetts was a direct violation of his parole agreement with the state which required he never came back. This information was never passed onto state authorities and was still another example of the duplicity of the agency in dealing with their informant.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005085,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005085,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237005085?profile=original" width="288" /></a>The trial took place, and Barboza pleaded out to manslaughter, irrespective that he had shot his victim in the back of the head. In support of his evidence on behalf of the defendant, Edward Harrington (left) offered the court quite an unbelievable statement:</p>
<p><em>……it is essential that the government should fulfil its commitment to Barboza to do all within its power to ensure that he suffers no harm as a result of his cooperation with the federal government.</em></p>
<p>And then according to F. Lee Bailey:</p>
<p><em>Barboza was sentenced to 5 years to life and, was hustled off to Montana to some country club to serve his time.</em></p>
<p>Marteen Miller said he figured during the trial that the federal officers appeared on Barboza's behalf because they were afraid he would recant the testimony he had given at the Boston trials. At one time, Rico offered to lie for the defence, according to a statement later made by Miller who also commented:</p>
<p><em>Is this the stuff the FBI gets away with?</em></p>
<p>But he said he wondered at the time why they didn't let Joe go ahead and then simply laugh him out of court. :</p>
<p><em>Evidently</em>, Miller reported, <em>now it appears their motive was a little farther reaching than that.</em></p>
<p>Marteen Miller told the House Committee on Government Reform in 2003, that the FBI <em>was absolutely fearful that Barboza would receive the death penalty, fearing he might recant his testimony as a government witness in past trials if sentenced to death.</em> To assist with Barboza's defense, Mr. Miller said that then-U.S. Attorney Edward Harrington and FBI agents H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condon <em>were fully cooperative in testifying on behalf of Barboza</em>. Mr. Miller commented that in his 40 years as a criminal defence attorney, Barboza was the only individual to be convicted of second degree murder yet only serve 4 years in prison.</p>
<p>The 1971 trial was a local sensation, with Barboza mugging for the cameras, threats against witnesses, and even talk of sequestering the jury to protect them from possible Mafia intimidation. Before he left for prison, he sent a quote to a court reporter for the Press Democrat newspaper:</p>
<p><em>It was a pleasure to be living Santa Rosa.</em></p>
<p>Ed Cameron, an inspector in the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office who worked the Clay Wilson murder, was outraged at the manipulation of the trial by the government’s representatives.</p>
<p><em>This fellow Barboza murdered one of our street punk criminals who was not a heavyweight by any stretch of the imagination, he said. But he didn't deserve to get killed. And he got killed as a direct result of letting this animal back out on the street. And it turns out his testimony was false to start with. It's damn well unbelievable right up until today.</em></p>
<p>Within a month of Barboza entering the prison system, Edward Harrington began campaigning for his parole, the first letter, dated January 19th, 1972, including:</p>
<p><em>The government also requests that Barboza’s significant contribution to law enforcement in the organized crime field be weighed when his eligibility for parole is considered.</em></p>
<p>Edward F. Harrington, by now a United States senior judge, was still defending crooked agents of the F.B.I. twenty-six years later, when he gave evidence in 2008 in a court in Florida, in support of John J. Connolly Junior who had been indicted on murder and conspiracy charges and who according to the sentencing judge, was another agent <em>who had crossed over to the dark side.</em></p>
<p>In May, 1972, Joe Barboza was called to Washington D.C to give evidence at a select committee on crime investigating organized crime’s involvement in horse racing.<br /> Vincent Teresa said:</p>
<p><em>The committee did not know what time of day it was. They had Barboza testifying about fixing races. He never fixed a race in his life. He was an enforcer, a mob assassin, not a money man.</em></p>
<p>For good measure, Joe also threw in that Frank Sinatra was in bed with organized crime, stating he had been told personally by Raymond Patriarca that the singer held front points for him in the Fontainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach and the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. He also told the committee:</p>
<p><em>I was an enforcer that kept the other enforcers in line.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005283,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005283,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237005283?profile=original" width="522" /></a><em><strong>Joe Barboza testifying before select committee</strong></em></p>
<p>In July 1973, Harrington travelled to Montana to appear before the parole board as a character witness for Barboza.</p>
