lcn - Blog 2.0 - Gangsters Inc. - www.gangstersinc.org
2024-03-28T21:32:12Z
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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.
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<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>
The DeCavalcante Crime Family: "The Sopranos... Is that supposed to be us?"
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-decavalcante-crime-family
2020-09-21T15:30:48.000Z
2020-09-21T15:30:48.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236976073,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236976073,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236976073?profile=original" width="600" /></a>First Boss</span>: Filippo "Phil" Amari<br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">Primary activities</span>: Extortion, gambling, drugs, loansharking, union corruption, prostitution.<br /> <strong>Boss</strong>: ?</p>
<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:large;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">PROFILES</span></span>:<br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">BOSSES</span>:<br /> <br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-jersey-mob-boss-francesco-guarraci-dies-at-age-61">Francesco Guarraci</a> (dead, natural causes)<br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/turncoat-mobster-once-again">Vincent "Vinny Ocean" Palermo</a> (flipped)<br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-jersey-decavalcante-family-boss-john-riggi-dies">John "The Eagle" Riggi</a> (dead, natural causes)<br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/decavalcante-boss-john-damato">John D'Amato</a> (whacked)<br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">CAPTAINS:</span><br /> <br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-of-decavalcante-crime-family-capo-charles-stango">Charles Stango</a> (prison)<br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/decavalcante-capo-francesco">Francesco Polizzi</a> (dead, natural causes)<br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">SOLDIERS:</span><br /> <br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-sopranos-is-that-supposed-to-be-us-profile-of-decavalcante-ma">Joseph "Tin Ear" Sclafani</a> (freedom)<br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/i-chopped-him-up-so-bad-profile-of-decavalcante-mafia-family-sol">Anthony Capo</a> (flipped, dead)<br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">ARTICLES</span>:<br /> <br /> <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/what-happened-to-tony-soprano-series-creator-david-chase-reveals">What happened to Tony Soprano?</a> Series creator David Chase reveals New Jersey mob boss’ fate<br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/alleged-new-jersey-mobster-admits-gun-and-coke-were-his">Alleged New Jersey mobster admits gun and coke were his</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-jersey-decavalcante-mafia-family-mobsters-hit-with-drug-charg">DeCavalcante Mafia family mobsters hit with drug charges</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mafia-author-shares-dark-stories-behind-garden-state-gangland-the">Mafia author shares dark stories behind Garden State Gangland:</a> The Rise of the Mob in New Jersey<br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-jersey-mafia-capo-gets-10-years-for-plans-to-whack-crime-fami">New Jersey Mafia capo gets 10 years for plans to whack rival</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/decavalcante-crime-family-capo-admits-planning-mob-rival-s-murder">DeCavalcante family capo admits planning mob rival’s murder</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/two-decavalcante-family-mobsters-admit-distributing-cocaine">Two Decavalcante family mobsters admit distributing cocaine</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/will-historic-mob-bust-really">Will Historic Mob Bust Really Go Down As Historic?</a><br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/turncoat-mobster-once-again">Turncoat Mobster Once Again Involved in Dirty Business</a></div>
<p> </p></div>
Visiting Chicago’s Prohibition-era underworld with new gangster tour
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/visiting-chicago-s-prohibition-era-underworld-with-new-gangster-t
2019-04-22T12:50:02.000Z
2019-04-22T12:50:02.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/visiting-chicago-s-prohibition-era-underworld-with-new-gangster-t" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237121472,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237121472?profile=original" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Chicago has seen its fair share of violence. It was infamous during the Prohibition years for its gangland killings and notorious Mafia boss Al Capone. Starting June 14, you will be able to visit many of these historic underworld sites with the brand-new Chicago Prohibition Gangster Tour.</p>
<p>Based on 25 years of research and lasting two and a half hours, the bus tour visits various interesting places, such as the location of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/al-capone-wishes-rivals-a-happy-valentine-s-day" target="_blank">St. Valentine’s Day Massacre</a>, the sites of the murders of Dean O’Banion, Hymie Weiss, “Big Jim” Colosimo, and John Dillinger, and the attempted hit on Jack McGurn.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ:</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/from-violent-to-loving-in-a-heartbeat-the-two-sides-of-infamous-c" target="_blank"><strong>The two sides of infamous Chicago Outfit mobster Tony Spilotro</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The tour is guided by John Binder, author of <em>Al Capone’s Beer Wars</em> and <em>The Chicago Outfit</em> and a consultant on numerous organized crime documentaries. He operates ChiTown Gangster Tours and shares his vast knowledge on the subject. During the luxury bus tour he answers all your questions. The tour involves no walking, but does make a few stops where you are welcome to exit the bus to get a closer look at the sites where gangland activities once took place.</p>
<p>Gangsters Inc. <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/al-capone-s-beer-wars-chicago-s-prohibition-era-gangland-laid-bar" target="_blank">interviewed</a> Binder about his most recent book, <em>Al Capone's Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago during Prohibition</em>. In it he debunks many myths about this period, especially regarding the amount of murders. “Let’s get to the facts here,” Binder <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/al-capone-s-beer-wars-chicago-s-prohibition-era-gangland-laid-bar" target="_blank">told us</a>. “Virtually every conclusion I’ve seen previously drawn about gangland violence in Chicago during <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Prohibition" target="_blank">Prohibition</a> is pretty much wrong.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ:</strong> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/al-capone-s-beer-wars-chicago-s-prohibition-era-gangland-laid-bar" target="_blank"><strong>Chicago’s Prohibition-era gangland laid bare by mob historian John Binder in new book</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>What is the right story? For that you will have to <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/al-capone-s-beer-wars-chicago-s-prohibition-era-gangland-laid-bar" target="_blank">read our interview</a>, buy and read his book or book a spot on his tour. You will not be disappointed.</p>
<p><em>For more information, including how to buy tickets, go to</em> <a href="http://www.chitowngangstertours.com" target="_blank"><em>www.chitowngangstertours.com</em></a></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-chicago-outfit-overview">Chicago Outfit section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out our <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/gangsters-inc-on-social-media">social media channels</a></strong></li>
<li><strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/about-gangsters-inc">About Gangsters Inc.</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
<p> </p></div>
Lucchese family mobster planned to escape from Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, prosecutors say
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/lucchese-family-mobster-planned-to-escape-from-metropolitan-deten
2017-09-16T09:00:22.000Z
2017-09-16T09:00:22.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/lucchese-family-mobster-planned-to-escape-from-metropolitan-deten" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237093860,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237093860?profile=original" width="600" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>He’s a wiseguy who took his flossing seriously. Christopher Londonio, an alleged soldier in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-lucchese-crime-family" target="_blank">New York’s Lucchese crime family</a>, was charged Wednesday with planning to escape from the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn using dental floss, sheets, blankets, and a saw blade smuggled into the facility by a priest.</p>
<p>According to prosecutors, the breakout was concocted somewhere in June, by 43-year-old Londonio and another unnamed detainee. The imprisoned mobster used dental floss as a cutting tool to tamper with a window in the center. He also planned to solicit a priest to smuggle a saw blade into the facility, and secretly stockpiled a large number of sheets and blankets, intending to use them as a rope to aid in his escape. </p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-lucchese-crime-family-boss-vittorio-vic-amuso" target="_blank">Profile of Lucchese family boss Vittorio Amuso</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>As usual when it comes to these high-profile <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mafia" target="_blank">Mafia</a> busts, the plan was foiled after a fellow detainee reported the escape plan to authorities.</p>
<p>“Although sounding like a script for a made-for-tv movie, the charges allege yet another serious federal crime against Londonio,” Joon H. Kim, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York told the press. “As alleged, with this latest chapter in his years-long life in the mob, Londonio adds to the string of crimes he must now face, in a criminal justice system he was desperately seeking to escape.”</p>
<p>Londonio has been detained at the MDC since February 2017 in connection with murder and racketeering charges pending in White Plains federal court. He was among nineteen members and associates of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Lucchese" target="_blank">Lucchese</a> La Cosa Nostra family <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-york-s-lucchese-mafia-family-deadly-as-ever-in-2017-prosecuto" target="_blank">charged</a> with racketeering, murder, narcotics offenses, and firearms offenses.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-york-s-lucchese-mafia-family-deadly-as-ever-in-2017-prosecuto" target="_blank">New York's Lucchese Mafia family deadly as ever in 2017</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Authorities have charged Londonio with the murder of drug boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Meldish" target="_blank">Michael Meldish</a>, a former leader of the infamous Purple Gang in New York which had longstanding ties to New York’s five Mafia families. Many of the current mob bosses started out as members of the Purple Gang. Londonio is also charged with playing a role in the shooting of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family" target="_blank">Bonanno family</a> soldier Enzo “The Baker” Stagno.</p>
<p>He will be arraigned on the new charge at the next pretrial conference, which is currently scheduled for September 20, 2017. The attempted escape charge carries a maximum prison term of five years. Londonio is represented by his lawyer Charles Carnesi.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/prison-breaks-from-mobsters-and-hitmen-to-serial-killers-and-drug" target="_blank">Prison Breaks: From mobsters to drug lords</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-lucchese-crime-family">Lucchese 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>
Al Capone’s Beer Wars: Chicago’s Prohibition-era gangland laid bare by mob historian John Binder
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/al-capone-s-beer-wars-chicago-s-prohibition-era-gangland-laid-bar
2017-09-12T08:05:49.000Z
2017-09-12T08:05:49.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/al-capone-s-beer-wars-chicago-s-prohibition-era-gangland-laid-bar" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237092696,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237092696?profile=original" width="600" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>The Prohibition era in Chicago has gone down in history as a time of extreme mob violence. A time when hoodlums were mowing down enemies with Thompson machine guns in a battle over the lucrative bootlegging business. When mob boss Al Capone ruled supreme while being on the cover of every newspaper. Author John J. Binder gives readers a complete account of those turbulent times in his new book <em>Al Capone's Beer Wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago during Prohibition</em>.</p>
<p>“It’s a book to set the record straight,” John J. Binder tells Gangsters Inc. right off the bat. <em><a href="http://amzn.to/2jljphE" target="_blank">Al Capone’s Beer Wars</a></em> is based on over two decades of exhaustive research by the renowned mob historian and several of his colleagues that covers the entire period from 1920 to 1933.</p>
<p>In it, he paints a detailed picture of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-chicago-outfit-overview" target="_blank">Chicago Outfit</a> from its beginnings under leader “Big Jim” Colosimo to its prolific rise under bosses John Torrio and Al Capone. Using many previously unexplored sources Binder lays out how the organization’s diversified operations in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Prostitution" target="_blank">vice</a>, <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>, and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Union" target="_blank">labor racketeering</a> enabled its expansion and ensured its survival after <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Prohibition" target="_blank">Prohibition</a> ended.</p>
<p>Another reason the Capone gang was so successful was that it welcomed gangsters from other ethnicities into its ranks. “Therefore,” Binder writes in his <a href="http://amzn.to/2jljphE" target="_blank">book</a>, “from the earliest days [they] greatly benefitted from the likes of Jake Guzik and Murray Humphreys and readily embraced other non-Italians such as Sam Hunt and Willie Heeney. Capone was also willing to cooperate with and eventually merge with other gangs as things evolved, as opposed to fighting them and then expelling them from the areas they controlled, even though these other gangs were not heavily Italian in membership.”</p>
<p><span class="font-size-4"><strong>ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!</strong></span></p>
<p>One should add that all of this reasoning is based on decades of research. Part of the reason for writing this <a href="http://amzn.to/2jljphE" target="_blank">book</a> stems from the large amount of crime fiction that is being presented as fact by many writers. “A lot has been written about this subject, which I’ve been studying for 25 years now,” Binder tells us. “I’ve had the opportunity to dig into a lot of things. And as other books came out I’d sometimes be perplexed.”</p>
<p>Flipping through the pages, Binder found himself asking: “Really? How could you say that? How do you think that happened?” Or, he adds, “When one guy says X and 99 other sources say Y yet the author, without anything else to contribute to this issue, goes with X. Come on! You’re kidding me?!” he exclaims.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/chicago-mob-story-the-man-who-loved-being-a-gangster" target="_blank">A Chicago Mob Story: The man who loved being a gangster</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>There are many reasons for this, he explains. “One problem is that in this day and age sensationalism sells books. I think a lot of authors might be a bit too quick to go with something that they hear or can put together quickly, especially if it is very sensational.” This sensationalism, Binder says, led to the creation of myths and fiction like the claims that Capone was a cocaine addict (he wasn’t) or that Capone had nothing to do with the St. Valentine’s Day massacre (he did).</p>
<p>A bit frustrated by this and realizing he had compiled a ton of factual evidence about the Prohibition era in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Chicago" target="_blank">Chicago</a>, Binder went to work on <a href="http://amzn.to/2jljphE" target="_blank">his latest book</a>. A major focus of his work is how the group led by Al Capone gained a virtual monopoly over organized crime in northern Illinois and beyond even though it was just one of a staggering twelve major bootlegging gangs vying for territory at the start of Prohibition.</p>
<p>When it comes to <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/al-capone-s-beer-wars-book-delves-into-prohibition-era-chicago-ga" target="_blank">researching organized crime</a>, Binder has simple advice: Dig deep and dig wide. “Working this subject is so difficult,” he admits. “You’re talking about a field of history where you have minimal source material. You think the Middle Ages are bad? Organized crime history is much worse.”</p>
<p>What helps is cross checking every lead you find, Binder advices. “If you’re not careful of the source material you draw conclusions that might be very different than if you’d dig a little deeper.”</p>
<p><span class="font-size-4"><strong>TOMMY GUN MASSACRE</strong></span></p>
<p>“The history of Chicago prohibition and most of organized crime has been written about in a very particular way,” he tells us. “Most writers are not looking at the bigger picture, asking: What do these guys do? How do they make their money? Because that’s the sole goal of organized crime.” Instead, Binder says, the media focused on the violence.</p>
<p>“For years everybody was drawing conclusions without looking at what really happened. ‘Oh my God! 729 gangland killings! Oh, they must’ve all been bootleggers! They must’ve all been part of the wars between the bootleggers! It was so incredibly violent they were all using Thompson machine guns,” Binder says with a critical tone.</p>
<p>During his meticulous research Binder partnered with Mars Eghigian and decided to take a look at all of these 729 killings one by one, devoting an entire chapter to the topic in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/al-capone-s-beer-wars-book-delves-into-prohibition-era-chicago-ga" target="_blank">his book</a>. After painstakingly going through reports and historic documents the results were in. Of the 729 killings between 1919 and 1933 only 138 people were members of the major bootlegging gangs.</p>
<p>Binder: “The flashiest incidents [during Prohibition] were, yes, with the Thompson submachine gun, but that doesn’t mean it was used regularly. Let’s go look at all these incidents and see in what percentage a Tommy gun was used.”</p>
<p>In 444 murders between 1926 and 1933 the Thompson machine gun was used a total of only 27 times. “There is a simple reason why they used them infrequently; when fired on full automatic such weapons are difficult to control and the gangsters were extremely wary of accidentally hitting bystanders. To minimize the risk, gunmen tended to shoot their victims at close range, in which case a handgun or shotgun was sufficient.”</p>
<p>Binder: “That chapter more than any other shows what the work was really all about: Let’s get to the facts here. Virtually every conclusion I’ve seen previously drawn about gangland violence in Chicago during Prohibition is pretty much wrong.”</p>
<p><span class="font-size-4"><strong>“AL CAPONE WAS A GREAT BOSS”</strong></span></p>
<p>One man who has gotten a particularly bad rep is <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Capone" target="_blank">crime boss Al Capone</a>. Described frequently as a hothead with little in terms of brain capacity, readers had to ask themselves: how could this guy be boss?!</p>
<p>“In my opinion,” Binder begins, “Al Capone was a great gang leader. He had strong business sense and excellent martial skills. They’re running a multimillion-dollar business empire. Illegal as it is, that is the sole goal. If you can’t earn profits and make money for everyone, you won’t last very long. Guys underneath you are probably going to revolt, because you’re not just damaging how much guys at the top make but also how much everyone makes. I don’t think anyone would last very long as a gang leader if he didn’t have some basic and decent business skills to run the operations.”</p>
<p>Apart from that, Capone could never have lasted, Binder says, if he wasn’t able to keep his aggression under control. Not just because it would cloud his judgement and result in hasty and bad decisions, but also because he would alienate others. “You have to be diplomatic in how you interact with people inside and outside your organization,” he adds.</p>
<p>Of course, he did have his shortcomings. Binder acknowledges that Capone’s public behavior put him in the spotlight and that he should have filed his income tax returns every year and declared income equal to what he thought the authorities could attribute to him.</p>
<p><span class="font-size-4"><strong>LESSONS LEARNED FROM PROHIBITION</strong></span></p>
<p>After extensively researching this fascinating period, what have we learned from <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Prohibition" target="_blank">Prohibition</a> with regards to fighting organized crime? Well, you might not like the answer.</p>
<p>“The basic law enforcement approach is someone breaks the law and you punish him,” Binder says. “The next approach is, as you saw in Chicago, authorities would try to hit them in the pocketbook. Shut everything down in a certain area so they lose income and start behaving themselves. Or if it’s really bad, something really major, authorities will shut down organized crime citywide for two weeks. Maybe keep hitting the speakeasies and gambling places and keep them totally closed to really punish the gangster element.”</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/there-goes-the-neighbor-hood-take-a-tour-through-chicago-s-gangla" target="_blank">Take a tour through Chicago's gangland</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>But you hit organized crime the hardest if you take away their livelihood altogether. Binder: “Make their activities legal. If you do that, you put them totally out of business. Legal casinos and legal slot machines have taken illegal gambling largely away from the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-chicago-outfit-overview" target="_blank">Chicago Outfit</a>.”</p>
<p>If we apply that theory to our present-day predicament, it would mean legalizing drugs. “Complete legalization of drugs would take it away from the street gangs who are involved in a lot of the violence on the street corners and from those at the upper ends distributing and trafficking it. I’m not trying to use that as a blanket statement, saying there’s your conclusion, let’s do it. Society would have to weigh the benefits against the costs. People always argue about the cost and that it will create more addicts, more crime, but it would certainly have a positive effect as all that violence would probably disappear. The corruption of public officials with drug money would go away. The government could tax the narcotics trade and make it a revenue baring activity for society,” Binder argues.</p>
<p>“We learned from Prohibition that the racket quickly ended when authorities legalized alcoholic beverages again. The bootlegging gangs tried to go legit, but found they were bad at it. When they’re forced to deal with a legal competitive environment they get their pants kicked off. When alcohol became legal they tried to hold on but it was very clear that they had become ancient history as far as the booze business was concerned.”</p>
<ul>
<li><em><strong><a href="http://amzn.to/2jljphE" target="_blank">Al Capone's Beer Wars</a> is available at <a href="http://amzn.to/2jljphE" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a> and bookstores near you.</strong></em></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>ABOUT THE AUTHOR:</strong></p>
<p>John J. Binder, Ph.D., is the author of two previous books on organized crime and has appeared in interviews on and served as an expert consultant for documentaries on the mob shown on the A & E and AMC cable networks and on the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. He has also given numerous interviews on the subject for newspapers, magazines, and radio and television news programs. He lectures frequently on organized crime in Chicago. He is associate professor emeritus of finance in the College of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago.</p>
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Profile: Gambino crime family capo Bartolomeo Vernace
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-capo-bartolomeo-vernace-found-guilty
2017-03-08T06:30:00.000Z
2017-03-08T06:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-capo-bartolomeo-vernace-found-guilty"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237012093,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237012093?profile=original" width="520" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>After more than thirty years, Gambino capo Bartolomeo “Pepe” Vernace finally had to face the music in 2013 when he was found guilty of a 1981 murder and various racketeering charges. His victim was an innocent bar owner who had nothing to do with the mob. Vernace on the other hand rose rapidly through the underworld while dodging murder charges for years.</p>
<p>It may sound corny, but it was just like a scene from the movie Goodfellas. Apparently Henry Hill and Martin Scorsese perfectly captured the mob ethos of that period. On the night of April 11, 1981, wannabe mobster Frank Riccardi was celebrating his 24th birthday at the Shamrock Bar on Jamaica Avenue. He was having a grand time, fooling around and getting drunk, until someone spilled a drink on a woman he was with and ruined her dress.</p>
<p>Be it alcohol, a short temper, or simple disrespect, Riccardi reacted with violence, starting a bar brawl with the other patron which ended when bar owners Richard Godkin and John D’Agnese broke it up and led Riccardi and an associate out the door and onto the street. As the owners went back inside, Riccardi decided he wasn’t done yet.</p>
<p>Within half an hour he was back at the Shamrock Bar with two friends by his side. One of them being Bartolomeo Vernace, who was an associate in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview">Gambino Crime Family</a> at the time, the other was Ronald “Ronnie the Jew” Barlin, the man who stood by him during the bar brawl. The reason they were there was clear to all present. As they entered the bar with guns drawn, Riccardi shot D’Agnese in the face. Vernace was struggling with Godkin, a Vietnam vet, against an arcade machine. As Vernace got the upper hand, he shot him in the chest and left him to die.</p>
<p>Bartender Joseph Patrick Sullivan witnessed the whole scene. He later testified about what he saw, but he wouldn’t at that moment. Nor a decade later. He was too frightened. According to Sullivan, a few days after the violent murders, Gambino mobster Ronald “Ronnie One Arm” Trucchio summoned him to come see him at his social club. Trucchio was a close associate of Vernace. When Sullivan arrived, no one was there. Still, he got the message: Don’t talk to the cops.</p>
<p>Killing two innocent men over nothing isn’t the mob’s modus operandi. It attracts unwanted heat from police and alienates people in the neighborhood. The three men responsible were in big trouble with their higher ups. And they knew it. They decided to lay low while both police and the Gambinos investigated what exactly had happened.</p>
<p>The situation got complicated when it turned out that one of the victims, John D’Agnese, was the boyfriend of a girl named Linda Gotti, daughter of Peter Gotti and the niece of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-john-gotti-sr">John Gotti</a>. Two men who just a few years later would lead the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview">Gambino Family</a>. Both father and uncle sat down with Linda and told her not to cooperate with the police. Omerta, the code of silence, was an important tradition within the Gotti-household and they made that clear to the young woman grieving over her dead boyfriend.</p>
<p>Despite having behaved like a loose cannon and angered the Gottis, Vernace still had enough backing within the Gambino family. According to rumors, Vernace’s uncle had a lot of pull and managed to get him a pass. The other men managed to make amends without getting whacked as well.</p>
<p>With the mafia off their backs, the three men still had to deal with the law. But thanks to their mob connections witnesses were so intimidated that prosecutors failed to make a fist: Charges were dropped against Barlin; Riccardi was acquitted in a state murder trial; and Vernace was acquitted in 1998 in a state trial.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237012464,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237012464,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237012464?profile=original" width="300" /></a>The acquittal meant that Vernace was back on the streets for good. The Gambino Family took notice and a year later, in 1999, made him an official member of the crime family. After the senseless killing of <a href="http://youtu.be/7pQ6fd6iO_c" target="_blank">Billy Batts</a>, Joe Pesci’s character thinks he will become a “made guy” as well, only to find out the mafia has a long memory and decided to use the ceremony as a ruse to murder him. It would have been a fitting end for Vernace. Especially considering he was in on the killing of Linda Gotti’s boyfriend and the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-john-junior-gotti">Gotti clan</a> still ruled the Gambinos during the years he was made. But eighteen years later any beef that existed had long since been squashed. Besides, Vernace (photo right, Vernace left) was bringing in a lot of money.</p>
<p>Over the next two decades, his power within the mafia grew as he became actively involved in robbery, drug trafficking, loansharking, and gambling, while operating a large and profitable crew from a café on Cooper Avenue in the Glendale neighborhood of Queens. His rank rose as well, going from a soldier to a captain who served on a three-member ruling panel that led the Gambino Family.</p>
<p>His rise was halted on January 20, 2011, when he was arrested in a big <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/will-historic-mob-bust-really">nationwide mob bust</a> that saw over 120 members and associates of La Cosa Nostra in handcuffs, including leaders of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family">Colombo Family</a> in New York and the Patriarca Family in New England.</p>
<p>When Vernace heard the charges against him he must have had a moment of déjà vu. Prosecutors topped off Vernace’s indictment with the 1981 double homicide of Richard Godkin and John D’Agnese. And this time witnesses weren’t afraid to testify.</p>
<p>After a five week trial, the jury came back with its verdict. Guilty. As part of the racketeering conspiracy, the jury found that Vernace participated in all racketeering acts alleged in the indictment, including the murders of Richard Godkin and John D’Agnese, heroin trafficking, robbery, loansharking, and illegal gambling.</p>
<p>The 64-year-old mobster now faced life in prison because back in 1981 his friend came to him with the request to come and go out to kill two bar owners for doing their job. Meanwhile, the man who was the source of all this violence remains unknown. That evening over thirty years ago, he spilled a drink on a nice dress that was subsequently “ruined” and left a pretty lady pretty angry, causing her gangster boyfriend to get a buddy and some guns to set things straight and murder two men.</p>
<p>Three years after being found guilty, Vernace passed away behind bars at age 67.</p>
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Philadelphia mob family associate stabbed in chest
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/philadelphia-mob-family-associate-stabbed-in-chest
2017-03-03T04:30:00.000Z
2017-03-03T04:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philadelphia-mob-family-associate-stabbed-in-chest" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237091270,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237091270?profile=original" width="520" /></a>By Gangsters Inc. Editors</p>
<p>An associate of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-crime-family" target="_blank">Philadelphia crime family</a> was stabbed in the chest on Wednesday, March 1, FOX26 Philadelphia crime reporter <a href="https://twitter.com/DSchratwieser" target="_blank">Dave Schratweiser posted on Twitter</a> yesterday. Sources told <a href="http://gangsterreport.com/philadelphia-mobster-bones-depena-survives-stabbing-stays-true-to-code-of-the-street/" target="_blank">Gangster Report</a>’s Scott Burnstein the victim is 48-year-old William “Billy Bones” DePena.</p>
<p>DePena was stabbed in the chest on Wednesday night on the intersection of 11th and Oregon in South Philadelphia. When police arrived on the scene, DePena refused to provide them with information regarding who had stabbed him. He was transported to the hospital and looks to recover from his wound.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/interview-john-gotti-jr-sits-down-with-gangsters-inc" target="_blank">Ex-Mob boss John Gotti Jr. talks about getting stabbed</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Exactly why DePena was stabbed remains unclear. The knife is an unusual murder weapon for a modern-day Mafia hit, and the location itself seems to point toward an argument gone awry. If the motive behind this stabbing does become clear, we can trust on Dave Schratweiser to post about it on <a href="https://twitter.com/DSchratwieser" target="_blank">his Twitter account</a> so go and give him a follow.</p>
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Anthony Colombo, son of Mafia boss, dead at 71
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/anthony-colombo-son-of-mafia-boss-dead-at-71
2017-01-12T15:00:00.000Z
2017-01-12T15:00:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/anthony-colombo-son-of-mafia-boss-dead-at-71"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237080065,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237080065?profile=original" width="520" /></a>By Gangsters Inc. Editors</p>
<p>Retired mobster Anthony Colombo passed away last week, <a href="http://ganglandnews.com/" target="_blank">Gangland News</a> reports. He was 71. Anthony was the eldest son of Mafia boss Joseph Colombo, who founded the Italian-American Civil Rights League and was shot by an assassin at one of his civil rights rallies in 1971. He remained paralyzed and died almost seven years later.</p>
