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2024-03-29T14:33:23Z
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Profile of Colombo family boss Carmine Persico
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/colombo-boss-carmine-persico
2018-11-03T13:30:00.000Z
2018-11-03T13:30:00.000Z
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<div><p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236977283,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236977283?profile=original" /></p>
<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> Posted in 2001</p>
<p><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong>Read the obituary and most up-to-date profile of Carmine Persico <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/legendary-new-york-mafia-boss-carmine-persico-was-the-ultimate-su" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></span> <br /> <br /> Carmine Persico was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Carmine senior, was a soldier in the Genovese Crime Family. To his friends Carmine Persico was known on the streets as 'Junior', to his enemies he was known as 'The Snake'. As a teenager he became the leader of a group of young thugs called 'The Garfield Boys'. When he was 17 he reputedly killed his first victim. Before he could be convicted on the testimony of a state witness known only as "The Blue Angel," his older brother Alphonse confessed to the murder and went to prison for 18 years.<br /> <br /> Carmine Persico was one of the main enforcers for the Colombo Family. When he was a Capo he had a crew that consisted of many heavy hitmen such as: Alphonse "Ally Boy" Persico (Carmine’s brother), Gennaro Langella, Anthony Abbattermarco, Joey Brancatto and associate Hugh "Apples" McIntosh. Eventough Apples couldn't become a made guy, his father was not Italian, he still was a very succesful enforcer for the Family and ultimately became Carmine Persico's bodyguard and was very respected within the underworld. Carmine Persico was a real tough guy. Small in stature, scrawny and ugly in appearance, one hand was twisted from a bullet wound; he had also been shot in the face during the first Gallo Wars. The incident, that went down in mob lore had him and a partner in crime, Alphonse D'Ambrosia, sitting is a car as a group of Gallo hoods drove by shooting at them with a M-1 carbine. Ambrosia was shot in the chest and the Snake got one in the face, but spat the bullet out and then drove them both to hospital.<br /> <br /> Persico became boss for the first time at the end of the second Gallo war, although it has not been proven most people believe that he pulled the strings from prison while Thomas DiBella was appointed acting boss. When Persico got out of prison DiBella stepped down and handed the seat to Persico. His tenure as boss of the Colombos was marked by his troubles with the law. Of his first thirteen years in the seat, he spent ten of them in prison. When he was out of prison, he operated the family out of the Diplomat Social Club, on the corner of 3rd Avenue and Carroll Street in the Van Brunt district of Brooklyn. Here you would find the main players of the Persico faction of the Colombo faction: Carmine, when he was out of prison, his brother Ally Boy, Jerry Langella, Hugh MacIntosh, one of the family’s main enforcers, Carmine Franzese, the brother of Sonny, Greg Scarpa, Anthony, Vincent and Joe, Jr., the sons of Joseph Colombo, anybody who was part of the Persico faction or who had dealings with them.<br /> <br /> <img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236978678,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" style="float:right;" />Throughout the 80’s, the Colombo family was under massive pressure as the FBI and city and state organized crime strike forces attacked them and the other four families on all fronts. In 1986, Anthony, Joseph and Vincent Colombo were convicted for racketeering, conspiracy and narcotic offences and went to prison for varying terms. Carmine and Alphonse Persico and Jerry Langella went down for labor and construction racketeering and extortion for terms of 39, 12, and 65 years respectively. In addition, Carmine and Langella were sentenced to 100 years for crimes under RICO in what became known as "The Commission Trial," effectively removing them from the streets of New York forever. But in removing "the Snake" from his stronghold, the government was helping to set the stage for the third war in the family.<br /> <br /> Incarcerated in Lompoc Penitentiary in California, Persico still held control and strong influence over his family, he made Vic Orena acting boss and in doing so he created the third Family war, after this war which decimated the Colombo Family Carmine’s son <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/colombo-boss-alphonse-persico">Alphonse</a> was put in charge as acting boss. Until he too got nabbed by the feds. If Carmine Persico is a real Family man then he probably is glad to be in prison because the Colombo Family is not doing well and is on the verge of braking down, maybe Carmine prefers his rose garden over his troublesome mob family.<br /></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
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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>
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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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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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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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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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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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Profile of Colombo family boss Thomas “Tommy Shots” Gioeli
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/colombo-boss-thomas-tommy
2011-05-16T12:30:00.000Z
2011-05-16T12:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/colombo-boss-thomas-tommy"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236994287,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236994287?profile=original" width="451" /></a>By David Amoruso<br /> <br /> “I’m going to hell!” <br /> <br /> The above is a quote attributed to Colombo Crime Family leader Thomas “Tommy Shots” Gioeli. According to the FBI, Gioeli uttered the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2011/05/12/2011-05-12_thomas_gioeli_aka_tommy_shots_feared_going_to_hell_after_killing_exnun_according.html" target="_blank">words</a> to a fellow mobster when they were discussing a 1982 mob hit gone wild. So wild that a former nun ended up dead in the ensuing carnage. Though all mobsters break every law in the book, or both books, most have been raised with strict Catholic values. Gioeli is no different, and the dead nun was apparently eating away at his conscience. <br /> <br /> The conversation about the murdered nun came out in court twenty-nine years after the hit took place. A lot can happen in twenty-nine years. A free man in 1982, Gioeli was a young enforcer for the Colombos. Today, in 2011, he sits in prison awaiting trial on a long list of racketeering and murder charges. An older man now, Gioeli also has outgrown his career as muscle, becoming acting boss of the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family">Colombo Family</a> in 2004. His life so far has been a bumpy ride filled with gang violence worthy of a Scorsese movie.<br /> <br /> Thomas “Tommy Shots” Gioeli began his rise to Mafia stardom in the 1970s. In 1980 he got his big break when he stood up and did his time after being jailed on a robbery conviction. After being released from prison he became an initiated, or ‘made’, member of the Colombo Family led by Carmine Persico. <br /> <br /> As an official member, Gioeli was the go-to-guy for mob hits. Mob author Jerry Capeci once quoted a police source who told him: “He’s got a crew of shooters who haven’t really gotten touched.” But Gioeli had no problem getting his own hands dirty either. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995070,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995070,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236995070?profile=original" width="260" /></a>Something that he allegedly made clear to trusted fellow mobster Dino Calabro (right), when he said he was going to hell for a mob hit that ended up accidentally claiming the life of a former nun. But defense attorney Adam Perlmutter thinks Calabro is telling false stories. “If one of the government's cooperators said Gioeli killed 'Cock Robin' from the children's fairytale, the government would believe that, too. The government believes anything its rats tell them,” Perlmutter said. <br /> <br /> He may be correct. Another mob turncoat, Salvatore Miciotta, had already told authorities all about this infamous mob hit years ago. Miciotta was a captain in the Colombo Family when he ‘flipped’ and joined Team America. He told the FBI that the Colombos planned to murder Joseph Peraino Sr. and his son Joseph Jr. because there was a dispute about the profits of the porn movie Deep Throat, which had been produced with mob investments. A hit team went to their house and in the confusion the nun ended up dead. Boss Carmine Persico approved the hit on the Perainos and Miciotta said that other participants in the murder plot included Joseph "Jo Jo" Russo, John Minerva, Vincent Angellino, Frank Sparaco, and Anthony Russo. No mention of Thomas Gioeli. And until this recent turncoat, Gioeli had never been linked to this mob hit. <br /> <br /> Whether there is any truth to Calabro’s claims will have to be seen when Gioeli’s racketeering trial starts and prosecutors will put up all their proof and the defense can cross-examine the government’s witnesses. Gioeli and several other mobsters had been indicted in June of 2008 on charges ranging from murder, extortion, and racketeering. Regardless of Gioeli’s alleged involvement in this particular hit, though, the government will not charge him with it, yet. But the government does believe it can link him to six other mob murders, most of them committed during the bloody Colombo Family war of the early 1990s. <br /> <br /> The Colombo war of the 1990s lasted two years and is one of the most infamous happenings in recent mob history. When boss Carmine Persico was sent to prison for life he made Victor “Little Vic” Orena his acting boss. Orena liked the position and tried to oust Persico as official boss. This move created a split within the family, with Persico loyalists facing the rebellious faction led by Orena. Between 1991 and 1993, the two groups fought a tit for tat battle that saw ten mobsters and two bystanders killed. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995459,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995459,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236995459?profile=original" width="260" /></a>During that bloody war, Gioeli (left) proved his worth once more. On June 12, 1991, Orena-faction member Frank Marasa was shot multiple times outside his home in Brooklyn in retaliation for his perceived involvement in the murder of a Colombo family associate. Authorities have charged that Gioeli committed the murder together with Dino Calabro and Joseph “Joey Caves” Competiello. Both Calabro and Competiello are now testifying for the government. <br /> <br /> Gioeli and Calabro were a close duo before their arrest in 2008. On March 25, 1992, they also committed the double murder of Colombo family soldier John Minerva and Minerva’s friend, Michael Imbergamo. Imbergamo was not a target of the murder, but was killed because he was with Minerva, a member of the Orena faction, at the time of the attack.<br /> <br /> It is clear Gioeli had no problem firing shots, but how would he react to being on the receiving end of some well aimed bullets? Well, on March 27, 1992, he found out when he was wounded in a wild car chase/shootout in Brooklyn. He was hit multiple times during the incident, but survived and his stature among his fellow gangsters had risen substantially after that day. <br /> <br /> After the FBI arrested Vic Orena and several other Colombo mobsters, things soon returned to normal. Persico’s son <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/colombo-boss-alphonse-persico">Alphonse</a> was firmly in place as acting boss for his imprisoned father and the two warring factions had begun to make peace and ‘fuggedabout’ all the violence that had occurred between them. Orena loyalist <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/colombo-underboss-william-wild">William “Wild Bill” Cutolo</a> was made underboss and everyone was happy. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995654,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236995654,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236995654?profile=original" width="251" /></a>Of course, this isn’t a fairytale. This is a world filled with men who cheat, rob, hurt, and kill in the blink of an eye. No wonder then that “Wild Bill” Cutolo soon went missing and Colombo mobsters Dino Calabro and Thomas Gioeli all received a promotion shortly thereafter; Calabro became a made member, while Gioeli became a captain. Prosecutors have added the Cutolo murder to the long list of murder charges against Gioeli. <br /> <br /> Wild Bill’s remains were discovered in October of 2008, “in a wooded area around an industrial complex near Frank Ave. in Farmingdale where acting Colombo crime boss Thomas Gioeli lives,” the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/10/06/2008-10-06_what_a_way_to_get_the_boot_corpse_found_-2.html" target="_blank">New York Daily News</a> reported. Colombo turncoat Joseph Competiello pointed authorities to the burial ground. <br /> <br /> Sitting in his jail cell, thinking about freedom and life behind bars. That’s the situation Gioeli is in right now. If he is convicted he will spend the remainder of his life in prison. Two of his most trusted fellow mobsters are lining up to testify against him. While he sits in a small cell, he knows his former friends will get out of prison eventually. It is part of the sweet deal the government offers to all turncoat mobsters. <br /> <br /> One wonders if Gioeli ever thinks about making such a deal himself. There wouldn’t be many gangsters left to testify against, but who knows. Then again, it is more likely Gioeli’s belief in that core mafia value of Omerta is still very strong. He would rather be in prison for life than become a turncoat, a rat. Perhaps Gioeli really has just one fear. Namely, the answer to the question: “What happens when I die?”<br /> </p>
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Genovese Capo Sentenced to 10 Years For Murder Conspiracy
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/genovese-capo-sentenced-to-10
2011-05-05T21:30:00.000Z
