By Robert Sberna

By the 1970s, Cleveland’s once-powerful underworld was merely a shadow of itself. Just 20 years earlier, the city’s Mafia was a thriving enterprise, with up to 60 made (formally inducted) men involved in loansharking, gambling and union rackets.

The dwindling of the…

By David Amoruso

New York’s melting pot of an underworld has erupted into a violent volcano with the city’s Bonanno crime family and the Bloods street gang involved in a deadly dance that resulted in the murder of Mafia associate Sylvester Zottola at a McDonald’s drive through in The Bronx last week.

Federal…

By David Amoruso

Decades after the slaughter of journalists, police officers, judges, and politicians, termed “excellent cadavers” by the media, Sicily remains a harsh place for those fighting the Mafia. Claudio Fava, the chairman of Sicily’s anti-Mafia commission, received a threatening envelope, one with a bullet…

By David Amoruso

MS-13 leader Anderson Daniel Cabrera Cifuentes (photo above) hated doing time. Not a good thing when you’re looking at serving 162 years in a cell for murder, murder conspiracy, and extortion. But for every problem, there’s a solution.

Last year, in August of 2017, Cifuentes thought he’d found a way…

By David Amoruso

Sylvester Zottola had problems. The Bonanno family mobster was beefing with someone and that person was intent on murdering him over it. After surviving several attempts on his life, Zottola’s number was finally up on yesterday evening when an assassin shot him dead while he waited for his coffee at a…

By David Amoruso

Dark humor. What else can you do when you’re facing over three decades behind bars? That’s what fugitive Liverpool gangster Shaun Walmsley must’ve thought when cops slapped handcuffs on him after he spent 18 months on the run after breaking out of prison with the help of some of his machine gun-wielding…

By David Amoruso

Lucchese crime family mobster Joseph “Joey Glasses” Datello (photo above) pleaded guilty on Monday to various acts of racketeering, including the attempted murder of a witness against him, narcotics trafficking, and collecting debts through the threat of violence.

67-year-old Datello faces a maximum…

By David Amoruso

The former National Vice President of the Bandidos Outlaw Motorcycle Club, 59-year-old John Xavier Portillo, was sentenced on Monday to two consecutive life sentences, plus twenty years, in federal prison for racketeering and drug trafficking charges.

Portillo (photo above) was convicted alongside…

By David Amoruso

Newark gang boss Corey Hamlet went by many nicknames. “Blizzie”, “C-Blaze” or simply “Blaze”. But it’s the name “Castor Troy” that sticks out when reading his indictment. The character portrayed by Nicholas Cage in the 1997 movie Face/Off was a criminal mastermind who reigned by engulfing the world around…

By David Amoruso

Gene Gotti took a 50-year prison sentence and didn’t flinch. Just like his infamous big brother, John, the Teflon Don, Gene did his time and kept his mouth shut. Now, he faces his toughest challenge yet: Living life as a Gotti.

For a long time, life as a Gotti was simple. Though the…