<p>Anthony followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming an official member – or made guy – and then a capo in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family">crime family</a> bearing his last name. His mob career earned <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Colombo">Colombo</a> time behind bars when he was busted by authorities leading a crew that ran illegal gambling operations in New York.</p>
<p>After retiring from “the life,” Colombo wrote a book about his father and family history titled <em><a href="http://amzn.to/2jArVEK" target="_blank">Colombo: The Unsolved Murder</a></em> with Don Capria. The book details his father’s rise in the Mafia and the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-colombo/did-the-fbi-kill-my-fathe_b_9190980.html" target="_blank">facts and theories</a> behind his death by the hands of a, supposed, lone assassin. </p>
<p>Colombo died of natural causes in his sleep.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237080865,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237080865?profile=original" width="500" /></a><em><strong>Joseph (left) and Anthony Colombo (right) on the Dick Cavett tv show</strong></em></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
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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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Profile: Gambino crime family boss Carlo Gambino
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-carlo-gambino
2015-03-25T07:36:51.000Z
2015-03-25T07:36:51.000Z
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<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> Posted in 2002<br /><br /> Carlo Gambino was born on August 24, 1902 in Palermo, Sicily. He arrived in the US in 1921 and settled in Brooklyn with help of relatives and friends who had already made it their home. He would later help his two brothers when they arrived in the US. In the United States Gambino got involved in crime and in 1930 he was arrested for larcency in the operation of the "handkerchief pill game". By the 1930s he was heavily involved in bootlegging. From the money he made through bootlegging he bought restaurants and other legit fronts. After prohibition in 1939 Carlo Gambino continued the bootlegging and in May 23, 1939 received a 22 month sentence and a $2.500 dollar fine for conspiracy to defraud the United States of liquor taxes. Eight months later the conviction was thrown out and Gambino was a free man again. During the second World War Gambino made millions from ration stamps. The stamps came out of the OPA's offices. First Carlo's boys would steal them. Then, when the government started hiding them in banks, Carlo made contact and the OPA men sold him the stamps. All in all by the wars end Gambino had made millions through the stamps and the bootlegging.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989884,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Gambino also got involved in the narcotics trade. Gambino traveled to Palermo several times to set up the routes and make the deals. Using Sicilian men Gambino imported the narcotics into the United States. By 1957 Carlo Gambino had moved up in the Mangano Crime Family, he had become Underboss of Albert Anastasia. He also had a loving wife Catherine and three children (two sons and a daughter). 1957 was a great year for Gambino, on October 24, 1957 his boss Anastasia got whacked while he was getting a shave in the barber shop of the Park Sheraton Hotel. With Anastasia gone Gambino assumed leadership of the Mangano Family, exactly his plan since it was Gambino who was behind the Anastasia hit. Listed as a labor consultant to the outside world Gambino was leading his Crime Family into better times.<br /> <br /> Gambino was making loads of money by now. In addition to the illegal income Gambino also made loads with his legal businesses. Gambino owned meat markets, bakeries, restaurants, nightclubs, linen supply companies and on and on. Life was great for Gambino. His health wasn't good but with both his blood and crime family doing well and money pooring in he didn't mind. RICO hadn't made it's grand appearance yet and turncoats weren't as common as they would be during the 1990s. The government knew who Gambino was and what he did for a living but to get to him was impossible. Gambino who entered the United States as an illegal alien still hadn't become an American yet and so that's where the government tried to take Gambino down. They tried to get him deported, but failed time after time. In 1971 Gambino's wife Catharine died. His health was detoriating fast after that. His heart problems kept playing up and by 1975 Gambino felt it was time to choose his successor.<br /> <br /> And there he made the only mistake during his reign as boss of the Mangano/Gambino Family. He chose Paul Castellano over his Underboss Neil Dellacroce. This decision cut the Gambino Family in two factions and would create a power struggle a decade later. But in the end Carlo Gambino is considered one of the great bosses of La Cosa Nostra. He died on October 15, 1976 of natural causes in his Massapequa, Long Island home.</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
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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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Profile: Gambino crime family mobster Robert Sasso
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-mobster-suspect-in-brazen-murder
2014-09-01T13:19:42.000Z
2014-09-01T13:19:42.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-mobster-suspect-in-brazen-murder"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237033873,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237033873?profile=original" width="520" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Gangbanger or Mafioso? You be the judge. He may not look like it, but Robert Sasso, pictured above, is a Gambino crime family associate whose father and grandfather were in “the life” as well. And while he may not have learned how to dress like a mobster, he is alleged to be very familiar with the Mafia’s violent ways of doing business.</p>
<p>The 33-year-old Gambino wiseguy allegedly shot a 39-year-old man four times on a Whitestone shoreline near Boulevard St. in Queens at 2 a.m. The victim was taken to New York Hospital Queens, where he was listed in critical condition, the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/tattooed-grandson-mob-associate-allegedly-shot-man-queens-police-article-1.1922215" target="_blank">New York Daily News reported</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/08/29/police-search-for-suspect-with-mob-connections-in-malba-queens-shooting/" target="_blank">CBS 2 News New York</a> reports that, “the victim was taken out to a jetty, where he was shot. He was then able to call 911 and identify his shooter.” (<em>Photo above shows crime scene.</em>)</p>
<p>They don’t make them like they used to.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/GangstersInc" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237034289,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237034289?profile=original" width="300" /></a>In the old days, a mob hit man made sure his victim was dead. The victim in turn made sure that if and when he did survive, he would not talk to authorities. Things were a lot simpler back then.</p>
<p>Kidding aside, Sasso (right) won’t get a prize for secrecy anytime soon. With his face tattoos he would fit in better with South American gang MS-13 than with any of the five New York Mafia families. Yet, here he is, a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview">Gambino family</a> associate. Allegedly.</p>
<p>His father, also named Robert, is an alleged organized crime figure who did time for gun trafficking. Sasso’s grandfather, named Robert as well, was President of Local 282 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and was also heavily connected to the Gambinos.</p>
<p>According to information provided by former Gambino underboss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-underboss-salvatore">Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano</a> Sasso “gave sweetheart contracts to mob-controlled companies and that he shared in payoffs to mobsters made by contractors for labor peace.”</p>
<p>In short, Gravano said, “[He] was with us.”</p>
<p>Sasso was forced to step down as President and was later convicted of union racketeering. He spent several years in prison until his release in 1997. That same year, his son was also released from prison.</p>
<p>And now, the youngest of these Robert Sassos is wanted for murder.</p>
<p>It’s not the first time police are eyeing Sasso as a murder suspect. Last year, authorities accused him of ordering a hit on a construction supervisor who fired him. He was questioned but managed to dodge the charges. And there are other cases where police suspect Sasso’s involvement, but are unable to take him to trial.</p>
<p>With a face that looks like a bulletin board for prison gangs it won’t be long before Sasso finally finds himself in actual prison again. For how long depends on whether authorities can make the charges stick this time.</p>
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Profile: Gambino crime family boss John "Junior" Gotti
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-john-junior-gotti
2013-11-12T12:30:00.000Z
2013-11-12T12:30:00.000Z
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<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> Posted: March 10, 2007<br /> Updated on: August 12, 2008<br /> <br /> "<span style="font-style:italic;">I know my father loved me, but I got to question how much, to put me with all these wolves. This is the world you put your kid in? So much treachery. ... My father couldn't have loved me, to push me into this life.</span>" – <span style="font-weight:bold;">John “Junior” Gotti</span><br /> <br /> John “Junior” Gotti was born on February 14, 1964. His father, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-john-gotti-sr">John Gotti Sr</a> would become the most famous mob boss since Al Capone. It has been said many times, John Gotti Sr had charisma. He walked the streets in his expensive suits, and had an air of being untouchable surrounding him. After winning several court cases against him, he got the nickname “The Teflon Don.” John Gotti Sr was at the top of the world, and on the cover of TIME magazine. On top of the Gambino Crime Family after orchestrating the murder of boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-paul-castellano">Paul Castellano</a>. The media attention would be his downfall though. The FBI was obsessed with putting him behind bars. In April 1992 they succeeded, John Gotti Sr was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Gotti Sr put his 28 year old son in charge of the crime family.<br /> <br /> Junior Gotti became a made guy, a Mafia member, on Christmas Eve in 1988. Two years later he was made a captain, and two more years later he was Acting Boss of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Gambino" target="_blank">Gambino Crime Family</a>. A meteoric rise if there ever was one. With the rise came the money. Junior bought a six-bedroom Colonial mansion on three acres of rolling hills in Mill Neck, an exclusive community on the North Shore of Long Island.<br /> <br /> In January of 1998 Junior was arrested and charged with extorting the owners and employees of the Scores nightclub; armed robbery of a drug dealer; telephone calling card fraud; loansharking and gambling. In April 1999 he pleaded guilty in a deal carrying a maximum of seven years and three months in prison, $1.5 million in fines, forfeitures, restitution and court costs to charges that include bribery, labor racketeering, gambling, loansharking, tax evasion and lying on a mortgage application. In October 1999 he began serving his sentence.<br /> <br /> Just a few weeks before being released from prison Junior was indicted again. This time he was charged with racketeering, extortion, securities fraud and loansharking. The biggest charge was the kidnapping and shooting of radio host Curtis Sliwa. Sliwa had been badmouthing Gotti Sr on his radio show. Junior allegedly ordered his men to “teach Sliwa a lesson” for disresprecting his father. The government’s star witness was Gambino capo Michael DiLeonardo, who had been made during the same ceremony as Junior, and was a good friend of him as well.<br /> <br /> Junior Gotti went to trial saying he had quit the mob in 1999. To bolster his claims Gotti’s <a href="https://www.jeffreylichtman.com/" target="_blank">attorney Jeffrey Lichtman</a> had 100 hours of recordings of Gotti's talks with close friends inside the bleak visiting room of a prison in upstate Ray Brook. The FBI had begun taping Junior’s prison conversations on March 13, 2003. The tapes give interesting insights in Junior’s views on mob life during and after his father’s reign.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236976269,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />"My father on the street made you want to be a part of it, because he was that kind of guy." "You had to be part of it. You wanted to feel as close as possible to him. The only way was by being that. You wanted to be in it. When he left, John, the picture changed." "I finally realized that when my father was here, it was a real thing. It meant something. He really, really in his heart, loved and believed it, do you understand?" "I wanted to believe and love like him, but then I - once he went to jail and I seen how some people work - believe me, it was like a thing I wanted to get away from. I wanted to be anywhere else but there. I wanted to raise my children. I wanted to coach football for my kid. I wanted to get away from them, you understand me?" "Now I'm here. Here. Now he's dead. I really realize that it's not real. What he loved and what he believed in doesn't exist. It may have existed at one time, and it certainly existed in his mind, and probably in the fellas' minds and some other people's. But it doesn't exist anymore.” "Any honor and dignity, died with my father."<br /> <br /> In September 2005 Junior Gotti was acquitted of securities fraud, the jury was hung 11-1 for conviction on racketeering charges, which included the kidnapping and assault of Sliwa. His re-trial on the remaining charges also ended in a mistrial. At Junior Gotti’s third trial, his new lawyer Charles Carnesi told the jury: “They don’t have evidence after 1999.” “They know he’s out. They want to recycle this evidence.” It worked again, his third trial ended in a mistrial again! Shortly thereafter the government dropped all charges against Gotti.<br /> <br /> "In the 1990s, I lived an opulent and extraordinary lifestyle. I have very simple needs now." "I'll take my family and I'll go. It's enough now. They got to let go. Let us go, he's [John Gotti Sr] dead." "I want to start from scratch, w<img style="float:left;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236975886,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />herever my wife would be happy. I'm different than my father. My children are my life. You can convert me. My father you could not."<br /> <br /> "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." This could be one of the things Junior Gotti was thinking on the morning of August 5, 2008 when he was arrested by federal agents at his Oyster Bay, Long Island home and charged him with racketeering, murder and cocaine trafficking. The three murders he is charged with are that of Gambino family soldier Louis DiBono in 1990, the 1988 murder of George Grosso, and the 1991 slaying of Bruce Gotterup. All murders occurred under Junior's father John Gotti's watch. Junior Gotti claims he is being framed. If he is found guilty he will face life in prison.</p>
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Profile: Lucchese crime family soldier Frank Federico
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/lucchese-soldier-frank-frankie
2013-07-27T14:55:32.000Z
2013-07-27T14:55:32.000Z
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<div><p><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989455,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /><br /> By David Amoruso<br /><br /> Frank "Frankie Pearl" Federico was born on January 3, 1928. On August 10, 1989 Federico murders Long Island carters Robert Kubecka and Donald Barstow at the offices of the Kubecka Carting Company at 41 Brightside Avenue, East Northport, New York because of their cooperation with law enforcement’s investigation of the carting industry on Long Island. In October 1989, two months after the slayings, Federico became a made man in the Lucchese Crime Family. The ceremony was conducted by Vic Amuso, who was a fugitive at the time, and held in a basement in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. According to testimony of turncoat, and former acting boss, Joseph DeFede Federico was placed under capo Anthony "Bowat" Baratta.<br /> <br /> In March 1993 Federico was given a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in the Eastern District of New York and provide blood and hair samples for comparison with evidence recovered at the murder scene. Rather than appear Federico fled. A warrant for his arrest was issued. In April 1994 a second warrant for his arrest was issued on charges that he, together with other members of the Lucchese family, engaged in a pattern of racketeering that included the Kubecka-Barstow murders. But Federico was nowhere to be seen. It was believed he was hiding in Europe, more specifically Italy.<br /> <br /> On January 27, 2003 at 6:50 pm authorities arrested Federico at a Twins Doughnut shop on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. Federico was there for a meeting with a former associate. Later it was confirmed that it was Federico’s blood that was found at the East Northport, L.I., office murderscene. In September 2004 Federico was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the 1989 murders. Attorney William Gurin said that given Federico's advanced age, the penalty was essentially a life sentence. With time off for good behavior, Federico would be eligible for release at 88. Brooklyn Federal Judge Frederic Block said it was unfortunate Federico had even a glimmer of hope of freedom someday.<br /> <br /> <strong>For more on the Kubecka-Barstow murders read Thom L. Jones account of the story titled <em><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-evil-that-men-do-the">The Evil That Men Do</a>: The Killing of Robert Kubecka and Donald Barstow</em> at Jones' <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/thom-l-jones-mob-corner">Mob Corner section</a> of Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
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Profile: Bonanno crime family boss Joseph Massino
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/bonanno-boss-joseph-massino
2013-07-11T13:00:00.000Z
2013-07-11T13:00:00.000Z
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<div><p><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236994099,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />By David Amoruso<br /> Originally posted on February 11, 2005 - Updated July 11, 2013<br /><br /> When I first wrote this profile back in 2001/2002 Joseph Massino was a rarity. He was the only official Mafia boss who wasn’t in a prison cell. The press called him "The Last Don". To the outside world Massino was a great boss with old school Cosa Nostra values. His crime family seemed to run smooth as well. But by January 2005 things looked totally different. Here’s the story.<br /> <br /> Joseph Massino was born on January 10, 1943. He began his underworld career as a truck hijacker and quietly rose in rank. When then Bonanno Family boss Carmine Galante got whacked (July 1979) Massino was a Capo. The slaying of Carmine Galante brought the Bonanno family into a new family war. The Family now had to select a new boss this was what cut the Family in half with two factions: One faction supported proposed new boss Philip "Rusty" Rastelli while the other faction was against Rastelli as new boss. Massino supported Rusty Rastelli and alligned himself with him just as Capo Sonny "Sonny Black" Napolitano, Sally Farrugia and consigliere Steve Cannone.<br /> <br /> The faction that opposed Rusy Rastelli was made up out of: Captains Caesar Bonventre, Philip "Philip Lucky" Giaccone, Dominick "Big Trin" Trinchera and Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato. Eventually the faction supporting Rastelli won, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/aftermath-of-a-hit-the-murder">killing three captains of the other faction in an shotgun ambush</a>, it has been rumored that Massino was one of the shooters at that ambush. Rastelli became boss and it seemed that finally all would be well within the ranks of the Bonanno Family. All was well until the F.B.I. paid Sonny Black a visit, they had a message for the Family, for six years they had an undercover F.B.I. agent within their ranks. The famous Donnie Brasco a.k.a. Joseph D. Pistone had infiltrated the Bonanno Crime Family and before the Bonanno members really realized what happened it was raining indictements and members were murdered. Sonny Black, blamed for bringing Donnie Brasco to close to the family, was found shot to death with his hands cut off.<br /> <br /> Massino wasn't whacked, he was just indicted. In 1986 Massino was convicted and sent to prison on charges stemming the Bonannos’ control of Teamsters Local 814, the union that represents furniture movers. During his trial, when Pistone walked past Massino on his way to the witness stand to testify against him, the adversaries eyed each other. "Hey, Donnie," Massino reportedly said. "Who’d you get to play me in the movie?". Unfortunately for Massino the movie 'Donnie Brasco' with Al Pacino and Johnny Depp was more about Sonny Black's crew then his.<br /> <br /> When Philip "Rusty" Rastelli died in 1991 Massino was the obvious choice for new boss. When Massino went to prison the Bonanno Family was on it's way to extinction. Its members, considered <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mob">mob</a> "outlaws," did not have a seat on the Mafia’s fabled Commission, the governing group that oversees the city’s five crime families. An internal war left several members dead. And rampant drug dealing in the family brought intense pressure from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When Massino came back he had a lot of work to do.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236994865,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236994865,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236994865?profile=original" width="290" /></a>In 1993, Joseph Massino was released from prison and came back to work. He ran the Bonanno Family with Salvatore A. Vitale (his brother in law) as Underboss and 73 year old Anthony Spero as consigliere. Under Massino's lead the Bonanno Crime Family has turned around completely. Massino is known as an electronics whiz with a penchant for secrecy and discretion. He lives modestly with his wife in Howard Beach, Queens, a few blocks from the home of his friend, the late Gambino crime boss John Gotti. "He’s careful. He’s a very smart guy," said one NYPD organized crime detective. "He’s wise to surveillance, and he lives by the old-school rules. He believes in keeping La Cosa Nostra secret." Massino was the levelheaded leader who stopped the erosion of the family power. He shut the Bonanno social clubs and avoided other situations that might invite surveillance. Massino has denied any involvement in La Cosa Nostra and has accused the federal government of bias against Italian Americans. His principal source of legitimate income, authorities say, is King Caterers, a Farmingdale, L.I., business that provides food to street vendors. He also is part owner of the Casablanca Restaurant in Maspeth, Queens where he likes to enjoy the finer Italian cuisine in the city and meet with other mobsters. Casablanca once hosted a sitdown of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mob">mob</a>'s ruling commission, authorities said. It's a joint where you could round up the usual suspects, too -- Bonanno capos were regular guests at the restaurant, court papers said.<br /> <br /> It seemed Massino was doing a great job running his crime family. The <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family">Bonanno family</a> regained its seat on the Commission and its crews have beefed up longtime interests in narcotics, unions, loansharking, gambling and Joker Poker machines. Massino looked like he was untouchable. Even his Bonanno Family seemed untouchable. But at the years end things around Massino started to crumble. His Underboss and consigliere both went away. Spero was indicted on a racketeering and murder charge and was found guilty in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison. Massino didn't panic and replaced him. <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/bonanno-consigliere-anthony">Anthony "T.G." Graziano</a> was promoted to Consigliere and was seen in company of Massino on flights to Mexico and Italy. However unfortunately for Massino, Graziano was indicted again in 2002 on murder, murder conspiracy, drug trafficking, extortion and illegal gambling charges allegedly committed in the past 12 years. Massino however was not indicted in any of these high profile cases.<br /> <br /> In January 2003 Massino’s world collapsed. He was indicted and arrested on January 9, 2003 on, among things, murder charges. Massino pled innocent. If convicted Massino faced life in prison. On May 24, 2004 the trial began and things didn’t look good. Eight Bonanno turncoats were set to testify against Massino among those eight was Massino brother in law, close friend and underboss Salvatore Vitale. Massino, older by five years, taught Vitale how to swim. Massino was the best man at Vitale's wedding, and later served as godfather to one of his sons. And it was Massino who brought Vitale into the Bonanno crime family in the early 1970s. But things turned sour between the two men. Vitale was "shelved". Vitale testified: "I had the title, but for lack of a better term, I was a figurehead." It became known later that Massino had thought about having Vitale killed but decided to shelf him instead to spare his wife the loss of her brother. Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano was recorded on tape saying: "Unfortunately, we all do our mistakes, but some mistakes are too gruesome to learn from," "He [Massino] was thinking about his wife [Vitale's sister] and he probably in the back of his mind didn't wanna actually believe it."<br /> <br /> Massino was accused of seven murders. The murders were: Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato, Philip "Philly Lucky" Giaccone and Dominick "Big Trin" Trinchera who were killed in May 1981. Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano, who was killed in August 1981. Tony Mirra, a Bonanno soldier who was killed Feb. 18, 1982, after his bosses found out he was the first member of his crime family to befriend Pistone. He was shot in a lower Manhattan parking garage. Cesare Bonventre, a rival capo of Massino's who was killed in April 1984. Gabriel Infanti, a mob hit man who was killed between October and December 1987 after he botched at least three jobs and was believed to be talking to the feds. He was shot in a warehouse on Staten Island. Turncoat mobster Frank Coppa testified Massino told him mobster Gabriel Infanti was killed because it was feared Infanti could give incriminating testimony in a civil racketeering case.<br /> <br /> On July 30, 2004 Massino was found guilty on all counts. Besides the seven murders he was also found guilty of arson, extortion, money-laundering. He was scheduled to get life in prison without parole when he was to be sentenced Feb. 1, 2005.<br /> <br /> On January 27, 2005 the unbelievable news broke: Massino was co-operating with authorities (flipped). Massino had secretely recorded his acting boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/top-5-of-true-stand-up-wiseguys">Vincent Basciano</a> plotting the assassination of a federal prosecutor. Massino also got Basciano to talk about the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/bonanno-family-boss-michael-mancuso">Pizzolo murder</a>: "I thought this kid would have been a good wake-up call for everybody," Basciano was recorded saying. Why did Massino turn you may ask. Well ofcourse he did not want to sit in a prison cell for the rest of his life or face a lethal injection for the Sciascia murder. But I think more importantly he wanted to care for his family (no, not his CRIME family). Because of Massino becoming a turncoat the feds will not take his (and that of his wife) house in Howard Beach, Queens. Massino’s 89-year-old mother, Adeline, can also rest easy that the feds won't evict her from her house in Middle Village, Queens, which Massino formerly owned.<br /> <br /> And that is the story thus far. Massino is the first New York Mafia boss to become a turncoat. According to Salvatore Vitale Massino once told him: "John (Gotti) set us back 100 years,", how many years will Joseph Massino set the Mafia back?<br /> <br /> On June 23, 2005 Joseph Massino was sentenced to life in prison. He received two life sentences after he admitted ordering the slaying of Bonanno family captain Gerlando "George from Canada" Sciascia and waived his right to appeal his conviction last year for seven other slayings.<br /> <br /> His cooperation got him everything he wished for and more. On July 10, 2013, Massino's life sentence was reduced to time served, which ends up being about 10 and a half years. He was the sole culprit behind all the crimes committed by members of his "Massino crime family", was sentenced to life in prison, faced the death penalty, and will now be able to live out the rest of his life in freedom. At age 70, the big boss is a shining example of what a high rank in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?tag=Mob">mob</a> and becoming a government witness can do to your time in prison: It can make it disappear like dead bodies in an oven.<br /> <br /> Though he is living in freedom, Massino will be under FBI supervision for the rest of his life. Whether that is for the safety of the public or simply to keep his thick body from dying of lead poisining is up for debate. When asked by the judge if Massino had anything to say, the former Bonanno boss said: "I pray every night for all of the people I hurt, especially the victims' families." With the sun beaming down on Massino's face as he eats another slice of pizza in some unknown location, I'm sure the families of his victims will be very pleased to hear about his prayers. Then again, maybe not.</p>
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Genovese and Gambino Mobsters in Garbage Bust
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/genovese-and-gambino-mobsters-in-garbage-bust
2013-01-17T16:24:03.000Z
2013-01-17T16:24:03.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-and-gambino-mobsters-in-garbage-bust"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237022695,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237022695?profile=original" width="521" /></a><em>“I'm in the waste management business. Everybody immediately assumes you're mobbed up. It's a stereotype. And it's offensive. (…) There is no Mafia.”</em> - <strong>Tony Soprano</strong></p>
<p>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Thirty-two members and associates of the Genovese, Gambino, and Lucchese crime families were hit with various racketeering charges yesterday, all related to the waste hauling business in New York and New Jersey. Showing once more the resilience of the American Mafia.</p>
<p>For decades the mob has been in a free fall. Going from an all-powerful entity that controlled organized crime across the United States to a rat infested dysfunctional group with aging members and a lack of smart new ones. With each bust prosecutors claimed the Mafia had been finished. Its control over a certain industry ended. Yet new incidents continued to prove both authorities and the media wrong.</p>
<p>Though La Cosa Nostra has been weakened, it is still up to its old tricks. They are still corrupting <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814742734/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=gangstersinc-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0814742734" target="_blank">unions</a>, still extorting the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-mobsters-extorting-feast-of-san-gennaro">Feast of San Gennaro</a>, and still involved in waste management. Yes, garbage has remained a moneymaker for the beleaguered gangsters.</p>
<p>According to the indictment, the mobsters charged yesterday, “worked together to control various waste disposal businesses in the New York City metropolitan area and multiple counties in New Jersey.” The Waste Disposal Enterprise, as authorities call it, was a criminal organization members of which engaged in crimes including extortion, loansharking, mail and wire fraud, and stolen property offenses.</p>
<p>“The operation of the Waste Disposal Enterprise was coordinated by and among factions of the La Cosa Nostra families through the use of “sit-downs” to determine which faction would control a particular waste disposal company and established the financial terms upon which control of that company could be transferred from one faction to another in return for payment,” the indictment states.</p>
<p>The mobsters avoided any official connection to the waste disposal businesses they controlled because they were either officially banned from the waste hauling industry, or unlikely to be granted the necessary licenses required to do business because of their affiliations with organized crime. So they simply hid themselves behind waste disposal businesses that were officially owned and operated by clean front men, who were able to obtain the necessary licenses because they had no known affiliations with organized crime.</p>
<p>Now in control over these waste disposal businesses, the gangsters dictated which trash pick-up stops that a particular hauling company could use and extorted payments in exchange for protection by individuals associated with organized crime. By asserting and enforcing purported “property rights” over the trash pick-up routes, the wiseguys excluded any competitor that might offer lower prices or better service, in effect imposing a criminal tax on businesses and communities. Separately, some of the front men were also committing crimes, including stealing property of competing waste disposal businesses and defrauding businesses of their customers.</p>
<p>Mobsters involved in this Waste Disposal Enterprise were, allegedly, a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-genovese-crime-family">Genovese Crime Family</a> crew based principally in Lodi, New Jersey, named the “Lodi Crew”, which included Genovese Family soldiers Anthony Pucciarello and Peter Leconte, as well as Genovese Family associates Anthony Cardinalle, Howard Ross, and Frank Oliver. These men took over from Genovese associate Carmine Franco and immediately demanded monthly protection payments as well as a 90 percent share of the business.</p>
<p>Another Genovese crew led by Genovese soldiers Dominick “Pepe” Pietranico and Joseph Sarcinella and a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview">Gambino family</a> crew including Gambino soldier Anthony Bazzini and associate Scott Fappiano were also involved.</p>