2011-05-05T21:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-capo-sentenced-to-10"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989887,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236989887?profile=original" width="450" /></a>By David Amoruso<br /> <br /> “Anthony Palumbo’s decades long crime spree has finally come to an end. He is going to prison which is exactly where he belongs.” Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, could not have been any more clear and direct in his statement about Genovese mobster Palumbo (photo above). <br /> <br /> Today, Anthony “Tony D.” Palumbo (62) was sentenced to ten years in prison and three years of supervised release for his participation in a conspiracy to murder a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/russian-mafia-overview">Russian organized crime</a> figure. He had already pleaded guilty on August 30, 2010. The murder conspiracy took place two decades ago and is another sign that the law has a long memory and the ability to bring the culprits to justice many years after the crime occurred. <br /> <br /> In 1990, Palumbo was placed in charge of overseeing the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-genovese-crime-family">Genovese Crime Family</a>’s interests in an illegal mob cartel that extorted petroleum companies affiliated with several Russian mobsters engaged in a motor fuel bootlegging scheme. Through this scheme, the petroleum companies evaded the payment of federal and state motor fuel excise taxes, and the Genovese and other organized crime families extorted a share of the illegal proceeds. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991065,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991065,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236991065?profile=original" width="140" /></a>“In late 1992 or early 1993, one of the Russian gangsters asked Palumbo and others to murder a hitman who worked for him. Palumbo and his co-conspirators agreed to murder the Russian hitman, but higher-ups in the Genovese Crime Family would not authorize the murder, so it did not happen,” the FBI’s press release states. <br /> <br /> Because Palumbo pleaded guilty to this murder conspiracy, prosecutors did not pursue charges against him for the 1992 mob hit of Angelo Sangiuolo. Prosecutors allege the murder of the Genovese associate was ordered by former Genovese boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-boss-vincent-chin">Vincent “The Chin” Gigante</a> (right) because he had ripped off a gambling business associated with Palumbo. After Palumbo complained to Gigante, Gigante ordered Angelo Prisco, a Genovese capo, to murder Sangiuolo. Prisco recruited two of his associates to commit the murder. On or about June 2, 1992, Prisco’s mob associates shot and killed Sangiuolo in a van in the Bronx.<br /> <br /> Palumbo was picked up by federal agents in 2009 together with a group of Genovese mobsters that included Acting Boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-boss-daniel-leo">Daniel Leo</a>. On orders from Leo, authorities allege, Palumbo took over a Jersey City business after the owner fell behind on a loansharking debt.<br /> </p>
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La Primula Rossa: The Story of Luciano Leggio (Part 3)
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of-2
2011-03-05T09:30:00.000Z
2011-03-05T09:30:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of-2"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006468,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006468?profile=original" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of">Part One</a> - <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of-1">Part Two</a> - <strong>Part Three</strong><br /> <br /> By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> Following Leggio’s acquittal in the second trial, although he was subject to re-arrest to face other outstanding charges, the Attorney General in Palermo, Scaglione himself, had ruled this could only take place in Corleone. As he had no intention of ever returning there, Leggio’s freedom seemed guaranteed. He entered a number of private clinics on the mainland, ending up in Rome, and when it was time to leave, a Cadillac, supplied by Frank Coppola turned up to drive him off.<br /> <br /> Leaving the Romana di Bracci clinic, he made a visit to a lawyer. <br /> <br /> Journalist Mario Francese, in an article published in <em>Giornale di Sicilia</em> on March 10th, 1974, claimed that Leggio went to the law office of Salvatore Albano, in Rome, where he had drawn up a special power of attorney in favour of his older sister, Maria Antonina, allowing her almost a free hand in administering his estate and assets.<br /> <br /> The notorious lawyer and Leggio had worked together since the 1960s. Albano also represented Frank Coppola and Giulio Andreotti, the most famous of Italian politicians, who was arrested and tried twice for complicity in cases regarding the Mafia.<br /> <br /> Leggio surfaced a few weeks later at Cinisi near Palermo, living under the protection of Don Tano Badalamenti, the capo of the local cosca. He had courted a woman from Corleone when he was young, a woman whose family was close to that of Leggio’s. So, they had been connected through both of their families-biological and crime-for a number of years.<br /> <br /> After a period of some weeks, Leggio then moved east across the island to the province of Catania, where he stayed in hiding in a two story villa in Via Morgioni in the hills above San Giovani La Punta. The house he rented was only a short distance from the local carabinieri barracks. As in Corleone, four years before, he seemed to enjoy the risk or perhaps the challenge of living almost under the noses of the very people charge with his capture and arrest. <br /> <br /> He was joined there for a time, by Riina along with Bernardo Provenzano who was also on the run from the law. The Calderone brothers, head of the Catania cosca, organized papers for Leggio and Provenzano, in the names of Antonio and Giuseppe Farrugia. Leggio was using this identity when he was finally caught by the police in Milan, three years later. Although he was thirty-seven at this time, Provenzano could not drive, and had to commute between Catania and Palermo by train.<br /> <br /> Ironically, the two men claimed to be butchers by profession. They were probably two of the three biggest, in the history of the Mafia. <br /> <br /> In July 1971, two months after he probably shot Judge Scaglione, the short, stocky man with the limp, moved across to the mainland and settled in Milan. Pippo Calderone the capo of the local Mafia family in Catania, was under police surveillance, and it was certain that eventually they would have tracked him to the house in San Giovanni. It was time for Leggio to move on.<br /> <br /> In this period, he was operating his crime family through both Riina and Provenzano, two killers who were every bit as ruthless and deadly as he was. In a meeting with the two men in Catania, he had made the decision to appoint Riina as his regent, to arbitrate on his behalf when he was unable to attend commission meetings. <br /> <br /> By this time, the Mafia commission, perhaps set up sometime following a mob meeting at the Hotel des Palmes in Palermo in 1957, and made up of the representatives of the major families on the island, had laid down an edict that kidnappings were out of bounds.<br /> <br /> It’s more than probable in fact that in Palermo at least, going back to the end of the 19th century, there had been some formalized system to control continuity between the various cosche, a governing body of some description. This was according to evidence presented at the Court of Catanzaro. <br /> <br /> In January 1897, the eight Mafia families of the Palermo region convened in a meeting headed by Malaspina cosca boss, Francesco Siino. Unresolved matters lead to an inter-family war that went on until 1900. Siino became one of the causalities and was shot and wounded. <br /> <br /> Ermanno Sangiorgi, the Palermo chief of police, persuaded Siino to become a <em>pentito</em>, only the second Mafioso in Sicily to have turned informant, after Salvatore D’Amico, a member of the <em>Stuppaggheri</em> sect of Monreale. He was the first ever to disclose intimate details of the organization, naming structure, ranks from boss down to soldier and his testimony generated an investigation resulting in the arrest and trial of 19 members of the clan. For his help in unveiling the secret society, he was murdered in Bagheria, in 1878.<br /> <br /> Irrespective of when and how the commission started, its members decided that people who were rich enough to justify the risks in terms of kidnappings, were also often politically placed in positions of power that caused the act to be counter-productive to the political strategy of the Mafia. But kidnappings were a great source of income for the Corleonesi, now badly lacking funds. They had financed a number of costly trials, and lawyer’s fees and the usual bribes had dug deep into their reserves. <br /> <br /> So Luciano Leggio got involved in kidnappings on the Continent.<br /> <br /> Between 1961 and 1972, 372 known Mafiosi moved to Milan, or operated between the largest city in Italy and Sicily. He was one of them.<br /> <br /> From the time he moved to the mainland in 1971 and his arrest there in Milan, in 1974, information on his movements and activities is fragmented and at times, vague. Almost all of it comes to us from informants. There is evidence that through a nominee, Antonio Quartararo, that he purchased a citrus grove, Vaccarizzo, in Catania and had constructed a two-story, 400 square metre house, which had a built-in storage cell, intended to hold kidnap victims.<br /> <br /> When he first arrived in Milan he stayed at Via Steniti 6, living under the protection of Francis Turatello, aka <em>Faccia d'Angelo</em>-Angel Face-a member of the ‘New Camorra’ in Naples. Turatello’s name goes down in mob history as surely the only one who was murdered in prison (in 1981) and then disemboweled by his killer, Catania Mafioso Antonino Faro, who proceeded to eat his liver. Faro a five-times killer by the age of 28, killed Turatello under the orders of Camorrista Pasquale Barra, who in turn was following the orders of the ‘New Camorra’ boss Rafaele Cutolo. The murder created a major rift between Sicily and Naples as not only was Turatello the godson of Frank Coppola, he was personally appointed by Leggio to supervise the Corleone’s drug business in Milan.<br /> <br /> In 1971, Leggio held a council meeting at his apartment with Tommaso Buscetta, Gaetano Badalmenti and Geraldo Albertini. On the agenda were a number of items, including the development of the family’s drug-trafficking business. <br /> <br /> Other meetings with mob associates were held regularly in a restaurant and wine bar he co-owned in the Via Giambellino. Later in the year he held another sit-down meeting, this time attended by Salvatore Riina, Vincenzo Arena, Giuseppe Taormina and Salvatore Gambino. This was mainly about setting territorial boundaries in the kidnapping business he was developing. There were more meetings, including one attended by Riina, Salvatore Enea, the Bono brothers, Gerlando Alberti, Francesco Scaglione and Vincent Arena. These meetings were tracked through the use of informants, by Colonel Giuseppe Russo, a carabinieri specialist in organized crime, who would be murdered by the Mafia in 1977, while holidaying with his wife and child in the resort of Ficuzza, near Corleone.<br /> <br /> Leggio, Turatello, and other Catania mobsters, formed a gang based upon, and referred to by law enforcement, as <em>Anonima Sequestri</em> literally ‘Anonymous Kidnappers.’ Originally a Sardinian phenomenon, it had been transported to the mainland and adopted by Camorra gangsters. The Naples based version of the Sicilian Mafia may well have begun in Sardinia, in a prison in Cagliari, a port on the island, in 1200, and imported into Naples at some later time. <br /> <br /> Lombardy became the kidnapping capital of Italy. Between 1969 and 1999 there were 672 kidnappings registered by the police in the country and 158 took place in and around Milan.<br /> <br /> One of the most famous Leggio helped to architect was the abduction of the young John Paul Getty III in 1973. He was held for months in Calabria, before his tightwad grandfather coughed up the $3 million ransom after he got an ear in the mail. <br /> <br /> By this time, Leggio had been convicted by the court of appeals in Bari, in Calabria, for not committing a murder.<br /> <br /> In the strange and perverse Italian judicial system, in December 1970, he was convicted-in abstenia-of murdering Doctor Michele Navarra back in 1958. There had been no new evidence introduced to inculpate him, but he was found guilty because no crimes of the Mafia type had been committed in Corleone since his arrest in 1964.<br /> <br /> He was given a life sentence because ‘Leggio’s sinister personality had been clear in the proceedings (the trial), and the fact that he is a Capo beyond any reasonable doubt.’ <br /> <br /> In fact, the only tangible evidence that linked him to the killing was a reflector that broke off the Alfa 1900 during the shoot-out, and was found at the scene by investigators. And even this was suspect, as there was a strong possibility that the original fragments had been replaced to throw doubt on the court exhibit.<br /> <br /> The Supreme Court of Italy upheld the verdict. It was a finding based on shifting sands and broken mirrors, but it was the only way the judiciary could figure out how to lock down Leggio, a man who had evaded the law for over twenty years. <br /> <br /> Everybody knew he did it, no one knew how he did it, so they convicted him for being in effect the man who probably did it. It was a pretty shonky deal by any legal parameter, and illustrated just how low the law had sunk in its desperation to get its man.<br /> <br /> The Court of Appeals in Bari had acquitted Liggio of various homicides, but sentenced him to life for the murder of his former chief, Michele Navarra, recorded in the Antimafia Commission, <em>Relazione sull'indagine riguardante casi di singoli Mafiosi,</em> pp. 105-130; Antimafia Commission, <em>Relazione conclusiva</em>, VI legislature, doc. XXIII, n. 2 (Roma, 1976), pp. 110-117 <br /> <br /> But convicting him and grounding him where two very different matters. He entered into some of the best years of his life in the early 1970s, taking a string of bewildering alias’s-at one time he held eleven different passports-in names like Pablo Villa, Sebastiano Tarola, Antonio Tazio, Calogero Polla, Baron Osvaldo Fattori, Antoni Paranzan and Michele Di Terlizzi, among others.<br /> <br /> From some time in 1971 until September 1973, Leggio’s address was Via Cremosana 4, an apartment which belonged to a close associate, Nello Pernice. Nello, known as ‘The Negro’ because he had been born in Addis Abbaba, was a career criminal and alleged hit-man for the mob. He had been ‘made’ into the Mafia by Leggio, when they were both incarcerated at Ucciardone Prison in Palermo.<br /> <br /> Leggio roamed Europe, setting up an expanding criminal empire based on theft, embezzlement, gambling, extortion in the construction industry, and kidnapping on a grand scale. He travelled widely, without any problems from police or custom authorities. Marco Nese an Italian journalist, tracked Leggio down on one occasion and photographed him in a Swiss restaurant.<br /> <br /> Here, Leggio met up again with Gerlando Alberti, a member of the Porta Nuova Mafia family in Palermo, and along for the ride were Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore ‘L‘ingegnere’ Greco, one of the most enigmatic Mafiosi of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, to dine in the Park Hotel in Geneva, in May 1972.<br /> <br /> It’s quite possible he even visited America during this period of his life based in northern Italy.<br /> <br /> Nicholas Pileggi, the well-known author, claimed in an article he wrote in 1973 on the drug trade that a group of senior New York Mafiosi, all well-known to law enforcement, held a meeting late in 1972 in the home of a Gambino crime family capo Johnny D‘Alessio, on Staten Island. Leggio was noted as being one of the seven or eight men, including Funzie Teiri, head of the Genovese Family, Aniello Dellacroce, number two man in the Gambino Family, and Alphonse Persico brother of Carmine, boss of the Colombo’s, who attended, along with Francesco Salamone, who interestingly, was listed as the president of a company in Milan linked into Leggio and other mobsters. The Italian Financial Police believed this was a front for mob money laundering.<br /> <br /> In Milan, Leggio went generally by the name of Antonino Farruggia, the one he had used in Catania. He claimed to be an importer of wines, and ran a large wine store called Vinicola Borroni in the Viale Umbria, and the wine bar on the Via Giambellino, through his nominee, Pernice. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006879,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006879,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006879?profile=original" width="367" /></a>He had, at some time, formed a relationship with a woman called Lucia Parazana (right), a Yugoslav refugee, who worked as a nurse, (the same occupation held by Leoluchina Soressi back in Corleone!) and they moved, in September 1973, into a top floor apartment of an upmarket apartment building at Via Ripamonti 166 in the Vigentino district, about two miles from the centre of Milan.