<p>Barboza was moved to a bewildering variety of penal facilities in the short, forty-three months period he spent behind bars.</p>
<p>He started in Santa Rosa jail, then went to Vacaville, Tehachapie, Washington State, Folsom, Eel River Montana, Deer Lodge Montana, Missoula County jail, San Quentin and finally, on October 30th 1975 was quietly released from the Sierra Conservation Centre near Jamestown, about one hundred miles east of San Francisco. His prison time was not without incident. On one occasion, on December 17th 1973, he attacked a guard and broke his jaw, which resulted in the transfer to San Quentin.</p>
<p>Barboza while in prison, drafted out an idea for a book to be called <em>In and Outside of the Family</em>, and used a friend from Lynn, Massachusetts, James Jimmy Chalmas, aka Theodore Sharliss, a Greek-American now living in San Francisco, to carry out negotiations with the writer chosen to ghost the story, Bob Patterson. Barboza and Chalmas had first met when they both in prison in the late 1950s and had been friends until Chalmas left Boston. Although this project never went ahead, Barboza did eventually create a manuscript which was sent to famous crime author Hank Messick to edit into another book, which was published in 1975. Joe also filled in time by writing poetry and painting-he was it seems a very talented artist. His verse was less so, somewhat naïve and inept.</p>
<p>The book ghost written by Messick, carried a foreword by Edward Harrington. Perhaps the first and only time a book by a mass murderer was endorsed by a senior figure in the American judiciary system. (Harrington is currently a senior judge in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts.)</p>
<p>Harrington informed Joseph Barboza by letter at his prison in Deer Lodge, Montana in December 1972:</p>
<p><em>I will be very happy to meet with your ghost writer and provide him background on you and your dealings with the organization here in New England and your significance as the first government witness to testify against the organization in this area.</em></p>
<p><em>. . . I will be quite happy to write some remarks in the preface extolling</em><br /> <em>your contribution to law enforcement in the organized crime</em><br /> <em>field.</em></p>
<p>Released after four years in prison, Joe Barboza had four months left to live.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006082,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006082,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006082?profile=original" width="137" /></a>Now calling himself Joe Donati, he moved in with Jimmy Chalmas (left) and his wife, Regina, who lived at 1710 25th Avenue, in the Sunset district of San Francisco. Chalmas had a severe alcohol and drug problem at this time and was seemingly very unstable. He was known to the police as a bookmaker and extortionist. Unknown to the police, he was also an informant for the F.B.I and had been since the early 1970s.</p>
<p>Joe lived with them from November 1st until the 15th when along with his girlfriend, thirty-two year old Maggie Delfel, he moved into a $250 a month apartment at 1250 La Playa Street, one block back from the beach, and just south of the Golden Gate Park, in the Outer Richmond district of the city. They seemingly lived an uneasy, but quiet life here, making causal acquaintances, of other residents in the building, but no close friends.</p>
<p>He would visit Jimmy almost every day, and soon had a job, which may have been set up by Chalmas, as a chef at the Rathskeller Restaurant in Turk Street, two blocks north of City Hall. It was an interesting choice of job locations for Joe, as the noisy, downstairs bar and food hall was a popular place for the police to meet after their shifts had finished.</p>
<p>In the few weeks he lived in San Francisco, Joe could not resist the temptation of easy money, and tried setting up a number of extortion schemes with porn shops and strip clubs that infested the area around <em>The Tenderloin District</em>, in the city centre. It was rumoured that the Mafia in San Francisco had asked for the help of Los Angles based Mafioso, Aledena Fratiano to sort the problem out, but that he had deferred it to Boston. Barboza was often found at <em>Luigi’s</em> or <em>La Pentera</em>, restaurants in the city, which he frequented three or four nights a week.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, February 11th 1976, Joe Barboza visited Jimmy Chalmas at his home. Joe was wearing a sports coat and slacks. His wallet contained $300 and he had a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver tucked into his belt. The two men went to a nearby deli for lunch and returned late in the afternoon. At approximately 3:40PM, Joe said goodbye to his friend, telling him he was going off to pick up a prescription at a pharmacy, and walked the few yards to Moraga Street where he had parked his car, a light blue, two-door 1969 Ford Thunderbird.</p>