<p>Fappiano is probably the most surprising name on the list. He was freed in 2006 after having served 22 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. In 2011 he was first arrested in a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/will-historic-mob-bust-really">huge mob takedown</a> that saw 127 men in handcuffs on various racketeering charges. Fappiano, then hooked up to the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family">Colombo Crime Family</a>, got off with a slap of the wrist, reported the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/reputed-mob-associate-scott-fappiano-served-21-years-wrongful-conviction-light-sentence-shakedown-article-1.1011987" target="_blank">New York Daily News</a>, as he was sentenced to time served, one month, in that case.</p>
<p>Now he is back behind bars after joining the Gambino Family in this latest endeavor. And he probably didn’t even need the money as he received $2 million in a settlement after having sued the state due to his wrongful conviction.</p>
<p>Prosecutors say the aforementioned mafiosi were all involved in the extortion of a waste hauling business owner who became a cooperating witness and will now be the government’s most important weapon against this latest mafia comeback.</p>
<p>Whether or not the mob’s influence over the garbage industry has been eradicated has yet to be seen, but this indictment will at least keep everyone on their toes.</p>
<p><strong>Takedown: Interested in reading more about the Mafia’s involvement in the garbage industry? Then we highly recommend the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0425192997/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=gangstersinc-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0425192997" target="_blank">Takedown</a>: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire by Rick Cowan and Douglas Century.</strong></p>
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Chicago Hitman Frank Calabrese Sr. Dies in Prison
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/chicago-hitman-frank-calabrese-sr-dies-in-prison
2012-12-27T13:00:00.000Z
2012-12-27T13:00:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/chicago-hitman-frank-calabrese-sr-dies-in-prison"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237020871,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237020871?profile=original" width="426" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Chicago mobster Frank Calabrese Sr. died Christmas day at the age of 75. He was serving a life sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina after having been convicted of several murders at the Family Secrets trial in Chicago.</p>
<p>Calabrese Sr. will not be remembered as a kind person. During his trial there was gruesome evidence of several vicious murders that Calabrese Sr. had a personal hand in. The evidence literally made the mob hitman laugh in a full courtroom.</p>
<p>His bad temper and violent behavior even alienated Calabrese Sr. from his own relatives. His own sons testified against him. Adding to the heap of evidence that resulted in guilty verdicts against Calabrese Sr. and Chicago bosses <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/chicago-boss-joseph-lombardo">Joseph Lombardo</a> and James Marcello. The <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/chicagos-family-secrets">Family Secrets trial</a> was the biggest trial against the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-chicago-outfit-overview">Chicago Outfit</a> in decades and succeeded in sending many top mobsters to prison for life.</p>
<p>Frank Calabrese Jr. told the <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-mob-hitman-frank-calabrese-sr-dies-in-prison-20121226,0,4793843.story" target="_blank">Sun-Times</a> on Wednesday that his father’s violent history made his death especially emotional. “I believe he was taken on Christmas Day for a reason. I hope he made peace. I hope he's up above looking down on us. He's not suffering anymore. The people on the street aren't suffering anymore.”</p>
<p>Calabrese’s attorney in the Family Secrets trial, Joseph “Shark” Lopez, told the <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-mob-hitman-frank-calabrese-sr-dies-in-prison-20121226,0,4793843.story" target="_blank">Chicago Tribune</a> that Calabrese Sr. had been in bad health. “Last I spoke with him a little over a year ago, he was a sick man,” Lopez said. “He was on about 17 different medications. But always a strong-willed individual.”</p>
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Mob Hit in South Philadelphia
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/mob-hit-in-south-philadelphia
2012-12-14T12:00:00.000Z
2012-12-14T12:00:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mob-hit-in-south-philadelphia"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017676,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237017676?profile=original" width="551" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>The Philadelphia crime family is finally returning to its dysfunctional roots. After a decade of relative peace and quiet under the guidance of boss Joseph Ligambi, South Philadelphia was shocked on Wednesday by the first mob hit in years.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, around 3 p.m., gunshots were heard across Iseminger Street in Philadelphia. Gino DiPietro, 50, was shot several times in the back. Fatally wounded he was pronounced dead fifteen minutes later. Authorities allege DiPietro was a mob associate. A neighbor told the Philadelphia Daily News that “[DiPietro] was in and out of trouble. He'd been in jail for drugs.”</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237018058,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237018058,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237018058?profile=original" /></a>The Daily News also <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20121213_South_Philly_slaying_could_be_city_s_first_mob_hit_in_a_decade.html" target="_blank">reported</a> that “police were tight-lipped about the shooting Wednesday, but one law-enforcement source said DiPietro may have made enemies by cooperating with authorities while incarcerated. His brothers are known mob associates.”</p>
<p>Reputed Philly soldier Anthony Nicodemo (left), 41, is being charged with the murder after police matched a bullet fragment found on DiPietro's clothes with a gun found in Nicodemo's car. Nicodemo is a rising player in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-crime-family">Philadelphia mob</a>, linked to many crimes. In 2009 he pleaded guilty to participating in running a sports bookmaking ring inside the Borgata Hotel Casino poker room. The FBI also thinks he was involved in the shooting death of John "Johnny Gongs" Casasanto in 2003.</p>
<p>The murder comes at a time when the leadership of the Philadelphia mafia is on trial for racketeering. Boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-own-words-to-be-used-against-him">Joseph Ligambi</a> was credited by many inside and outside the mob with bringing order to a chaotic crime family. After decades of bloodshed, Ligambi had started rebuilding what was left of the Philly mob.<a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996859,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996859,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236996859?profile=original" /></a></p>
<p>Ligambi’s (right) low-key and nonviolent way of conducting business is reflected by the lack of violent acts in the charges he and his co-defendants face at their <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-joseph-ligambi">current racketeering trial</a>. The brazen hit by a mob soldier on a mob associate, who is rumored to have turned rat, can only damage Ligambi’s defense.</p>
<p>But maybe Ligambi thinks differently. Maybe it’s time for a thorough damage control while he still has any control over his soldiers on the street. Of course, these are all theories. We will have to wait and see how this story unravels. In time all our questions will be answered. All it takes is one informant with an all-access pass to the Philadelphia underworld.</p>
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Philly Mob Boss' Own Words To Be Used Against Him
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-own-words-to-be-used-against-him
2012-09-15T19:06:55.000Z
2012-09-15T19:06:55.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-own-words-to-be-used-against-him"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996487,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236996487?profile=original" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Loose lips sink ships… and mafia families. For over a decade Joseph Ligambi has been credited with returning the dysfunctional Philadelphia La Cosa Nostra family to old world values of secrecy and efficiency. After he replaced Joseph Merlino as boss the juicy news and street gossip dried up. Until now.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237022891,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237022891,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237022891?profile=original" width="255" /></a>While Ligambi (right) has kept his mouth shut against police, the FBI, and the media he held nothing back during conversations with his fellow mobsters. Why would he, right? Why wouldn’t he trust a bunch of goodfellas who swore an oath of loyalty towards a criminal organization built on lying, cheating, stealing, and murder? Well, because sometimes goodfellas like to cheat their way out of a heavy prison sentence by wearing a wire on their colleagues. Unfortunately for Ligambi and several other Philly wiseguys: They had no clue.</p>
<p>Last week the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a federal judge had ruled that many conversations made by <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview">Gambino</a> soldier Nicholas “Nicky Skins” Stefanelli could be used against Ligambi and his seven codefendants at their upcoming <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-joseph-ligambi">racketeering trial</a>. This makes the trial, which is scheduled for October, a whole lot more interesting.</p>
<p>Inquirer reporter and mob expert George Anastasia wrote an <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2012-09-11/news/33738519_1_nicholas-nicky-skins-stefanelli-vincent-beeps-centorino-north-jersey-mobster" target="_blank">excellent article</a> on the recordings last week. Painting an image of gossiping mobsters who made fun of broke underlings, one of whom, Ligambi said, “was selling cakes out of the trunk of his car” and was always giving him “a ditty how broke he is.”</p>
<p>Most interesting was what Ligambi and company said about the soon-to-be-released Philly mob boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-joey-merlino-goes-to-hollywood">Joseph Merlino</a>. “Joey sends word,” said Ligambi. Anthony Staino, allegedly one of Ligambi’s most trusted associates and who is also a codefendant, had this to offer about Merlino’s return: “They're going to have a caravan wherever he's at. He sneezes, there'll be five hands giving him a hanky.”</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237023266,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237023266,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237023266?profile=original" width="222" /></a>With words like these to corroborate testimony of mob turncoats and FBI surveillance the trial could go very bad for the Philadelphia gangsters. Not to mention that Merlino might has to wipe his nose by himself.</p>
<p>Three members of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-crime-family">Philly mob</a> decided not to go to trial but plead guilty instead. Martin Angelina, Louis Barretta, and Gaeton Lucibello (right) all pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges. This past Friday, Lucibello was <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2012-09-14/news/33845145_1_mob-figure-lucibello-martin-angelina-gaeton-lucibello" target="_blank">sentenced</a> to 51 months in prison for his participation in a racketeering conspiracy involving extortion and illegal gambling. Angelina will be sentenced in September while Barretta will find out his sentence in November.</p>
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Goodfella Henry Hill dead at 69
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/goodfella-henry-hill-dead-at-69
2012-06-14T11:00:00.000Z
2012-06-14T11:00:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/goodfella-henry-hill-dead-at-69"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007658,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007658?profile=original" width="399" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>His death didn’t come as a surprise. Former mob associate-turned rat Henry Hill died in a hospital on June 12 at the age of 69. He leaves behind his fiancée Lisa Caserta and her son Nate. Nate told the Los Angeles Times that Hill died of complications of heart problems related to smoking. Not the cause of death many people would have expected for Hill when he was running around with the New York mafia.</p>
<p>As a mob associate with an Irish father, Hill knew he could never become an official member of the Italian mafia. His Sicilian mother earned him a little bit more trust with the mob, but the rules prohibited them from ever admitting him to their inner circle. It meant that no matter how big the scores, Hill would never become one of the big shot mobsters he saw around the neighborhood in New York he grew up in during the 1940s and 1950s.</p>
<p>In an interview with The Sun, Hill said he “was intoxicated by their lifestyle when I was young. Those guys were the role models of my neighborhood; they were the guys with the Cadillacs and diamond rings and a girl on each arm.”</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008064,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008064,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237008064?profile=original" width="220" /></a>With that in his mind, he became a career criminal and associate of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-lucchese-crime-family">Lucchese crime family</a>. Under capo Paul Vario and his crew, Hill was involved in a wide variety of crimes ranging from robberies, gambling, extortion, loansharking to drug dealing.</p>
<p>That last activity was frowned upon by the mafia. The drug money always found the warm hands of one of the mob bosses who outlawed the practice but was very content with the profits. Matter of fact, the biggest problem the mob had with drug dealing were the long sentences mobsters faced when they were caught. Thus, the solution for these men was simple: don’t get caught. And that’s exactly where Hill failed.</p>
<p>In 1980 his drug dealing operation was busted by law enforcement and the world around him changed dramatically. Having angered his mob family by being caught dealing dope and facing a heavy prison sentence, Hill decided to spill his guts and become a government witness. His testimony led to fifty convictions, including those of Paul Vario and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/lucchese-associate-james-jimmy">James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke</a>. Does this all sound familiar? No surprise there.</p>
<p>A big part of Henry Hill’s life story is known to millions around the world. It was the subject of a best-selling book by Nicholas Pileggi and an Academy Award winning movie directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert Deniro, Joe Pesci, and with Ray Liotta playing the part of Hill.</p>
<p>When Hill’s character in Goodfellas says: “Air France made me”, referring to a heist that netted him and his mob partners a lot of money, he hadn’t felt the power of Hollywood yet. After Goodfellas, Hill became a celebrity and a regular on television and radio shows. His appearances on the Howard Stern Radio Show (see video below article) were infamous as he would appear completely “shit faced” (drunk) while he discussed his past life of crime and new life after testifying against his mob cronies.</p>
<p>At that point he had divorced his wife Karen and left the witness protection program. Living off of his Goodfellas fame, Hill started a website ( <a href="http://www.goodfellahenry.com">www.goodfellahenry.com</a> ), wrote multiple books including "The Wiseguy Cookbook", "A Goodfella's Guide to New York", and "Gangsters and Goodfellas: The Mob, Witness Protection, and Life on the Run”, and told his story to various documentary makers doing a show about his life. All the while, getting lost in drugs and alcohol.</p>
<p>Through the years, various photos appeared online of a bum lying in the bushes somewhere in California. The gruff looking hobo was said to be Hill, who had become addicted to all sorts of drugs which brought him in trouble with the law. In 2003 he was arrested for disturbing the peace and in 2005 police charged him with possession of cocaine and methamphetamine.</p>
<p>Alongside the drugs, Hill kept drinking. In 2009, he told the Associated Press: “I've been on every drug humanly possible, and I can't get a handle on alcohol.”</p>
<p>When Henry Hill turned rat and informed on the mob, many people, including himself, thought he would end up dead from lead poisoning. Two bullets behind the ear and a canary stuffed in his mouth. If he was lucky.</p>
<p>As the years progressed, Hill made more and more public appearances and people started wondering why the mob didn’t make its move. The truth was that the mob had no interest in making a move that would only bring them unwanted heat from law enforcement.</p>
<p>Besides, Hill was doing a pretty good job at making a fool out of himself and being a poster boy for the “snitches are scumbags” movement. Hill was doing himself more harm alive than the mob could ever do to him. Either by way of torture or death.</p>
<p>Hill grew up idolizing the mafia. The riches and freedom. The fancy cars and pretty women. But more specifically those mobsters that were fearless. The Alpha males that ruled the neighborhood. Those gangsters that would do anything to get the job done and then, when the judge handed them a fifty year prison sentence, would smile and say “Thank you”.</p>
<p>It must have hit Hill at one point. Looking in the mirror after sobering up after a particular heavy week filled with blanks, drugs and alcohol, staring at the man eyeing back at him. In those few seconds with a clear head, he knew. He had not lived up to the image of any of his idols.</p>
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Violent Gambino Drug Crew Pleads Guilty
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/violent-gambino-drug-crew-pleads-guilty
2012-04-27T12:58:42.000Z
2012-04-27T12:58:42.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/violent-gambino-drug-crew-pleads-guilty"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237025282,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237025282?profile=original" width="504" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>Five members and associates of the Gambino Crime Family pleaded guilty in New York yesterday to a host of crimes including racketeering, drug trafficking, extortion, gambling and murder conspiracy. The five Gambinos were part of the big nation wide mob bust that went down in January of 2011.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237025470,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237025470,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237025470?profile=original" width="100" /></a>Vincenzo Frogiero is the only “made” mafia member of the five that pled guilty yesterday. As a soldier in the Gambino crew led by capo Louis Mastrangelo he worked closely with Gambino associate and fellow crew member Todd LaBarca. The two men were also involved in various schemes with Gambino associates John Brancaccio, Christopher Reynolds, and Sean Dunn, who were part of the crew led by capo Alphonse Trucchio (right).</p>
<p>The mobsters were involved in a wide variety of mob rackets. Trucchio was one of the Gambino family’s biggest players in the drug business. From the late 1980s through 2010, he and others oversaw the family’s large-scale narcotics distribution operations, which were primarily located in Queens, New York. Numerous drug suppliers, wholesalers, and street dealers operated under the authority and protection of the Gambino family in exchange for paying the family a portion of their profits.</p>
<p>Over the years, the crew distributed hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and marijuana, and thousands of ecstasy and vicodin pills, all of which generated millions of dollars in illegal proceeds for the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview">Gambino family</a>. LaBarca, Brancaccio, Reynolds, and Dunn all plead guilty to drug trafficking.</p>
<p>Where there are drugs, there is murder. Todd LaBarca was running an extremely successful and profitable multi-million marijuana trafficking operation. He and other Gambino mobsters imported hundreds of kilograms of high-potency marijuana from Canada into the New York City area.</p>
<p>In 2001, Martin Bosshart, an associate who was involved in the drug business with various members of Trucchio’s crew, began making efforts to exclude Michael Roccaforte, an associate of LaBarca, from the marijuana importation operation. In an effort to prevent Bosshart from taking over for Michael Roccaforte and from moving in on the marijuana importation business, LaBarca plotted with other Gambino family mobsters to murder Bosshart.</p>
<p>On the night of January 2, 2002, LaBarca and others lured Bosshart to an isolated location in Queens, New York. There, another Gambino family associate shot him in the back of the head at point-blank range, killing him. Bosshart’s body was recovered at the scene, and LaBarca’s guilty plea in this case is the first conviction of any individual in connection with this murder.</p>
<p>LaBarca, Brancaccio, and Reynolds also pled guilty for their roles in extorting payments from various businesses’ owners and individuals based in New York City through the use of violence and threats. In one instance, LaBarca, Brancaccio, and others threatened a small business owner with guns and threats of death in an effort to extort tens of thousands of dollars. The two also pled guilty to committing assaults for the Gambino family.</p>
<p>To top off the guilty plea, Gambino soldier Vincenzo Frogiero, and associates LaBarca, Brancaccio, and Reynolds pled guilty to various gambling offences, including running internet-based sports betting, or “bookmaking,” operations, various regular, high-stakes card games, and operating video poker machines.</p>
<p>Vincenzo Frogiero faces a maximum of 10 years in prison. Todd LaBarca is looking at a maximum of 23 years in prison. John Brancaccio can get a maximum of 20 years in prison. Christopher Reynolds and Sean Dunn each have the prospect of spending life in prison.</p>
<p>Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: “For more than a decade, the vicious murder of Martin Bosshart in a mafia turf battle went unsolved. With today’s guilty plea of Todd LaBarca, one of the responsible parties will be held to account. The laundry list of illegal conduct to which LaBarca and these four other defendants pled serves as a reminder of the scourge that is organized crime and that our efforts to root it out will continue unabated.”</p>
<p>Fourteen defendants previously pled guilty in connection with the case: Gambino family captains Trucchio and Mastrangelo; Gambino family soldiers Michael Roccaforte and Anthony Moscatiello; and Gambino family associates Christopher Colon, Salvatore Tortorici, Frank Bellantoni, Michael Kuhtenia, Salvatore Accardi, Keith Croce, Frank Roccaforte, Michael Russo, Robert Napolitano, and Anthino Russo.</p>
<p>Charges are pending against the remaining three defendants charged in the Indictment: Gambino family consigliere Joseph Corozzo, Gambino family ruling panel member Bartolomeo Vernace, and Gambino family associate Robert Bucholz.</p>
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Give a Man a Gun: The story of Carmine DiBiase
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/give-a-man-a-gun-the-story-of-carmine-dibiase
2012-03-17T13:00:00.000Z
2012-03-17T13:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/give-a-man-a-gun-the-story-of-carmine-dibiase"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237016697,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237016697?profile=original" width="530" /></a>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>Carmine DiBiase went out on Christmas Day and got drunk. Very drunk. Very, very drunk. And then he shot and killed someone.</p>
<p>Not just any old someone, but a best friend someone. A guy who had stood by Carmine at his wedding, as his chief attendant. Been godfather to one of his children. Was his business partner.</p>
<p>A man who was also so drunk, he never even saw the bullets coming.</p>
<p>Carmine then became famous not so much for shooting dead his best friend. More for being a celebrity of sorts. The Federal Bureau of Investigation sorts.</p>
<p>They chased him and tried to nail him down for years. Even put him up on their Top Wanted List on May 28th 1956, at number ninety-eight, where he would remain for two years. He may well have been the one and only Italian-American mob guy who graduated into this eccentric catalogue of most wanted criminals (at least until the inclusion of Cleveland’s Anthony Liberatore twenty-one years later) and then stayed there longer than most of the common or garden thugs, serial killers, robbers and traditional malcontent anarchists that traditionally populated its archives.</p>
<p>He also hit it big twenty years later when he was, it seems, the shooter, or at least one of them, who sent Joey Gallo, the Hamlet of organized crime, off on his last journey into the great unknown, after scungilli marinara as appetiser, followed by a dessert of .32 and .38 caliber bullets.</p>
<p>And then, just like in the years before, after killing his best friend, Carmine did a runner. But this time, he never came back. As far as we know. Except maybe once.</p>
<p>Carmine stood five eight and weighed in at two hundred and ten. So he was big without being tall. He had wavy black hair and brown eyes, a Bodhisattva smile and a police record that dated back to 1940 when he was eighteen.</p>
<p>On October 5th, Di. Biase and a close neighborhood friend, Salvatore Granello who would grow up to be a mobbed up guy, and known throughout his life as Solly or Sally Burns, tried to rob a tailor, Mike Bakalian, at 558 Hudson Street. The attempt failed, and even this early in his life DiBiase illustrated his propensity for violence by pistol-whipping the victim eight times.</p>
<p>Carmine was arrested and convicted of attempted robbery and sentenced to a serve a term in the State Vocational Institution at Coxsackie. He came out, but didn’t get any better at his chosen profession.</p>
<p>According to police reports he was known in his neighbourhood as a thug and a bully, with a vicious temper; he hung out at the local bars around Mulberry, Elizabeth, Hester and Mott Streets, his preference as a tipple being a good Scotch whisky. A flashy dresser, he was known in the area as a ladies’ man. He had a scar on his left temple and upper lip, and above his wrist on one arm, a tattoo: Pinto 1949.</p>
<p>He dressed like a text-book hood: open-neck shirt, in silk of course, gold necklace on display over hairy chest, pointed-toe featherweight Italian shoes, highly buffed, silk socks and monogrammed underwear. A macho guy who dressed like a gay hairdresser, but who hefted a roscoe instead of a blow-dryer.</p>
<p>He may also have displayed classic psychopath tendencies - charm, narcissism, egotism and manipulation. Probably a standard set of personality traits for anyone hoping to be successful in the murky world of the New York Mafia.</p>
<p>Pete Diapolous, the bodyguard of Joey Gallo claimed:</p>
<p>He was no big earner or mover. Sober he was nothing, but drunk, he would blow your head off.</p>
<p>In February 1944, he was back inside again, this time at Elmira State Reformatory, starting another five years for the same kind of crime. He came out again, and seemed to either get somewhat improved at his job, or gave crime away, for the time being at least. The cops in New York thought of Carmine as a peanut punk, the kind of hood who would probably never amount to much. He’d been arrested eight times, including the two that sent him away. Maybe it was in prison that like Joey Gallo, a man to whom he would be forever linked, Carmine DiBiase became a voracious reader devouring books by Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka , among others.</p>
<p>His parents, Gustave and Lena, were first generation immigrants from Italy, and he lived with them and his brother Gaetano, in Little Italy in Lower Manhattan.</p>
<p>He got married, had two children, and worked as a machinist, or a millwright, and then sometimes as a painter and a plumber’s helper, a salesman and once, as a shipping clerk. For a while he became of all things, a tailor. Like almost every guy in the underworld trade, he had a nickname. Many in fact. At times he called himself Carmine De or Carmine Vincent, or Ernest Pinto or just plain Sonny. But to most people in the underworld of New York, he was simply Sonny Pinto. In his early days, he had a look somewhat of the well-known movie star of the period, Victor Mature.</p>
<p>Insert here image of Carmine DiBiase as a young man 1950s.</p>
<p>Then came Christmas, 1951.</p>
<p>Carmine had taken over the lease on the first floor of a building at 167 Mulberry Street, along with Michael Mikey Evans Errichiello, his best friend. They turned it into a bar and meeting place, calling it The Mayfair Boys Civic and Social Club. Like most of these places that dotted the streets of New York, it was a den that catered to crooks, thieves, vagabonds and workers of the night. It never obtained a liquor license, but served booze to its clients until the wee small hours of the morning. It had battered tin ceilings, a bar, a pool table, and tables and chairs scattered around the scarred wood-planked floor. The Copacabana it was not.</p>
<p>Errichiello was a convicted gambler, with a string of arrests for assault, robbery and vagrancy. Peas in a pod were Carmine and Mikey. Until something went very bad in their relationship.</p>
<p>A few days before Christmas, the two friends had an argument. A big one and a bad one according to witnesses. People walking on the street past the club heard the two men shouting and yelling at each other. No one knew for sure just what it was about, but the word going around was that Mikey Evans had been cheating some of the guys playing cards in the club, and worse - had been siphoning off money collected by the club’s poker machines. More for him, less for Sonny. Everything went wrong. Hard to fix. It was like shaking a box of old watch pieces and hoping to pick out a Vacheron Constantin.</p>
<p>It never happens.</p>
<p>The events that unfolded in the early hours of December 26th are based on the testimony of a young, sixteen year old street kid called Joey Luparelli, and the evidence gathered by the police at the scene of the crime, as well as court documents.</p>
<p>Luparelli, known by his street name of Joe Pesh, would grow up to be a criminal associate of the New York Mafia Colombo Crime Family and be present, by some strange quirk of fate at another shooting, twenty-one years into the future, and a block and a half south of The Mayfair Boys, again involving Carmine DiBiase.</p>
<p>Carmine claimed he had spent Christmas day at his home, an apartment at 110 Grand Street, then he had gone to his mother-in-law’s where he stayed until late, before returning to his own place. About 1:00 am he had gone uptown to meet some friends at The Town Crest Bar and Grill. He stayed there for some time, before heading back to Little Italy and the club. There, he found his friend Michael Errichiello dead, and called the police. He claimed he was so drunk he could not remember anything about that night.</p>
<p>The cops came and did what cops do. They looked at the body, slumped in a chair, perforated three times, measured up the place, flashed the pics and took statements from any witnesses still around this time of the morning.</p>
<p>Joe Luparelli, sixteen, lived in an apartment across the street from the club with his mother and sister. His parents were first time immigrants, into New York from Sicily. There were seven kids in the family. The father died when Joe was still a boy, and he grew up wild on the streets like so many of his friends. He got to know the mob guys who infested the area like cockroaches on the hunt. Always on the hunt for something.</p>
<p>In Joe’s days they used to call them gangsters and they all lived by the same code:<br /> Mind your business. Close your eyes. See nothing. Hear nothing.</p>
<p>Joe claimed he was a good kid, as in good at cheating and stealing rather than being good-behaved. That’s what the mob guys were looking for in the street kids.</p>
<p>Christmas Eve, 1951, Joe Luparelli spent at home with his family, then went to the movies with some of his friends. Gene Kelly, the great Irish-American song and dance man in An American in Paris, pure escapism on the most diversionary night of the year. He went back to Mulberry Street about three in the morning and decided to visit the club. This early, there were only three people there. Rocky Tisi who owned a nearby tavern was playing pool with a guy known as Pretty Willie, who worked at the clubhouse, and Errichiello, who was asleep at the bar, his head resting on his folded arms.</p>
<p>Joe hung around watching the pool game and then the door opened and Sonny Pinto looked in, caught Joe’s eye and beckoned him to come outside into the street. He asked Joe to go to a nearby apartment at 13 Elizabeth Street, and wake up one of his gangster friends, a man called Alphonse Sonny Red Indelicato and get him to bring down to the club the guns Sonny Red was holding for him.</p>
<p>In due course, twenty year old Indelicato arrived at the address with a paper bag containing two revolvers, and he and Sonny Pinto went into the club. The two men playing pool, dropped their cues and ran for the door. Carmine DiBiase started shooting at his sleeping friend, hitting him three times, in the head, stomach and the heart, killing him instantly. As Rocky and Pretty Willie scrambled to get of the doorway, Indelicato fired at them, but his aim was off, and he only managed to wound Tisi in the ankle by clubbing him with the gun.</p>
<p>Luparelli (right), the young boy of the streets, Joe Fish to everyone in Little Italy, the kid who ran errands for Mickey and Sonny, found himself trapped in a vortex of necessity. Carmine DiBiase’s future would depend on Joe Luparelli’s silence, and Joe’s life would depend on the premise that Sonny would trust Joe to keep his mouth shut.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017653,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017653,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237017653?profile=original" width="219" /></a>When the homicide detectives started looking for DiBiase, he did a runner, and disappeared for seven years. The New York Police department listed him as their number five on the Top Ten List the city kept, and it was on May 28th 1956 that he made the F.B.I. most wanted list.</p>