<br /> <br /> On April 5th 1973, Angelo Mangano, the police officer who had seemingly arrested Leggio in 1964, was attacked outside his home in Via di Tor Tre Teste in the eastern suburb of Casilino in Rome, along with his driver, Domenico Casella. Although both of them were shot repeatedly by three men, and badly injured, they survived. <br /> <br /> According to informants, the attackers were Michele Zazza, the infamous Camorrista, and his nephew Ciro Mazzarella along with Leggio. Enrico Bellavia in his book <em>Un Uomo D’Onore</em> claims that Angelo Nuvoletta was also one of the attackers. Bellavia relates that Leggio, Provenzano, Riina and Francesco Di Carlo, the boss of the Altofonte cosca held a meeting at which the attack was planned. Di Carlo subsequently became a pentiti and offered up this information. It may have been pay-back time for Leggio, having perhaps long held a venomous hatred for the police officer who had helped arrest him in 1964, back in Corleone.<br /> <br /> Fourteen shots were fired at the two men by the assassins, who had driven up in a yellow Alfa 2000 with Milan plates.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>Cornuto</em>,’ one of them shouted. ‘<em>You’re finished being a spy</em>,’ and then the gunmen opened up. Investigators were puzzled by two things. Firstly, Mangano’s wife had received a telephone call only the previous day, threatening his life, which should have meant he was being extra cautious. Secondly, they wondered why a self-proclaimed top marksman in the state police, did not even return a shot!<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007274,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007274,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007274?profile=original" width="482" /></a>Mangano (right) later claimed he had been shot because he was about to unearth the killers of Judge Scaglione and other serious crimes linked into Leggio.<br /> <br /> Sometime in June, 1973 Leggio became the perpetrator of a particularly nasty quartet of murders.<br /> <br /> Damiano Caruso, was a soldier in the Mafia family of Giuseppe Di Cristina, in south-east Sicily, although he himself lived in Villabate. The family don of Reisi had been an informer for the carabinieri and claimed among other things that Leggio had a fire-team- <em>gruppi di fuoco</em>- of 14 assassins, who were prepared to kill anyone, anywhere, on his orders.<br /> <br /> Caruso found himself in Milan. Escaping from internal exile he came to northern Italy to meet up with many of the Mafioso who had settled here, looking for opportunities. Caruso had been one of the squad that killed Michele Cavataio in what came to be known as ‘The Viale Lazio Massacre,’ in December 1969. Along with Bernardo Provenzano, another member of the team, he was wounded.<br /> <br /> He was sent to New York to recuperate. There, he had gotten into trouble with Carlo Gambino who was then one of the most powerful mob bosses in America, and was banished back to Sicily. Caruso was a man, according to Antonino Calderone, who had unlimited courage and a huge amount of ferocity in his nature. However, he had no idea when to shut up and listen to others who had more knowledge than he had. He did whatever he wanted to, regardless of the consequences, and this would be his undoing. He once tried to kill a parliamentary deputy, hitting him with an axe, doing more damage to himself when he missed his swing, slashing his own leg. <br /> <br /> His boss, Di Cristina, ordered him on one occasion to kill a Mafioso called Candido Ciuni in the small bar the man ran on the Via Maqueda in Palermo. Caruso attacked the man in October 1970, stabbing him, though not finishing the job off properly. <br /> <br /> A week later, on Tuesday 27th, while the wounded man lay in the Civic Hospital recovering, Caruso, Raffaele and Pasquale Bovi, Pietro Ciotta and Gioacchino Marrone, walked into the building, dressed as doctors. They disabled the duty doorman, Salvatore Saglio, ran up the stairs to the second floor and in room six, machine-gunned the injured man to death, in front of his screaming wife, Antonina Orlando, who desperately tried to stop it by rugby tacking one of the gunmen. It was unique in mob killings in Sicily: shooting the victim a second time, as he recovered from the first attack. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007671,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007671,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007671?profile=original" width="202" /></a>Ciuni (right) who was 44 at the time of his death, came from Ravenusa, a small town near Riesi, the fiefdom of Di Cristina, and his family had been involved in a feud with the family of the Mafia boss since 1946. He had also publicly voiced his dissent in the killing of Vitto Gattuso, who had been shot-gunned to death while walking hand-in-hand with his small son as punishment for an infringement against Di Cristina. <br /> <br /> Ironically, and somewhat amazingly, in view of the events, there is a proverb in the town of Ravenusa that recalls:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>First they stab you and send you to hospital where they fatten you up and then kill you</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Leggio believed Caruso had been responsible for the death of a young man he was fond of, Nino Guarano. Nicknamed ‘Big Heart’ he had been part of a plot to de-throne Di Cristina, and when Caruso found out, he killed him.<br /> <br /> In addition, Caruso had robbed a jeweller in Palermo who was under the protection of Salvatore Riina, as well as stealing goods from a warehouse owned by another man of honour. Enough aggravation to get you killed by Leggio, who organized for Nello Pernice, to have Caruso removed. In typical Leggio style, one mere death wasn’t enough to satisfy his passion for murder. When Caruso’s woman came calling looking for him, Leggio murdered her, and then for good measure, raped this woman’s fifteen year old daughter before disposing of her. <br /> <br /> To round it off, a cousin had travelled to Milan endeavouring to track down Caruso, and in a fit of pique, Leggio killed him as well. This information was passed onto the authorities by Antonino Calderone.<br /> <br /> The kidnapping of wealthy industrialist Pietro Torrielli in December of 1972, set the whistles and bells going in the office of Judge Giuliano Turone, the deputy anti-Mafia prosecutor of Lombardy. The huge ransom of 1.5 billion lire was an indication that the kidnappers were probably part of a sophisticated ring. Following the release of Torrielli, the <em>Guardia di Finanza</em> (Financial Police) followed a long and torturous paper trail of documents, bank checks, money orders and telegrams that all seemed to lead to one Senor Antonio, whose name kept coming up on wiretaps the police had set up across Milan. All of their intelligence pointed to the fact that Senor Antonio was Luciano Leggio. On May 13th, 1974, a wiretap on his own phone altered the police to the fact that he was soon leaving the city on an ‘extended visit.’<br /> <br /> Plans were laid, and at 6:00 am on the morning of May 16th, the Financial Police mounted a massive containment exercise. Ten trucks containing 47 police officers arrived in the Vigentino district, sealing off all possible escape routes around the apartment at Via Ripamonti. At 6:30 am Colonel Vissicchio and Major Lombardi in charge of the arrest, accompanied by a dozen officers, climbed to the top floor of the building and hammered on the apartment door. It was opened by Leggio in pyjamas and slippers.<br /> <br /> In the background the police could hear a baby crying. It was Paolo, Leggio’s one year old son. The most wanted and perhaps feared man in the whole of Italy surrendered peacefully. The police found a revolver in his bedroom along with books on philosophy and history. It was almost an exact replica of his arrest in Corleone ten years before!<br /> <br /> Tommaso Buscetta when he gave evidence following his decision to become an informer against the Mafia, inferred that Riina had betrayed his boss in order to gain control of the Corleonesi. <br /> <br /> In an ironic twist, it’s quite possible that twenty years later, Riina after 23 years 6 months and 8 days on the run, was arrested himself because of the betrayal of one of his men, Baldassare Di Maggio.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006468,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006468,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006468?profile=original" width="428" /></a>Destined to spend the rest of his life in various prisons across Italy, and finally into the isolation of Badu e Corros penitentiary in Nuoro on the island of Sardinia, at the age of forty-nine, for Luciano Leggio (right), his life of freedom was over. But that did not stop him from running his crime family. Riina and Provenzano operated as his proxy on the cupola, with Riina gradually assuming more and more power over the Corleonesi’s affairs. <br /> <br /> Leggio sat in his prison cells across Italy, moving his killers like pawns across the chessboard of Sicily, picking up judges and prosecutors and journalist and politicians. And knocking them down one by one as it suited his agenda.<br /> <br /> Over the next twelve years, he was constantly moving between prisons and courthouses.<br /> <br /> ON July 29th 1974, he was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in connection with the 114 Trial.<br /> <br /> In November 1974, along with 31 other men, he was tried for the crimes committed by Anonima Sequestri.<br /> <br /> In 1975 he was arraigned before Judge Terranova and his conviction for the murder of Dr. Navarra in 1958 was re-confirmed.<br /> <br /> He was tried in connection with the kidnapping of Luigi Rossi di Montelera, in 1976.<br /> <br /> In 1977 he was indicted on the evidence of Leonardo Vitale, the pentiti from the Alterallo cosca, near Palermo, who pre-empted Buscetta and Contoro as the most significant Mafia informant of the 20th century, although the authorities had no real idea who and what they were dealing with, and simply had him shipped to a mental hospital for seven years.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007477,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237007477,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237007477?profile=original" width="304" /></a>Leggio featured at a court of appeals hearing in 1978 at Palermo, when he and Benedetto La Cara argued their cases against their 1974 sentences.<br /> <br /> In 1982 he was tried in Reggio Calabria in connection with the killing of Judge Terranova and acquitted. <br /> <br /> In November 1985 he was back in Reggio Calabria, where he appeared to be having an affair with a buxom, 41 year old blonde from Perugia, called Maria Pia Davena, although their meetings were always in prison cells or courthouse interview rooms.<br /> <br /> There were hearings regarding the murder of Judge Terranova in April 1986, moved from Calabria to Palermo, in order to have him handy for the forthcoming Maxi-trial.<br /> <br /> The Genoese police officer in charge of logistics at the trial held in Sicily, in Palermo, in a special bunker-style courthouse built onto the Ucciardone prison, would not even mention Leggio’s name in the security of his own quarters.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>Leggio</em>,’ he explained to anthropologists John and Peter Schneider, ‘<em>could bury any of us</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Although he exerted his hold over some of his interests, there never was, according to Judge Giovanni Falcone, a <em>grande vecchio</em>-powerful old man, of the Mafia, who pulled the strings from the very top. The judge considered this concept an idea of great intellectual crudity.<br /> <br /> As Leggio and everyone who followed him knew, the real power lay in the Palazzo Chigi and the Montecitorio, in Rome, the heart in the body of political Italy.<br /> <br /> In one of his many trials or court hearings in the 1970s, Leggio defended his lifestyle by quoting almost word for word the Mafia definition as laid down by the famous 19th Palermitan doctor and ethnographer, Giuseppe Pitrè:<br /> <br /> <em>Mafia is neither a sect nor an association, it has no regulations or statutes. The Mafioso is not a thief or a criminal……..Mafia is the awareness of one’s own individual strength…….The Mafioso is someone who always wants to give and receive respect. If someone offends him, he does not turn to the law.</em><br /> <br /> Throughout part of his years of isolation, Leggio used a Catholic priest, Agostino Coppola, to carry messages from him to his subordinates in the Mafia. The grandson of the old don, Frank Coppola, he was, like a number of the men of the cloth in Sicily, a Mafioso himself, made into the Partinico cosca in 1969. This was confirmed to the authorities by Antonino Calderone. A man of some considerable power within the church, Coppola at one time, administered the assets of the diocese of Monreale and was the parish priest of Carini for a number of years.<br /> <br /> Coppola’s brothers, Giacomo and Domenico were Mafioso who controlled the land west of Carini towards Paterna, an area which included the Zucco Estate an area of 147 hectares and a number of buildings, including a castle. Giuseppe Russo the carabinieri colonel murdered by the Mafia in 1977, was convinced that the priest Coppola had arranged to hide Leggio on this estate for a number of months<br /> <br /> The priest had acted for Leggio’s kidnapping unit on at least one occasion when he was the emissary between the gang and the family of the young engineer, Luciano Cassina, kidnapped in August 1972 and held in captivity for six months until released on payment of a ransom of over one billion lira. For this little escapade, the priest was indicted in 1976 and sentenced to 14 years in prison.<br /> <br /> Eventually suspended and then dismissed from the church, he married into the Caruana family, the greatest drug dealers the Sicilian mob has ever known. He was the priest who in fact married Salvatore Riina and his life-long love, Antonietta Bagarella, on April 16th, 1974 either in a villa near Cinisi, or at a little church in the San Lorenzo district of Palermo, according to which source is consulted.<br /> <br /> In 1977, prison officials at the penitentiary in Lodi in the province of Lombardy, Northern Italy, discovered a plot to spring Leggio, apparently engineered by the Mafia, and the prisoner was immediately moved to another high security facility.<br /> <br /> Between 1979 and 1980 when he was incarcerated at Ucciardone in Palermo, another conspiracy to break him out of prison was uncovered, and he was again transferred.<br /> <br /> Leggio’s incarceration in prison was a lot more comfortable than a lot of his peers. Before he was sent to Badu e Corros in Sardinia, he had his meals delivered from an outside restaurant, and paid another inmate to act as his food taster, to make sure he wasn’t poisoned. At one prison he had as his protector and guard Antonino Faro, the Catania Mafioso and homicidal cannibal killer. <br /> <br /> As the years passed, Leggio grew fleshy and even sleeker in his appearance, but always kept himself smart and well-groomed. He had boxes of long, fat Toscanello Tuscany cigars delivered each week, and would sport a huge diamond and gold ring to impress his guests.<br /> <br /> He would spend his time writing poetry and reading, studying the pre-Socratic philosophers and later serious writers such as Dostoevsky.<br /> <br /> He filled his days painting, producing over 400 pictures, strong vibrant images of Corleone and the surrounding countryside, either from his memory or from postcards sent to him by friends and relatives. One of his lawyers, Pierro Arru, said Leggio‘s inspiration came from Vincent Van Gough. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008273,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008273,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237008273?profile=original" width="350" /></a>Some less than kind commentators, suggested that the paintings were in fact done by other inmates, one in particular, Gaspare Mutolo, who had shared a cell with Leggio for a period of time, claimed he painted more than half of the work that was eventually put on display, and Leggio simply added his signature to them. ‘<em>Leggio</em>’ he claimed, ‘<em>couldn’t paint a daisy</em>.’ Whatever, the works of art attracted thousands of curious sight-seers when they went on exhibition. <br /> <br /> His first collection of fifty-five paintings was displayed at the Marino Gallery on the Via Dante in Palermo in January 1988, organized by another of his lawyers, Salvatore Traina. The showing opened on Saturday 2nd, and by the following Tuesday, forty had already been sold. The proceeds of the sales, organized by his ageing sister, Maria-Antonina, back in Corleone, would go towards providing a dialysis machine in the hospital there. Some of his works were to sell for as high US$30,000. Soon, art galleries in New York, Spain and Germany were clamouring to get their hands on them.<br /> <br /> In 1992, the governor of the prison applied for an injunction to prevent Leggio sending out anymore of his paintings on the grounds that they contained secret signals to his mob associates. Leggio’s lawyer fought the action, but the Italian supreme court found in favour of the prison authorities. <br /> <br /> Early in 1986, Leggio was moved from his current prison back to Palermo as a defendant in another major organized crime investigation that became known as the Mafia maxi-trial. <br /> <br /> The biggest legal event of its kind, ever held in Sicily, it ran from February 1986 until December 1987. 464 defendants, including 4 women, faced charges, that along with their names, filled 400 pages of the court documents than ran to 8607 pages. There were 200 defence lawyers in court along with two full sets of judges and jurors to last the course.<br /> <br /> There were over 100 prisoners who appeared in the special courthouse on February 10th. One hundred and thirteen were out on bail awaiting a later trial and 115 under indictment were at large, including Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano. By December 1987, the trial was over, having sentenced over 300 of the accused on a variety of charges from murder to associating with the Mafia. Leggio, secured in his own private cage during the hearings, treated the court with contempt and disdain. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008498,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237008498,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237008498?profile=original" width="422" /></a>‘<em>How could I do these things I’m accused of?’ he said. ‘I have been in prison for the last twelve years. Do you wish to call my jailer to confirm that I have not been out. It is impossible that I have committed crimes</em>.’<br /> <br /> He had indeed been in prison during the steamroller rise of the Corleonesi’s to power within the brotherhood. During the blooding of the second Mafia war in the early 1980s when perhaps a thousand or more were killed, according to Judge Giovanni Falcone, he had been confined. He was incarcerated when he helped organized the take over of the heroin trafficking into America. The Mafia had murdered a former mayor of Palermo, eleven senior police officers, four judges, six public prosecutors, two famous journalists and four politicians. The dead were everywhere. It’s more than conceivable that none of these things happened without his approval and consent, and during all of this time, he was in prison.<br /> <br /> He was cleared of all counts, on this, his last trial. As usual, the judiciary couldn’t really come to terms with a man who was really a monster.<br /> <br /> On Monday, November 15th 1993, he collapsed in his prison cell at the high security prison in Sardinia. He had been here for nine years. <br /> <br /> Penitentiary Guard, Antonino Pampitta, discovered him in a routine cell-check at 8:35 am. lying on his bed, his mouth open, gasping for breath, his eyes dilated In his final years, Leggio suffered from many ailments-asthma, prostate and liver problems, along with rheumatism and bladder dysfunctions, and his endless bone problems. Three doctors worked on him, trying to keep him alive. Taken to the San Francesco Hospital on the Via Mannironi in Nuoro, he went peacefully before the ambulance arrived, as his heart turned to jelly and died on him and his kidneys and bladder finally gave in to the struggle. He was sixty-eight years old. <br /> <br /> The official cause of death was myocardial infarction. <br /> <br /> Dying quietly in bed was an option he had offered few of his enemies. <br /> <br /> His lawyer, Francesco Azzena had been appealing his sentence, on the grounds of his numerous health problems, and the fact that he had in total, served 25 years in prison.<br /> Angelo Puggioni, the owner of a well-known furniture store in Nuoro- Dania Arredamenti- had guaranteed Leggio a position as an interior designer, should his release be facilitated.<br /> <br /> The image of Luciano Leggio, one of the most virulent Mafioso of all times, effusively offering clients advice on their selection of drapes and soft furnishings, is one to be conjured with long into the night.<br /> <br /> After a postmortem, just to make sure he had died a natural death , his body was shipped by air to Sicily, arriving into Punta Raisi, Palermo airport at 1:30 pm on the 17th of November.<br /> <br /> The coffin was collected by an old, blue Mercedes hearse, and escorted by two police jeeps, the convey made its way south, through Montelepre, the haunt of the bandit Giuliano fifty years before, then across and through San Giuseppe Jato, the heartland of the Mafia for over 100 years, and into Corleone. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009452,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009452,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009452?profile=original" width="392" /></a>The hearse brought the body to the tiny church of San Rosalia in the Piazza Giuseppe Vasi. Here, parish priest Girolamo Leggio, first cousin to the dead man, performed the burial service. This and the internment, were attended by only some immediate family-his sister Carmella and cousin Giovanna Palazzo along with her husband, Francesco Zito. Maria Antonina (right) the sister who administered his estate and had been charged with allocating the proceeds of Leggio’s paintings into philanthropic endeavours, stayed at home with brother Carmelo, who had been part of Leggio’s original gang.<br /> <br /> At the cemetery on the Via Marqueda, TV camera crews and newspaper reporters filled out the available spaces. There was a strong police presence in and around the area, and many tourists, unaware of the proceedings taking place, were re-routed away from Corleone that day as the law closed down the area with roadblocks on all the main roads into the town. The streets were deserted, the shops closed down for the day. The town rested still and quiet, as though waiting for the consummation of a curse long overdue.<br /> <br /> Leggio’s partner from Milan did not attend the funeral services as neither did his son, 19 year old Paolo, who according to the media, had disowned his father. Leochina Sorisi now married and living in Genoa, wanted nothing to do with the ceremony. The only one from that period at the cemetery was a man in a grey overcoat who claimed to have been Sorisi’s cousin, and had been around during those days in 1964. He wanted, as he told a reporter, ‘to see the end of the story.’ <br /> <br /> This may have been Ludovico Benigno, who had been one of the men seen with Placido Rizzotto before he was kidnapped and murdered, all those years before.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009296,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009296,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009296?profile=original" width="455" /></a>At five minutes after four in the afternoon, the sky overcast through the fiery glow of the setting sun and a wind blowing in over the Rocca Busambra shrouded in dark clouds, dusting dried flowers from graves across the cemetery, the coffin was interred in the red, granite family vault, alongside his brother Giralamo who had been buried there in 1967. There is no name or picture on the tomb to indicate Luciano Leggio is buried here. Two wreaths, one from his sisters and brother one simply marked ‘from the grandchildren,’ are laid in place, and it is over.<br /> <br /> La Primula Rossa now lies forever, in this graveyard, only twenty five paces from the grave of Dr. Michele Navarra. Somewhere here, in this burial ground, it is rumoured, lie the remains of Calogero Bagarella, interred in secret after he was killed in the shoot-out at the Via Lazio, in 1969.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>Leggio was one of the most important chiefs of the Cosa Nostra</em>,’ said Luciano Violante, chairman of the anti-Mafia Committee in the Italian Parliament. A fitting epitaph, a back-handed compliment, or perhaps a sad commentary on a wasted life. <br /> <br /> On January 29th 1994, a ceremony was held in the town of Corleone to rename Piazza Vittorio Emanuel III. After months of wrangling amongst council members, it was agreed to call the square ‘Piazza Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellini’ as a permanent tribute to the two judges murdered two years previously, by the Mafia.<br /> <br /> Hundreds of people gathered that morning in the square overshadowed by the local carabinieri barracks, where sixty-eight years earlier, Carmelo Rizzotto had been one of the dozens of suspected Mafia criminals rounded up before being deported to the Palermo prison. <br /> <br /> The re-naming was pushed through by mayor Giuseppe Cipriani who said, ‘There is more to Corleone than the Mafia.’ Sisters of the murdered judges carried out the unveiling ceremony.<br /> <br /> Ironically, the superintendent in charge of monuments for the city, was called Meli, the same name as Antonino Meli, the 68 year old judge from Caltanissetta , appointed by Rome in 1988 as chief prosecutor in Palermo to head up the anti-Mafia Co-ordinating Group, replacing Falcone and effectively putting back efforts to defeat the Mafia by years. Also, the stonemason hired to create the granite street signs for the square was called Liggio!<br /> <br /> Maybe degrees of separation, as conceived by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in 1929; coincidence, an alignment of random points, the long arm of fate, kismet, chance; all sorts of threads run through the story of Luciano Leggio, linking together a tapestry of energy rather than fabric.<br /> <br /> It had been a long and winding road for him and the Sicilian Mafia, a road that had taken him and his criminal clan from a rustic-based enterprise into a tangled urban world of deceit, treachery and mayhem on a scale never seen before in Italy.<br /> <br /> Anton Blok said, ‘<em>Before there was the Mafia; now there is politics</em>.’<br /> <br /> It may be somewhat simplistic to infer that the Mafia changed its spots simply because it became involved in the machinations of the state. However, there is little doubt that all along, Cosa Nostra’s most exhilarating and profound attraction to its members, was and is, its complete and utter insouciance to the law. Its members could do anything they wanted, safe in the unconditional knowledge that they were protected by their own special coda. It was a short step from indifference to the law towards indifference to the state. It did however, require a quantum leap in the mob’s philosophy regarding killing as a means to an end.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237010063,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237010063,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237010063?profile=original" width="179" /></a>The <em>Little King of Corleone</em> may also have qualified for a unique if somewhat macabre appellation, as one of the greatest mass murderer of his time. His tally was probably somewhere between one to five hundred, many at his own hand, but most at his direction.<br /> <br /> He left as his legacy, the two killing machines he had nurtured and encouraged- his avatars-Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano (left), who eventually both came to represent him on the Mafia’s commission-its board of governors, creating a new precedent within the Sicilian Mafia that under certain circumstance, there could be more than one capo leading a family. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009686,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237009686,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237009686?profile=original" width="240" /></a>Riina (right) who became know as ‘The Beast,’ and rightly so, was eventually brought to bay in 1993, and caged forever. Provenzano, called ‘The Tractor,’ because he ran everything down in his path, kept going for another thirteen years until he was finally brought to justice in April 2006. It was reported that the townspeople of Corleone were so delighted that he had at last been brought down, they re-named a street after the date he was captured-11 Aprile.<br /> <br /> Their successor as the supreme boss of Cosa Nostra is supposed to be Matteo Messina Denaro, a man of forty-eight. A Porsche-loving, computer savvy, Latin speaking, playboy-killer, known affectionately by his peers as ‘<em>Mathew Money</em>,’ and who once bragged: ‘<em>I filled a cemetery all by myself</em>,’ he seems to be as equally evasive, and difficult to catch as Luciano Leggio was. And like Leggio, he suffers from a permanent and debilitating disease, although his is myopia. <br /> <br /> He is the capo of Castelvetrano, the same place where the bandit Salvatore Giuliano was murdered in 1950. Nothing is set in concrete however, and time will tell if he is in fact the man who has taken over from Provenzana. His story is still to be told.<br /> <br /> In 2005, talking with Gabriella Ebano, the Sicilian author and photographer, Pina Rizzotto, recalled the effect her brother’s murder had on the family. How she and her parents and sisters went with the procession to the Rocca Busambra, on December 14th 1949, and on that cold and misty morning, had witnessed his remains being reclaimed from the deep cave that was used as a burial ground by the local Mafia.<br /> <br /> How her mother, Rosina screamed in anguish and her father, Carmelo, stood with tears streaming down his face, as her brother’s head and items of his clothing were brought out by carabinieri sergeant, Orlando Notari, who had been lowered into the 35 metre chasm.<br /> <br /> Although Placido had been adopted by Rosina, his own mother Giovanna Moschitta, Carmelo’s first wife, dying of the Spanish Flu in 1918, when he was just a baby, he was always been considered by the Rizzotto’s as their eldest boy and treasured son.<br /> <br /> Every night for 57 years, Pina said she had offered a prayer for him. Her sister Salvatrice developed heart problems, and another sister Concetta, six months pregnant, lost her baby because of the stress they went through when their brother disappeared. The whole family was torn apart, and never put together again.<br /> <br /> As the investigation dragged its slow way through the courts and appeals, her brother’s remains lay boxed as evidence, 6007/63, and were never returned to the family even though they made application on five different occasions between 1952 and 1963. Her parents and all her five siblings died without being able to bury their brother and son, and in due course the remains of Placido Rizzotto disappeared into the labyrinth of the Italian bureaucracy. In 2005, Francis Forgione, president of the anti-Mafia Commission, promised there would be a major government investigation to find and return the box. It was thought to be either stored somewhere in the courthouse building in Palermo or at the Court of Cassation in Rome. Things grind exceedingly slow in Italian bureaucracy. <br /> <br /> In August 2008, human remains were found in a sinkhole on the Rocca Busambra. <br /> <br /> In March 2010, Carmelo Rizzotto was exhumed, and DNA samples were taken to match to these remains. The RIS (<em>Reparto Investigazioni Scientifiche</em>) of the CID branch of the carabinieri carried out the tests in Messina. Also, found in the cave, was the skeleton of a farm animal which could indicate that after killing Rizzotto, Leggio had the body carried to the mountain by a mule, which was subsequently shot, and left with the trade unionist’s remains.