<p>As he went to open his car, a white Ford Econoline panel van pulled alongside him. Its sliding door opened. Joe, obviously suspicious was turning, reaching for his gun, when two men appeared in the van’s entrance. A witness claimed one man was tall, wearing a red ski mask. He was holding a shotgun. The other man was shielded by this first gunman, and pointing a rifle of some kind. The guns went off, the noise booming across the quiet intersection. The rifle shot missed Joe, burying itself in the interior of the car, The shooter with the semi-automatic shotgun did not. Three times he racked and fired, the weapon. Thirty 00 buckshot rounds hammered into Joe’s body above his right hip, tearing open his intestines, eviscerating him, rupturing his liver and lungs, bursting his body open like a watermelon stamped on hard. He was dead before he hit the asphalt.</p>
<p>In his last seconds of life, Joe Barboza was heard screaming out:</p>
<p><em>You fuckers! You fuckers!</em></p>
<p>Was he cursing the men who were killing him, or maybe all the men he himself had killed over his short and brutal life?</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006885,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006885,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006885?profile=original" width="750" /></a><strong><em>The house three down from the corner is where Jimmy Chalmas lived.</em></strong></p>
<p>The van screamed away down the road, and was found abandoned five blocks away. The shotgun, a 1912 Winchester 12 gauge, and a rifle, along with some spent shotgun shells had been discarded inside, the killers long gone.</p>
<p>Chalmas rushed from his home on hearing the shots, and found Joe slumped against the side of his car, sprawled in a widening pool of blood. Homicide detectives from the San Francisco police department under Lt. Charles Ellis visited Chalmas that night, and questioned him extensively. From the first, the police investigators knew this was a mob hit, but it was some time before all the dots were connected.</p>
<p>That night, the news was played on the radios at the MCI medium security prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts. Henry Tameleo and Peter Limone were housed there, and the prisoners broke out in cheering and yelling that went on for over an hour, celebrating the death of a rat and pay-back in some form at least, for the four men who had already spent years in prison for a crime they never committed.</p>
<p>On May 24th 1976, an airtel from the Boston office of the F.B.I. to the one in San Francisco, stated that an informant had passed on word that Sharliss (Chalmas) was to be murdered by <em>The Office</em> as they were concerned he might <em>fold</em> under interrogation by law enforcement.</p>
<p>The San Francisco office contacted Sharliss with this information. Four days later, while being question by agents, Sharliss confessed that he had notified Boston Mafia capo Joseph Russo that Barboza visited him on a regular basis, and that he believed Russo had shot Joe. In October or November 1975, he stated that he had met with Russo in the dining room at the Hilton Hotel in downtown San Francisco and that Russo had offered him $25000 to kill Barboza. Sharliss said that he had refused. He also told the agents that he had spoken by telephone with Russo less that forty-eight hours before Barboza died.</p>
<p>On October 28th 1978, Jimmy Chalmas now living in Chula Vista, south of San Diego, was indicted in connection with the murder.</p>
<p>On January 24th 1979, he was charged with violation of Title 18 USC, Section 241, Civil Rights-Murder and Conspiracy. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in the custody of the Attorney General under a plea agreement of complete cooperation and testimony against those responsible for the murder of Joe Barboza.</p>
<p>On November 28th 1980 the S.A.C. in the Boston office of the F.B.I. contacted the current head of the bureau, William H. Webster, confirming that they had evidence placing Joseph Russo in San Francisco hours before the hit on Barboza.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006683,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006683,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006683?profile=original" width="137" /></a>The case against Russo for the murder dragged on for another eleven years until May 1990 when Russo along with other members of the New England Mafia were indicted on various charges, including the killing of Barboza. In January 1992, Russo (right) pleaded guilty to killing Joe Barboza and was sentenced to sixteen years in prison and fined $758,000.</p>
<p>It had taken fourteen years to bring someone to justice for the murder of Joe Barboza, but only one of the three involved paid the price. The drive of the van, and the other shooter were never traced. It was almost a given that the Boston family would have coordinated their activities with the head of the San Francisco Mafia family, James Lanza in the planning and preparation for the hit on Barboza. If nothing else, common courtesy would have demanded it. The F.B.I gathered information that indicated the getaway van had been bought some weeks before the killing. Joe Cerrito of the San Jose Mafia family forty one miles south of San Francisco, was apparently concerned that one of his men, Joe Piazza who had carried out the purchase assisted by two other members of the family, Angelo Marino and Manny Figlia, might be indicted for their part in the killing of Barboza, although this never eventuated.</p>
<p>It was another seventeen years before justice was served on the four men wrongly convicted and imprisoned because of the perjured testimony of Barboza in his Faustian pact with the government.</p>