<p>The newspapers were less than kind in the coverage they gave Sonny Pinto. One called him a rat-face, bowlegged thug, and another referred to him looking like a roast suckling pig.</p>
<p>Tisi eventually rolled and gave the New York police details about the two Sonnys and their involvement in the shootings at the clubhouse. The police placed Rocky into protective custody and he stayed there for seven years, a New York record which still stands to this day.</p>
<p>Indelicato was subsequently tried and convicted for his part in the murder of Mickey Evans and sentenced to twelve years, to be served in Sing Sing Prison.</p>
<p>Carmine DiBiase was indicted for the murder of Michael Errichiello in 1952, but was long gone. The F.B.I. put out a bulletin on him referring to him as a man who will kill without provocation.</p>
<p>He lived in some kind of self-imposed exile, either in New York or somewhere else for seven years, and then in August 1958, accompanied by his lawyer, the famous Maurice Edelbaum, he handed himself into the New York police. At one stage in his absence, he had allegedly lived with Rusty Rastelli, a soldier in the Bonanno Mafia family.</p>
<p>Following his surrender, Carmine DiBiase reportedly made the following statement:</p>
<p>I am getting older and accomplishing nothing having to stay away from my wife and children, mother and father. I am glad it is over. I had to come in.</p>
<p>Edelbaum, a short, fat man, always seemingly dressed in a rumpled suit, represented whole dynasties of Mafia executives including Vito Genovese, Natale Evola, John Franzese, Carmine Perisco, Joseph Bonanno and Vincent Gigante to name a few, and also played a major role in defending the hierarchy rounded up at the great Mafia gabfest at Apalachin in 1957. He was one of the best and most expensive, but even he could not save Carmine, although in a way, in the end, he did.</p>
<p>DiBiase came to trial, was convicted on May 3rd 1959, and sentenced to death in the electric chair by Judge Michael D. Schweitzer. All death penalty convictions in New York were subject to mandatory appeal and his was heard a year later, in February, 1960 and decided that April.</p>
<p>One of the judges hearing the appeal stated:</p>
<p><em>I turn to the other ground for reversal. Some years after he had been indicted, the defendant was surrendered by his lawyer to the authorities in New York County. Under our system of law and justice, an indictment must be followed by</em><br /> <em>arraignment and trial and, in the present case, it is obvious that the defendant's voluntary surrender was designed to assure him a prompt arraignment, with all of its consequent advantages. The defendant had a right to the effective aid and assistance of the attorney who represented him. The fact that his attorney surrendered him for such arraignment in court could not possibly be regarded as a consent or invitation to secret interrogation by police or prosecutor or a waiver of fundamental rights. It matters not, therefore, that the defendant did not object to being questioned or insist on the presence of his lawyer. The damaging statements made by the defendant during the course of his illegal interrogation by the police and District Attorney should not have been received in evidence.</em></p>
<p>In essence, having surrendered to the law, Carmine DiBiase should have had his lawyer present when any statement or evidence was taken from him by the arresting police officers. By being absent, Maurice Edelbaum effectively guaranteed his client grounds for appeal, which in fact is what happened. Whether by luck or cunning, the lawyer won his client’s appeal, and Carmine DiBiase was granted a new trial.</p>
<p>The records of this are archived and not obtainable, at least to this writer, but the defendant walked from court a free man on March 1st 1961. It was a remarkable about-face. A man convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, two years later after a re-trial left the courthouse a free man, ready to go back onto the streets and do what he did best-be a criminal.</p>
<p>It was claimed that Matty Ianiello, a powerful crew boss in the Genovese family had helped Carmine DiBiase when he went on the lam after shooting Michael Errichiello, and that Ianiello had paid the attorney fees for Sonny.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017890,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017890,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237017890?profile=original" width="132" /></a>And for the next eleven years there is not much on record about Carmine DiBiase (right).</p>
<p>Harold Konigsberg, a Jewish, freelance hit man for the mob, claimed that DiBiase and Joe Yacovelli had staked out and killed Ali Waffa, the fearsome Arab bodyguard of mobster Joey Gallo, when Ali returned from a sea journey to the Hoboken docks, in July 1963.</p>
<p>A confidential informant notified his FBI handler that DiBiase had been involved in the murder of Michael Granello, who was the son of his boyhood crime capers partner, Solly Burns.</p>
<p>Michael was found shot dead in an auto on 86th Street and Riverside Drive, in 1968. A drug addict, he had been holding up and robbing made men, including on one occasion beating almost to death, with a baseball bat, a mobster called Caserta. Solly, who had allegedly headed up the mob’s enforcement arm overseeing their casino interests in Cuba prior to Castor’s revolution, swore vengeance against his killers. He disappeared in 1970 and was also presumed murdered.</p>
<p>Granello's body found in car 6 Oct 70 at East River Dr. & Hudson St. He was last seen on the 24th September; the FBI claimed he was killed on the 25th at an Elizabeth St. coffeehouse (between Hudson & Prince, perhaps the 8th Ward Pleasure Club, 2623-264 Elizabeth) by Vince Generoso for Thomas Eboli. Granello and Eboli, it was alleged, were at one time competing to succeed Vito Genovese, the boss of the family until his death in prison in 1969, and it was Eboli who ordered the December 1968 hit on Michael Granello for dealing in narcotics, not for his activities in robbing and beating Casserta. The FBI suspected Salvatore Granello was set up by one Jim Corallo and that the garrotted and shot body was allowed to be found because he was on bail. This information would almost certainly have been passed onto the FBI by one of their many CI’s.</p>
<p>There is an FBI report from 1969 that shows DiBiase was a suspect in running an illegal card game venue at 209 West 79th Street, in partnership with some men who were well know to the police department in New York - Victor Tramaglino, Charlie Blum, Hugh Mulligan, Stanley Ackerman and Spanish Raymond Margques - a hotchpotch of the New York underworld - Italian, Irish, Jewish and Hispanic - a mini United Nations of crime.</p>
<p>Tramaglino was listed as a close friend of Carmine Sonny Pinto DiBiase in an earlier, February 5th 1963 FBI internal memo which lists 347 suspected Mafia members operating in New York requesting individual investigations to be carried out on them.</p>
<p>There were other FBI reports that indicated Carmine DiBiase was working under Matty Ianiello and Anthony Strollo a close confident of Vito Genovese.</p>
<p>DiBiase was now a made man in the Genovese Mafia crime family and was still listed as such in a Congressional report on organized crime in 1988, although most sources claim he was part of the Colombo crime family..</p>
<p>According to Luparelli, Carmine dabble in drug trafficking, heroin being his narcotic of choice for sale. He was also involved, according to Luparelli, in the murder of Joseph Visconi, a bouncer in The Wagon Wheels Bar on Broadway who had carried out a robbery on a man called Frank Yacovelli who just happened to be the brother of Joe Joe Yack Yacovelli, a high ranking member of the family administration in the Colombo crime family. Thinking he was going to buy discounted stolen American Express cheques, he was ambushed and killed in an apartment in Little Italy, on Elizabeth Street, by a group of men that also included Sonny Indelicate, DiBiase’s co-conspirator in the killing of Mickey Evans.</p>
<p>By the end of the 1960s, DiBiase and his wife were living in an apartment in Southbridge Towers at 90 Beekman Street in the South Street Seaport District in Lower Manhattan.</p>
<p>He was also involved in a particular brutal and sordid double-murder that took place on the last night of 1970.</p>
<p>On New Year’s Eve, Joseph Fatty Russo held a party at his home on Packanack Lake, in Wayne County, New Jersey. An affluent crook, he was connected into the New York Mafia by an uncle who was a member of one of the five crime families. Fatty himself grew up around Mulberry Street and had allegedly generated his considerable wealth through drug trafficking. He had known Sonny Pinto most of his life.</p>
<p>Sometime after midnight, the party went badly wrong.</p>
<p>Russo had hired two black people to wait on his guests. One was Charles Shepard, a local man, thirty-one year old part-time musician and bar tender. The other, was his common-in-law wife, Shirley Green, who worked as a waitress, and lived in Manhattan. There were over thirty people attending, including children. The party was held in the large basement area of the property. By the end of the night, Russo was either drunk or stoned or a combination of the two, and he noticed that Shepard was drinking his booze, and even worse, dancing and trying to make out with the wife of his nephew.</p>
<p>Incensed, he stormed upstairs into his bedroom where he kept a loaded .38 calibre hand gun, came tumbling back down the stairs and in front of the entire party, emptied the gun into Shepard, killing him instantly. The chaos that erupted must have been electrifying. While some of the guests held a struggling and screaming Shirley, Russo then staggered back to his bedroom, found his ammunition box, re-loaded the gun and went back down to the basement where he shot Shirley six times in the head.</p>
<p>The guests were hustled away to their homes, and along with three of his remaining friends, Russo carried the two bodies to a car which was driven to Pine Brook Road in Montville about fifteen miles away, and the two dead bodies were dumped unceremoniously into snow drifts that lined the street. They were discovered there the first day of January, and the New Jersey police mounted an investigation.</p>
<p>By the time the detectives assigned to the enquiry had traced the shooting to Russo’s home, he had moved to Florida. As the police dug deeper, they discovered that all the guests present that night in New Jersey were also in Florida, on an expense-paid holiday, courtesy of Fatty. Also down for the sun and R & R was Sonny Pinto.</p>
<p>When Russo was finally arrested and charged with the murders of Shephard and Green, he turned to Carmine Persico, a powerful capo or crew boss in the Colombo family, who assured him that the case could be fixed through the family’s connections and control of crooked law enforcement and judicial officers.</p>
<p>Russo was in fact tried twice for the double murders, but was acquitted on both occasions. Federal Organized Crime Strike Force investigators had tapped telephone calls between Russo, Joe Yacovelli, and Carmine DiBiase, which indicated that Russo was being offered help and assistance to evade or avoid prosecution in the murders.</p>
<p>On August 8th, 1972, Federal warrants were issued against all three men on charges of conspiracy. On November the 13th, all of the men were indicted for conspiring to enable Russo to avoid prosecution for murder. In September 1973, a mistrial was declared in the case of Russo and Persico. By then, both Yacovelli and DiBiase were fugitives from justice.</p>
<p>Less than a year down the track, Sonny Pinto would find himself in another murder conspiracy. One that would echo a lot more loudly across the canyons of New York than the sordid killings in New Jersey.</p>
<p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mafia-rebel-crazy-joey-gallo">Joseph Gallo</a> was a mobster who transcended the gun and the knife and became, literally, a legend in his lifetime. An unlikely mover in the counterculture revolution of the early 1970s in New York, he went where no gangster had gone before. He fancied himself as an artist and Greenwich Village intellectual, hanging out with beatniks, show business celebrities, poets and artists, talking Existentialism and Marxism, and taking on the establishment which in his own peculiar universe was something called the Mafia. Out of Radical Chic bloomed Mafia Chic with Joey Gallo becoming something of an above-ground social entity.</p>
<p>He was Tommy Udo, the giggling psycho, writ large. The Kiss of Death morphed from a celluloid nightmare into a real life one, dark suit, white tie and all, who stalked the streets of Brooklyn and gave his brethren in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-original-new-york-mafia-family-boss-giuseppe-profaci">Joseph Profaci</a> mob crime family a big dose of heartburn.</p>
<p>As one commentator put it:</p>
<p><em>Joey had a terminal case of the twofers - too far, too fast.</em></p>
<p>Crazy Joe, sometimes called Joe the Blond was a pain up the ass of the Brooklyn based Profaci Mafia clan. Its management hated his loud mouth, louche attitude, polemical approach and egregious manners. In a word, he was their nemesis, and had to be sorted.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017478,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017478,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237017478?profile=original" width="131" /></a>One of his own brothers had nicknamed him Crazy Joe (right) and it stuck. A skinny little runt at five six and one forty five pounds, he went off like fireworks when the wrong kind of thing lit him up. It seemed that in order to earn a livelihood he had to be a lively hood. One of his best friends and his bodyguard, Pete Diapolous, referred to him as <em>a vicious, immoral killer possessed of a certain kind of charm when in a good mood, but undeniably dangerous.</em></p>
<p>New York Post reporter Pete Hamill saw him <em>as dressed in a zoot suit, but the eyes were ancient…eyes devoid of time or any conventional sense of pity or remorse…. He would joke with the cops and smile for the reporters, but the eyes never changed…tormented eyes.</em></p>
<p>His second wife, Sina Essary, a former nun, recalled that <em>You could see the remnants of what had been a strikingly handsome man in his youth.</em> She remembers, <em>He had beautiful features—beautiful nose, beautiful mouth and piercing blue eyes, that seemed to range from the colour of slush to the colour of fogged blue steel.</em></p>
<p>Always the eyes. Everyone noticed that about Crazy Joe. <em>They watched everything</em>, according to Hamill.</p>
<p>Jimmy Breslin the New York crime historian, reporter and novelist, wrote a book about him, called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, which was made into a movie that starred Broadway star Jerry Orbach, who one day would become a good friend of Joe; Bob Dylan wrote a song about him in 1976, and two years after his death, a movie called Crazy Joe came out with Peter Boyle portraying him. It seemed somehow that Joey simply overdosed on the public’s perception of his fame and reputation, alive or dead.</p>
<p>An editor at Viking Press wanted him to write a book. It would be a sensation the publisher said. Joey said, <em>There's something suicidal about publishers paying a lot of greens for the big nothing.</em> Perhaps he thought it was too much work. Perhaps while ploughing through his ten books a week while in prison, which had included Sartre and Camus and Nietzsche, he had noted what Robert Louis Stephenson had said about <em>young writers having to read like predators</em> and there was so much more to do in whatever years he had left.</p>
<p>Born in June, 1929, in Brooklyn, to Albert Gallo and Mary Nunziato, he had two sisters, and two brothers-- Larry and Albert. They grew up on East 4th Street in Brooklyn, between Ditmas Avenue and Cortelyou Road in Kensington. The brothers were to be gangsters just like Joey. They worked together and ran a street crew called The Cockroach Gang terrorizing the neighbourhood of 4th Avenue and Sackets Street.</p>
<p>Donald Goddard saw him as a circus freak dressed in gangster’s clothes.</p>
<p>In an interview with him, Joey stated that he <em>had travelled with bums from the time he was nine. At eleven, he was running a crap game, and when he was thirteen, running his gang. They were his people, and he lived on the streets. And then, they were giving him the slips and he’s running numbers, and then people were getting to hear about Joey’s floating crap game.</em></p>
<p>His first wife, Effie, thought he was too feeling, too humane. <em>He wasn’t very good at what he did….his instincts were all clouded up.</em></p>
<p>After numerous scuffles with the law, although he was only arrested once for burglary in 1950, and had never been in prison, Joey joined the navy at seventeen, but was out in six months, discharged as being emotionally immature, egocentric and demanding.</p>
<p>He became a protégé of a mobster called Frank Frankie Shots Abbatemarco, a Bensonhurst-based big league bookie and the major policy banker in the crime Mafia crime family headed by <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-original-new-york-mafia-family-boss-giuseppe-profaci">Joe Profaci</a> who was based in South Brooklyn and had headed up his clan since the late 1920s.</p>
<p>Larry was already in Team Frankie Shots, and Joey and his two brothers using the clout and protection of Abbatemarco, gradually built up their own street gang of thugs and extortionists pushing their jukeboxes into bars and cafés across the teeming streets of the second biggest city in America and running extortion scams across the boroughs. It became known in the New York underworld as The International Mob, and consisted of a Greek, two Syrians, an Egyptian, a Jew, a Puerto Rican, an Irishman and by necessity, some Italians. It also at one time included a dwarf called Armando Mando Illiano, and if we believe the legend, a lion called Cleo who was kept in the cellar of Armando’s café. He was apparently a great discourager to late payers on the vig they owed the gang on their street loans.</p>
<p>Sometime in the 1950s, the elder brothers (Albert was the kid in the group) were inducted into the Profaci family; according to FBI informant Greg Scarpa, around 1956, becoming made men, their mythical buttons proudly displayed to those who understood the solipsistic rhythms of the streets of New York. A mob guy was like a paladin, an advocate of the benefits of bad over good. Their guiding philosophy may well have been, to quote Oscar Wilde: <em>The best way to overcome temptation is to succumb to it.</em></p>
<p>Scarpa claimed they were introduced into the Profaci family by Johnny Scimone, an old time mob guy. Charlie Lo Cicero, the family consigliere opposed them from day one, considering them too much trouble (and he was certainly proved right in that respect) but he was overruled as it was perceived that they were good earners, perhaps the most paramount quality in prospective mob members.</p>
<p>Joey and his gang were often used by Profaci for the dirty work that was required from time to time around the mob in Brooklyn, and it was alleged he once stabbed a man to death with an ice pick. In October, 1959, the squad was put to use in the killing of Frankie Shots himself.</p>
<p>Profaci had a reputation as a tight-fisted wad and a boss who would use you then kill you. Pete Diapolous claimed he was more feared in the ranks of the New York Mafia than even the Mad Hatter himself - Albert Anastasia.</p>
<p>Profaci demanded off all his men a share of their revenue, maybe as much as a third from his capi, and when Frankie Shots reneged on the demand, Profaci had him whacked. Frankie and his crew were raking in up to seven thousand dollars each and every day and he had no intention of sliding over 30% of the net to the boss. The Gallos used their little, fat and fearsome torpedo, Joseph Joe Jelly Gioielli for the job, and he and a partner (probably his closest friend, Vincent The Sicilian Gugliaro) shot Abbatemarco nine times, leaving the victim sprawled in careless confusion on the floor of his cousin, Anthony Cardiello’s Tavern, at 256 4th Avenue and Carrol Street, late on the day of November 4th, 1959.</p>
<p>Following the killing of Abbatermarco, Joey and his gang assumed Profaci would allow them to take over Shot’s massive policy bank as a reward for doing Joe‘s dirty work. It didn’t happen.</p>
<p>Profaci was angry that Joey had not arranged to killing of Abbatermarco’s son, Tony, who he considered a threat to the family’s stability on the basis that he would probably seek revenge for the death of his father, and as a result, by-passed the Gallos and passed the numbers business over to his underboss and brother-in-law, Joe Magliocco.</p>
<p>The Gallos decided to resolve the problem the only way they really know how to - with violence. A maverick in his strange underworld and a cowboy with attitude, Joey had no intention of kneeling in respectful supplication at the feet of the elderly Mafiosi who controlled his destiny. As John Tuohy wrote it, <em>to the Gallos, it was going to war over cash and common respect.</em></p>
<p>Although their group never numbered more than twenty to twenty-five, they went up against Joe Profaci and his Mafia family, an entity of over two hundred made men and hundreds more associates. This Mafia war raged across the streets of Brooklyn from 1960 until late in 1963.</p>
<p>The first audacious move on the part of the Gallo gang was to kidnap Joe Profaci. But as he was in Florida when they made their play, they had to settle instead for four of his senior men - Joe Magliocco, John Scimone, Profaci’s personal bodyguard, Profaci’s brother, Frank and a relatively unknown capo called Joe Colombo. The men were eventually released on the basis of promises made by Profaci, none of which materialized.</p>
<p>On August 21st 1961, Larry Gallo was ambushed and almost murdered in the Sarah Lounge on Utica Avenue, his life being saved by the timely arrival of NYPD Sergeant Meagher, patrolling the area with officer Melvin Blei. Sometime either just before or after the abortive hit on Larry Gallo, Joe Jelli the gang’s ace hit man, disappeared and was presumed killed and dumped at sea. His wife notified the police of his disappearance on August 31st. His killer may have been Salvatore Sally D D'Ambrosio, who himself was probably murdered eight years later. He disappeared from a Bensonhurst social club, although his bloodstained shirt was later found there by police investigators.</p>
<p>The war dragged on for over two years with car bombings and shootings filling the New York newspaper headlines. In January, 1962, Joey Gallo was indicted, tried and convicted on extortion charges and sentenced to up to fourteen years in prison. The judge at sentencing stated that <em>Joey Gallo has an utter contempt for the law and is a menace to society.</em></p>
<p>Later in the same month, seven members of the gang, leaving a restaurant, saw smoke coming out of a window at 72 President Street. Rushing into the building, the group which consisted of Albert and Larry Gallo, Frank Punchy Illiano, Anthony Abbatermarco, Alfonso Peanuts Serantonio, Leonard Dello and John Commarato, found six children in a smoke filled apartment on the top floor and rescued them. No one was injured and for a few brief days, the Gallo gang were front page news and local heroes. They even made it into Life magazine. When interviewed by the press, Albert Gallo said:</p>
<p><em>We only did what any red-blooded American boys would do.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019280,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019280,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237019280?profile=original" width="750" /></a>Tony Abbatermarco. Albert Gallo and Frank Illiano with children rescued from President Street fire in January 1962</p>
<p>Five months later, Joe Profaci died of cancer and in due course his crime family was taken over by Joseph Colombo, the obscure capo who had been one of the group kidnapped by the Gallo’s early in 1961.</p>
<p>In March, 1971, Joey came out of prison, divorced his wife Jeffe, met another woman called Sina Essary, a dental technician, who was an ex novice nun, married her, moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village, immersed himself in the counter culture revolution, socialized with actors and writers and artists and on April 6th 1972 celebrated his last birthday, his 43rd in the process becoming an entry on a New York Police blotter: Homicide GUN at 5:20.</p>
<p>While imprisoned in Attica, Joey had been diagnosed as suffering from pseudo psychopathic schizophrenia. His response to the doctors report was typical Joey:</p>
<p><em>Fuck You.</em></p>
<p><em>Things are not right or wrong anymore. Just smart or stupid. You don’t judge an act by its nature. You judge it by results. We’re all criminals now…..Things exist when I feel they should exist, okay? Me, I am the world!</em></p>
<p>Joey Gallo may well have suffered from what the German’s referred to as machbarkeitswahn: fantasies of omnipotence.</p>
<p>Wayne Christeson of Tennessee, wrote in an article on Sinna Essary:</p>
<p>……<em>While Joey was still languishing in prison, his old enemy Joe Profaci died. Control of the Profaci mob passed to Joe Colombo, one of the “new” Mafia dons who knew something about politics and public relations. He formed an organization he called the Italian American Civil Rights League and used it to rally support against the FBI’s claim that he was a mobster. With the league as his mouthpiece, Colombo maintained that there was no such thing as “the Mafia” and that he was “just an honest businessman.” The league was hugely successful and so powerful that Colombo was able to win concessions from the producers of The Godfather about the way Italian Americans were portrayed in the film.</em></p>
<p><em>The Profaci organization’s racketeering remained profitable too, but many of Colombo’s subordinates were bridling at the way he ran the business and divided the spoils. To his hardened street enforcers, Colombo was a lightweight and a publicity seeker. Dissension in his family was building.</em></p>
<p><em>Into this unsettled world, Joey arrived fresh from prison, bearing a ten year grudge against the Profaci family. Joey might have been flashing his new cleaned-up image in public, but in secret he was re-energising the Gallo gang. He planned to dispose Colombo. Less than six weeks after his release from prison, Joey demanded a $100,000 tribute payment from Colombo as a condition for staying away from his business. Colombo refused to pay. Instead, he placed a contract on Joey’s life.</em></p>
<p><em>On June 28th, 1971, just four months after Joey’s release from prison, Colombo held a rally of his Italian American Civil Rights League in Columbus Circle, just off Central Park. Thousands of people attended the noon time affair. But as Colombo began making his way to the dais to speak he was shot and severely wounded by a black man identified as Jerome Johnson.</em></p>
<p><em>No one ever discovered who Johnson was working for. As fate would have it, he was immediately shot and killed by yet another never-identified gunman. Colombo was left in a near-vegetative state and was off the board as far as the rackets were concerned. The event made the cover of Time magazine the following week.</em></p>
<p><em>Joey claimed that the FBI was behind the Colombo attack, but most reasonable minds concluded that Joey had engineered it himself. He had a clear motive, and he was certainly capable of pulling it off. While the police and FBI looked for clues, the heirs to Colombo’s power renewed the contract on Joey’s life…</em></p>
<p>Something that has not been widely investigated in the shooting of Colombo is the link between Charles Shephard shot dead by Joseph Fatty Russo just six months previously. Jerome Johnson and Shephard had both lived close to each other in the same area in northern New Jersey and may well have been connected by friendship or some other link. It’s quite possible that Johnson was driven by a desire to avenge his black brother and knew of the link between Russo and the Colombo family members and how they had helped him avoid prosecution for the double killings.</p>
<p>Joey had become friendly while in prison with Harlem dope dealer Nicky Barnes, and it was widely rumoured that through his prison connections into the black criminal fraternity he was intending to recruit black gangsters into his own organization. This never eventuated and may well have been simply street gossip, but the Mafia family under Colombo, seemed certain that Gallo was behind the shooting of their boss. He was a target for them from that day at Columbus Circle according to some crime researchers, although it was not that obvious to police observers who were tracking the activities of the Mafia underworld. They believed that having done his time in prison, the feeling was to leave him alone to get on with his life.</p>
<p>The Gallo gang themselves did their own research into the shooting of Colombo and decided the man behind Johnson was probably Tony Abbatermarco, son of the late Frankie Shots.</p>
<p>He was the biggest numbers guy in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a black ghetto in Brooklyn and tight with a lot of black criminals. He’d held a grudge against the Profaci family since the killing of his father, was mad at Joe Colombo for squeezing money from him and had hated Joey Gallo who he knew had been behind the hit on his father.</p>
<p>He had guessed, quite rightly that the shooting of Colombo would automatically be construed as an act by Joey Gallo.</p>
<p>Joey had left prison deeply disturbed by the way time had left him by. He was a train wreck in waiting, searching for a displaced point on the lines of his life. He was returning to streets that were very different from when he prowled them. Following the death of Joe Profaci and the installation of Joe Colombo as the family boss in 1963, there had been some changes in the family’s structure of command.</p>
<p>Joe Yack Yacovelli, Carmine Persico and Larry Gallo had been promoted to capo status. But Joey, languishing in his prison cell, stayed a soldier and this burned away at him like an ululating cancer.</p>
<p>On his release, he had demanded a cash testimonial from Colombo to guarantee the boss his fealty. He also wanted all his old rackets back-- the policy banks, the loan shark operations and vending machine companies-- and demanded that a least ten of his crew be made into the family.</p>
<p>On May 22nd he had tried again to kidnap the boss of the family, this time Joe Combo,<br /> But the attempt was botched, dissolving into no more than a street brawl. But the message was loud and clear. The Gallo-Profaci war was on again.</p>
<p>None of Joey’s demand were ever going to happen. The Colombo family at a meeting on December 20th 1971, officially rejected all of his demands.</p>
<p>Joe Yacovelli, who would become a major player in the administration of the Colombo crime family, wanted to kill him where he stood, but this was vetoed by the Commission, the Mafia’s board of arbitration. They did not want another Gallo war on their hands.</p>
<p>According to Donald Frankos, a Greek-American criminal who had served time in prison with Joey, Gallo owned several night clubs on 8th Avenue, and two or more sweatshops in the garment district. He also ran dice and card games and was into extortion rackets and trafficking cocaine and heroin, and through black criminal associates was running criminal enterprises in Gary, Indiana and Steubenville, Ohio.</p>
<p>Just three weeks before Joey’s final birthday party, he and two of his men had gone to the San Susan nightclub in Mineola, Long Island, threatened the manager and told him they were taking the place over. A place that just happened to have John Franzese as a silent partner. John Sonny Franzese was one of the more terrifying dangerous mob bosses in New York and had been part of the Profaci/Colombo crime family for most of his working life. A psychopath in his own right, a stone-killer, whose father Carmine The Lion had allegedly disposed of his victims in his bakery ovens. Franzese was not a man to trifle with.</p>
<p>Then on Easter week-end 1972, Ferrara’s Pastry Shop on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan, was broken into and it was reputed over $50000 was stolen from the safe. Ferrara’s was not just any old café, although it was old, dating back to 1892, it was also a venerable landmark and meeting place of many of the senior mob figures in New York, including Carlo Gambino, allegedly the biggest Mafia boss in America.</p>
<p>It was an egregious move, an insult to the old Don who would have given his guarantee to the owners that their place of business was safe and protected by the strength of his reputation. To compound matters, Ferrara’s was a place often used by Vincent Aloi, who may have taken over the management of the Colombo Mafia family after boss Joe was gunned down at Columbus Circle.</p>
<p>The word went around that Joey had given his approval to two of his men--Gennaro Ciprio and Richie Grossman--to do the job. Both men were subsequently murdered, Ciprio, who was Sonny Pinto’s godson, was blasted to death in a hail of bullets in front of his sister, as he left the restaurant he owned in Brooklyn, on 86th Street.</p>
<p>Five days after the break-in at Ferrara’s Joey Gallo was dead.</p>
<p>In the end, it didn’t matter what the trigger was--the shooting of Colombo, the muscle attempt on Long Island, the theft from a mob sanctuary, the disrespect he had shown the men of the Colombo Mafia family--he was a victim of the system, and the politics of cosa nostra.</p>
<p>In essence, since the day he left prison he was a dead man walking.</p>
<p>Joey had moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan on his release and rented Apartment 8A in a bland, twenty-one story apartment building at Seven West 14th Street, a block away from Union Square. Sina, the woman he was to marry, lived with her young daughter in a penthouse apartment in the same building, paying almost twice the rent that Joey did. When he queried this apparent show of wealth by a dental technician, one of his friends shrugged and mentioned something about the dentist she worked for.</p>
<p>After a classic whirlwind courtship, Joey and Sina married, and three weeks later they would celebrate his 43rd birthday.</p>
<p>On the evening of April 6th, Pete Diapolous, driving a black Cadillac, arrived at the apartment building with his gummare, Edith Russo, and along with Joey’s sister Carmella Fiorello, Sina, her ten-year old daughter Lisa, and Joey spruced up and sharp in a pinstripe suit, headed off for a night at the Copacabana at 10 East 60th Street, just across from Central Park. They arrived about eleven, in time for the second show which starred <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/insulting-mobsters-with-don-rickles">Don Rickles</a>.</p>
<p>Sometime after four the next morning, they left the club and drove south into Little Italy. Although they had wined and dined, Joey insisted they needed more sustenance, and he was determined to find a favourite Chinese restaurant, Su Lings, in Chinatown. When they arrived, it was closed. Trolling the rain-washed streets, they found themselves crawling up Mulberry. There, on the corner of Hester, they saw arches and square windows all lit up, a new place on the block, called Umberto’s Clam House.</p>
