Featured Blog Posts (212)

By David Amoruso

Italian authorities released an updated identikit of Sicilian boss of bosses Matteo Messina Denaro, today. New digitally created images show the 52-year-old mob boss with a little bit more weight, his receding hairline advanced, and without his glasses. The update comes after an informant who had recently met with Messina Denaro had…

By David Amoruso

Oh, how we miss The Sopranos! Tony and his two families. The drama. The violence. And those storylines that seemed too funny to be true. Like when Uncle Junior started running the mental institution as his personal fiefdom. Great entertainment, but that would never happen in real life, right? Wrong.…

By David Amoruso

Updated on March 22, 2014

The Bandidos Motorcycle Club has started a probationary chapter in the city of Sittard in the Netherlands. In the country where once the Hells Angels reigned supreme things have gotten pretty crowded in the past few years. The presence of the Bandidos is especially worrisome to police, though, as…

By Alex Hortis

This story is an excerpt from The Mob and the City: The Hidden History of How the Mafia Captured New York (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014), available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and other book…

By David Amoruso

Devon “D-Bloc” Rodney, a former leader of the violent Brooklyn street gang “Six Tre Outlaw Gangsta Disciples Folk Nation,” was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, New York, yesterday. It’s the FBI’s latest success in its campaign against America’s violent street gangs. A campaign with no end in…

By David Amoruso

The Yakuza is not doing so great. According to Japan’s National Police Agency, the total membership in Yakuza organized crime groups dropped below 60,000 for the first time since police started keeping records. Last year, all the Yakuza groups combined had 58,600 members, down from about 63,200 in 2012.

Membership has been going down for…

By David Amoruso

Irish gangster John Gilligan was shot by two gunmen this past Saturday as they crashed the christening party of his niece and unleashed several well-placed bullets at the once feared Dublin crime boss. He is currently in Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown, recovering from his wounds which are deemed non-life threatening.

The hit was no…

By Clarence Walker

The recent capture in Mexico of Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the world’s richest, most dangerous and powerful drug lord labeled by U.S. Government as Public Enemy Number 1.…

By David Amoruso

Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has been captured by U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials. He had been on the run since 2001 when he escaped from a Mexican prison. Guzman is considered to be the most powerful drug lord in Mexico and was even named on Forbes magazine’s 2009 list featuring the world’s most…

Pierre de Champlain is one of Canada’s foremost experts on organized crime. As an intelligence analyst for the RCMP he got an up close and personal look at gangsters and crimes. As an author he shared his knowledge with readers around the world. On February 26, his new book about the history of organized crime in Montreal will hit stores.

By Pierre…

By David Amoruso

A joint operation by the FBI and Italian authorities has shut down an international narcotics pipeline between South America and Europe. During raids in the United States and Italy agents arrested 26 people. The investigation targeted the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and the New York Gambino crime family. And once more, the FBI managed to…

By David Amoruso

Sicilian Cosa Nostra is feeling the heat. And Italian authorities continue to turn up the pressure. So much so that the Mafia has threatened to wage a new war against the state and in particular those prosecuting them. And this time, young boss of bosses Matteo Messina Denaro could join in.

Last month, imprisoned mob boss Toto…

By David Amoruso

Art imitating life imitating art imitating life? The man behind the Satin Dolls strip club in New Jersey, which served as the location for The Bada Bing from The Sopranos, has “gone bad” and is giving the FBI information about his former Mafia buddies.

Anthony “Tony Lodi” Cardinalle (61) was caught up in a waste hauling case…

By David Amoruso

Ever since mob boss John Gotti drove by the dead body of his predecessor Paul Castellano, the Gambino crime family in New York has been ruled by him or one of his men. Be it his son Junior, his brother Peter, or his friend Jackie, Gotti’s grip on the family was firm and outlasted his own life. In 2011, that grip was broken when Domenico Cefalu…

By David Amoruso

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russian organized crime and politics have become so intertwined that it is difficult to distinguish a member of the country’s parliament from a member of the vor z zakone, popularly known as the Russian Mafia. With President Putin as boss of bosses mobsters in Russia are feasting on rampant corruption…

By William Hryb

With the McClellan hearings spearheaded by Robert Kennedy came a daily dose of shocking disclosures that organized crime had crept into the very inner circles of the labor movement. The hearings conducted between 1957 and 1959 had a carnival-like atmosphere, where prosecutors dissected every word of suspected persons who had ties to organized crime…

By David Amoruso

Bittersweet. That’s the feeling Bonanno wiseguy Thomas Di Fiore (photo above) must have had when he was offered the position of acting boss of the Bonanno crime family while boss Michael Mancuso is in prison. Sweet, because the position…

By David Amoruso

The Sicilian Mafia emerged from the shadows as a criminal powerhouse that would rule the underworld not just in Sicily but in Italy and North America as well. Secrecy allowed them to grow. Now, author Carl Russo is pointing a photo camera at the places that played a role in Cosa Nostra’s shady history. His new book …

By David Amoruso

Are you ready for Goodfellas: The Sequel? You better be, cause the story has arrived. Yesterday, FBI agents arrested five wiseguys of the Bonanno crime family and hit them with various counts of racketeering. One Bonanno mobster is charged with participation in the 1978 Lufthansa heist immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s movie…

By David Amoruso

For a Sicilian Cosa Nostra boss loyal to omerta, the code of silence, Toto Riina was quoted in the media an awful lot of times in the past few months. His incriminating and outright hostile words brought back memories of his vicious war on the Italian State during the 1990s in which the Sicilian Mafia terrorized the entire country…