<br /> <br /> The tests however, were negative, as disclosed towards the end of November 2010.<br /> <br /> After 62 years, the search for closure is still important to the members of Placido Rizzotto’s family, the trade union he represented, and in fact the state of Italy.<br /> <br /> It has not gone unnoticed that the bodies of Michele Navarra, Luciano Leggio and other Mafiosi who contributed to the murder of the young trade unionist have been buried with full civil and religious accord, whilst their young victim has still not been laid to rest.<br /> <br /> In Placido Rizzotto we see the true face of the victims of the Sicilian Mafia, and their families, representing the thousands of similar stories which lie untold across a hundred years of enforced violence, generated in order to satisfy the ambitions of those who worshipped false myths and pagan gods and destroyed everything that stood in their way. Men, who Corrado Stajano claimed, <em>were a ghastly tangle of terror, vice, brutality and death</em>.<br /> <br /> Renate Siebert in her achingly beautiful account of life and death in the Mafia, from a woman’s perspective, ‘<em>a journey into Hades</em>,’ as she describes it, hopes that women’s sensibility will help bring about the demise of a phenomenon that represents a negation of what is considered one of the higher achievements of civilization, the right of man, denied individuals through terrorism executed at every social level in Sicily.<br /> <br /> James Lee Burke notes in his book ‘<em>The Glass Rainbow</em>’: ‘<em>If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence in our skin</em>.’<br /> <br /> Surely no one is born malevolent and debased? Genetic disposition and social pressures create the schismatic shift in personality that eventually erupts as a psychosomatic earthquake, damaging everything and everyone around the fault line of that person’s presence. <br /> <br /> Then again, Anthony Burgess in his dystopian novella, ‘Clockwork Orange,’ explored the theme that perhaps we are all born evil, or at least can become perverted along the way.<br /> <br /> Luciano Leggio came into the world a baby, innocent as all are, until these changes occurred in him and turned him into the epitome of malevolence and abomination.<br /> <br /> Mark Twain believed everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anyone. If that is the case, Luciano Leggio’s moon was surely always in perpetual eclipse.<br /> <br /> Aristotle spoke of <em>hamartia</em>, the tragic flaw of man. While the modern popular rendering of hamartia is broadly imprecise and often misleading, it lends itself perfectly to the concept that in Leggio’s case, it may well have been simply that he was Sicilian, and as a result, his destiny was predestined. <br /> <br /> It is hard to find the verbs or adjectives that do justice to the nature of this man: evil, controlling, frightening, unpredictable, pernicious, deadly, capricious, cruel, predatory, aberrant, mendacious are just some that come to mind. They hint at his nature, but hardly scratch the surface of the person. <br /> <br /> He killed for fun, as a game, out of sheer malice, according to Antonino Calderone. <br /> <br /> Maybe this is all we really need to know about La Primula Rossa.<br /> <br /> If we all have our own dark dreams that keep us awake in the small hours of the morning, Luciano Leggio was surely Sicily’s, until Salvatore Riina came along to live up to his nickname ‘The Beast,’ and start the whole, heartbreaking cycle over again.<br /> <br /> Paolo Borsellino, the judge murdered by Cosa Nostra in 1992, said:<br /> <br /> ‘<em>People are dying all around me. If we deny the Mafia their existence they vanish like a nightmare</em>.’<br /> <br /> He was wrong of course. It seems more than likely, they never will.<br /> <br /> Nine years later in August 2001, Pietro Lunardi, a minister of the state under the government of Silvio Berlusconi, admitted this when he claimed: ‘<em>We have to live with the Mafia. They have always been and will always be</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Giovanni Falcone wrote about the permanent sense of mortality that engulfs the life of a Mafioso:<br /> <br /> <em> ……the constant risk of death, the low value placed on the lives of</em><br /> <em> others, but also on one’s own, force them to live continually on the alert. We</em><br /> <em> are often amazed by the incredible quantity of details that besiege the</em><br /> <em> memories of the men of Cosa Nostra. But when one lives, as they do, in</em><br /> <em> expectation of the worst, one is forced to gather even the smallest crumbs.</em><br /> <em> Nothing is useless. Nothing is a product of chance. The certainty of the</em><br /> <em> closeness of death – in a moment, a week, a year – infects them with a</em><br /> <em> constant sense of the utter precariousness of their lives.</em> <br /> <br /> Could it be that Leggio lived by his own, unethical, self-interested code of behaviour because he knew how circumscribed his life was? Surrounded by men who would kill each other without cause or conscience, all operating within an element characterised by random or formulated sudden violence. Men who, as Renate Siebert pointed out, operated in an activity obsessed by death, and were in contrast to the hagiographic image they liked to portray-rebels, negative heroes and defenders of a historical tradition- instead, contrivers of violence and assassination, which spoke more of cowardice and manipulation than any patina of honour. <br /> <br /> It’s possible that in the end, Leggio quite simply adopted Machiavelli’s guiding principle that the end justifies the means, and applied this philosophy as an excuse for his lifestyle.<br /> <br /> Whatever it was that tripped him over from peasant boy to peasant boy-killer, Luciano Leggio created a journey for himself that could only ever lead to one of two destinations: death or imprisonment. <br /> <br /> I leave the final words to the late, and great, English author, Norman Lewis who wrote one of the finest books ever on the Mafia, called <em>The Honoured Society</em>. He had been in Sicily during World War Two as part of the military occupying forces, and returned in the 1960s to travel across the island and research this social criminal phenomena that was evolving, yet again in the post-war years. Another phoenix arising, just like it had before, following the assault on its seemingly invincible being by Cesare Mori in the late 1920s.<br /> <br /> He talks about a small town near Palermo, but his observations could easily apply to Corleone or any of another hundred small places across western Sicily.<br /> <br /> ‘<em>The Mafiosi of Tommaso Natale are Bedouins in double-breasted suits and gaudy pullovers, with nomad faces and eyes still screwed up from searching the depths of hallucinatory landscapes for their straying beasts. Without realizing it, they have killed each other as far back as anyone can remember, and still kill each other, not so much out of bloodthirsty sentiment, but from economic necessity. There has never been enough to go around</em>.’ <br /> <br /> Francis Ford Coppola himself, could not have created a more evocative image.<br /> <br /> <em><strong> These are of some of the sources I used in preparing the story:</strong></em><br /> <br /> <strong> Bibliography</strong><br /> <br /> Alongi, Giuseppe. El Maffia. Palermo: Sellerio Editor. 1977.<br /> Arlachi, Pino. La mafia imprenditrice. Bologna: 1983.<br /> Arlachi, Pino. Men of Dishonour. New York: 1993<br /> Bardoni, Avril. Man of Respect. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, spa. 1988.<br /> Biagi, Enzo. Il boss è solo. Milan: Mondadoris 1990.<br /> Blok, Anton. The Mafia of a Sicilian Village. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.<br /> Dalla Chiesa, C. Michele Navarra e la mafia del corleonese. Palermo: La Zisa, 1990.<br /> Dolci, Danilo. Fare prèsto (e bene) perchè si muore. Turin: Franscesco De Silva, 1954.<br /> Falcone, Giovanni. Cose di Cosa Nostra. Milano: Rizzoli, 1991<br /> Follain, John. A Dishonoured Society. London: Little Brown & Co. 1995.<br /> Gambetta, Diego. La mafia siciliana. Turin: 1992.<br /> Hess, Henner. Mafia. Rome, Bari: Laterrza and Figli Spa, 1984.<br /> Kermoal, Jacques and Bartolomeri, Martine. La mafia se met à table: Histories e recettes de l’honorable société. Paris: Actes Sud 1986.<br /> Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. Il gattopardo. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960.<br /> Lewis, Norman. The Honoured Society. New York: Putnam, 1964.<br /> Lodato, Saverio. Dieci anni di Mafia. Milan: Rizzoli, 1990.<br /> Lupo, Salvatore. Storia della Mafia. Rome: Donzelli, 1993.<br /> Lupo, Salvatore. Story of the Mafia. New York: Columbia University Press 2009.<br /> Nese, Marco. Nel Segno della Mafia: Rizzoli 1976.<br /> Pantaleone, Michele. Mafia e dròga. Turin: Einaudi, 1966.<br /> Poma, Rosario. La Mafia: Nonni e nipoli. Florence: Vallecchi, 1971.<br /> Schneider, Jane and Peter. Culture & Political Economy in Western Sicily. New York: Academic Press, 1976.<br /> Servadio, Gaia. Mafioso. New York: Stein and Day, 1976.<br /> Siebert, Renate. Mafia and anti-Mafia Concepts: Universita della Calabria.<br /> Secrets of life and death. London: Verso, 1996.<br /> Stille, Alexander. Excellent Cadavers. London: Jonathon Cape, 1995.<br /> Stajano, Corrado. Mafia: L’atto daccusa dei giudici di Palermo. Rome: Riuniti, 1992.<br /> Sterling, Clair. The Mafia. London: Grafton, 1990.<br /> Zingales, Leo. Provenzano. El Rey de Cosa Nostra. Cosenza: Pellegrini, 2001<br /> <br /> <strong> Newspapers articles from:</strong><br /> <br /> L’Ora. <br /> Giornale di Sicilia <br /> Corriere della Sera<br /> Il Messagero<br /> La Sicilia<br /> La Repubblica<br /> Città Nuova Corleone<br /> <br /> <strong>Official documents</strong><br /> <br /> <strong> Extracts from the testimony of:</strong><br /> <br /> Tommaso Buscetta to Judge Falcone and others, July-September.<br /> 1984.<br /> Salvatore Contoro to Judge Falcone and others, October 1984-June 1985<br /> Testimony of Antonino Calderone to Judge Falcone and others, March 1987-<br /> June 1988.<br /> Testimony of Gaspare Mutolo, February 1993.<br /> </p>
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Gambino Crew Pleads Guilty To Racketeering And Prostitution
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-crew-pleads-guilty-to
2011-01-12T15:00:00.000Z
2011-01-12T15:00:00.000Z
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<p>By David Amoruso<br /> <br /> It was one of the most disgraceful busts in <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">American La Cosa Nostra</a> history when fourteen Gambino Family mobsters were charged with pimping out underage girls. Though they were also charged with other crimes such as murder and extortion, it was their prostitution ring that attracted widespread attention from the media and public. <br /> <br /> For those of you who missed that story, the government says that a <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview">Gambino Crime Family</a> crew operated a prostitution business where young women and girls (some under the age of 18) were exploited and sold for sex. They put various young women and girls to work as prostitutes and advertised the prostitution business on Craigslist and other websites. The women were driven to appointments in Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Staten Island to have sex with clients. They were also available at a weekly high-stakes poker game. Almost half of what the young women earned went into the pockets of the mob family. <br /> <br /> If the American mob still had a vague respectability about it, it vanished with the above mentioned crimes. Especially when all defendants pleaded guilty to all charges against them. <br /> <br /> Of course career criminals will sometimes plead to crimes they did not commit simply to avoid the risk of an extreme long stay in jail if they are found guilty by a jury at a trial, but to plead guilty to pimping out girls under the age of 18? Well, that is something no self respecting man can do. Even more so in the tough guy world of La Cosa Nostra where mobsters claim to hold themselves to higher standards than other criminals. As I wrote in an earlier <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mob-myth-busted-gambino-family">article</a>: that myth has been thoroughly busted. <br /> <br /> The guilty pleas were announced on Monday by Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Janice K. Fedarcyk, the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the FBI.<br /> <br /> “The Gambino Family and their associates continue to use violence, threats, and intimidation to wield power and profit illegally off the backs of their many victims. But the convictions of all 14 individuals charged by this office just nine months ago has dealt the Gambinos a significant blow. As the result of our prosecution, one of the Mafia's preeminent leaders and many of its rising stars will now serve significant prison sentences. We are, however, far from finished with the Gambino Family and will continue working with our law enforcement partners to put their members and associates out of business and behind bars”, Bharara said in the press release.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236978280,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236978280,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236978280?profile=original" /></a>The “preeminent leader” Bharara mentions, is Gambino boss Daniel Marino (70), who pleaded guilty to murder conspiracy. The man who was killed was his nephew, Frank Hydell, who the mob correctly suspected of being an informant. Marino’s colleagues came to him to seek permission for the hit. In his guilty plea “Marino (right) admitted that he gave his co-conspirators the "green light" for the murder to proceed.” Marino now faces five years in prison when is sentenced on January 25. <br /> <br /> Two other Gambino gangsters waited a long time until they decided to admit guilt. Where twelve of the men had pleaded out in the past several months, Gambino soldier Thomas Orefice and associate Dominick Difiore did so on January 10. Difiore admitted to extortion and the distribution cocaine and oxycodone and faces ten years in prison. Orefice had a lot more on his plate and pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, with objects including extortion, sex trafficking, loansharking, and gambling. The 34-year-old Gambino soldier can now look forward to becoming an old man in prison as he is facing a thirty year sentence. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991689,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991689,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236991689?profile=original" width="145" /></a>Fellow Gambino soldier Onofrio Modica has a very similar outlook after pleading guilty to racketeering conspiracy, with objects including accessory to murder, jury tampering, extortion, and gambling. At age 47, he will spend the next twenty years behind bars. <br /> <br /> Janice K. Fedarcyk, the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the FBI, said the following about the case: “The guilty pleas by Orefice and Difiore effectively mark the successful end of the prosecution of this case against a portion of the Gambino Family. The fourteen defendants admitted their roles in crimes that include sex trafficking, extortion, violent assaults, and murders, putting to lie the notion that today's mob is somehow less violent or craven than in the past. While this case is effectively over, the FBI's commitment to policing the Gambino Family and La Cosa Nostra is far from over.”<br /> <br /> As Fedarcyk indicates, the war against La Cosa Nostra has not been won and the fight will continue. Where the FBI and numerous newspapers have frequently labeled certain mob cases as an end of the American mob, they are now a lot more cautious in making such claims. <br /> <br /> Mainly because the Mafia seems to be extremely resilient and deeply ingrained in the American (criminal) landscape. On January 9, an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/nyregion/10carpenters.html?_r=1&src=twrhp" target="_blank">article</a> in the New York Times showed how La Cosa Nostra still held control over the New York City District Council of Carpenters, despite the fact that it had been put under supervision after the district council’s leader, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/nyregion/29plea.html" target="_blank">Michael J. Forde</a>, and nine others, including union officials, contractors and the head of an industry association had been charged with racketeering and corruption. <br /> <br /> Though things have changed since the days of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-disappearance-of-jimmy">Jimmy Hoffa</a>, a lot, it seems, remains the same.</p>