<p>It had been opened in February by Umberto Ianiello, the thirty-five year old brother of Matty The Horse Ianiello, a capo in the Genovese Mafia family. There was a group of men standing talking on the corner, including Matty, who was acting as the manager this night, as Diapolous pulled the Cadillac to halt. The windows wound down, and Pete and Joey chatted to the men, one of whom was Joe Luparelli.</p>
<p>Joe Pesh Luparelli had led a less than auspicious life as a gopher and associate for the Colombo and Genovese crime families in the years since the killing of Mickey Evans. Using a luncheonette on 11th Avenue between 60th and 61st Street as a business base, he worked under Dick Fusco and Joe Gentile and was at one time a drive for Joe Yacovelli, a job he had been instructed to do by Sonny Pinto. Up to this point his mob career had revolved around the Westside, the term by which the underworld referred to the Genovese Mafia family. He’d been in prison on two occasions, and made his money by being a safe man, strong-arm goon, fence, loan shark and in the numbers business.</p>
<p>Encouraged by their comments, Joey Gallo decided they would eat here, and as Pete parked the car, the small party moved into the restaurant.</p>
<p>Fishing nets and plastic life preservers bedecked the walls, and the floor was tiled white. The tables scattered around were butcher-block design and there was a serving counter-type bar at the back of the seating area, running the length of the restaurant from the Hester Street end to near the kitchen.</p>
<p>There are conflicting accounts as to whether or not there were other customers in the place. Some sources say it was empty, others that four men in work clothes were sitting around a table; that there was an Asian couple in the corner, two college-type girls sitting together and a few night people scatted about at tables and at the bar.</p>
<p>There are only two recorded eyewitness accounts of the events which happened in the early hours of that morning, April 7th: the one reported by Joe Luparelli who was outside, and by Pete Diapolous who was inside. Sinna Essary, almost forty years later, did pass on her very brief recollection of the shooting, but it was blurred by time and no doubt distorted by the sclerotic panic she found herself in.</p>
<p>Luparelli recounted his involvement approximately two weeks after the shooting went down, and Diapolous his presence at the killing of Joey Gallo in a book he co-authored about four years later, so their memories would have been fresh and their recollections much clearer.</p>
<p>The Gallo party ordered and enjoyed a fish and pasta meal and were so impressed, they ordered up seconds. In the meantime, Luparelli had left Umberto’s and hurried down Mulberry, crossing over Grand and into the King Wah Chinese restaurant at number ninety-one. Although closed to the public this time in the morning, it was open to the mob. It had in fact at one time been a Mafia social club and was currently owned by Dominick Dickie Pallatto who ran it with his Chinese wife, Mona. Pallato would be found dead in mysterious circumstances in 1977--drowned in three feet of water in his swimming pool on the island of Grenada. It was deemed he had drowned due to cramp!</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019466,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019466,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237019466?profile=original" width="223" /></a>Sitting at the bar were Sonny Pinto and a soldier in the Colombo crime family called Philip <em>Fat Funghi</em> Gambino (right), a distant cousin of the don, Carlo Gambino. Luparelli told them that Joey Gallo was eating up at Umberto’s and Sonny decided this was the time to hit him. There were also two other men who were brothers, at the bar. Luparelli only ever knew them as Cisco and Benny. Sonny went to a telephone in the restaurant and rang Joe Yacovelli, who gave his immediate approval to clip Joey. The brothers went out to fit-up and returned with two .38 and one.32 calibre revolvers.</p>
<p>Because Luparelli was walking with the aid of a cane as he had damaged his knee some weeks earlier, his job would be to drive one of the two cars the hit squad would use. As Fat Funghi was on parole, he would drive the other. Sonny, Benny and Cisco would go into Umberto’s.</p>
<p>The two cars headed north up the narrow, one-way street and sometime after 5:00 AM parked either side of Hester Street. Armed up, the three gunmen went into the restaurant.</p>
<p>Over the years the story of the killing of Joey Gallo has been retold endless times. . The stories say he died on Mulberry Street when in fact he was actually declared dead in the Beekman Hospital after he was driven there by police officer Felix Agosta who stopped his patrol car outside Umberto‘s just after the shooting.</p>
<p>That everyone under the sun did the hit, the latest disclosure being that of Frank Sheeran, a mid-west killer who claimed on his death-bed that he went into Umberto’s and did the shooting. Frank must have been the only three-handed man on the planet because the New York Police Engineering Unit carried out an evidence survey of the crime scene and found the remains of at least twelve shots that had been fired--three .32 calibre, five .38 calibre from two different guns, three of unidentified calibre and one .25 calibre and this did not include the three that actually connected with their target. A total of fifteen rounds fired in all.</p>
<p>The other factor that makes his involvement in the shooting impalpable is just how did he know where to go to do the job? The Gallo party themselves had no idea where they were heading when they left the Copacabana. The hit on Joey was the result of coincidence or fate or simply sheer bad luck. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a Titanic looking for the iceberg in the dark, inhospitable sea of the mean streets of Manhattan.</p>
<p>Henry Miller said <em>We create our fate every day we live</em>. If he was right, Joey Gallo was going in the wrong direction from the day he was born.</p>
<p>On December 13th, 1972, a Manhattan Grand Jury identified one Carmine DiBiase in an indictment handed up on the killing of Joey Gallo. There was no mention made of one Frank Sheeran.</p>
<p>Pete Diapolous, a man who had spent most of his working life on the streets of New York, states categorically in his book The Sixth Family;</p>
<p><em>I saw Sonny Pinto wide and dark coming in……I made Sonny Pinto and two other guys.</em></p>
<p>Diapolous had met Sheeran a few hours earlier at the Copacabana so knew exactly what he looked like. There was no way Pete the Greek would have mistaken Sheeran for Carmine DiBiase.</p>
<p>Insert here image of Pete Diapolous</p>
<p>Joey and his group had been enjoying their food (no drink as Umberto’s was so new it was not yet licensed) when, to coin the hackneyed expression enjoyed by writers of thrillers, <em>All Hell broke loose</em>. At approximately 5:10 AM Pinto and his crew burst into the restaurant guns blazing, slugs going all over the place. Pushing over tables to protect the women, Joey then ran away from their area, drawing the fire of the gunmen who pinged away as he raced towards the corner door at Mulberry and Hester. Diapolous, struggling to clear his .25 Titan semi-automatic, took a round in his backside as he tumbled over the tables.</p>
<p>Chasing the gunmen out of the restaurant he fired repeatedly at their cars as they drove off.</p>
<p>Joey Gallo shot in the elbow, the buttocks and the back collapsed onto the sidewalk, and lay motionless until Pete Diapolous and the police officer bundled him into the patrol car and screamed off to the hospital a five minute journey to the south.</p>
<p>And that was that. With his death, the Gallo war drew to a close.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019694,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019694,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237019694?profile=original" width="622" /></a>There was one final incident which in a tragic way epitomized The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight reputation that the Gallo gang had acquired over the years..</p>
<p>The Neapolitan Noodle was a restaurant located at 320 East 79th Street in Manhattan. In August 1972, it was the scene of one of the worst mistakes in Cosa Nostra history. Albert Gallo was determined to avenge his brother Joey’s death and laid down a hit to be carried out on some of the Colombo family’s top administration.</p>
<p>On Friday, August 11th, the Gallos found out that Yacovelli, Allie Persico, brother of Carmine, Jerry Langella and Charlie Panarella would be at the bar of the Neapolitan Noodle. Robert Bongiovi aka Bobby Darrow a long time member of the Gallo gang was earmarked to spot the targets for the killers. A few minutes before their hit man arrived however, the mobsters had moved to a different table. In their place were five meat traders with their wives celebrating the engagement of one of their daughters to the restaurant’s manager. As the party moved to their table, the shooter, dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt and wearing dark glasses and a long, black wig, opened up with two guns, firing nine shots, killing Sheldon Epstein and Max Teklech and wounding two of the other men. The killer, allegedly brought into New York from Las Vegas, escaped and was never found.</p>
<p>No one was ever prosecuted for the killing of Joey Gallo which Pete Hamill referred to as <em>A classic New York moment full of tradition, an endorsement of certain eternal verities, one that brought immense joy to the life of newspaper editors.</em></p>
<p>The only one who did time was Pete the Greek. He got a year in Rikers for illegal possession of an empty firearm.</p>
<p>Joey was buried in a half-ton $5000 casket in Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, in Lot 40314 alongside his brother, Larry who had died of cancer in 1968. He shares the cemetery space with luminaries such as Boss Tweed, Leonard Bernstein, Lola Montez, William S. Hart and George Catlin, a lawyer who changed professions and became a painter of the Indians in the wilderness of America. He had died only a hundred years before Joey, although in terms of the way America had changed, it could well have been a million.</p>
<p>His funeral was a circus, with hundreds of people crowding the sidewalks to try and catch a glimpse of the coffin, and police and FBI agents mingling with the crowds to prevent any potential acts of gangland retribution that might erupt.</p>
<p>Sina Essary remembered the procession would have appealed to Joey’s sense of show business. Tommy Udo was dead, and as she remarked, “<em>You would have thought the Pope was passing by</em>.”</p>
<p>As a former nun, she would have known better than most.</p>
<p>Joey Gallo was a complex, confounding figure whose brief life seemed to have been overshadowed by an almost pathological desire to prove to everyone how much smarter he was than they. As Charles McCarry commented, he <em>“saw things with the joyful clarity of the incurably insane.”</em> It’s easy to picture him pleading with Sina not to rob him of the credit for destroying himself.</p>
<p>Like Othello, he would play the swan and die in music.</p>
<p>Three weeks before he was shot dead in a restaurant, The Godfather, believed to be the seminal Mafia movie of all time, previewed in New York. It featured a scene of a Mafia man being shot dead in a restaurant. The coincidence no doubt helped cement fable and reality in the public‘s consciousness. Maybe Mafia gunmen as well.</p>
<p>Following the shooting at Umberto’s, Joe Luparelli, Carmine DiBiase, the two brothers and Philip Gambino went back to the Chinese restaurant down the street and had a few more drinks. Benny and Cisco eventually left to dispose of the guns, then Joe, Carmine and Gambino travelled out of New York and stayed for a number of days at an apartment provided for them by Joe Yacovelli in Nyack twenty miles north of the Manhattan boundary.</p>
<p>In due course, Luparelli afraid for his life, fearing that Yackovelli was going to have him killed to silence him as a witness, fled New York and travelled to Los Angeles. He subsequently surrendered to the government and became an informant.</p>
<p>Philip Gambino disappeared from New York and was arrested by authorities near his home in Palm Beach, Florida, in May 1972, and charged with violation of his parole condition by consorting with known felons.</p>
<p>Benny and Cisco, whoever they were, merged back into the crepuscular landscape that hid them as though they had never existed.</p>
<p>Joe Yacovelli also went on the lam, and eventually, on February 27th, 1974, accompanied by his lawyer, David Markowitz, surrendered to the police in a radio station in New York. He was charged as a material witness in the killing of Joey Gallo.</p>
<p>On April 9th, two days after the murder of Joey Gallo, Carmine DiBiase met up with a man called Charlie in a lot in Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey and left with him by car, heading somewhere.</p>
<p>And so, Carmine DiBiase (right) disappeared from New York, again.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237020671,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237020671,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237020671?profile=original" width="232" /></a>It would be the last time that he and the police or the Federal Bureau of Investigation would cross paths. Sonny fought the law, and the law won, insofar as his actions that night on the corner of Mulberry and Hester sent him straight past go and back into oblivion. Away from his beloved streets where the action was. Away from the excitement and lure of the clubs, and the broads and the endless scamming and deal-doing that had filled his days.</p>
<p>Joe Luparelli claims that Carmine did however come back to New York one last time, in the summer of 1975.</p>
<p>On June 30th, there was an altercation on the corner of Prince and Elizabeth Streets in Little Italy. A card sharp had set up a Monte game and suckered in three passing men who lost a considerable amount of money before they realized they were being fleeced. One of these men was Gaetano, the 26-year-old son of Carmine DiBiase.<br /> When they remonstrated with the dealer he ran off, jumped into a car and sped off. Gaetano and another man chased him in their car, stopping the dealer’s car a block away on the corner of Houston Street.</p>
<p>Gaetano DiBiase, dressed in a white suit, pulled his car over and ran up to the dealer, pointing a gun and shouting:</p>
<p><em>“Give me the money.”</em></p>
<p>An off-duty police officer at a gas station across the street saw what was going down and ran over, drawing his handgun. He shouted at Gaetano that he was a police officer, and then a fire-fight erupted. The police officer shot DiBiase twice, who staggered over to his car, which then drove off at high speed. The car travelled as far as 11th Street and 7th Avenue in Greenwich Village, stopping in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital. Gaetano rolled out of his car and collapsed on the sidewalk. The car disappeared. Rushed into emergency, surgeons operated but were unable to save him. He died three days later.</p>
<p>The police staked out the wake and the funeral hoping to apprehend Carmine DiBiase, but he never showed up. At least during the day. Luparelli claimed Sonny Pinto visited the funeral parlour late one night to pay his last respects to his son. It was also alleged that he put out a contract on the officer who had shot his son. Senior officials of the New York Police Department visited the heads of each of the five families and promised a massive retaliation against the mob if anyone tried to fill it. The contract was eventually withdrawn.</p>
<p>Carmine DiBiase was in the wind again. His life deracinated by actions he embraced with almost a libidinal enthusiasm, was corkscrewing him away once more from<br /> his home and family and the life he knew.</p>
<p>It was rumoured he had moved to Hartford, the state capital, a small, relatively nondescript city in the bucolic reaches of Connecticut, nicknamed The Insurance Capital of the World.</p>
<p>And here, is where the trail runs cold.</p>
<p><em>If this is</em> where he landed, his final years are not unlike the man himself: an enigma, maybe wrapped in a riddle and even possibly shrouded by mystery, to paraphrase Winston Churchill.</p>
<p>Did he start again? Form new relationships? Get married, albeit bigamously? Heaven forbid, get a job? He obviously kept deeply under the radar, as his name never crops up again in any police report or judicial system north, south or west of New York.</p>
<p>It was as though he had simply vanished off the face of the earth.</p>
<p>Maybe in the twilight of his life he would wander down to the south side, the Little Italy of Hartford, where he could find the food and drinks that perhaps reminded him of the Lower Manhattan version of the mythical neighbourhood, the place the amici nostra would gather on street corners to talk and smoke and reflect on their day’s endeavours. As Stefan Kanfer recalled it “<em>with its gritty avenues and rude wit, its hard-nosed gin joints and occasional grace notes.</em>”</p>
<p>The teeming, crowded alleys and tenements where the Mafia had begun sometime towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Mustache Petes of the old Honoured Society - Giuseppe Morello and Giouse Galluci and Ignazio Lupo and Joe Fontana and even for a brief period, none other than Vito Cascioferro, the big boss from Sicily - had all played their part in putting down roots and helped grow the biggest most far-reaching criminal conspiracy America would ever experience.</p>
<p>And he had been part of it.</p>
<p>One of the thousands of unknown mobsters who had made up this criminal enterprise. A phenomenon born of the hopes and aspirations of the poor, uneducated working stiffs born out of the years of Italian Diaspora into the biggest city in America. Men whose lack of education, and cultural background, branded them as misfits in the brave new world and whose only chance for survival and progress was under the umbrella of a secret society that held the city and country to ransom for generations.</p>
<p>Perhaps as he sat drinking a coffee, watching the world go by, he remembered images of his life; a montage of memories filled with Grand Street, and the Mayfair Boys and card games and fenced jewellery and shylock loans and deeds done darkly for the boss man and most of all, a bleak, wet early morning in April, the arches and square windows of Umberto’s reflecting the cold yellow light, shaking to the echo of gunfire, people shouting and screaming as he like some Jedi Knight, brought order back onto the streets in a wild and lawless city in a universe far, far away.</p>
<p><em>And, of course, that is what all of this is - all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs - that song, endlessly reincarnated - born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 - same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness.</em></p>
<p>- Nick Tosches: Where Dead Voices Gather</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><em>I would like to thank Jim Ruffalo for passing on information I had missed in my research.</em></span></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/thom-l-jones-mob-corner">Thom L. Jones' Mob Corner</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
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Bonanno Family Leadership Busted
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/bonanno-family-leadership-busted
2012-01-27T22:00:00.000Z
2012-01-27T22:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/bonanno-family-leadership-busted"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009075,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009075?profile=original" width="501" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>The Bonanno Crime Family has been hit once again. This morning, federal agents of the FBI and DEA arrested several high ranking mobsters on charges of racketeering, extortion, illegal gambling, and conspiring to distribute marijuana. One of those arrested is an alleged associate of the Gambino Crime Family and is charged with loansharking. If convicted, each defendant faces a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment.</p>
<p>Among those picked up this morning was Vincent Badalamenti (53), the reputed acting boss of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family">Bonannos</a>, who was placed in handcuffs at his luxurious Staten Island home. According to prosecutors, Badalamenti was the highest ranking Bonanno member still on the streets.</p>
<p>“The indictment is the result of a multi-year joint investigation by the DEA and FBI that utilized a variety of techniques to gather evidence, such as consensual recordings of the defendants discussing their charged crimes, cooperating witnesses who were formerly members and associates of organized crime, and surveillance. The evidence revealed a pattern of violence and intimidation employed by the defendants to further the mob family’s economic interests, including Badalamenti allegedly directing the hostile takeover of a bar located on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, as a result of its owner’s failure to repay a debt owed to Badalamenti”, reads the official press release by the FBI.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009858,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009858,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009858?profile=original" width="193" /></a>Besides Badalamenti, the other wiseguys hit with new charges are alleged Bonanno capo Nicholas Santora (69), Bonanno soldiers Anthony Calabrese (44) and Vito Balsamo (55), and Gambino associate James LaForte (35). Bonanno consigliere <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/bonanno-consigliere-anthony">Anthony “TG” Graziano</a> (71) was already behind bars after he was charged late last year with extortion.</p>
<p>Graziano’s (right) name should add a lot of media and public attention to this pretty straight forward mob case as his daughters <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/married_to_the_mob_m5Ur79Y9DWIgfsP0fhsBqJ#ixzz1LlWzRizW" target="_blank">Renee</a> and <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/crime_time_drama_rNl5C50bXdlF57rTsysJdP" target="_blank">Jenn</a> are enjoying time in the spotlight creating and appearing in the hit television show <a href="http://www.vh1.com/shows/mob_wives/season_1/series.jhtml" target="_blank">Mob Wives</a>. Though many members of online discussion boards like <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gangsters-inc-discussion">The Real Deal</a> jokingly claim Anthony Graziano is getting a nice chunk of money as tribute payment from his daughters for making money off of his reputation. The reality seems to be that the show only gives “TG” more headaches and a bulls eye on his back. Seeing all the reports in the media it is clear that this case will not fly under the radar but instead will be followed closely by both the New York tabloids as well as gossip shows and websites. That kind of publicity is something the secretive mafia is not too fond of.</p>
<p>Authorities, meanwhile, are adding this bust to a very long list of blows they dealt to the Bonanno Family. “The charges and arrests announced today are the latest in an ongoing investigation that has resulted in the prosecution of more than 175 members and associates of the Bonanno family in the Eastern District of New York. Since March 2002, more than 10 Bonanno family bosses, acting bosses and administration members have been convicted in this district on racketeering and racketeering-related charges.”</p>
<p>“Members of organized crime continue to exploit their victims the old-fashioned way—through violence, threats, and intimidation. Learning nothing from their incarceration, two of the defendants allegedly sought to regain their money and influence on the street while still under federal supervision. But because they learned nothing, they find themselves back in custody again, along with their co-defendants,” stated United States Attorney Lynch. “We will not rest in this pursuit until the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family">Bonanno crime family</a> and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">La Cosa Nostra</a> have been completely dismantled.”</p>
<p>FBI Assistant Director in Charge Fedarcyk stated, “Today’s charges confirm that La Cosa Nostra families continue to engage in the bedrock money-making activities like extortion and loansharking, and are not shy about resorting to violence as a method. As long as mobsters continue their predatory ways, the FBI will continue to target the mob.”</p>
<ul>
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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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Bonanno Boss Murdered Near Montreal
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2011-11-25T18:30:00.000Z
2011-11-25T18:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/bonanno-boss-murdered-near-montreal"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017863,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237017863?profile=original" width="500" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p>The underworld of Montreal is at war. Several high profile mafia bosses have been murdered and yesterday Bonanno family boss Salvatore Montagna was the latest victim as he was shot to death in a suburb near Montreal.</p>
<p>When paramedics arrived on the scene, they found Montagna laying in a river. They pulled him out of the cold water, into the even colder snow and tried to resuscitate him. To no avail. Montagna was pronounced dead at the scene. He was 40 years old.</p>
<p>Montagna had arrived in Montreal in 2009 after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported him because of a criminal contempt charge. Montagna was born in Montreal, but grew up in Sicily, and later moved to New York where he would go on to head the New York <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family">Bonanno Crime Family</a> at the young age of 35.</p>
<p><strong>For a profile of Salvatore Montagna and his criminal career <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/bonanno-boss-salvatore">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The Surete du Quebec immediately took over the case and began their investigation. As with any organized crime murder, details are still sketchy and uncertain. According to witnesses they saw Montagna break a window of a house and run away towards the river where paramedics later found him. Other witness accounts also mention gun shots and another man chasing Montagna. Though, police point out that the investigation is still in progress and they cannot confirm anything as of yet.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995491,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995491,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236995491?profile=original" /></a>Thus, the exact motive behind the murder of Montagna (right) remains unclear. But it almost certainly has something to do with a power struggle within the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-mafia-of-montreal-a-short">Montreal underworld</a>. Ever since the arrest and sentencing of Montreal mob boss Vito Rizzuto, his crime family started unraveling. A few months after his arrest, Vito’s father Nicolo and over seventy alleged members and associates of his criminal organization were <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/montreal-mafia-bust-project">picked up on various criminal charges</a> including drug trafficking.</p>
<p>In 2009, the killing of members of Rizzuto’s weakened organization began. The first one to fall was Federico Del Peschio, a close associate of Nicolo. Vito’s son Nick was next. Vito’s father Nicolo was killed while sitting at his kitchen table by a gunman standing in his yard with a rifle. As Vito Rizzuto sits in an American prison cell serving a ten year sentence for the murder of three Bonanno Family captains he must have been heartbroken. These were the two men who were the closest to him. Not to mention his most loyal henchmen on the streets of Montreal.</p>
<p>The murders continued with the killing of Lorenzo LoPresti, on October 24, being the most recent. That is, until Salvatore Montagna’s time ran out on a snowy white Thursday morning. Was the former mob boss from New York sticking his nose where it didn’t belong? Hopefully authorities can find out.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/six-plead-guilty-in-murder-of-ex-bonanno-family-mob-boss">Six men pleaded guilty in murder of Sal Montagna</a></strong></p>
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Nicky Scarfo Junior Following in Daddy's Footsteps
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/nicky-scarfo-junior-following-in-daddy-s-footsteps
2011-11-07T15:30:00.000Z
2011-11-07T15:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/nicky-scarfo-junior-following-in-daddy-s-footsteps"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237013063,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237013063?profile=original" width="500" /></a>By David Amoruso<br /> <br /> Growing up as the son of Philadelphia mobster <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/nicodemo-little-nicky-scarfo-boss-of-the-philadelphia-crime-famil">“Little Nicky” Scarfo</a>, it was pretty clear that Nicodemo Scarfo “Junior” would have a hard time avoiding the notoriety that came with the family name. For better or worse he began following in his father’s footsteps over twenty years ago. Looking at his past and present it is safe to say his decision hasn’t really brought him much happiness. But then again, who are we to decide?<br /> <br /> When his father had become boss of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-crime-family">Philadelphia crime family</a>, Nicky Junior slowly but surely moved towards a life of crime. Wherever he went doors opened and he was greeted with smiles and respect. What a life, he must have thought. He was barely out of school or people were already treating him as a man. The only problem was: it was all fake. <br /> <br /> As soon as his father was sent to prison for what amounted to life on various racketeering convictions, the respect and smiles had disappeared. Though, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/nicodemo-little-nicky-scarfo-boss-of-the-philadelphia-crime-famil">Scarfo Senior</a> still held sway over the crime family by using his son as a messenger between himself and men who remained loyal to him, it was too little to hold on to power. <br /> <br /> This was best illustrated on Halloween night in 1989. That evening, Nicky Junior and two of his friends were enjoying a meal at Dante & Luigi’s in South Philadelphia. As the three men are eating, a man wearing a Halloween mask and carrying a trick-or-trick bag, walks up to the table, pulls out a Mac-10 semi-automatic machine pistol and opens fire. Bullets hit Junior in the neck, chest and arm, but all miss vital organs and within days of the attack, he walks out of the hospital alive and relatively well.<br /> <br /> No one has ever been charged with the hit attempt but informants and sources within law enforcement claim the masked man was <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-joey-merlino-goes-to-hollywood">Joseph Merlino</a>, son of Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino. Chuckie Merlino served as underboss for Scarfo Sr. only to be demoted by him because of his alcohol abuse. It is an interesting anecdote that can be added as a motive, though the real reason for the attack was probably to send a message to the imprisoned mob boss that he no longer was in control of the crime family. <br /> <br /> That message was received loud and clear as Scarfo sent his son to New Jersey to stay with the only men still loyal to him. The move proved to be disastrous as Nicky Junior’s bodyguard, <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philadelphia-capo-george">George Fresolone</a>, turned out to be an informant. Fresolone recorded numerous incriminating talks between himself and the boss’s son resulting in a racketeering conviction that sent Nicky to state prison for a total of four years and seven months. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237013091,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237013091,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237013091?profile=original" width="200" /></a>With both father and son in prison and their crime family beyond their control, the elderly Scarfo sought the help of a fellow inmate who happened to be the boss of a major New York mob family. <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-lucchese-crime-family-boss-vittorio-vic-amuso">Vittorio Amuso</a> and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/nicodemo-little-nicky-scarfo-boss-of-the-philadelphia-crime-famil">Nicky Scarfo</a> had become close while doing time together and Scarfo asked Amuso if he could put his son on record with the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-lucchese-crime-family">Lucchese Family</a>. Being on record as a Lucchese associate offered Nicky Junior (right) some protection from Merlino and his Philadelphia crew. <br /> <br /> In 2000, some protection turned into full protection when Scarfo Junior became a fully fledged member of the Lucchese Family. He could now rely on the muscle of the New York family to keep him safe from his enemies in Philly. But his membership did not offer him any protection from law enforcement as he was convicted of illegal gambling in 2002 and sent to prison for 33 months. When Nicky Junior was released from prison, he quickly got involved in a scheme that would prove to be a huge cash cow for him. <br /> <br /> Law enforcement has been warning the public about how La Cosa Nostra is branching out into so called white collar crimes such as internet fraud and “boiler rooms” which net the mafia millions of dollars. After having been to prison for bread and butter mob crimes like gambling, Scarfo eagerly dived into the new world of corporate crime. Seeing how all those bosses on Wall Street managed to swindle the world out of billions without going to prison, he must’ve thought it was the newest easy way to riches. <br /> <br /> Together with Salvatore Pelullo and twelve others Scarfo allegedly devised a plan to take over FirstPlus Financial Group, a publicly traded company located in Texas, and to replace its existing board of directors and management with individuals who would serve at the direction of Scarfo and Pelullo. By using threats of violence and lawsuits the men succeeded in taking control of the company in June of 2007. <br /> <br /> According to the indictment: “Accordingly, on or about June 7, 2007, to control the Enterprise's affairs, members and associates of Scarfo and Pelullo caused FirstPlus Financial Group's (FPFG) existing board of directors to appoint additional new members, who had been selected by the Scarfo-Pelullo Enterprise. Following the appointment of these new board members, the Enterprise caused the original board members to resign. The newly constituted board of directors then appointed certain executive officers who served at the direction of the Enterprise.” <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237013286,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237013286,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237013286?profile=original" width="250" /></a>The takeover continued as planned: “These "figurehead" FPFG board members (hereafter "figurehead board") and executive officers conducted transactions designed to benefit the Enterprise while concealing the roles of defendants PELULLO and SCARFO in controlling FPFG. The figurehead board served to "rubber stamp" the directives of PELULLO and SCARFO and made the board's decisions appear to be independent and legitimate to conceal the involvement and control of PELULLO and SCARFO in creating these directives, as well as their illicit purposes. PELULLO used his direct control of the figurehead board to approve transactions that were designed to personally benefit members and associates of the Scarfo-Pelullo Enterprise to the detriment of the FPFG shareholders.”<br /> <br /> In layman’s terms: Scarfo (left) and Pelullo had managed to put in place a puppet board that did as they wanted. And the thing they wanted was money, lots of it. By using the company to buy other companies owned by Scarfo and co at inflated prices, the group fleeced shareholders out of at least 12 million dollars, authorities allege. <br /> <br /> The money was spent in various ways but with one similar goal: to make life good for those that spent it. “Proceeds of the scheme were used to finance a lavish lifestyle that included luxury automobiles, a yacht, a luxury home for Scarfo, trips abroad, mortgage and rental payments, and jewelry as well as recurring monthly expenses.”<br /> <br /> But when your name is Nicodemo Scarfo, your father is doing life in prison after having littered the streets of Philadelphia with dead bodies, and you yourself have compiled quite an impressive criminal record, it doesn’t take law enforcement long to figure out you haven’t turned into a successful legitimate boardroom executive in just a few years after getting out of prison. <br /> <br /> After a two year investigation, on November 1, 2011, Nicky Scarfo Junior and thirteen others were arrested on Federal racketeering charges. When the case goes to trial, Scarfo will realize once more that he continues to follow in his father’s footsteps. Maybe even in such a way that in the not so distant future, their feet will face each other as they share a prison cell.</p>