<p>In the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Peter J. Limone et al versus United States of America, Judge Nancy Gertner found on July 26th 2007 that:</p>
<p><em>Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, and Edward Greco were originally sentenced to death by electrocution. Joseph Salvati was sentenced to life in prison. And though two were finally released in recent years, it is fair to say that all of them literally lost a lifetime. I find that their losses were proximately caused by the malicious prosecution, negligence, and conspiracies engaged in by the government.</em></p>
<p><em>Losses of this magnitude are almost impossible to catalogue. The loss of liberty. The loss of the enjoyment of their families. The loss of the ability to care for and nurture their children. The loss of intimacy and closeness with their spouses. Indeed,</em><br /> <em>the task of quantifying these losses -- which I am obliged to do -</em><br /> <em>- is among the most difficult this Court has ever had to undertake.</em></p>
<p>She did a good job, awarding damages of over $100,000,000 to the plaintiff’s and their families.</p>
<p>In 2009, the First Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in Boston Massachusetts dubbed the FBI's conduct <em>outrageous</em> and <em>a sad chapter in the annals of federal law enforcement</em>, in upholding a lower court judgment of $101,750,000 against the federal government for its 30-year cover-up in helping a <em>Top Echelon</em> informant secure convictions of four men for a murder they did not commit.</p>
<p>The murky, sometimes incomprehensible manoeuvrings that surrounded Joseph Barboza and the Boston underworld, helped create an urban landscape where cops and robbers became at times, almost indistinguishable. Barboza’s story is one of bribery, corruption, deceit and the seduction of power that would rival anything by Zola or Dostoevsky. But no one should be above the law, including and especially, lawmakers.</p>
<p>No one is born evil. Evil is taught to us.</p>
<p>Shakespeare’s Iago appears in Othelo as simply pure evil. To constantly lie and deceive your friends and your wife, you must be evil, or amoral. To steal and kill without the slightest feeling of guilt you must be guilty of a level of sin that goes beyond natural boundaries. Iago appears in the play as a Machiavellian schemer and manipulator, a trusted soldier of the Moor whom he betrays. It has been rightly determined that evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the evil character of Iago. The analogy between him and Joe Barboza is compelling.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza even went past this line. Possessing a keen intellect, he was fluent in three languages and had an above average IQ. The thing he lacked of course, was a conscience. He killed often for pragmatic reasons-to remove an obstacle, fulfil a promise, earn a reward-but he also killed because it was convenient or simply because he did not care. The example of the old lady in the house he wanted to burn down with her dying as collateral damage is a good example of this.</p>
<p>The philosophical dilemma inherent in the presence of evil has long plagued philosophers.</p>
<p>The New Testament uses a number of terms to describe evil including Anomia-non observance of a law, and Parabisis-to transgress. Those of us who never knowingly adopt this vocabulary of sin are considered normal and law-abiding. People like Barboza had no idea they even existed.</p>
<p>What was Barboza? A mass murderer. A serial killer. A mob executioner?</p>
<p>In essence, these are simply categories of evil. His body count was high, somewhere between seven and thirty or more, making him a suitable candidate for all of these descriptions.</p>
<p>His own murder has made it impossible for any real study of a man who was a minefield of paradox and dissonance. A classic example of someone suffering from ASPD-antisocial personality disorder, showing the characteristic persuasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others, something that began in his childhood and continued throughout his life.</p>
<p>Maybe as a child, he fell on his head or was subject to a form of viral infection that damaged him irreparably for life, causing some kind of psychological meltdown. Add to this, his broken home upbringing-his drunken father left him and his mother and siblings to fend for themselves in the late 1930s. By his early teens, Barboza was an incorrigible thief and troublemaker embarking on a career that would take him in only one possible direction-to that quiet street in suburban San Francisco.</p>
<p>The fact that he was helped on that journey with considerable assistance, by members of the premier law enforcement agency in the country, is something that perhaps even William Shakespeare might find hard to adapt into one of his many tragedies. The evil of Barboza in this story is only matched by perhaps an even bigger evil, displayed by servants of the government who in their own twisted way, sought to justify an end by whatever means they thought was necessary.</p>
