Featured Blog Posts – February 2016 Archive (14)

By David Amoruso

You know times are bad when the brother of a Mafia boss is driving a car loaded with 62 kilograms of cocaine across the border between the United States and Canada. Yet that is exactly what Girolamo Del Balso (photo above, right) was trying to do. His older brother Francesco is one of the leading members of the Montreal Mafia…

By David Amoruso

Police in Naples are dealing blow after blow to the region’s Camorra clans. Last week they arrested boss Domenico Ferrara (photo above) and several of his lieutenants, while today, Carabinieri arrested 21 people and seized 35 kilograms of cocaine and 2 kilos of hashish. Police said the cocaine would have netted €2 million euros if…

By David Amoruso

The wife of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most notorious drug lord, fears for her husband’s life, claiming that the Mexican government is treating him to harsh and inhumane prison conditions as punishment for his escape from the same jail in 2015.

Guzman’s 26-year-old wife, former beauty queen Emma Coronel Aispuro,…

By David Amoruso

In order to break the stranglehold the Mafia – and in particular the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta – has on Italy, more citizens need to help police and provide them with information, authorities say. The request comes following a successful drug bust last Thursday in which 26 people, including 11 members of the…

By David Amoruso

It was a day that would go down in mob history. The murder of mob boss Bugsy Siegel on June 20, 1947, shocked the American underworld and dominated news stories in all major cities. It was also a day that, years later, would cause a young girl…

By David Amoruso

Nathan Barksdale, the Baltimore drug boss who inspired one of the best, if not the best, television series, has died in federal prison, the Baltimore Sun confirmed yesterday. He was 54. Barksdale ran a violent heroin trafficking organization in the Murphy Homes public housing complex in …

By David Amoruso

The Las Vegas black book has become a thing of gangland lore, a list containing the most notorious organized crime figures who were banned from Las Vegas casinos. Now, police in Australia have compiled their own black book. But several infamous individuals, including the alleged head of the ‘Ndrangheta in Melbourne and a reputed Triad…

By David Amoruso

Colombo crime family hitman Tommy McLaughlin disappeared into the Witness Protection Program last Friday. Gangsters Inc. bids him farewell with a profile.

Thomas McLaughlin (photo above) began his criminal career as a member of a street gang called the Bay Parkway Boys. An innocent enough sounding name, but these boys quickly…

By David Amoruso

Francesco Arcadi, one of Montreal’s leading Mafia figures, will do the remainder of his prison time at a halfway house until his sentence expires in 2019, the Montreal Gazette reports. 62-year-old Arcadi (pictured…

By David Amoruso

New York’s Genovese crime family has a new official boss. Liborio “Barney” Bellomo has ascended the ranks and, according to authorities, is now firmly in control of America’s largest and most powerful Mafia family.

You have to hand it to them, while other mob families have been decimated by law enforcement and turncoats, becoming…

By Thom L. Jones

Life changes fast.

Life changes in an instant.

- Joan Didion

George Scalise was born in Calabria in 1896. When he was two, his family emigrated to New York and settled in Brooklyn. At seventeen, along with a partner in crime, Joe Alfono, he was arrested and imprisoned for four…

By David Amoruso

Italian police arrested several high-ranking members of the Camorra yesterday. In separate raids spread out across Italy, agents busted fugitive boss Alessandro Giannelli, who is held responsible for a drug war that is raging through Naples, and the financial arm of the Moccia clan.

Giannelli’s (above, right) arrest comes at a…

Crime Beat Radio is back! CRIME BEAT: ISSUES, CONTROVERSIES AND PERSONALITIES FROM THE DARK SIDE on Artist First Radio Network is pleased to announce its forthcoming schedule for February 18, 2016, through April 14, 2016. Topics covered include Death Row Records, the Asian Mafia, prison reform, O.J. Simpson, the White Devil, African Americans in Jim Crow America,…

By David Amoruso

A high-ranking leader of the Florida chapter of the Pagans Motorcycle Club was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week after he was convicted of firearm charges. Another member of the club received 12 months behind bars. The convictions signal the ending of a very successful undercover operation targeting the biker club’s…