<p>Scarfo Jr. was found guilty of racketeering conspiracy and sentenced to 30 years in prison on July 28, 2015. His associate, Salvatore Pelullo, also received a 30-year term.</p>
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Philly Mob Boss Joey Merlino Goes To Hollywood
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-joey-merlino-goes-to-hollywood
2011-09-13T12:00:00.000Z
2011-09-13T12:00:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-joey-merlino-goes-to-hollywood"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002483,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237002483?profile=original" width="491" /></a>By David Amoruso<br /> <br /> The Philadelphia Crime Family is an open book. Almost literally: its history has been well documented in books written by researchers, journalists, and turncoat mobsters who spilled their guts about what was labeled as the most violent and dysfunctional mob family in the United States. But now a former boss is about to make a movie about his life in the mob. <br /> <br /> When its secretive boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philadelphia-boss-angelo-bruno">Angelo Bruno</a> was murdered in front of his home, the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-crime-family">Philly Family</a> descended into chaos, never to fully recover again. Bruno’s successors messed up a good thing and by the 1990s two factions were fighting for petty leftovers. <br /> <br /> One of the men involved in that war of the 1990s was Joseph Merlino. At the time, he was a young up-and-coming street tough who grew up in the Mafia with a father and uncle who were both made members of the Philadelphia Family. Merlino felt he was owed a piece of the action and, together with his friends, he took on <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philadelphia-boss-john-stanfa">John Stanfa</a>, the newly crowned Sicilian boss of the family, in a struggle for control of the city’s mob rackets. <br /> <br /> After a bloody war in which Merlino himself was wounded after an attempt on his life, the FBI stepped in and took Stanfa and his crew off the streets on racketeering charges. Merlino and his group had achieved their goal of seizing mob power. But Merlino had a desire for the limelight and was quickly branded the new John Gotti by the media. The dapper young mob boss had no problem going on camera and talking to reporters, something that gave the FBI even more motive to take down this cocky “kid”. <br /> <br /> And they got him. In 2001, Merlino was sentenced to 14 years on racketeering charges. His reaction to the sentence was that of a true stand up guy: “Ain't bad. Better than the death penalty.” After doing twelve years, Merlino was released to a halfway house in Southern Florida in March 2011. The <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2011-03-16/news/28698126_1_edwin-jacobs-joseph-merlino-law-enforcement" target="_blank">media</a> immediately started debating whether or not the former mob boss, now 49 years old, would return to his old stomping grounds and take back control of the Family, which just saw its current leadership under <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-joseph-ligambi">indictment</a> on fresh racketeering charges. But apparently, the attention greedy gangster had other ideas.<br /> <br /> Yesterday, journalist <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/dan_gross/?c=r" target="_blank">Dan Gross</a> had an interesting <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2011-09-12/entertainment/30145505_1_mob-boss-joey-merlino-ralph-natale" target="_blank">tidbit</a> in his gossip column, a column most mob buffs probably don’t read. Gross wrote that Merlino “has been talking to veteran actor and screenwriter Leo Rossi about writing a movie about his life.” Gross contacted Rossi to verify and Rossi did. Telling Gross “he has had six phone conversations with Merlino, who he says ‘has got a great sense of humor.’ Rossi says that he and Merlino are both trying to line up financing for a possible biopic about the jailed mob boss. Rossi says he knows that he'll be asked whether he thinks that Merlino is ‘out of the life.’ He doesn't care.”<br /> <br /> A movie about the life of a Mafia boss made by the actual Mafia boss the film is based on. The Philadelphia mob never seizes to amaze those who are fascinated by everything Mafia. And probably a few old school mobsters are amazed as well. Perhaps even sickened by another sign that the famous code of silence known as Omerta is fading faster than you can say ‘scene’.</p>
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Kill The Chinaman
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/kill-the-chinaman-1
2011-07-08T09:30:00.000Z
2011-07-08T09:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/kill-the-chinaman-1"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236999492,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236999492?profile=original" width="500" /></a></p>
<p><strong>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> </strong> <em>‘It is the theory that decides what can be observed.</em><br /> <em>If the facts don’t fit the theory change the facts.’</em><br /> <strong>Albert Einstein</strong><br /> <br /> <em>New York Times April 16th 1931:</em><br /> <br /> <em>It took ten years and a lot of shooting to kill Giuseppe Masseria. He was Joe the Boss to the underworld--but his enemies found him with his back turned yesterday in a little Italian restaurant in Coney Island…….</em><br /> <br /> This is where it all happened. Wednesday, April 15th 1931.<br /> <br /> Not with a whimper, but more of a bang. A number of bangs in fact……<br /> <br /> In a dingy street, in a dingy corner on Coney Island, filled with the stink of fish and the stench of treachery most foul, as Shakespeare or someone would have said.<br /> <br /> At various times on this same day:<br /> <br /> The Brooklyn Robins went down to the Boston Braves three to nine in Beantown.<br /> <br /> King Alfonso and Queen Ena of Spain went into exile.<br /> <br /> The first walk backwards across America began in California.<br /> <br /> Prince Thomas, Duke of Genoa and the nephew of the first king of a united Italy, died.<br /> <br /> As did a man who was claiming to be the first king of the New York Mafia.<br /> <br /> His name was Giuseppe Masseria (right, photo credit: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0738573140/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0738573140&linkCode=as2&tag=gangstersinc-20" target="_blank">New York City Gangland</a> by Arthur Nash), sometimes called ‘Joe the Boss.’ <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236999094,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236999094,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236999094?profile=original" width="223" /></a>Short, fat, (although at 5’4’ and 155 lbs some might think him more squat than tubby) a bit of a trencherman, which is a polite way of describing a glutton, he had the habit of squinting his eyes when talking, hence the sobriquet ‘The Chinaman’ though never apparently to his face.<br /> <br /> Sometime on the afternoon of that long-ago Wednesday, he came to the restaurant, in a building owned or leased by a thirty-two year old man from Angri near Pompei, Italy, called Gerado Scarpato, who lived in the apartment above the restaurant with his wife and mother-in-law. <br /> <br /> Just what Scarpato’s place in the New York Italian-American underworld was, has never been satisfactorily explained. He was a restaurateur, but other things as well. <br /> <br /> Probably involved in extortion, one of his victims arriving at the restaurant unexpectedly that very afternoon, chased away by Scarpato who was talking to a group of men on the sidewalk, including notorious hoodlum, Anthony Carfano and others of an equal bent. Carfano was tight enough with Masseria to have gone into partnership with him in a horse racing stable and a bookmaking business among other things.<br /> <br /> A document in the New York archives indicates that Scarpato had taken over the extortion ring previously run by Giuseppe ‘Clutching Hand’ Piraino, (a close associate of Carfano,) who had been killed the previous August during the mob war that had been taking place in New York since February of 1930.<br /> <br /> Whatever he did on the wrong side of the law, he was good at it. He did not have an arrest record of any sort.<br /> <br /> Scarpato was married to twenty-seven year old Alvera, whose mother, Anna Tammaro, was the head chef and whose name was above the door on West 15th Street, here on Coney Island. <br /> <br /> She may have been busy with her other customers on this day, but for Joe ‘The Boss’ there was little to do. Contrary to all the reports that have been published in the last eighty years that he ‘pigged out’ prior to his demise, his autopsy showed hardly any food content in his stomach - only two ounces of bile.<br /> <br /> Mrs Tammaro claimed that she had served coffee, and the men had asked for fish so she had left the building to purchase some. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236999889,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236999889,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236999889?profile=original" width="413" /></a>Whatever he was doing at the Nuova Villa (right), eating was not on the agenda for Joe the Boss. <br /> <br /> According to newspaper reports, on this day in the warmest April New York had experienced in 63 years and the driest since 1910, Joe was accompanied to the eating house by three men in his bullet-proof car, but just who these were has never been completely ascertained. <br /> <br /> One may have been Saverio ‘Sam’ Pollaccia, who was Masseria’s consigliere, or advisor. Another could possibly have been Nicola Gentile, a Sicilian Mafia Pied-Piper who had been wandering across America for twenty-five years, although he claimed that Joe was already dead when he arrived outside the restaurant. Consequently he never went in. At least he did in one of the versions of his memoirs. In another, he claimed he was there with among others, Vincenzo Mangano. <br /> <br /> As to the third? <br /> <br /> Was it Charlie Luciano? <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237000092,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237000092,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237000092?profile=original" width="180" /></a>His real name was Salvatore C. Lucania (right), and by the age of thirty-four he was, it seems, the right hand of Masseria. A petty criminal and minor drug dealer, he kick-started his career by becoming an informant in 1923 at the age of twenty-six, and never looked back. By the time he came under the wing of Masseria he had established himself as a bootlegger, and operator of betting and gambling rings in Lower Manhattan.<br /> <br /> Every book, article or story on this king-hit in Brooklyn, ever published, will tell you: <br /> <br /> a) it was orchestrated by Charlie, <br /> b) he was there having lunch and playing cards with his boss, and <br /> c) was taking an interminably long leak in the men’s room when all the action was going down, so he did not see anything. As you do.<br /> <br /> It is interesting, however, that even though every flatfoot and detective in town knew who he was, according to the press, nobody bothered to speak to him, and he was never detained or officially interviewed after the event. It seems certain though that the cops would have contacted him as they must have known of his connection to Masseria. Any notes they kept would have made interesting reading.<br /> <br /> Neither the New York Times or The Herald Tribune in their reports on the shooting make any mention of Luciano being present at the restaurant. Gentile claimed he went straight from the Villa Nuova to the home of Luciano in mid-town Manhattan where a meeting was held between himself, Luciano and Vincenzo Troia an associate of Salvatore Maranzano the man who headed the faction opposing Joe. <br /> <br /> If this is true, it might confirm that Luciano was not at the restaurant when the shooting took place.<br /> <br /> It has been reported that two men and in some reports, four men, arrived while Joe and his friends were playing cards, walked into the restaurant and shot him repeatedly. The autopsy on his body showed gunshot wounds to the back, and one in the back of the head.<br /> <br /> It’s been posited that Joe was swinging around to give these upstarts un occhio, the traditional Italian ’evil eye’ but simply got one there for his efforts. In fact, all the kill-shots came from behind. The eye wound was an exit one.<br /> <br /> The day after he was killed, Dr. G.W. Ruger carried out an autopsy on the body of Guiseppe Masseria.<br /> <br /> Joe had been dressed to the nines that day:<br /> <br /> Light gray three-piece suit by Vincent Balletta matched to a white Madras shirts by Henry and Al, New York. Black leather belt with silver buckle. His dainty size six feet in black Oxfords and blue cotton lisle socks. Underneath, cream, silk underwear. <br /> <br /> Dressed to kill!<br /> <br /> Two of the four back shots were through and through as was the head shot. Two of the shots to the back had smudged the coat jacket with gunpowder, indicating the shooter was only inches away. Heart, lungs and liver were torn apart. Brain was shredded. Two lead bullets were recovered, both .38 calibre. Although the autopsy does not indicate it, Joe was most certainly dead when he hit the wooden floor.<br /> <br /> The men who might have shot him have been identified over the years as:<br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237000300,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237000300,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237000300?profile=original" width="594" /></a><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237000660,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237000660,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237000660?profile=original" width="595" /></a>You could say they are the usual suspects. Whether or not any of these were the two or four shooters that day is open to debate. Why Italians would hire Jews to kill the biggest Italian mobster in town is something to speculate on. Although interestingly, it was done some months later to dispose of Masseria’s opponent, Salvatore Maranzano.<br /> <br /> Anastasia and Adonis were very likely members of another gang run by Stefano Ferrigno and Manfredi Mineo which was in support of Masseria in his war on the rest of the New York Italian-American underworld at this time. Albert was a stone killer, with a long list under his belt. Adonis was more a businessman than a hit man. Genovese was definitely another stone-killer and could well have pulled the trigger.<br /> <br /> However, it’s highly unlikely Anastasia was one of the killers. <br /> <br /> Samuel S. Leibowitz who became a judge in Brooklyn’s King County Court, in 1931 was a young lawyer with a reputation for being a top man in the defense’s corner. He had an office at 66 Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. At noon that day, Anastasia walked into the lawyer’s office demanding the receptionist check the time on the office clock. She did and confirmed it was correct. Anastasia asked for Leibowitz and was told he was in court until later in the day. He told the receptionist he would wait, and settled back, thereby creating for himself the perfect alibi. <br /> <br /> It would not be the last time Albert arranged a cast-iron alibi at the time a mobster was being murdered. Twenty years later, in October 1951, he arranged to be having an X-Ray in a public hospital as Willie Moretti the infamous little New Jersey hoodlum was gunned down in another restaurant, this time in Cliffside, New Jersey.<br /> <br /> Livorsi, Stracci and Coppola were all part of a crew of the Masseria family that operated out of East Harlem under the supervision of Ciro Terranova. His father had married the mother of Joe Morello (who had been the previous head of Masseria’s crime family,) and at forty three, was a senior member of the organization in years and experience. The three soldiers were seasoned gunmen, Coppola even carrying a nick name, ‘Trigger Mike’ as testament to his prowess with a gat, (For more on Coppola, check out Thom's earlier story <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/man-is-the-cruelest-animal-the">here</a>) so any of these could have qualified.<br /> <br /> Scarpato claimed he went for a long walk that afternoon and returned to find his prize guest gutted on the restaurant floor. But did he? Maybe he was the shooter. Who better to come up behind an unsuspecting customer than the maître d of the establishment? <br /> <br /> The only really strong link to the killer though, lies with a man called Johnny ‘Silk Stocking’ Guistra who according to some sources was part of the crew of Vincenzo Mangano, a capo in the Mineo crime family, operating the family’s businesses on the South Brooklyn Piers around Red Hook. Which could have been strange seeing as how he was from Calabria and Mangano was a staunch Sicilian Mafioso and averse to working with non-Sicilians in his crew. <br /> <br /> Other information however, implies Johnny was in fact in competition with Mangano and was part of the Masseria crime family. He was apparently involved in rackets linked into the laundry business across New York. It’s been suggested his nick-name indicated his penchant for the opposite sex on the one hand, and also that it represented his favorite tool of destruction as he had, unusually for a mobster, an aversion to blood. <br /> <br /> His connection into the hit was an overcoat he left hanging up in the restaurant.<br /> <br /> Seemed a strange thing to do though. Walk into a room, take off your coat, kill a man and then walk out leaving behind such incriminating evidence.<br /> <br /> Of course if he was there at the moment so to speak, and he was caught unawares, he may well have fled the scene in panic, with obviously no thought for his coat. You’re sitting at a table, talking to your boss, sipping a coffee, when suddenly someone or ones, starts shooting holes in him. It could be cause for extreme concern.<br /> <br /> ‘I’m outa here!’ <br /> <br /> Not unlike the comment and action of Jerome Squillante, when sitting next to Albert Anastasia in that barber shop twenty-six years later in mid-town Manhattan, who also found things just a little bit too hot to hang around when two men came in and banged his boss.<br /> <br /> Didn’t really matter to Johnny the Silk. Three weeks later he was shot numerous times in the head and chest and died in the hallway of a dingy tenement at 75 Monroe Street on the Lower East Side on May 10th. By his side lay his pearl-handed pistol. He’d been able to get it out, but tests revealed it had not been fired. <br /> <br /> Maybe loose ends being tied together? Maybe a double-cross too many? Maybe late on a loan? Never easy to pin the donkey in these tangled tales. All we know for sure is that he or someone wearing his coat, went to that Coney Island food place that afternoon and maybe killed Senor Masseria.<br /> <br /> It’s also possible of course that Johnny had left this coat on a previous visit and simply never got around to collecting it, and the fact that it was found had absolutely no bearing on the shooting at all.<br /> <br /> There was an interesting by-line to his murder. On May 14th his body was waked at 11 First Place in Carroll Gardens. Two men attending the service, Vincent Gesino and Ettore Zappi were given a message at 5 PM that a man called Joe wanted to see them at 1331 Sixty-ninth Street in Brooklyn. When they got there, they were ambushed in the hallway of the building and both men were shot and seriously injured, although surviving their wounds. <br /> <br /> Gesino who worked as a longshoreman, had apparently been involved with Giustra in some kind of business deal, perhaps in relation to the funeral company that Johnny ran from the very premises from where he himself was buried. <br /> <br /> Zappi who eventually became a capo or crew boss in the Mineo crime family <br /> was reported to be the ‘boss’ of Gesino and Giustra, although he claimed at the time to be a simple fruit merchant. Were these two men linked into Masseria’s death in some way and had been designated the chop as a result?<br /> <br /> ‘Silk Johnny’ was not the only one who met an unnatural death following the killing of ‘Joe the Boss.’<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001094,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001094,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237001094?profile=original" width="260" /></a>Saveria Pollicia (right), one of the ‘great unknowns’ of early mob history was close to Joe as his family counselor. It hadn’t always been that way. <br /> <br /> At one time he had worked with Salvatore D’Aquila (they were close enough for D’Aquila to become godfather to one of Pollaccia’s children, his daughter Rosa,) who had perhaps claimed the honorific ‘Boss of Bosses’ title within New York‘s Mafia clans, although this has never been substantiated, until he was gunned down on the Lower East Side in 1928. His group then came under the leadership of Manfredi Mineo who died during the underworld war of 1930-1931. This crime conglomerate, known to-day as the Gambino Family, was then headed by Frank Scalice, before being taken over by Vincenzo Mangano.<br /> <br /> Pollaccia was definitely interviewed by the police but was unable to help them in their investigation.<br /> <br /> With the death of his boss, Pollaccia became vulnerable to the machinations of Vito Genovese, one of the Masseria family’s more devious and unpredictable killers. For some reason Genovese had a grudge against Saveria, and as a result, sometime in 1932, Genovese arranged to visit Chicago with him, and there arranged with Paul Ricca, a member of Al Capone’s gang to dispose of Sam. His body was never found. He left a wife and five children who lived in Corona, Queens.<br /> <br /> Just how Vito Genovese was able to arrange the murder of the family consigliere without approval from Luciano the new family boss is a mystery. Unless of course Charlie gave it for whatever reason. Logic and Mafia politics are strange bedfellows even under the most discerning analysis. <br /> <br /> There was a third man who died of unnatural causes who may have been part of the plot to kill Masseria: Camello (sometimes referred to as Carmelo) Li Conti. He was with Guistra the night he got the chop, but through sheer, blind luck missed that hit and survived to live another day. Not for long though.<br /> <br /> His body was found, beaten, stabbed and slashed to death in the bathroom of a room at the Hotel Paramount on West 46th Street in mid town Manhattan. Two months to the date of his friend’s murder, on Friday, July 10th.<br /> <br /> Li Conti may have been a business partner with Guistra and it has been suggested he had been at loggerheads with Masseria over mob affairs. Li Conti was also an undertaker according to his family, with a business in Brooklyn. He in fact handled the burial arrangement for Guistra’s corpse. Li Conti had emigrated to New York in 1904 from Reggio Calabria at the age of sixteen to join his father who was already established in Brooklyn. <br /> <br /> In one of the many ironic links into the men of the Mafia, Vincenzo Mangano sailed into New York a year later at the age of seventeen on the very same boat that Li Conti had embarked on, the SS Gerty.<br /> <br /> Like so many of the characters that move in and out of this story, little is known about Camello other than that according to his wife, Antonina Irato, he buried people, (probably good at that,) and that he died a messy death at the age of forty-three.<br /> <br /> Last, but probably not least was the restaurant owner, Scarpato.<br /> <br /> Following the murder of ‘Joe the Boss’ Gerardo Scarpato gave off all the signs of a dead man walking. After police had questioned him, he demanded they take his fingerprints and keep them on file. ‘I think you may need them,’ he said. ‘I may be next.’ He was so certain he was to be killed, he had his full name tattooed on the inside of his right forearm. <br /> <br /> After the killing of Masseria, Gerardo Scarpato and his wife left New York and travelled back to Italy. They returned in June, 1932. <br /> <br /> Gerardo became interested in the sport of cycle racing in the Velodrome at Coney Island and visited professional boxing matches here also, in the complex at West 12th Street and Neptune Avenue. He also became an executive of the Coney Island Surf Democratic Club. With his background, probably all of these interests were outlets for his extortion ring or some other nefarious activity.<br /> <br /> Alvira then went for another holiday, apparently on her own, to Acra, near Cairo in the Catskills. Just why she went to this tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere is just another tantalizing mystery, especially considering that Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond the infamous bootlegger and gunman had an estate here at this time. <br /> <br /> She returned from the holiday late on Friday September 9th to find Gerardo was not in the restaurant or their apartment above it. He had not returned on Saturday either. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001476,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001476,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237001476?profile=original" width="230" /></a>The unknown man who appeared at the beginning of this story, waiting for Scarpato outside the Villa Nuova Tammaro, may have been one of the last ‘legitimate’ persons to have seen him before his death. He claimed he met with Scarpato to hand over money on the night that Scarpato was murdered. After passing the money to him, Scarpato then left, promising to return soon. An hour later, Anthony Carfano (right) appeared and told the man, ‘listen, no matter what happens, you never knew Scarpato. Get the hell out of here and keep your mouth shut.’ <br /> <br /> This was between eight and nine in the evening, on the corner Fourth Avenue and Union Street in Park Slope in Brooklyn. Hours later Gerardo Scarpato was dead.<br /> <br /> He was last seen officially, at a small café he owned on the corner of Surfside Avenue and West 15th Street on the island. Teddy Sallini, the bartender, told the police Scarpato left the place at about 1:AM..<br /> <br /> Five hours later, early in the morning of Sunday, September 11th, someone reported a car parked under a tree at 216 Windsor Place, two block south of Prospect Park. Just what was suspicious about this has never been disclosed, but when the police attended, they discovered his body in the back seat of the black sedan, wrapped in a burlap sack. He had died a particularly hard death. He had been knocked unconscious then trussed up with rope in such a way that as he awoke and started to struggle, the more he did, the tighter the rope around his neck strangled him. It would have been slow and very bad. <br /> <br /> For some reason, never disclosed, the police believe he had been murdered in the Bath Beach area. <br /> <br /> Just why he was killed in this particularly gruesome way is a mystery, like almost all of this story. The Mob would normally kill by pistol or shotgun, or sometimes by a knife in the back. Scarpato died in a way that was surely designed to send a message.<br /> <br /> Captain John McGowan, head of the Brooklyn Homicide, remembered when he interviews Scarpato after the killing of Masseria he was afraid that friends of Joe might have believed he had put him ‘on the spot.’ <br /> <br /> But was his murder about Joe the Boss, or something much more mundane-greed?<br /> <br /> Felix Di Martini a private investigator operating from offices in Beekman Street had been a NYPD officer from 1905-1919. He had worked major crimes for the District Attorney’s of Manhattan and Brooklyn and had operated under Joe Petrosino in the famous ‘Italian Squad’ investigating high-profile murders, Black Hand extortionists and gang crimes. He claimed information that indicated Vito Genovese was the man behind the killing of Masseria. He also stated that Gerardo Scarpato was a ‘confidential lieutenant’ of Genovese.<br /> <br /> Martini believed Scarpato had been murdered because he had sided with a Paulie Merchione (there was a Paul Marchione listed in the crew of skipper Jimmy Angelina in the Genovese family chart set up by Joe Valachi in 1963) in a dispute involving a loan of $5000 to Sam Maraglia, sometimes known as Tony Meddeo, also known as Samuel Medal, and that he had conspired with Merchione to abduct and kill Medal over the dispute regarding this loan. Medal was a beer baron of some substance, apparently worth over $250,000, operating in the Bronx. It was also claimed that he worked under Ciro Terranova whose place in the Masseria family has already been documented.<br /> <br /> Medal disappeared on September 6th 1932 sometime after 7:PM after visiting the ‘Wolverine’ a club owned and operated by Steve LaSalle, on Lexicon Avenue. <br /> <br /> Within a week Scarpato was dead.<br /> <br /> Di Martini believed: <br /> <br /> ‘The supposition in that Scarparto took sides with Paulie and the Sicilian faction in bringing about Medal’s disappearance. It is probable that Scarparto’s death was brought about by Genovese hearing that Scarparto had betrayed his trust and for that reason Genovese would figure that Scarparto’s death was coming to him.’ The photo below shows his funeral.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001287,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001287,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237001287?profile=original" width="640" /></a>Two days after Masseria was murdered another killing took place in Brooklyn. Late on the evening of April 17th, Ernesto ‘Hoppy’ Rossi was shot dead as he sat at the wheel of a car outside the home of Police Captain Lewis J. Valentine, 1642 Sixty-eight street. Information about the shooting was sketchy, but it seems two men left the car and then started shooting, before leaving in a another car that was found to have carried false plates. <br /> <br /> Rossi had been part of the crew operated by Frankie Yale, the notorious gangster who had himself been gunned down in Brooklyn in July 1928-the first mobster to become a victim of the Tommy-gun in New York. <br /> <br /> Yale (his Americanized name) was a Calabrian who was a group leader in the Masseria family before his death.<br /> <br /> It has been suggested that Rossi may have worked for a time as the chauffeur of Joe the Boss. Rossi, born in Manhattan of first generation immigrants from Naples, had a father, Pasquale who himself had been arrested by the police as early as 1907 for extortion. So the pedigree was good.<br /> <br /> Rossi’s murder is not a direct link into the case of Joe the Boss, but is still an interesting diversion in this tangled web of who killed whom and for why.<br /> <br /> Just why these men died following the killing of Masseria has never been explained to any degree of satisfaction. Pollicia, Guistra and Li Conti seemed certain to have been part of the Masseria crime family. Scarpato? There is no evidence to indicate one way or the other, but it seems highly likely that he was at least associated with them.<br /> <br /> So why were they clipped?<br /> <br /> Pollicia as mentioned, is believed to have died because of an internal struggle within the Masseria crime family. The other three were all killed for the same reason, or three different ones.<br /> <br /> If it was the same reason, then logic indicates it was to do with the death of ‘Joe the Boss.’ But were they killed by the opposition that saw them as future problems in the making, even though they had done a great service by killing off their chief? Or were they murdered in retribution by men still loyal to the memory of Masseria?<br /> <br /> If each man died an individual death for an individual reason, then the choices seems almost limitless.<br /> <br /> There’s the rub, as the aforementioned Will Shakespeare would have it.<br /> <br /> Why did Joe find himself so unpopular after having reached the pinnacle of his chosen career?<br /> <br /> He had been born around 1887 in a small, rural town in the province of Agrigento, Sicily, and immigrated to New York some sources claim to avoid a murder charge at the age of seventeen. This is conjecture, as there has been no evidence produced to conclusively prove why he left the island. In his late teens he may have been involved in Black Hand activities including kidnapping gangs and for almost two years ran a burglary ring operating in and around the Bowery. He worked for a time as a tailor during the day and went thieving at night. In 1913 he was caught and convicted, receiving a four to six year prison sentence. On his release he lived in the Forsythe Street area of Lower Manhattan with his wife, Maria, before moving to various other addresses in East Houston and East 16th Streets, running a pool room, working in the ice distribution business and operating gambling dens until he moved to an apartment on 2nd Avenue and with the advent of Prohibition, began his climb up through the ranks of the New York underworld. <br /> <br /> Coming from an area in Sicily which had no traditional Mafia history, Masseria it’s safe to assume, held no preconceived ideas as to the place of ‘The Honoured Society’ within the framework of criminal gangs that infested the streets of the biggest city in America. By the early 1920s reports indicated that he was already calling himself’ Joe the Boss’ on the lower East Side of Manhattan.