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Profile: Genovese crime family soldier George Barone
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/genovese-soldier-george-barone
2011-01-06T20:00:00.000Z
2011-01-06T20:00:00.000Z
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-soldier-george-barone"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237013471,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237013471?profile=original" width="240" /></a><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> <br /> When George Barone died late last year, an adventurous life came to an end. He was a hero of the second world war. A founding member of the Jets street gang made famous in the musical West Side Story. And spent decades as a Genovese mobster who ruled the docks and was a favorite hitter for family boss Tony Salerno. To top it off, Barone became a cooperating witness for the government. <br /> <br /> Barone was born in 1923 in Bensonhurst, New York. When asked about his roots, he said: "I am a mongrel. I'm partly Italian, Irish, and Hungarian." As a young kid, the Barone family moved to Chelsea when his father got a job as a pier watchman. Barone dropped out of high school, and when the US entered the second World War, he signed up with the Navy. He participated in five seperate invasions in the Pacific arena of WW2.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237012887,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237012887,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237012887?profile=original" width="224" /></a>After the war, Barone returned to school for a few years, but the classroom still wasn’t for him and he joined the Merchant Marines, spending two years at sea. He probably would have spent his life traveling the world’s seas if he hadn’t injured his hand. The injury made his job impossible and pretty soon he was back in New York. <br /> <br /> Back on the mainland again, he did not venture far from his beloved ocean. In the late 1940s, he became a member of the International Longshoremen’s Association and started working as a hiring boss on the Lower West Side Pier 58. Barone got the job thanks to some old friends who had become quite prominent and influential gangsters on the Upper West Side. <br /> <br /> But it didn't keep him out of trouble. In February of 1954, longshoreman William Torres complained about Barone’s selection skills, claiming he refused to hire him. Barone and a few strong pals confronted Torres and when they had him cornered, Barone proceeded to beat him senseless with a metal bar. Police charged Barone with felonious assault, but his lawyer managed to get it toned down to disorderly conduct.<br /> <br /> When asked what he did next, Barone answered: “I became a gangster.” But he needed some back up if he wanted to become a successful racketeer and so he and a career criminal by the name of Johnny Earle formed a gang they called The Jets. Together with a bunch of other wannabe thugs they started making a name for themselves on the streets of New York. <br /> <br /> As The Jets battled other street toughs for control over the local gambling and loansharking rackets, Barone showed he had no problems killing another man. When he was being debriefed by the FBI he explained why: “I got a track record of being in a lousy, dirty, rotten environment where killing was part of staying alive.” Killing was also a big part of making a profit. When Barone and Earle heard of a thief who was sitting on a nice haul, the two gangsters waited till he got home. <br /> <br /> When the man stepped through his door, Barone shoved him down and fired several deadly shots into the unlucky thief. The two left with $650,000 in cash. Barone was crystal clear about his motives: “[He] had something we wanted. He resisted, and we shot him.”<br /> <br /> The Jets quickly became a success story and <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">La Cosa Nostra</a> took notice. One of the mobsters who was impressed with these young street toughs was Vito Genovese, who used the gang for various chores. But the relationship between Genovese and The Jets soured when the gang’s leader, Johnny Earle, was murdered in 1958, allegedly on orders that originated from within his own gang. Genovese liked Earle and with him gone had no more interest in the young gang. <br /> <br /> But Barone was still considered a good footsoldier, his success with The Jets and career with the ILA proved his skills, so it wasn’t long before he found another mobster who would take him under his wing. That wiseguy was Genovese leader Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, who had his headquarters in East Harlem. With Salerno’s backing, Barone was finally on the road to riches. Using the mob’s muscle and his own knowledge of the New York docks, he managed to expand his influence and was able to negotiate extremely favorable union deals for mobbed up companies. He later testified: “I was in La Cosa Nostra and we told the [shipping] companies what to do or else we just didn't cooperate with them. We made millions. Millions!”<br /> <br /> As the swinging sixties came to an end, Barone was the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-genovese-crime-family">Genovese Crime Family</a>’s official representative on the waterfront. He said the docks were divided between the Genoveses and Gambinos. With the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-crime-family-overview">Gambino family</a> ‘owning’ Staten Island and Brooklyn, and the Genovese family ruling over New Jersey and Manhattan. <br /> <br /> Though Barone was a huge success on the waterfront, Salerno also found him to be an extremely capable hitman and used him frequently. His great handiwork earned Barone membership in the Genovese Family. At a ceremony in Harlem in the early 1970s, he became a made member. <br /> <br /> By now, Barone was both a successful mobster as well as a success within the ILA, becoming the president of a local in Miami. But authorities were catching up and paying extra attention to the mobbed up unions. In 1979, Barone and seventeen others were charged with racketeering on the Florida waterfront. Barone was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but after successfully filing an appeal he got a sentence reduction and was a free man after serving seven years.<br /> <br /> As Barone came home to “the life” he noticed a lot had changed. For one, he no longer was the main man on the Florida docks. And second: the Genovese Family was now run by a man newspapers labeled “The Oddfather” for his crazy behavior. <br /> <br /> Though <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237013692,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237013692,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237013692?profile=original" width="224" /></a><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-boss-vincent-chin">Vincent Gigante</a> may have behaved like he belonged in a mental institution, and he actually was in and out of several mental institutions during his lifetime, everyone in the underworld knew the truth. The truth was that Gigante was very smart and the most powerful mob boss in the United States. His crazy-act had saved him from going to prison on several occasions and despite his behavior he still was highly respected by his soldiers. His word was the law for any member of the Genovese family. When he let it be known that he no longer wanted his men to refer to his name aloud, but point to their chin (Gigante was nicknamed “Chin”) instead, they all did as they were told. When mobsters did refer to him by name they were immediately reprimanded by their colleagues, as several recorded conversations proved. <br /> <br /> Barone still held sway over the waterfront, but younger wiseguys had moved into positions of more power and wealth and the ‘oldfella’ felt disrespected. It made him hard to deal with and he soon came to blows with <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/genovese-associate-andrew">Andrew Gigante</a>, the son of the family boss. Andrew needed help with getting a friendly company a lucrative contract and Barone was told to make it happen. But Barone was owed money by the company and insisted that debt be paid first. <br /> <br /> The conflict between Barone and father and son Gigante quickly escalated, resulting in Barone (right) being “put on the shelf” as it is called in mob parlance. Which meant he held no more power within the Mafia. He had become a pariah. And he knew that now that the mob no longer had any use for him, probably viewed him as a liability even, his time was surely up. That is when, in 2001, he contacted Team America.<br /> <br /> “I went bad,” Barone said about his new role as government witness. “I wanted to get even. I wanted to survive. I didn't want to get killed by them,” he added, referring to Vincent Gigante and his Genovese Family. “I decided that the Mafia is not the paternal, wonderful organization that it proposes to be. The esprit de corps does not exist. Greed, violence, betrayal: that is what exists.” <br /> <br /> Despite this epiphany, becoming a turncoat was not easy for him. “I lived all of my life without being an informer. Now I am. That is a difficult decision.” George Barone died on December 28, 2010, at age 86.</p>
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Profile of Bonanno crime family consigliere Anthony "T.G." Graziano
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/bonanno-consigliere-anthony
2010-11-26T21:00:00.000Z
2010-11-26T21:00:00.000Z
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<div><p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236994064,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236994064?profile=original" /></p>
<p>By David Amoruso</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: Former <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/former-bonanno-mafia-family-consigliere-anthony-graziano-dead-at" target="_blank">Bonanno Mafia family consigliere Anthony Graziano</a> dead at 78, his “Mob Wives” daughter reports</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Anthony "T.G." Graziano was born on November 12, 1940 in New York. When asked by a judge how far he got in school, Graziano answered "about the seventh grade". Before his school days were over Graziano had taken to a life of crime which eventually saw him joining the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-bonanno-crime-family">Bonanno Crime Family</a>. In the Bonanno Family Graziano climbed the ranks and by 1990, authorities listed him as a capo. In April of 1990, Graziano pleaded guilty to evading $100.000 in taxes and hiding assets by having them listed in names other than his own. He was sentenced to prison. In 1993 he finished his sentence and was once again a free man. He continued his business where he had left off before prison, as a capo in the Bonanno Family.<br /> <br /> By 2001 the boss of the Bonanno Family was <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/bonanno-boss-joseph-massino">Joseph Massino</a>. Massino was a close friend of Graziano. That friendship enabled him to gain even more power within the underworld. On February 15, 2001 Massino and Graziano flew to Mexico. With the imprisonment of Bonanno consigliere Anthony Spero Massino needed someone new to fill the position. The man he had in mind for the job was none other than Graziano. In Mexico Massino anointed Graziano consigliere of the Bonanno Family. Once back in the U.S. Graziano enjoyed his new powers, but things wouldn't be enjoyable for too long. On December 19, 2001 Graziano attended a Christmas party. Also in attendance were numerous Bonanno mobsters. Graziano was enjoying the evening, Christmas season meant that the Bonanno mobsters would pass along their tributes (cash) to him. When the party was over Graziano walked the short distance to his car, as he stepped inside and was about to drive off, several F.B.I. agents approached him and summoned him to step out of the car. In reply Graziano said: "What the fuck are you breaking my balls about now?". The F.B.I. agents produced a search warrant that allowed them to search him for financial records and cash. Someone had tipped the feds that Bonanno members would be passing along their tributes to Graziano at the party that night. Always eager to collect evidence to take a mobster down the F.B.I. agents took action and seized all the cash Graziano had on him. He was issued a receipt for the cash and allowed to make his journey home.<br /> <br /> In March 2002, Graziano was arrested and indicted on racketeering charges including conspiracy to distribute cocaine through a Brooklyn crew from January 1994 through October 1996, loan-sharking and conspiracy to murder two <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-colombo-crime-family">Colombo Family</a> associates. The murder conspiracy took place in 1994. Colombo associates John Pappa and Calvin Hennigar shot up a Staten Island topless joint owned by Graziano. In the process of shooting up the club they wounded a night club patron. This incident upset Graziano who in turn ordered his Brooklyn crew to find and kill the two Colombo guys. After a sitdown with another Colombo mobster was lost, the hit was called off by Graziano. In December of 2002 he would plead guilty to racketeering charges and was sentenced in September of 2003.<br /> <br /> A day after his New York indictment Graziano was indicted in South Florida. This time he was indicted for his role in illegal gambling, loan-sharking and boiler room operations. The boiler room operation was a phony tele-marketing scheme that swindled $11.7 million from investors. In April 2003 Graziano pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering but his lawyer Jefrey Hoffman said that Graziano had virtually no involvement with the investment/boiler room scam. While about $2,000 of its proceeds allegedly went to Graziano as a gift, he knew no details about the operation or even where it was located, Hoffman said.<br /> <br /> July 18, 2003 was the day of reckoning for Graziano, he was to be sentenced for the South Florida case. In court Graziano greeted the prosecutor, assistant U.S. attorney William Shockley, with: "How are you Mr. Shockley? I'm glad you could come to my funeral." Graziano was sentenced to 135 months or 11 years in a federal prison. At one of his trials an associate of Graziano was asked by a reporter whether Graziano was cooperating with authorities, he responded: "Are you nuts?" "That man is a man and a half." When asked by a judge how he made a living Graziano answered: "I was a broker in between. You know, I put two people together, like a broker."<br /> <br /> On November 13, 2003, Anthony graziano was sentenced to nine years in prison for tax evasion and racketeering, including a plot to murder two mobsters. The sentence will run alongside a racketeering sentence Graziano received in Florida earlier this year.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: Former <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/former-bonanno-mafia-family-consigliere-anthony-graziano-dead-at" target="_blank">Bonanno Mafia family consigliere Anthony Graziano</a> dead at 78, his “Mob Wives” daughter reports</strong></li>