<p>Joseph Barboza, like most people, was not all evil. He loved animals, especially dogs; he treated children with care and respect-would often buy popcorn at cinemas for those too poor to afford it. Most of the men who worked in his crew were loyal to the point where it got them killed. There were two women who loved him enough to marry him. His daughter, Jackie, grew up without realizing just what her father was and broke her heart when she finally discovered the truth, hidden from her for years by her mother, in a class on organized crime she attended in college.</p>
<p>Something, somewhere, went terribly wrong. And that is what we will remember about Joe Barboza.</p>
<p><em>Joe Barboza was a cold-blooded killer. They gave him a new identity. They put him in the middle of an unsuspecting community. They put him on the payroll. And he killed again. At that point they should have locked him up and thrown away the key. They did just the opposite. They did everything they could to get him back on the street. Joe Barboza was murdered himself in 1976. I have to wonder, if he hadn't been killed, how many murders would they have let him commit before the Justice Department decided to reign him in?</em></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Dan Burton, chairman House Government Reform Committee, 2003.</span></p>
<p><em>It is better to die on your feet,</em><br /> <em>than to live on your knees,</em><br /> <em>And know your concepts are sound.</em></p>
<p><em>Than to try to run, hide and scurry,</em><br /> <em>Out of fear of the dirt, the earth and the ground.</em></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;">An excerpt from Boston’s Gang Wars written by Joe Barboza in Folsom Prison.</span></p>
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Chinatown Gangs in Boston Busted
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/chinatown-gangs-in-boston
2011-07-11T11:00:00.000Z
2011-07-11T11:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/chinatown-gangs-in-boston"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003071,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237003071?profile=original" width="500" /></a>By David Amoruso<br /> <br /> While the media is still focused on the arrest of Irish crime boss turned informant turned fugitive <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mob-boss-whitey-bulger">James “Whitey” Bulger</a>, one tends to forget there are a lot of other criminal groups still operating in Boston. A recent bust puts the spotlight on the city’s Chinatown. <br /> <br /> On Friday July 8, 26 people were charged with working for organized crime groups in Chinatown, selling drugs varying from oxycodone pills to ecstasy, operating prostitution rings, money laundering, extortion, and illegal gambling. <br /> <br /> According to a statement made by FBI agent Thomas Conboy, the information that made these arrests possible came from a confidential informant and secret video recordings. Conboy told of one violent incident involving Hin Pau, one of the defendants who allegedly worked as an enforcer for a crime gang. <br /> <br /> It is alleged Pau confronted a man about an unpaid gambling debt after which an altercation occurred. “Pau fought with the man in the gambling den, and then had told one of his associates to get a ‘piece of metal,’ meaning a gun, which [the informant] was told was being kept nearby in case of need.”<br /> <br /> Newspaper <a href="http://articles.boston.com/2011-07-09/news/29755937_1_gambling-charges-gambling-den-indictments" target="_blank">The Boston Globe</a> was the only paper to pay attention to this news. Reporter David Abel made clear that despite the official FBI statement “prosecutors declined to speak about the indictments or ongoing investigation, and many details remained unclear.”<br /> <br /> Abel did point out an interesting tidbit though: “In his statement in court documents, Conboy described alleged connections between crime rings in the Boston and New York Chinatowns”, Abel wrote.<br /> <br /> Though there is little focus on these connections in the Globe article, it is an interesting piece of information. And also one that has a long and bloody history. Chinese organized crime groups have, for many years, tried to organize themselves into a national body. <br /> <br /> As recently as the 1990s Asian gangs have fought for control of American Chinatowns and the national drug market. In the early 1990s, a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/triads-overview">Triad</a> crime boss by the name of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/triad-boss-peter-chong">Peter Chong</a> had begun a partnership with Boston crime boss Wayne Kwong. Chong had plans for a national syndicate called “Tien Ha Wui" or "Whole Earth Association". This syndicate would be comprised of all the Asian gangs in the United States, and would be led by him.<br /> <br /> But before the plan could come to fruition both bosses ended up in hand cuffs. Kwong began cooperating with authorities and Chong was sentenced to prison in 2002. According to the Bureau of Prisons he was released on July 29, 2008 at the age of 65. <br /> <br /> Could the successors of Boston gang boss Wayne Kwong have been planning another national syndicate, instead this time looking to their brothers in New York? An interesting question that should have an even more interesting answer as these 26 men go to trial. <br /> </p>
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