<br /> <br /> It’s highly likely that he was never himself, formerly inducted into the Mafia, although he came in due course to be recognized as a mover and shaker within its ranks. He gathered around him a disparate group of Italian-Americans from all over the Mezzorgiono, the ‘poor south’ of Italy-Sicilians, Calbrians and Napolitans. The one thing they had in commons was that they were criminals or criminals by inclination, and eager to buy their way out of the poverty of their miserable lives. <br /> <br /> Some of these men, such as Charlie Luciano, Vito Genovese, Vincent Alo, Anthony Carfano and Michele Miranda would go on to have major careers in the world of American Mafia crime across the next thirty to forty years.<br /> <br /> Through a series of astute moves and fortunate circumstance, by the late 1920s, Giuseppe Masseria was a major force in the Italian-American crime framework of New York. Joe Bonanno believed his success was simply based on the fact that he rose to his power base through take-overs and merges of a number of small criminal units engaged in illegal alcohol manufacture and distribution. It’s claimed he sought out the role of Boss of Bosses, which title he may well have shouldered for a brief period prior to his death on Coney Island, although this position seemingly was bestowed on Gaspare Messina the Mafia boss of Boston, at a council meeting of Mafia family heads from around America, sometime in December 1930, presumably replacing the mantle which had sat with Salvatore D‘Aquila before his murder.<br /> <br /> Masseria had gotten involved in a messy gang war between his crime family and his allies, the gang headed by Mineo, and another group across in Brooklyn headed by a man called Salavtore Maranzano who was supported by a mob based out of Harlem led by Gaetano Reina. This had dragged on for over a year, and although the casualties were relatively light, with probably a lot less than fifty deaths, shoot-outs on city streets that sometimes created civilian casualties, was not something the city council was too excited about.<br /> <br /> The only ‘inside’ information at a management level we have of the events leading up to the death of Joe the Boss comes from the memoirs of Nicolo Gentile. <br /> <br /> Joseph Valachi the Genovese Family informant of the early 1960s clued us into a lot of meat and potato stuff, but as a foot-soldier his viewpoint was somewhat limited. <br /> <br /> Joseph Bonanno another of the protagonists fighting on the side of Maranzano has also dropped tit-bits, although his biography was more self-serving than unveiling when it came to the truth of the matter. <br /> <br /> Gentile in fact produced two versions of his life-a document which was translated into English for the FBI, which was followed a few years later by a book published in Rome called ‘Vita di Capo Mafia,’ Life of a Mafia Boss. As self-serving as the other books, this one at least overdoses on details and trivia although its major drawback in the investigation into the death of Masseria is that Gentile was actually in Italy during most of the Castellamarese War, as the conflict became known, returning to New York in November 1930.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002094,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002094,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237002094?profile=original" width="88" /></a>Born in Siculiana, Agrigento, in the south west of the island in 1885, Gentile (right) had moved to America as a youth in 1903 and travelled back and forward across the country and back and forth to Sicily over the next 35 years before fleeing the country while on bail for narcotic trafficking. <br /> <br /> He tells us among other things that Masseria was ‘stained with the most horrible vileness.’ That he had ordered the assassination of Salvatore D’Aquila in 1928 and that prior to Christmas 1930, Joe the Boss had been called before the New York Police Commissioner, Grover Aloysius Whalen, and told in no uncertain terms that if he did not stop the shooting on the streets, he and all of his men would be arrested and thrown in the jug. <br /> <br /> According to Gentile, at this point Joe threw in the towel and called the war off.<br /> <br /> This, however, was obviously not good enough for someone or ones, which leads us to that Wednesday afternoon on Coney Island. There had been too much damage created, too many people disturbed by the events of the previous year.<br /> <br /> Winston Churchill said, ‘Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount.’ <br /> <br /> That afternoon in April, Joe Masseria made the fateful mistake of getting off, and suffered the consequences.<br /> <br /> The day after his murder, his twenty-four year old son, Joseph Junior, identified the body in the Kings County Morgue at Clarkson Avenue in Brooklyn. Junior had travelled from the family home in the famous Art Deco apartment building at 15 West 81 Street, across from Central Park. It had opened the previous August and Joe senior had purchased Penthouse E on the 15th floor, at some stage before his murder.<br /> <br /> His funeral on April 20th was as to be expected, big, lavish and gaudy. The solid silver casket was said to have cost $15000 ($204,000 in today’s currency). Sixteen automobiles alone were needed to carry the thousands of wreaths; although most were anonymous, one, a heart of roses, was believed to have been sent by Al Capone. Sixty-nine cars made up the funeral cortège which left the penthouse and made its way to the Italian Church of Mary, Help of Christians, at 436 East 12th Street for the requiem mass, held at noon by three priests. <br /> <br /> Interestingly five cars which had been nominated to carry the honorary pallbearers remained empty as none of them showed up.<br /> <br /> He was buried, later in the afternoon, in a mausoleum at Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, Queens County. Fresh flowers are still left there to this day.<br /> <br /> Detectives from Brooklyn’s 60th Precinct, opened a file on Masseria, Number 113, noting his death at approximately 3:30 pm. They finally shelved it as a cold case, 27th November 1940. No one has ever been officially accused of the murder of Joe Masseria.<br /> <br /> According to Gentile, Charlie Luciano claimed he had arranged the killing of his family boss, not to appease the opposing forces of Salvatore Maranzano, but ‘for personal reasons.’ <br /> <br /> It’s generally assumed that Luciano saw the writing on the wall, and that he believed the ‘Americanization’ of the Mafia was long overdue. That despotic ‘Moustache Petes’ like Joe had long passed their use-by date. His successor, Salvatore Maranzano would come to the end of his long-run thing five months after Joe went down. Luciano was a man who saw the purpose of the Mafia as a way to make money, but preferably by the truck-load, not in the dribs and drabs of localized mob extortion rackets which had governed much of the early mob’s social calendar. <br /> <br /> He saw ahead into the future, a future of unions controlled and milked dry. Of gambling and numbers rackets on a grand scale like never before. The domination of every industry and business that kept commerce running. Of political corruption that would help racketeers worm their way into the very fabric of society and eventually enable them to achieve the most noble of holy grails-legitimization. <br /> <br /> Sol Gelb, a New York criminal attorney in the 1920s, said . . . ‘a hoodlum was a hoodlum. A fellow who committed crimes never mixed with respectable people. [After Luciano] they began to look and act the same as respectable people.'<br /> <br /> And so, these hoodlums would aim to scam and rob and steal their way into the very heart of American society until they could achieve this-and many of them did in the years to come.<br /> <br /> But in order to do all of this, the fighting had to stop; peace had to return to the underworld. The boss had to go.<br /> <br /> They had first in the grand scheme of things, to kill the Chinaman.<br /> <br /> <strong>After word</strong><br /> <br /> During the first three days in August, 1931, men representing Mafia families from across the country gathered in New York. They were here to attend a kind of convention. One that would help celebrate the return of peace and order to the New York’s underworld and also to honor the ascension onto the throne of Salvatore Maranzano as the big boss.<br /> <br /> The scores of men who gathered here were ostensibly to be part of a celebration held by the Society Sciacca Maritima which had been formed in 1899 as a charity. Money raised was supposedly to go towards the annual Madonna del Soccoroso day held each year on August 15th on Elizabeth Street, in Lower Manhattan. The Madonna was one of two patron saints worshipped by people from Sciacca.<br /> <br /> The function was held in the Nuova Villa Tammaro and New York Police were on hand to check everyone going in to make sure they were not armed.<br /> <br /> It was an interesting choice of venue for the function, and the function itself, as the Maranzano crime family had apparently passed a death sentence on all Mafioso from Sciacca, who had traditionally supported Masseria in the underworld war that had ended with his death.<br /> <br /> Joe Valachi claimed that as the men entered the restaurant, they threw a donation onto a table, the money being collated and stacked by Frank Scalice. The amount collected varied between $100,000 and $150,00 depending on who was telling the story.<br /> <br /> A New York newspaper reported that Salvatore Maranzano waited in the restaurant on a chair positioned over the very spot where Masseria had been killed, receiving homage from the throng assembled.<br /> <br /> The King was dead. Long live the King. For now at least.<br /> <br /> This gathering of the clans so to speak, was not the only one. Following the killing of Masseria in April 1931, Nicolo Gentile claims that a general assembly was called under the auspices of Al Capone, at the 1000 room Hotel Congress on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, again, attended by hundreds of mobsters. It’s possible that at this time Capone actually owned the hotel which would have obviously guaranteed security.<br /> <br /> Joe Bonanno in his biography talks about a mob meeting in Maranzano's Wappinger Falls estate in Upper New York State in June, attended by 300 men from all over America. This one apparently followed the Chicago one which it seems was held towards the end of May. He also refers to the Coney island meet, but gave the wrong date, i.e. June, not August.<br /> <br /> Then Joseph Valachi revealed details of yet another meeting, this one in a hall off Washington Avenue, in the Bronx attended by 400-500 people. This was probably held for the benefit of the men who made up the five Mafia crime families of New York, keeping them in the loop, so to speak. A criminal shareholder’s meeting presided over by a board of directors of one-Salvatore Maranzano.<br /> <br /> Seems that following the killing of Masseria, all that was happening was meetings. It’s interesting to speculate just why there were so many, and all taking place in approximately four months, and in different parts of the country. Mafia USA was certainly in a bit of a turmoil once Joe the Boss was demoted.<br /> <br /> The building where Joseph Masseria met his violent end still stands to this day, at 2715 West 15th Street, although modified and altered over the years. It now houses Banners Smoked Fish, owned by Alan Levitz, a business involved in fish smoking, curing and importing; a company that services the hospitality trade across the five boroughs of New York.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002855,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002855,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237002855?profile=original" width="297" /></a>The only thing you will find dead there today are a wide variety of aquatic vertebrates awaiting shipment to restaurants.<br /> <br /> At times in New York, mobsters would send the relative or friend of a man they had murdered and disposed of, a parcel of dead fish, signifying the deceased was ‘swimming with the fish, or sleeping with the fish.’<br /> <br /> It seems ironic that the building that once housed Villa Nuova Tammaro, today still connects into mob lore through such a myth, when it once played host to the creation of one of the Mafia’s greatest myths and mysteries-who killed Joe the Boss.<br /> <br /> There is little more to add to this story. The history of the Mafia, at home and abroad, is intersected over the years with examples of men in charge murdered by their subordinates or enemies:<br /> <br /> Dr. Michele Navarra, Paul Castellano, Carmine Galante, Salvatore Inzerillo, Gaetano Reina, Rosario Riccobono, Joe Lombardo, Cesare "Chester" Lamare, Albert Anastasia, Thomas Eboli, Vincenzo Mangano, Giuseppe Calderone, and the most recent, in November, 2010, Mafia Don Nicolo Rizzuto, shot dead in his own kitchen in Montreal. <br /> <br /> An endless list of death by violence because of a life lived by violence.<br /> <br /> Giuseppe Masseria was not the first Mafia boss to die by the gun, and no bookmaker worth his salt, would give odds on how many more will die the same way in the future.<br /> <br /> The so-called ‘Honoured Society’ is a culture infused with greed, duplicity, and all the rest of the seven deadly sins. The greatest myth about the Mafia is the Mafia itself. It is simply a criminal organization composed of criminals, nothing more or less. Its perception in our minds, in our times, is often closer to the mythology created by the media than hard facts that sustain concrete conclusions.<br /> <br /> The Mafia is brand name criminality only in the context of the predatory criminal society based historically and predominantly in western Sicily. Otherwise the term should be regarded as a shorthand generic label for the criminal and racketeering activities of persons with predominantly Italian surnames. The Mafia of Sicily was never transplanted to America. What grew and developed there was simply a recreation in its own form of a culture based on the concept, not the concept itself.<br /> <br /> Most of the Mafia myths come from the United States and not Sicily. The myth, most persuasively created in Hollywood but also enlarged and developed in numerous government reports of the 50s and 60s, is of a virtual underground state of crime headed up by the godfathers or dons of Sicilian American crime families.<br /> <br /> Donald Cressey was wrong to infer that the Mafia stole America. They only ever stole substance, not fanciful theory. There was never an exchange rate for that on the streets of New York.<br /> <br /> The reality, as determined by to-day’s more dispassionate, investigative historians and criminologists, is more prosaic. Dissected, analysed, squeezed dry of every fanciful hyperbole, to-day’s Mafia in America is being presented less as a work in progress, more of an historical phenomena long past its use-by date. Its ranks filled with dissolute and ineffective soldiers with little or no real understanding of the heritage they are supposed to be promulgating, its future is as bleak as it once was promising. <br /> <br /> In America the Mafia grew from a wave of ethnic succession, especially in the New York area-Irish, followed by Jews, followed by Italian-Americans who found outlets for their unique talents in the social whirlpools of the big cities across America. Congressional committees and Presidential commissions have tried hard over the years to pin down just what is the Mafia in American society, and generally fell short every time. Generations of writers, reporters and law enforcement officers are all guilty of creating something out of nothing. It was, and never will be the sum of its parts; more like a part of its sum.<br /> <br /> Giuseppe Masseria tried hard to control something that was in fact uncontrollable.<br /> <br /> Catching falling stars is only for songwriters.<br /> <br /> <em>‘A man feared that he might find an assassin;</em><br /> <em>Another that he might find a victim,</em><br /> <em>One was more wise than the other.’</em><br /> <strong>Stephen Crane</strong> <br /> <br /> <strong>Some of the information and one image in this story was sourced from:</strong><br /> <br /> <em>The Origin of Organized Crime in America by David Critchley which I acknowledge.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0738573140/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0738573140&linkCode=as2&tag=gangstersinc-20" target="_blank">New York City Gangland</a> by Arthur Nash which I acknowledge.</em><br /> <br /> <em>I also acknowledge the web site Gangrule as the source of the autopsy report on Masseria . Go visit for more information on the early days of the New York Mafia: <a href="http://www.gangrule.com/">http://www.gangrule.com/</a></em><br /> </p>
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Man is the Cruelest Animal: The story of “Trigger” Mike Coppola
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/man-is-the-cruelest-animal-the
2011-06-05T14:00:00.000Z
2011-06-05T14:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/man-is-the-cruelest-animal-the"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991485,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236991485?profile=original" width="406" /></a>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> The man who appeared to be always photographed with a perpetual sneer on his face, seemingly had a temperament to match. Like many short men, he made up for lost inches with a bombastic, in-your-face approach to life. He is best remembered by the media for the way he treated women, rather than for his prowess as a gangster, although he was skilled in that field for sure. He probably murdered his first wife and certainly drove the second one to suicide. Legend has it that because of this, the mob disowned him, leaving him to live out his life in exile, cultivating orchards at his home in Miami Beach.<br /> <br /> Being short, fat, mean and ugly was less of a handicap to this man, more an inconvenience, something he would brush aside as he got on with the important things in his life, mostly to do with making money, and lots of it, which is the Holy Grail of men in the Mafia.<br /> <br /> Michael Coppola was born on July 20th 1900, in Salerno, Italy according to some sources, including the government. Professor Alan Block claimed he was actually born in the Naples area, 30 miles to the north. In December, his parents immigrated to America, settling in New York, in East Harlem. He was one of nine children, one of whom could have been Frank “Three-Fingers” Coppola, a man destined to be a major player in the Sicilian Mafia.<br /> <br /> Ed Reid, in his book “Mafia,” claims Coppola alias Frank LaMonde, was just that. He gets things wrong in this history on the mob, and this may be one of them. Frank Coppola was born in October 1899 in Partinico, Sicily to Francesco and Pietra Loicano. Michael was born a year later to father Giuseppe and mother Angelina.<br /> <br /> In 1914, Michael already an unruly teenager, was sent to truant school as “an incorrigible delinquent.” By the time he was twenty-five, he had been jailed five times, including a thirty-month stretch in Sing-Sing. He seemingly did his master’s degree in criminality on the streets, his curriculum involving grand larceny, felonious assault, pick pocketing, disorderly conduct and homicide.<br /> <br /> He claimed various fronts and occupations during his early years developing his crime profile: employment clerk, barber, restaurant owner and by the mid 1940s was referring to himself as a ‘betting commissioner.’<br /> <br /> Details of his early mob career are hazy. There are reports of him working with Dutch Schultz, the Jewish mobster with attitude; others have him linked into the East Harlem mob known as the “107th. Street Gang,” and by the time he was thirty, he had established himself as a soldier in the Mafia crime family that with the settlement of the Castellammarese War of 1930/31, would become controlled by Charlie Luciano. It was during this period that he earned the nickname “Trigger Mike” which helped him establish an image as a tough-guy, a status somewhat restricted by the fact that he stood barely five feet, five inches tall.<br /> <br /> It’s alleged that he joined the unit controlled by Ciro Terranova, (the half-brother of Giuseppe Morello who was probably the founder of the borgata,) referred to generally as the 116th Street mob or to-day “The Uptown Crew.” At some stage prior to 1935, Terranova was “shelved” by the family administration, and Mike Coppola became the capo controlling it.<br /> <br /> In May, 1929, he had attended the gangland convention at the Breakers Hotel, Atlantic City. Some sources claim that he was “allocated” the numbers business in Harlem at this meeting, although like many things written about the mob, this is speculative at best. Crime historians now believe that the gangster convention held in Atlantic City was more to do with ironing out the gang warfare problems in Chicago than anything else.<br /> <br /> Coppola may have been nominated by Charlie Luciano to watch over the family’s gambling and numbers interests, that were operating alongside those of the famous black gangster, Elsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, who had assumed control of another numbers business that had run successfully under the stewardship of Stephanie St. Clair, the woman who was known as “The Queen of Policy”. At this time, it was a very confused situation on the Upper East Side, with St. Clair, Johnson, Casper Holstein, James Warner and Dutch Schultz all vying for a share of the market that could generate well over $100,000 every day in bets. <br /> <br /> On December 7th., 1929, at 1:30 A.M. it’s alleged Coppola led a gang of six gunmen into a dinner party held by The Tepecano Democratic Club in the Roman Gardens Restaurant at the junction of 187th Street and Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. The party was hosting a function for magistrate Albert Vitale. There were some seventy guests in attendance, including at least one armed New York police officer, Arthur Johnson.<br /> <br /> The visitors were robbed of over $5000 and the cop lost his .38 service revolver, although he eventually, somehow, got this back due to the efforts of Vitale. There were some really tough New York gangsters in attendance that night including Ciro Terranova, the boss of the 116th. Street Gang, Joe “The Baker” Catania and Daniel Imascia who was a nephew of Terranova, and whose brother, Anthony, was an officer of the club. Daniel was also a bodyguard to the infamous ‘Dutch‘ Schultz. It’s an early link into the never ending relationship between the hoods and the politicians that seemed at times, to be the glue holding the New York underworld together. The raid by the gang may have been a setup, according to a subsequent police inquiry, although it is so convoluted and far-fetched it’s almost hard to believe. The only recorded account of this affair appeared in the 1940 book 'Gang Rule in New York,' and apparently emerged at the police department trial of officer Johnson. <br /> <br /> In brief: Terranova may have organized the assassination of mob boss Frankie Uale (aka Yale) back in 1927. A goon squad brought in from Chicago had carried out the killing on a Brooklyn street, notable for the first recorded instance when a Tommy-gun was hefted in New York by the mob. The killers were promised $30 big ones for the hit, but only received $5000 as a deposit. Terranova, allegedly was reneging on the balance and had asked to see the written contract he had offered, just to check the figures. The killers fronted up at the club with the paper, and Coppola fronted up with his boys to remove it along with the holdup takings, which of course was just a smoke screen to cover the real purpose of the raid. I can just picture the document: “The party of the first part, hereafter referred to as the killer, hereby instructs the party of the second part, to be known as the killee…..” It seems about as solid as the legend of the Loch Ness Monster, but then, who knows?<br /> <br /> It's possible the plan to rip-off the dinner party was discussed at either Celano's Garden Restaurant, 36 Kenmare Street in downtown Manhattan, or the garage across the street owned by Albert Marinelli, the crooked alderman representing the 2nd Assembly District. Both of these were, according to the New York Police, favourite meeting-places for Joe Masseria and Charlie Luciano and members of their gang, which at this time almost certainly included “Trigger Mike.”<br /> <br /> One certain victim of the “hold-up” was the judge, Vitale. The New York judiciary decided after a lot of public indignation had been expressed, to remove him from the bench in March 1930.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991879,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991879,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236991879?profile=original" width="348" /></a>On a hot steamy night, July 28th, 1931, an auto mobile filled with gunmen wheeled along East 107th Street in East Harlem, slowed outside the Helmar Social Club at number 208, and the men inside the car, levied a barrage of shots at a group of men standing outside the building. The targets threw themselves aside, but a number of children playing in the street were hit, one subsequently dying of his wounds. Two of the gunmen were allegedly Vincent Coll and Frank Giordano and they were looking for members of Dutch Schultz's gang.<br /> <br /> In another convoluted scenario, a police informant, trying to avoid prison, claimed that in fact one of the killers that night was Mike Coppola (right) and that another was Joe Rao, who was also identified as one of the targets of the attack! To complicate matters even more, Anthony 'Big Tee' Buzzone a major Harlem bookmaker, claimed he was the intended target, as part of an ongoing mob dispute revolving around control of sports betting in the area. Ironically, it has been alleged that 'Trigger Mike' had tried to kill Rao the previous year as part of the war taking place in the New York underworld between two warring factions lead by Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano.<br /> <br /> In 1933, Coppola made a trip to Europe and was seen on the Italian Riviera with some well-known New York criminals, including Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, another powerful Jewish gangster. A prize possession of crime author, Hank Messick, was an amateur movie showing these men relaxing by the waterfront, shot by Lepke himself. The trip was apparently financed by New York drug wholesalers, who might well have been Salvatore Santore or Dominick Petrelli, who were identified by FBN agents as being part of a major heroin trafficking ring that also included John Ormento, Tommy Luchese and Philip Mangano among others.<br /> <br /> In June of this same year, Mike Coppola was arrested by the police, who were in fact, after his companion, Buchalter. The two men were found in an expensive apartment on East 68th street, in a very Tony area of upper Manhattan. The cops were after proof that Buchalter was in possession of guns, but a thorough search of the thirteenth floor apartment only disclosed closets full of expensive clothes, and a collection of premium golfing gear, but no weapons. It was believed the two men were working closely together in garment industry racketeering. Coppola was also managing other business schemes, including coin-operated vending and gaming machines spread across Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan.<br /> <br /> From February to April 1937, Coppola rented a house on East 5th Street in Tuscon, Arizona, and along with Cleveland mobster Al Polizzi, Lepke Buchalter from New York, Pete Licavoli from Detroit and Joe Zucker, an aide to Frank Costello, spent time socialising with Jewish gangster Moe Dalitz, who went about purchasing a chain of laundries in the area, (Dalitz seemed to have a thing about laundries, owing a string of them in Detroit and Cleveland,) but just what these other gangsters were discussing as they went hunting and partying has never been disclosed, although it's fairly certain they had not travelled all this way just to get a tan.<br /> <br /> It has been suggested that with the Nazi government disrupting traditional drug trafficking routes out of Europe, these men had gathered here, close to the Mexican border, to try to sort out alternate routes for their raw materials source. If in fact this is what they had assembled here for, they were probably dealing with Enrique Diarte, a Tijuana based Mexican narcotics trafficker, who in the late 1930s and early 1940s was probably the biggest drug dealer in Mexico.<br /> <br /> By the early 1940s Coppola had consolidated his position in the Luciano family, growing rich on the proceeds of his gambling activities. His place in the mob was obviously a mystery to law enforcement officials at city and government level.<br /> <br /> The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN,) who were probably the most active agency tacking the Mafia at this time, wrongly perceived him as a lieutenant in the 107th. Street Mob, which is known today as the Luchese family.The agency had created a file in 1936 showing the group was led by Tommy Luchese assisted by Coppola and Dominck Petrelli. They believed the overall boss of the 107th Street Mob to be Ciro Terranova.<br /> <br /> Petrelli, Coppola and Terranova were part of the Mafia clan that was controlled by Charlie Luciano. The FBN did however, get Luchese’s place in the 107th correctly identified, just not his position. The family at this time was controlled by Tommaso Gagliano. The FBI would never “officially” recognize the existence of the Mafia for almost another twenty years, which no doubt suited Coppola and his mob friends down to the ground.<br /> <br /> Mike Coppola was part of a crew operating in East Harlem that would become famous for at least four of its other members in the years to come:<br /> <br /> Joseph 'Socks' Lanza, who became the czar of the Fulton Fish Market for the mob, making it for many years a major cash-cow for the Luciano crime family. Lanza probably worked for Coppola as a “muscle” man in the early stages of his mob career, but became a man of such standing, when he married in 1941, his best man was Frank Costello, then the head of the family.<br /> <br /> Phil Lombardo, a small, bald, and cross-eyed gangster, who at one time was driver/bodyguard for big boss Charlie Luciano and would become the family boss himself one day.<br /> <br /> Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, one of three brothers in the mob, the others being Alfred and Angelo, who would also rise in ranking to be the big cheese in the Genovese crime family, at least the 'front' big cheese.<br /> <br /> And Barney Bellomo who may or may not have reached that exalted position in the 21st century.<br /> <br /> According to informant Joseph Valachi, “Trigger Mike’s” crew was the biggest in the family, which if true, would have made him one if not the most powerful capo in what was perhaps the biggest Mafia unit in New York, at the time.<br /> <br /> In 1943, Coppola married Doris Lehman, a twenty-three year old dancer and hat-check girl at the Copacabana Club in Manhattan. She was tall, with dark hair, flashing eyes and great legs. In 1944 she gave birth to their first child, a boy they called Michael David. Three years later, Doris was pregnant again, but would never live to see her baby grow up.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236992264,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236992264,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236992264?profile=original" width="420" /></a></p>
<center>
<p><strong>Mike Coppola and Doris Lehman</strong></p>
</center>