</ul>
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Whack Out on Willie Moretti
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/whack-out-on-willie-moretti
2010-11-18T12:36:28.000Z
2010-11-18T12:36:28.000Z
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<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10663251668?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=300"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc</a>.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996881,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />He went to church every Sunday in Deal, New Jersey, with his wife and three daughters. The kids in the neighbourhood called him 'cump.' He had a home there on five acres, where he raised prize ducks, that was valued at $400,000. By to-days standards, many millions. He was short and squat with thinning hair, brushed straight back and whenever you see a photo of him, he's wearing the most hideous, hand-painted silk ties.<br /> <br /> One of a kind was Willie (right).<br /> <br /> Then one day, in October 1951, he arranged to have lunch with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but before he could keep that appointment, he had another, with four guys in Joe's Elbow Room at 793 Palisades Avenue in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. Dino and Jerry never got to sit with the man that day. His other friends shot him a number of times and left him sprawled on his back, on the floor, dead and bleeding, sporting another awful tie.<br /> <br /> He was a best friend to Frank Costello, who had been his best man at his wedding and a godfather to at least one of his children, led a gang of really tough guys, 60 at least, in the Garden State, with a lock on gambling that had made him and Frank very rich, was allegedly the under boss of the mob Frank controlled, now called the Genovese Family, never carried less than $2000 in his money roll, drove the best cars money could buy.<br /> <br /> So why did it all go horribly wrong that crisp, clean morning of October 4th?<br /> <br /> There was a rumour going around that he'd gone a little off his mind, more than a little really, because of the damage done by syphilis that he'd contacted in his younger days, and that he had to be put down before he did irreparable damage to Cosa Nostra, babbling away at the Kefauver Hearings, telling reporters little tit-bits of information, that kept stirring the pot on organized crime in New Jersey. That wasn't the reason of course. As always in the Mafia, what you see and hear is not what you necessarily get. Willie had to go because Vito Genovese was sick of waiting to take back the family he'd left in Frank's hands in 1937, when he did a runner to Italy to avoid a murder rap. He'd been back four years, and now, he was ready to make his move.<br /> <br /> Then again maybe there was an even more basic reason Willie got the clip that morning. Some sources claim he had reneged on a drug deal, and the party of the first part decided he no longer needed the party of the second part.<br /> <br /> Quarico Moretti grew up in East Harlem on East 108th Street, just up the block from Frank Costello who became one of his closest friends. His first, probably his only, legitimate job, was delivering milk for 25 cents a week. He tried his hand at prize-fighting but at 5'4'' he wasn't big enough or heavy enough to go anywhere there, so he got into crime like so many of his peers, and found he was really good at that. At some stage during this period of his life, people started calling him Willie Moore, a knick-name he came to use more and more often himself. He became so well established and trusted in the mob, that he was sent to meet and escort back to New York, Joe Bonanno, when he landed illegally in America The Federal Bureau of Narcotics kept tabs on Willie, and he was listed by them in 1931 as a major narcotics violator, with his own ID number: 138-A. By the time the Castellammarese War was under way, he was 36 years old and a seasoned veteran of the New York underworld. Along with Frank and Vito and big Al and little Tommy Luchese, he backed Masseria, then changed sides when the momentum shifted.<br /> <br /> After the dust settled, he moved over to New Jersey and started what was to become one of the biggest gambling and sports betting operations in the state. He worked in conjunction with Longy Zwillman and Anthony Sabio aka 'Chicago Fats'.<br /> <br /> In 1944, Joe Doto, another major player in the crime family then run by Charley Luciano, upped and left Brooklyn and moved across the Hudson and joined them. They creamed huge revenues from the numbers business and bookies working for them in factories, at the ports and offices in Bergen County, the New York wide spread wire system and the illegal casinos and 'sawdust' dice barns they set up in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Moretti expanded into legitimate areas: laundries, cigarette vending companies, trucking companies, wherever there seemed good opportunities to launder money.<br /> <br /> He was a consummate gambler, to the point that he converted his family room in the big house down in Deal into a sports betting room, and would often hosts groups of other gamblers who would spend the day betting on horses and sports events.<br /> <br /> Willie was a man of respect in every sense, important enough to attend the mob convention in May 1929 at Atlantic City, and fly down to Havana, Cuba to meet up with Lucky Luciano at the Hotel Nacional, having been one of the twenty or so senior mob figures who waved Lucky goodbye when he was deported on February 2nd, 1946 from New York. No doubt, if he'd lived long enough, the cops would have caught him running his chubby little legs off, through the woods at Apalachin.<br /> <br /> That morning, Thursday, October 4th., Willie drove himself to the restaurant, parking his new, cream coloured Packard convertible outside the building. His chauffer, Harry Shepherd, had been loaned out to one of Willie's associates, Albert Anastasia, who'd claimed his own driver was sick, and he had to go for an X Ray appointment that morning to St. Mary's Hospital up in Passaic. He'd make sure he stayed there until the afternoon, thereby setting up the perfect alibi.<br /> <br /> As Willie stepped from his car, a man came out of the restaurant. They shook hands, and went inside. There, three other men were waiting. According to the waitress on duty that day, Dorothy Novack, the group chatted awhile in Italian at a table by the window, then asked to see the menu. She went into the kitchen, and a moment later heard gun shots. Smart woman, she waited awhile, and when she came out, found Willie dead on the floor, lying next to one of the tables. It was 11.25 am.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236996890,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
<p><br /> <br /> The cops arrived, and the dicks wandered around, taking a few photos, smoking, chatting to themselves. They seemed more interested in the re-play on a radio, of the historic baseball pennant match fought out the day before, between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, than the corpse they had come to inspect and evaluate. He was after all, just another guinea. Gone.<br /> <br /> There was a cafe sign above the body, advertising the special of the day: Chicken in the Rough-$1.50<br /> <br /> Willie lay in quiet repose on the black and white lino floor. His left arm was crooked, thick, ham fist holding onto his heart long stilled; his ankles neatly crossed, a hint of sock showing, his eyes closed to the violence of that final moment, as his killers shot him, face on, a mark of respect- he had the right to see what was happening- the blood pooling out from under his shattered head, one of those awful ties, soaked in red, crumpled over the shoulder of his open jacket. They killed him with respect because it was to be seen as an act of pity, putting a sick lion to sleep. It wasn't of course. Imprudent as he may have been, Willie died to satisfy ambition, or maybe revenge, rather than to ameliorate a sad case of loose lips.<br /> <br /> The cops never caught the guys who did it, which in mob killings is almost a given. They found a couple of fedoras, carelessly left on tables by the gang, and one of them was traced to a dry cleaners on 6th Avenue in Manhattan, which interestingly enough, lay just across the street from the apartment of the brother of one John 'Johnny Roberts' Robilotto, a guy well know to the cops.<br /> <br /> Forty seven year old Johnny Roberts was originally sponsored into the Luciano organization by Tony Bender, a shifty, double-dealing crew boss, close to Vito Genovese, but Costello vetoed him on the grounds his brother was a cop. Albert Anastasia took a liking to him and worked him into his own family. Johnny was therefore a big supporter of Big Al; probably when Al said 'jump' Johnny would have said 'how high?' <br /> <br /> In due course, the police arrested one Joseph Li Calsi and charged him and Robilotto, but the evidence against them didn't stack up, and they were subsequently released. So did Johnny kill Willie and if so, why would Albert A. sanction this? He was supposedly a close friend and ally of Frank Costello, hated Genovese with a vengeance and logically would have done nothing to help him in his attempt to dethrone Frank, which the killing of Moretti would surely have helped along.<br /> <br /> But Al had gone to all that trouble to establish an alibi so must have known what was going down that morning. Did 'The Commission' ratify it, as has been supposed. Who knows? Maybe they did, maybe not. If they did, then surely Frank Costello had to be one who voted against the motion, but got lost in the numbers.<br /> <br /> It's complicated, as are most mob politics. Everyone involved is long dead and the mob don't keep minutes, so all we have is hypothesis, a dangerous quicksand to navigate when dealing with Cosa Nostra lore.<br /> <br /> Some sources claim there was an 'open' contract out on Willie, so anyone could kill him if and when the opportunity arose. But for Anastasia to go to the trouble arranging that alibi, indicates that he knew the killing was going down that morning.<br /> <br /> Did Al hope to move in and take over Willie's very lucrative operations. Hardly. There's was Willie's brother Salavator 'Solly' the right bower, to contend with and 'Johnny Caboos' the left bower, Willie's trusted number two. Both tough guys, and don't forget the heavy hitters in the crew who respected and supported the boss. How would they react? Another theory that went around, was that Anastasia, worried about Moretti's behaviour insofar as it might impact on his own safety, had him killed before Willie killed him. But why would Willie lend a guy his driver, then kill him?<br /> <br /> The other thing that’s worth some thought is just who were the guys Willie had arranged to meet and for why? He was a busy man, pushed for time. He had this big lunch date with two of America's top movie stars, so this detour into Cliffside Park had to be important. What was it about? He surely knew one, if not all of the men waiting for him. What was so important that morning that couldn't wait until another day?<br /> <br /> Shifting sands, broken mirrors, circles going nowhere.<br /> <br /> The thing that is intriguing is why would gunmen from another mob be used? There were plenty of tough guys in the family over in Harlem and down on the west side. In the Gambino Family, there was a long history of bosses getting killed by their own guys-Mangano, Anastasia, Castellano. It makes more sense to use your own troops surely, easier to control and manage.<br /> <br /> It's a puzzle, and it's logical to suppose the missing pieces will stay just that.<br /> <br /> They gave him a funeral on October 9th. fit for the king of Bergen County- over 5000 people attending either the ceremony or internment- as his family and friends travelling in 75 cars, buried him in a $5000 coffin inside a sepulchre in Saint Michaels Cemetery, on South Main Street, in Hackensack. It sits there to-day, squat and gray, with a cross on the roof, towering over the tombstones that stretch away on all sides.<br /> <br /> In life, Willie Moore never towered over anyone. He's made up for it now.<br /> <br /> The place where Willie got whacked is still a place where you can go to eat. The building, on the corner of Palisade and Marion Avenue, was bought and renovated by the Esposito family from Amalfi, Italy, who turned it, sometime in the 1980's, into the Villa Amalfi, one of the better Italian restaurants in this part of New Jersey. There's music and good food, friendly service and the only thing that gets whacked there to-day is the steak.<br /> </p>
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Hit in Harlem: The Life and Times of Eugenio Giannini
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/hit-in-harlem-the-life-and
2010-11-17T14:53:40.000Z
2010-11-17T14:53:40.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> By all accounts he wasn’t that nice a person.<br /> <br /> Described as small, lecherous and ugly, with a temperament to match, it’s hard to find anything redeeming in a life like his, cut short by the mid forties. He played one shady card too many, and found out the hard way that the mob doesn’t tolerate rats or double-crossers. It was only because of Joe Valachi that he made more than just a mention in the New York daily papers: another gangster taken for a one-way ride and dumped in the street. Another sad sack, emptied by the ill fortunes of bad timing and egocentric judgment. It was Joe who let us in on the details of that last night in Harlem, and helped the cops close their case on the body found on 107th Street early on the morning of September 21st, 1952.<br /> <br /> Eugenio (sometimes referred to as Eugene) Giannini was born in 1906 in Bari, Calabria, on the southern tip of the Italian peninsular. His parents immigrated to America, and he grew up in New York. Some sources claim his family settled in the Harlem or Bronx area, others that they laid down roots down in Greenwich Village. For a time as a teenager, he earned his living as a boxer, claiming 13 victories by knockouts. There is no record of just how he drifted into the criminal underworld, but in 1927 in Newport R.I., he served time for robbery, and again in 1928, he was arrested for carrying a revolver and pulled a five to ten year term in Dannemora prison. It was here, that he undoubtedly teamed up with at least one or more of the small group that later formed themselves into a ‘cowboy’ group that cruised the streets of New York looking for potential hold-up targets.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989690,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Released, he was again arrested in 1934 for armed robbery, but this time it also included a charge of first-degree murder for having shot and killed a police officer during the course of a hold up.<br /> <br /> Giannini (photo right) and his partners had been confronted by the patrolman, and in the ensuring shoot-out, the officer was killed and three people were wounded. Somehow, in the make-believe world of the New York jurisprudence system, charges were dismissed and Giannini went free.<br /> <br /> It’s a given in the Mafia underworld that you don’t kill law enforcement officers. Too much, far too much heat. Giannini was almost certainly not yet linked into that strange, mysterious brotherhood that afternoon when he went to meet his associates.<br /> <br /> The man who would become their main victim, left his home at 40 Pendelton Place, New Brighton, on Staten Island, a curved, tree shaded residential street, probably sometime after lunch, as he was working the four to midnight shift on this day, May 4th 1934. I see him playing with his young sons, then kissing his wife good-bye, forever as it turned out.