<p><br /> A major part of Coppola’s strength and power base in this part of New York, rested on the support he and other mobsters received from the congressman for East Harlem, Vito Marcantonio. They helped get him the votes for re-election, and he made sure things worked smoothly in their favour. He was fighting a primary in 1946, but his position was being jeopardized by the actions of a Republic party captain called John Scottorigio who was a district captain for Marcantonio's Republican opponent, Frederick Van Pelt Bryan. It was believed Scottoriggio had in his possession a record of voter names he intended to challenge the morning of the elections. Coppola and his group decided that it would be a good thing if Scottoriggio's intention was to be nullified.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993055,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993055,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236993055?profile=original" width="194" /></a>In a meeting held in his apartment at 347 East 1116th. Street (right), Coppola decided that Scottorigio had to be put out of action. He was waylaid early in the morning of election day, November 6th, 1946, as he left his apartment, by four men, who beat him so badly, he died six days later in hospital. Present that night at the meeting in the apartment, apart from the conspirators, were Doris and her father David Lehman.<br /> <br /> The police had arrested an ex-con named Emilio Tizol, who had been pinched for physically menacing three of Republican candidate Van Pelt Bryan's 18th Congressional District workers on Election Day. Hoping to mitigate his forthcoming sentence he asked to see District Attorney Frank Hogan, offering him information on the men who were behind the attack on the Republican captain.<br /> <br /> Based on Tizol's revelations, Hogan's detectives on Saturday the 16th of November, five days after Scottoriggio died, picked up Harlem's two most feared racket bosses, Trigger Mike Coppola and Joey Rao.<br /> <br /> They were subsequently released on bail of $250,000 an enormous amount for this time, which was quickly knocked down by a friendly judge, Aaron Levy to $25,000 following their arrest as material witnesses. The police went after other suspects (over 800 witnesses would subsequently be interviewed in the Scottorigio case,) including Doris and her father. But they disappeared, just after Mike was arrested.<br /> Along with the little boy, they first went to stay with relatives in Queens. Then, they headed south and stayed on Palm Island in Biscayne Bay, near Miami until the spring of 1947. From there, they made their way north, staying for a time with Anthony Del Guidice, an ex NYPD officer, and close associate of Mike Coppola, before finishing up at the palatial residence at 315 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence, Rhode Island, of Frank 'Butsey' Morelli, allegedly head of the New England Mafia family.<br /> <br /> Eventually the pressure grew too great, and Doris and her father surrendered themselves to the authorities. They both were indicted, facing perjury charges for their lack of co-operation in the investigation, and facing up to ten years in prison after District Attorney, Frank Hogan, had succeeded in having an indictment brought down in November 1947. <br /> <br /> Early in March, 1948, while awaiting trial for perjury, Doris was admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital at 153 West Eleventh Street, Manhattan, to await the birth of her second child. On March 17th., 1948, at 10:30 pm, a baby girl, Doris Patricia arrived. On March 18th., a little after nine, the mother died, very conveniently in hospital, of complications from childbirth. No autopsy was ever held to determine the cause of death, and Coppola, contrary to his religious beliefs, had his wife’s body cremated. The case against “Trigger Mike” died along with his wife. Charges against her elderly father were dropped. No loose threads; end of story. <br /> <br /> Doris was waked out of the Ferncliffe Mausoleum and Cemetery facility at 207 East 11th., Street, and it seemed as though half the New York underworld came along to say goodbye. Over 5000 people attended the service or funeral. Among the crowds of sombre men in black were Augie Cafarno, Gerardo Catena, Vito Genovese, Big John Ormento, Frank Morelli and Albert Anastasia, who simply signed the register of condolences as “Albert.”<br /> <br /> There was only one Albert of any consequence among these guys after all. The money pledged by the visitors covered the cost of the funeral, leaving the bereaved husband a profit of $1500. Anastasia dropped off a measly $50.<br /> <br /> In 1947, while his wife was hiding out in Florida, and he was no doubt visiting her, he did one of the many deals that helped make him a very rich man. He invested in the Manhattan Cigarette Company a firm founded in 1936 by Joe 'Doc' Stacher, a close aide of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-meyer-lansky-laundered-the-american-mafia-s-dirty-cash-and-ma">Meyer Lansky</a>, and Mike Lascari, a relative of Luciano’s. The business, originally called the Public Service Tobacco Company, was the largest cigarette-vending machine business on the East coast. Other investors in this booming business included Joe Adonis, Gerry Catena and the New Jersey, Jewish gangster, Abner Zwillman.<br /> <br /> The Mason Tenders Union of New York had long been a fertile breeding ground for Mafia control and manipulation. A unit of the LIUNA, Laborers International Union of North America, itself one of the most corrupt labour organizations in America. There are ten locals in the Mason Tenderts District Council of New York, and the Luciano/Costello/Genovese family had a lock on local 13 of Queens and 47 of Brooklyn for years. Mike Coppola seemingly had a turn controlling these union slush funds for the Mafia at some period prior to moving to Florida on a permanent basis.<br /> <br /> By November 1950, Coppola was the owner of a house at 4431 Alton Road, on the Miami Beach peninsular for which he paid $30,000. He had spent much of the war years here, on the Beach, living at 5138 Cherokee Avenue, just south of La Gorce Golf course in the Lake View neighbourhood.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993098,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993098,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236993098?profile=original" width="655" /></a><br /> He purchased the Alton Road property from John “King” Angersola a one-time member of Cleveland's Mayfield Road Mob, a man with many interests in Florida including the Carib, Wofford and Grand Hotels in the Miami area. Angersola and his brother had migrated south to Florida in 1939 to avoid the heat being brought down on the mob in Cleveland by the crusading director of safety for the city, Elliot Ness.<br /> <br /> Mike was soon investing in local opportunities and quickly became a partner with bookmaker Jack Friedlander in a casino called Club Collins.<br /> <br /> He bankrolled at least two of the South Florida on-track bookmaking heavies, Frank Ritter and Max Courtney In December 1955, his activities in this area had him ejected and bAnnd from the famous Tropical Park raceway in Coral Gables and all associated tracks.<br /> <br /> He also cemented relationships with Jewish gangster <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-meyer-lansky-laundered-the-american-mafia-s-dirty-cash-and-ma">Meyer Lansky</a>, also domicile in Florida and Lansky’s friend and partner, real-estate developer Loris Chesler a 300lb obese Canadian multi-millionaire and former prohibition rum-runner. Through him, he linked into gambling ventures via a Grand Bahamas company called Mary Carter Paints which morphed into Resorts International in 1968. Along with Wallace Groves and Chesler, Coppola became a director of the General Development Corporation whose functions was to purchase available land, including complete islands in the Bahamas chain, as potential sites for future casinos. It also became the largest real estate developer in Florida, creating among other interests, three entire small cities.<br /> <br /> Although he had essentially removed himself physically from the North East Coast, he still maintained ties there.<br /> <br /> A 1952 probe by the New York State Crime Commission into waterfront racketeering in New Jersey, named him as a major target for investigation<br /> <br /> Along with Joey Rao and Tony Bender, (the right hand man of Vito Genovese,) he was deeply involved in controlling the waterfront across the Hudson River.<br /> <br /> He was often observed by New York Police investigators, in the company of Tony Bender, meeting up with Frank Costello for meetings at New York’s many racetracks. Costello loved to gamble, and public courses were perfect venues to discuss Mafia business.<br /> <br /> Mike Copolla was also allegedly operating the largest floating crap game in New York which was busted by the police who raided a deserted loft in Harlem on the afternoon of February 5th, 1952, arresting 46 gamblers and seizing over $10000 in cash.<br /> <br /> Coppola like all the men of the Mafia, networked liked crazy. His business, his social life, his very existence, depended upon and was driven by his connections. Joseph Valachi, a mere soldier in the same crime family, had literally hundreds of friends, social links and access to fellow mobsters across the five Mafia crime families of New York, and he was hardly in the same league as Mike Coppola, whose contacts stretched across America-criminals, politicians, cops, grifters, a whole smorgasbord above and below the radar that he used to grease the cogs and ratchets of his life-style engine.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993454,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993454,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236993454?profile=original" width="198" /></a>One of the lesser known, but fascinating in his own right, was Pasquale “Patsy” Erra (right).<br /> <br /> Born in 1915 in Harlem, at the age of twenty, Erra became a professional fighter at the bantamweight level. He fought eight times in New York with a seven win one loss record between 1935 and 1936 until his life turned to custard when he was arrested, tried and convicted of larceny, for which he did time in prison.<br /> <br /> In 1945, Coppola commissioned him to carry out a hit on one Louis Cirello who had robbed one of Mike’s gambling joints. Erra and a partner who may have been one of his brothers, either Mike or Rocco, tracked down their prey and shot him four times as he stood at the back of the Cosmo movie theatre at 176 East 116th Street in Harlem, on Friday evening, June 1st although they did not do that good a job, and Cirello lived to steal another day.<br /> <br /> As a reward for at least trying. Coppola proposed Erra into the Luciano crime family and he became a member in 1949. He became the bodyguard and driver for Coppola until he also decided to move south to Florida.<br /> <br /> Erra was a man who developed some significant contacts himself. FBI “airtels” or summaries of an electronic bugging device, confirmed that he had been in contact with Raymond Patriarca, the Rhode Island based head of the New England Mafia at some time in the early 1960s indicating that he had progressed up the ladder from being just a hit man and bodyguard. <br /> <br /> In Florida, he more than likely kept on working for Trigger Mike, and along the way ended up in ownership along with Vincent Teriaca of the well-known nightspot, the Dream Bar, located in the Johnina Hotel on the beachfront at Collins and 71street in Miami Beach. He died, May 1973, age fifty-eight.<br /> <br /> Teriaca’s son, Craig, a golf professional was shot and killed in a barroom scuffle by Richie Schwartz, the step-son of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-meyer-lansky-laundered-the-american-mafia-s-dirty-cash-and-ma">Meyer Lansky</a>. Schwartz lasted a few weeks until he was also killed, shot-gunned to death as he sat in his car behind his restaurant. Mob vengeance is almost always quick and certain.<br /> <br /> Another mobster Mike Coppola was linked into was Joseph “Pip the Blind” Gagliano a cousin of Vincent Rao, and one of the major drug traffickers on the upper East Side.<br /> <br /> Starting as a street thug and working with petty hoods like Joe Valachi, stealing fabric out of warehouses in the garment district, he soon worked his way up the ladder into a position of authority in the early mob structures following the New York underworld war of 1930-31. <br /> <br /> He and Coppola had shared business and social agendas. On one occasion, in the early 1930s, they made a trip to Colorado, and were photographed on horseback. Spiffily dressed in matching sweaters and knickers, their hair greased back, they sit uneasily on two large horses, holding on for grim death as the photographer freezes them for all eternity. One, the king of the Harlem numbers, the other a drug dealer par excellence, the world was waiting for them, its arms outstretched.<br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993662,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993662,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236993662?profile=original" width="747" /></a></p>
<center><strong>Coppola & Gagliano</strong></center>
<p><br /> Gagliano operated as the narcotics manager for the 107th Street Mob, organizing the smuggling of opium from Mexico up into the New York area where it was processed into heroin by clandestine laboratories, according to the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics who tracked him through the 1930s before pinning him down and getting him indicted in December 1946 along with Charles Albero, a.k.a. “Charlie Bullets” and others. Facing up to 10 years in prison, “Pip the Blind” hung himself in his cell in the Bronx on April 10th 1947.<br /> <br /> In 1955, “Trigger Mike” flew from Miami to New York to watch a boxing match and find a new wife. <br /> <br /> The boxers were Archie Moore, grossly outmatched by Rocky Marciano. The woman was Ann Drahmann. She was thirty-four, five feet four (about the same height as Coppola,) dark haired, pretty and a solo mother. She had been born of Italian parents in Cincinnati, her father‘s name being Augustine. She had a seventeen year old daughter called Joan. Ann lived in Newport, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and had been married to Charley Drahmann who managed the Lookout House casino for the mob. In August 1952, he was killed in a plane crash near Atlanta.<br /> <br /> Friends of Coppola’s arranged an introduction between him and Ann at an Italian restaurant in East Harlem. Mike was ready for another woman to share his life, and Ann was looking for a way out of the poverty trap her husband’s death had created for her. She thought at first that the fat, little man, who spent the night watching her table from across the room was the maître d’ and thanked him for a wonderful evening. Coppola was obviously gob-smacked by her presence, and was soon courting her with a fervour that matched his thirst for making money.<br /> <br /> He pursued her, bombarding her with flowers and gifts of jewellery, chaperoned by big Fat Tony Salerno, one of his soldiers, who towered over the diminutive mob boss with the face of a dimpled doughnut. On December 28th., 1955, Ann and Coppola were married, with their wedding reception being held at the Beverly Hills Club, outside Newport, Kentucky. They moved straight into the Alton Road house, which sat on a 100 by 120 feet corner section with three bathrooms, four bedrooms, a gourmet kitchen and a full-sized pool in the backyard. Managed by a housekeeper, a cook and a gardener, thing should have been perfect, but for Ann, it was all downhill from then on. Ironically, because of their wedding location, she found herself locked into a relationship with her own Joe Btfsplk. <br /> <br /> Three weeks after the wedding, Coppola, in a screaming rage with his wife, calling her “a flat-nosed, frog-eyed bastard,” pulled out a revolver and wildly fired a shot at her, fortunately missing his target by a mile. She slept that night in the maid’s room, and was packing a bag to leave, the next day, when Coppola smacked her repeatedly in the face, knocking her to the kitchen floor. It was just the first of many beatings <br /> <br /> Three months into the marriage, Ann found herself pregnant. One afternoon, lying on the kitchen table, an underworld doctor known only as “Doctor D,” a house surgeon for one of the swanky beach-side hotels in Miami performed an abortion on her, at Coppola’s insistence. Trigger Mike even assisted in the operation, smiling with glee as the doctor cut away the foetus. Three more times, over the following months, Ann subjected herself to the pain and humiliation of these unsavoury operations. She came to believe that her husband wanted sex with her, only so that he could indulge himself in these sickening sequels. The doctor walked away each time with a tax-free fee of $1000 for his services.<br /> <br /> Throughout the 1950s, Coppola operated a loan-sharking business from his home, topping up his bank through regular visits to New York, always returning with at least $200,000 in cash. His wife in her testimony to the IRS, claimed her husband stashed at least $350,000 at any one time in five different secret locations throughout their house.<br /> <br /> Following its opening in 1954, Coppola made the Fontainebleau Hotel on Collins Avenue his operating base, not unlike the way Frank Costello in New York used the Waldorf Astoria as a mob headquarters. Coppola went by the name of Michael Kaplan to confuse any law enforcement investigators as he operated from a luxurious cabana, one of 250 that sat alongside the hotel’s 6500 square foot pool. He became a close friend to Ben Novack the flamboyant hotelier who had created the mammoth establishment that re-opened in November 2008 after a one billion dollar refurbishment!<br /> <br /> The domestic beatings and abuse continued, and on one occasion Ann was immobilized for three weeks after her husband kicked her so hard, he damaged tissue at the base of her spine.<br /> <br /> As much as he continually abused his wife, Ann confirmed that through her marriage, Coppola had showered her with jewellery, furs and presents worth at least $250,000, not so much because he loved her, but to show off and prove to people just how big and successful he was. And he was doing all this on a declared annual income of $15000!<br /> <br /> Late in 1956, Ann was searching through her husband’s possessions, and came across some papers. Although she never disclosed the full nature of them, she later told a federal agent that they confirmed her husband had arranged the murder of his first wife.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993891,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993891,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236993891?profile=original" width="124" /></a>By the end of 1957, Mike Coppola had decided to withdraw from New York street activities for good. He would leave his huge, profitable numbers business in the capable hands of Tony “Fats” Salerno (right), who would also take over the running of his crew. They settled the details when “Fats” came down for the winter break, to catch some sun in south Florida.<br /> <br /> Tony would courier Coppola’s share of the profits each month, and he would concentrate his efforts on his other business efforts in the sunshine state and the Caribbean, where along with <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-meyer-lansky-laundered-the-american-mafia-s-dirty-cash-and-ma">Meyer Lansky</a> and Vincent Alo (no relation to Joey), he had interests in Bahamian casinos, and his directorship in General Development Corporation which by now had bought up half of the Grand Bahamas Island for casino and gambling developments, and Nevada, that generated him substantial income from the points he had in various casinos. The money that came in brown paper parcels from New York was supplemented by bundles of money from these ventures as well. Ann estimated that his income from these sources was at least $1 million every year.<br /> <br /> In October, he and Ann visited Las Vegas, and one night at the Riviera casino, Coppola got into a marathon crap game that went on for twenty-eight hours, and cost him $140,000. On October 13th., he was arrested at the Stardust casino. Although no charges were brought against him, as a result of this brush with the law and the authorities, he was essentially bAnnd from the casinos of Vegas. In 1960, he found himself sharing top billing with eleven other men who had also been barred from any and all casinos and places of gambling in Nevada.<br /> <br /> His name was listed in what became to be known as “The Black Book,” created by the Nevada Gaming Board at the instigation of the governor of Nevada, Grant Sawyer on 13th June, 1960. It stayed there until he died.<br /> <br /> According to information supplied by Ann, some of it later confirmed by mob informer, Joseph Valachi, “Trigger Mike” was connected not only to men who would later become notorious as members of what is now known as the Genovese family, men such as Phil “Ben Turpin” Lombardo, Frank Livorsi, Tony Salerno, Joe Stacci and Vincent Alo, but also other such mob luminaries as Charlie Luciano, now residing at 464 Via Lasso, Naples, Italy, Moe Dalitz, Al Polizzi, Vito Genovese, Tom Dragna and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-meyer-lansky-laundered-the-american-mafia-s-dirty-cash-and-ma">Meyer Lansky</a>, to name only a few.<br /> <br /> His address book was thick with names as was his Xmas card list-Angersola, Bommarito, Scalish, Epstein, Polizi, a list of various Dragnas, an endless cavalcade of criminals and shady politicians who moved in and out of his business and social templates.<br /> <br /> Although Coppola had stepped back from his daily street crime involvement, he kept pursuing other money-making activities.<br /> <br /> In 1959, he came under the scrutiny of New York D.A. Frank Hogan who was investigating corruption in the professional boxing area. Hogan's office were scrutinizing the activities of a number of well-known hoodlums and shady businessmen such as Anthony Salerno, Frank Ericson, Gil Beckley, one of the biggest bookie-handicappers in Florida and the man who had orchestrated the meeting between Coppola and Ann Drahmann, Coppola himself and the arch-manipulator of the sport, New Jersey based Frankie Carbo, the most venal operator in the crooked world of boxing, and in particular their devious control of the famous June 25th 1959 fight between Ingemar Johansson of Sweden and American heavyweight Floyd Patterson. In a sport where it was often said 'only the ring was square' the mob's stranglehold was stifling to the point that nine months after his bout, Johansson had still not received his $300,000 prize money.<br /> <br /> The D.A.'s investigation led nowhere however, and Coppola and his associates were never indicted.<br /> <br /> As 1959 drew to a close, things were coming to a head in the Coppola household. Not only was Mike beating his wife on a regular basis, her twenty-one year old daughter was now, also a victim. Coppola was supplying her with drugs, and possibly even worse than that, sexually abusing her. Ann and her daughter finally gave in, and both left the house for good. On February 17th., 1960, Coppola sued for divorce, charging Ann with “extreme cruelty.” She cross-claimed, citing the same reason, and on March 25th., a final decree was signed off. She was at last free from the monster she had married almost five years earlier, but wasn’t just satisfied with a divorce and the cash settlement that was granted along with it.<br /> <br /> She wanted revenge, some kind of justice against the brute who had tormented her for so long. The Internal Revenue Service was after Mike, and she agreed to co-operate, working closely with one of their agents Joe Wanderscheid, to help build up a case. The IRS investigation carried on from May 2nd. throughout the rest of the year.<br /> <br /> On the evening of October 20th., Ann was kidnapped from the car park of her apartment building, Blair House on Bay Harbor Island, by two men. They drove her to a lonely beach on Easter Shores and gave her a solid beating. The men told her she was “a stoolie,” and “you got to leave Mikey alone, if you don’t, we’ll kill you.”<br /> <br /> She survived the beating, and later called a press-conference, accusing her husband of arranging the abduction. The IRS’s case against Coppola mounted over the months, and largely on information supplied by Anne, a grand jury indicted him on four counts of tax-evasion, involving $385,000.<br /> <br /> On May 25th., 1961, she and her daughter sailed on the S.S. United States to France to start a tour of Europe. It has been alleged that she took with her $250,000 of Coppola's cash. Over the next few months, she flew back and forward between Rome and New York as Coppola’s trial date neared. While in Florida she was secluded at the Homestead Air Force Base, forty miles south of Miami where agents of the IRS mounted what became known as “Operation Babysit” to ensure her safety and carry out their de-briefing of her.<br /> <br /> On one occasion, Coppola flew over his attorney who offered Ann $200,000 to stay in Europe. She turned him down. His first trial which began on November 27th was postponed because of an irregularity with the jury and at the second trial due to start on Feb 12th., 1962 when over two hundred witnesses had been subpoenaed to give evidence, Mike Coppola, literally minutes before the court convened, suddenly changed his plea to guilty. He had been indicted on charges of tax evasion this time to the amount of $966,193.00, but the government settled for 400K.<br /> <br /> The judged fined him $40,000 and sentenced him to serve a period behind bars. It was his first prison sentence in over 20 years.<br /> <br /> It was rumoured that the mob had held a ‘mini’Commission’ meeting somewhere in West Palm Beach and word had been handed down to Coppola to roll over and not cause any more waves.<br /> <br /> Frustrated at not being able to stand up in court and tell the world what a real slime ball Michael Coppola was, Ann eventually returned once more to Europe. Six months later she was dead.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236994076,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236994076,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236994076?profile=original" width="200" /></a>She and her daughter had settled in Rome. Ann (left) stayed in hotels although Joan had moved into her own apartment. Ann, fearful of reprisals because she had informed on such an important mobster as her husband, refused to live with her daughter in case of potential risk to her, and filled her days shopping and visiting Eve’s, a famous and expensive beauty salon on the Via Veneto.<br /> <br /> She had booked into a hotel room in Rome, on September 18th., and started drinking whiskey and gulping down Nembutal tablets. She wrote a letter of farewell thanking her friends in the IRS, extorting the attorney general, Robert Kennedy to keep up his fight on organized crime, sending farewell wishes to her daughter Joan, asking that she be cremated and her ashes strewn over Coppola’s house. And a final message for the man who had ruined her life:<br /> <br /> “Mike Coppola, someday, somehow, a person or God or the Law shall catch up with you, you yellow-bellied bastard. You are the lowest and biggest coward I have had the misfortune to meet.”<br /> <br /> Then, she lay down on the bed and died.<br /> <br /> Interestingly, only a few days before she killed herself, she had signed an agreement to lease an apartment in the city.<br /> <br /> Coppola served his time in the Federal prison at Atlanta. He found himself with plenty of mob company, including John Diougardi, a capo, and Joe Palermo, a soldier in the Luchese family, and the big boss himself, Vito Genovese serving 15 years for drug trafficking. He would have also, no doubt, mingled with a soldier from his own crime family, a small, inconspicuous man, Joe 'Cago' Valachi, who would soon turn organized crime on its head when he became an informant for the government.<br /> <br /> Mike Coppola returned to his home in Florida in December 1962 after serving nine months of his sentence. It seemed that the problems he had allowed to develop, and the resulting bad publicity surrounding the stormy marriage he had endured with Ann, were enough to convince his superiors in the Genovese crime family that he had served out his usefulness, and they basically put him out to pasture. He spent his remaining years looking after his ivory collection, and raising orchids in the big, empty house on Alton Road.<br /> <br /> Authorities did track him, travelling to Europe, Mexico and Central and South America during this period, but were never able to connect him to any obvious criminal activity.<br /> <br /> In September, 1966, he was taken ill, and was admitted into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He died there from kidney disease on October 1st. His body was shipped to New York where he was buried at the Ferncliffe Cemetery and Mausoleum in Hartsdale, Westchester County, New York. It was so quick and quiet, the Federal agents who had been checking on him since his release from prison, didn’t learn of his funeral until it was over and done with. <br /> <br /> Ferncliffe is the only registered cemetery in the north New York area that is allowed to carry out cremations. John Lennon and Nelson Rockefeller were cremated here, and the cemetery holds the remains of such luminaries as Jim Henson, the creator of “The Muppets,” Oscar Hammerstein III, actors Basil Rathbone, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland and Ed Sullivan. <br /> <br /> Michael Coppola is buried in a crypt under that of his first wife Doris. <br /> <br /> Ann Drahmann was one of many mob connected women who found their lives locked on an unstoppable course leading only to despair. She no doubt loved the riches her marriage brought her, but could never have imaged the despair those riches would generate.<br /> <br /> Renate Siebert in her elegant and arresting book on women and the Mafia, ‘Secret’s of Life and Death,’ recalls German poet Bertolt Brech’s ballad:<br /> <br /> <em>Oh! Moon of Alabama</em><br /> <em>We must now say goodbye,</em><br /> <em>We’ve lost our good old mamma,</em><br /> <em>And must have dollars</em><br /> <em>Oh! You know why</em><br /> <br /> Powerful ambition for social climbing coupled with the urge to acquire wealth even though it was all being subsidised by a demeaning lifestyle at the hands of a chronic and psychopathic bully made the options of Mrs. Mike Coppola very limited.<br /> <br /> A repulsive, obnoxious megalomaniac, a wife beater and worse, there were few redeeming features about this man. His second wife claimed he loved beautiful things and at times could be very gentle, yet she thought of him essentially as egotistical and cruel. His passing would have been mourned by few.<br /> <br /> Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno certainly would no doubt have been grateful for no longer having to cough up a share of the huge numbers business he controlled from his dingy social club on East 115th Street in Harlem, which is alleged to have generated up to and beyond $50 million a year. It’s highly feasible that he was a strong advocator that Mike Coppola be “shelved” so that he could no longer be obligated to keep sending a share of his profits to his former boss. If there is no honour among thieves, there is certainly none among Mafioso. Salerno had another twenty years to enjoy his wealth and station in the family before he went down to the government on the famous 1985 RICO case which sent him away to prison where he died as a result of a stroke in 1992.<br /> <br /> Coppola was without doubt evil by any definition. Alain Badion the French political activist and philosopher believes that abusing the power of truth enables the control of others or the amassing of power. “Trigger Mike” was undoubtedly a master in both arts.<br /> <br /> William Shakespeare claimed “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” The Mafia supplied many of them.<br /> <br /> Mike Coppola was ugly by looks and ugly by nature. Perhaps Friedrich Nietzsch had the true handle on it:<br /> <br /> “Man is the cruelest animal.”<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236994685,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236994685,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236994685?profile=original" width="118" /></a><br /> <em><strong>Thanks to Ed from The Real Deal Forum for his help on some of the research.</strong></em></p>
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Philly Mob Boss Joseph Ligambi Indicted
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-joseph-ligambi
2011-05-24T11:00:00.000Z
2011-05-24T11:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philly-mob-boss-joseph-ligambi"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996487,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236996487?profile=original" width="460" /></a>By David Amoruso</p>
<p><br /> It was a nice run while it lasted, but after eleven years at the helm of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bruno-crime-family">Philadelphia’s mob family</a>, Joseph Ligambi has been arrested. He is charged with illegal gambling, extortion, loansharking, and obstruction of justice. A dozen other members and associates of the Philly mob have also been indicted on racketeering charges yesterday. <br /> <br /> Reporter <a href="http://www.myfoxphilly.com/dpp/news/local_news/Major_Mob_Bust_Philadelphia_South_Jersey_052311" target="_blank">Dave Schratweiser</a> was quick to point out that this was a bust that was hanging in the air for a long time. “This is that long-awaited mob indictment that George Anastasia and I have been talking about on 'Mob Talk' for probably three or four years, at least”, he said in a television interview. Crime reporter <a href="http://www.georgeanastasia.com/" target="_blank">George Anastasia</a> has written several books detailing the old and recent history of the Philadelphia crime family and knows it inside out.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236986487,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236986487,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236986487?profile=original" /></a>Though it didn’t take an expert to know Ligambi’s run would end one of these days. Mafia bosses in Philadelphia haven’t had much success. The last one to have a long taste of power and riches was <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philadelphia-boss-angelo-bruno">Angelo Bruno</a> (left) and even his life ended with a shotgun blast to the face. His successors all ended up dead or in prison within ten years. <br /> <br /> But a lot of those short runs had to do with the violence that surrounded the Philly mob. Internal wars that resulted in murder and mayhem and, eventually, led to <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/philadelphia-capo-thomas-tommy">turncoats</a> and prison time for those involved. Ligambi was going to do things differently. <br /> <br /> And he did. During his reign there was hardly any violence. Certainly not the kind people were used to during the time of his predecessors or the kind that could be linked directly back to him. Authorities did not file any murder charges in the current indictment either, further emphasizing the fact that Ligambi’s tenure was not necessarily less violent but definitely a lot more quiet and secretive. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996859,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996859,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236996859?profile=original" width="175" /></a>According to the indictment, Ligambi (right) was the boss of a criminal enterprise named the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-philadelphia-crime-family">Philadelphia La Cosa Nostra Family</a>. From 1999 until January of 2011, he was the undisputed leader and settled disputes between mob members and allocated the organization’s profits.<br /> <br /> Together with high ranking members Anthony Staino Jr. and Joseph “Mousie” Massimino, Ligambi ran the JMA Video Poker Business. JMA stands for Joseph, Mousie and Anthony, their first/nicknames. Via this company the three men operated video poker machines that were located across Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania region and put in bars, restaurants, convenience stores, coffee shops and numerous other spots. <br /> <br /> Most machines were rigged in such a way as to continuously provide the mobsters with hefty profits. One machine could generate as much as $1,000 a week. JMA was to conceal the illegal nature of the business, authorities allege. Mobster Anthony Staino was taped claiming it was a way to: “Hide the money from the feds”. Staino would know, as he picked up most of the collections. Driving from his home in South Jersey to Philadelphia spots that had one of his machines.<br /> <br /> Staino seems to be in a lot of trouble with this indictment, as it features lengthy quotes of him uttering threats. “You know this motherfucker, I’m going to kill him ok? I’m telling you right now I’m going to kill him. OK? And I don’t talk like that”, said Staino. But apparently he does talk like that. A lot. <br /> <br /> In another conversation he tells an underling: “You tell this motherfucker, but not on the phone. He made his money. Everybody’s making money and I can’t get mine. Now you can’t get out of the situation. You got all this fuckin’ money out with this guy that nobody even fuckin’ knows, and I’m gonna have to fuckin’ … hurt this guy for something, for fuckin’ something that I didn’t even do… I got two fucking gorillas.. fucking chop him up…”<br /> <br /> As if things didn’t look bleak enough, he also threatened an undercover cop who he told: “Not to fuck with me” and “Please, on my life. I like you. I don’t want to fucking have to hurt you.” It would be unfair to point out Staino as the sole weak link. <br /> <br /> Even Ligambi was caught up in using the mob family’s violent past to intimidate. Authorities claim he did so to a person who was to appear in front of a grand jury by placing his hand on him and making threatening statements to withhold a photograph from an official proceeding. A small gesture for a violent mobster but one that is labeled as obstruction of justice.<br /> <br /> If convicted on a single racketeering conspiracy charge each man faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. This indictment could mean the end of the current leadership and middle management. For a small family such as this one that could mean extinction. Of course, the media keep saying that about American La Cosa Nostra.</p>
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