<br /> <br /> Standing by the door to their small, neat house, watching him stroll down the street towards the sea, maybe she waved to him, one last time. He lived only about a mile and a half from the ferry terminal, so it’s possible he walked the journey. The five cent fare would take him to lower Manhattan in about thirty minutes.<br /> <br /> It was going to be a hot day-temperatures would get up into the 80s by late afternoon in Central Park- perhaps even hotter where he would be working. It could be he stood on the ship’s deck, letting whatever breeze there was cool things down; the wind blowing through his short, dark hair, brushed back from his strong, oblong- shaped Scandinavian type face. As likely as not, he caught a street car from South Ferry Terminal, reaching the precinct building at number nine Oak Street in plenty of time to get ready for his watch.<br /> <br /> Some of the streets he walked no longer exist to-day because of the redevelopments in the area: the new off ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, and the massive twelve apartment buildings that make up the Governor Alfred E. Smith Housing projects.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236990063,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />That afternoon however, after signing in and getting ready for his shift, he left the station house, walked the short distance to New Chambers Street, turning east to Cherry and then north up Cherry before turning into Oliver, and that’s where it all turned bad.<br /> <br /> Patrolman Arthur P. Rasmussen (right), Badge No. 13779, was 31 years old. An eight year veteran of the New York Police Department, his beat was the teeming, cramped streets and thoroughfares of the old Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side, sometimes referred to as ‘Little Spain.’<br /> <br /> Like police officers the world over, his daily routine would be 97% boring routine, with maybe 3% of sheer terror and chaos kicking in.<br /> <br /> For Arthur Rasmussen, to-day would be a three per center.<br /> <br /> Unknown to him, just a few hundred yards away events were shaping up that would change things forever.<br /> <br /> At 83 Oliver Street, Leonardo and Orizio Mangano were busy serving customers at their grocery store, a few hundred feet north of the Cherry Street intersection. Three men walked into the shop. They were, according to witnesses, almost identical: short, swarthy, with black hair under their fedoras, slim and well-dressed in dark coloured suits The men produced revolvers and demanded money. The two brothers handed over their day’s takings-$147-and although the thieves warned them to stay quiet as they left, Orizio threw a milk bottle through the storefront window, shouting out an alarm.<br /> <br /> The robber’s startled by this, began running away down towards Cherry Street brandishing their guns, clearing a way through the crowded sidewalk..<br /> <br /> Meanwhile Officer Rasmussen continued his beat, actually walking past the robber’s getaway-car, a tan coloured Auburn, parked at the northwest corner of Cherry and New Chambers Street-the driver sitting there- the car engine ticking over as the police officer walked past him.<br /> <br /> As he approached the corner of Oliver Street, Rasmussen heard the noise of people screaming and saw crowds running, scattering across the street and sidewalks. The three men appeared running towards him like crazy, their little legs pumping like pistons looking for a con rod.<br /> <br /> As soon as they saw the blue uniform they started shooting. By the time Officer Rasmussen had cleared his revolver, he had been shot three times- in the jaw, chest and abdomen. He collapsed onto the sidewalk as the robbers leapt over and around him, in their mad rush to their car. Struggling to his knees, the police officer fired his .38 revolver repeatedly after the crooks, until it clicked empty. Due to the street being so crowded, he must have strained to pick his targets without endangering any of the dozens of people milling about.<br /> <br /> Caught in the cross-fire, three civilian victims were injured:<br /> <br /> Ten month old Thomas Farino, the son of another Oak Street officer, who was being taken for a walk by his aunt, Sue Farino, was grazed in the face by a wild shot; Joseph Gaetano, over from Brooklyn for the day, received a wound above his left eye as he was playing ball in the street with some pals. Officer Rasmussen had stopped briefly and taken a friendly swat at the ball with his nightstick. Leonora Albanese, who lived on Cherry Street was with two of her girlfriends. It was her birthday and she had just purchased a cake. The girls were walking three abreast, Leonora in the middle, when she was hit just above the heart. Shots ricocheted off parked cars, and fire escapes and one shattered the window of a barber’s shop.<br /> <br /> Arthur Rasmussen finally collapsed in a heap outside a Greek coffee shop. He was bundled into a taxi by some people in the street and rushed half a mile south to the Beekman Street Hospital, but was dead on arrival. As doctors tried to resuscitate him, the three wounded victims started arriving, also by taxis.<br /> <br /> The murder of Officer Rasmussen was the latest in a series of shootings involving New York Police officers. Two other patrolmen had been killed and four seriously wounded since the first day of the year. One of the wounded, Patrolman Lawrence Ward gunned down on 101st Street in Harlem the same morning of the day Officer Rasmussen was shot, died of his injuries on May 6th and the city was in an uproar.<br /> <br /> Mayor LaGuardia issued an edict from City Hall demanding the police ‘shoot to kill’ any bandits plaguing the streets. All available detectives and patrolmen were launched on a manhunt for Rasmussen’s killers. Dozen of cops congregated in the area to help search for them. Patrol cars from the Battery to Fourteenth Street were ordered to converge in a huge dragnet around the area. Detectives were assigned to cover all railways stations, ferries and main highways out of the city.<br /> <br /> It took the police fifteen days to make the breakthrough in the case.<br /> <br /> Two ace detectives, from Oak Street-Gunson and Kaplan- were given one job: trace that brown coloured Auburn getaway-car.<br /> <br /> No one had remembered the plate number, but some witnesses swore it started with a ‘U.’ That brought the two cops into the Bronx, where it might have been registered. After a lot of footwork, the detectives discovered a car like this may have been parked on Second Avenue in Harlem, and eventually tracked down a young boy, Joseph Borello who lived with his mother in an apartment at number 2165. He knew the car-and even better-who owned it. His name was ‘Whitey’ and he lived on East 109th Street, two blocks south. Calling up reinforcements, the officers rushed to the apartment and found Ralph DeLillo.<br /> <br /> Taken to the Oak Street precinct, DeLillo was ‘vigorously’ questioned by the detectives, finally confessing to his part in the robbery and implicating two of his associates, Alfred Luicci and Gene Giannini who was also using the alias ‘Eugene Giovanni.’ Both men were quickly arrested and booked. They were held without bail as the prosecutor’s office and the police kept investigating, looking for others who might have been involved in the robbery and shoot-out.<br /> <br /> It was believed by the authorities that the gang had intended to hold up the construction office of the huge Knickerbocker Village complex being erected at 137 Cherry Street. The worker’s payroll was due to be delivered on Friday afternoon, but police assigned to guard it became suspicious and delayed its delivery. This may have forced the killers to pick another target in the neighbourhood.<br /> <br /> Interestingly enough, Giannini was found to have an infected wound on his right leg, which may have been a gunshot wound, indicating that although dying, as he fired off his revolver, Police Officer Rasmussen may well have hit one of his targets.<br /> <br /> On May 7th, Police Officer Arthur P. Rasmussen was buried at 3 o’clock with a full Inspector’s funeral in the Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp. Over one hundred police officers attended along with family and friends. He lies buried in the single grave section, number 2819. His wife Sophie and his sons, Eugene and Charles have joined him there, over the years.<br /> <br /> Officer Rasmussen's grave is on the westerly edge of the cemetery. At night, on an adjoining property, the New Dorp Lighthouse’s beacon of light shone out into the Atlantic Ocean guiding vessels into New York Harbor past the notorious West Bank, protecting ships as Officer Rasmussen had protected people in his life as a policeman.<br /> <br /> A year later on May 2nd, Ralph DeLillio, the twenty-seven year old Harlem gangster was sentenced to thirty years in the penitentiary at Sing Sing for the murder of the police officer.<br /> <br /> From records available, he seems to have been the only member of the gang of four that actually did any time for the killing. Eugene Giannini managed to escape this one, although arrogant and filled with a sense of self-importance, he apparently confessed to his mob pals, in years to come, chatting over card games of briscola and trisette in social clubs, how he ‘had knocked off that cop bastard.’<br /> <br /> Joe Valachi, the mobster who turned informant, claimed that Giannini was part of the 107th Street Mob, the group we recognize today as the Luchese Crime Family, under its boss, Giacomo Reina, although it’s possible he was actually connected into the crime family run then by Charley Luciano.<br /> <br /> He was known to his mob associates as 'Gino' or sometimes 'Genie,’ and worked off and on with a tight-knit gang of drug traffickers which included 'Big John' Ormento, Joe Valachi, Fiore Sano, Salvatore Shillitani, Pat Pagano and Pat Moccio.<br /> <br /> Some researchers claim he was a close friend of Luciano and at times, he did business with Anthony Strollo, also known as 'Tony Bender,' a capo, or crew chief, in Luciano’s group, a crooked wheeler and dealer who was also an immediate and personal friend of the mob Machiavelli, Vito Genovese. Giannini, along with boyhood friends from the Greenwich Village area, Pasquale Moccio and Vincenzo Mauro, apparently also helped Strollo in his drug dealing activities.<br /> <br /> Shillitani went back a long way with Joe Valachi. An early associate of Tommy Luchese, he had been part of a street gang formed by Joe, running burglary and break-in teams in the late 1920s. Shillitani was inducted into the Mafia at the same time as Joe, and another tight buddy, Frank Calluce in 1930. Valachi eventually shifted allegiance from the group he was initially elected to, run by Joe Bonanno, into the one run by Luciano. He actually started his mob career with the crime family run by Reina, and may well have been the only hoodlum in the mob to shift base three times throughout his criminal career.<br /> <br /> Shillitani had been born in 1906 in Sicily, his given family name being Scillitano (1) and had immigrated to New York with his family as a child.<br /> <br /> He was hardly that successful as a mobster, spending a lot of his time in prison for various crimes, including drug trafficking that always seemed to go wrong. On a scale of one to ten as a success in his chosen career, he probably rated 100.<br /> <br /> His mob pals called him ‘Solly Shields’ and after limited schooling, he had gone to work as a butcher. He left this job and then linked into Valachi’s street gang. He first served a 2-10 year sentence in prison for attempted robbery in 1925. Paroled from Sing Sing prison in 1928, he was quickly re-arrested for petit larceny and found himself back in the familiar granite building up the Hudson River. Released, he was back there yet again in 1929 for parole violation. He somehow managed to stay clear of the law for a while, but then on January 28th 1932, he and Nicky Paduano were part of a group involved in a shoot-out at the corner of Mace and Paulding Avenues in the Bronx. Twenty-year old Benedetto Bellini got the worst of this and laid down and died. Chased by Police Officer Thomas Qualles, Police Commissioner Muldoon’s driver, Nicky also ended up dead, courtesy of the cop’s .38, and Solly finished up in cuffs.<br /> <br /> On May 25th., in front of Judge Barrett in the Bronx County Court, 27 year old Shillitani was found guilty of the manslaughter of Benedetto Bellino, and went away on a twenty year sentence, serving fourteen, and being released in 1946. At this point, never obviously a good learner, he decided to go donkey-deep into drug trafficking.<br /> <br /> A police officer whose path kept crossing Shillitani’s said of him:<br /> <br /> ‘He’s been a bum and a hood all his life. His associates are all bums and hoods and he’ll die a hoodlum. He’s just no good.’<br /> <br /> He and Joe had less than a stellar relationship as they moved through the Mafia underworld, scuffling for their share of the money-making opportunities all mobsters seem to devote their lives to finding. They also had their run-ins on numerous occasions.<br /> <br /> Sometime in August, 1951, Sal went up to Joe’s bar and grill, The Lido Bar on Castle Hill Avenue, in The Bronx. A few days before Valachi had supplied his friend with a quarter of a kilo of heroin, which Shillitani had on sold, unknowingly to an agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics code-named ‘Pocoroba.’ The drug however, turned out to be less than perfect.<br /> <br /> ‘Joe,’ Shillitani said, ‘that merchandise you gave me, that is not on par, it’s not what you said it is. I got the guy "‘Pocoroba’" with me, out in the car, and he is kicking like hell.’<br /> <br /> ‘I can’t do nothing,’ said Joe, ‘it’s the way I get it, and the way I give it. I give you my word, I never touch it. The way I get it is the way I give to you. Any future time I can make good for it, let us see.’<br /> <br /> ‘Solly Shields’ spent a lot more time in the pen than Joe, but managed to outlive him by almost twenty years, dying in a Miami hospice in 1990, aged 84!<br /> <br /> By the early 1940s, Giannini was running a variety of legitimate businesses, including a venture in restaurant supplies, and a garbage collection firm called the Eagle Waste Company. These were convenient covers for the illegitimate operations he supervised from his office at East 74th Street, which included gambling, loan sharking and the wholesaling of drugs. In between his frequent sojourns in the state prison, Shillitani also ran horse-betting and policy books with Giannini from these premises.<br /> <br /> Giannini got himself married to a woman who had come to America from Sicily and they had two children.<br /> <br /> He was arrested again in 1942 by agents of the Federal Narcotics Bureau for peddling drugs, and served fifteen months in prison. He kept clear of the law through the rest of this period, and early in 1950 was apparently putting together a deal with two of his close associates, Shillitani and Giacomo Reina, members of the 107th Street Mob, now working under the control of Gaetano Gagliano.<br /> <br /> Reina’s father, Gaetano, had been the family head until he was gunned down in February 1930 during the mob war that perhaps resulted in the restructuring and formation of the New York Mafia crime families that operate to this day.<br /> <br /> The deal Giannini and the other two family members had set up, involved him personally shipping high demand medical drugs such as penicillin and sulphur based medicines, both in short supply following the end of the world war, into Italy, and using the profits from this to purchase heroin to bring back into New York.<br /> <br /> Giannini would in addition, take along on his trip, 15000 dollars in forged US currency for sale to the highest bidder, to help bolster the pot. He also wanted to take the opportunity to re-establish contact with members of the Paris and Marseilles French-Corsican drug gangs, people he had associated with during the late 1940s, frequenting bars and taverns on the New York waterfront. Men like Joseph Orsini, Marius Ansaldi, Francois Spirito, and Jean David, veterans of the European drug-trafficking business, who had operated prior to, and then after the end of the Second World War. These men controlled the flow of narcotics through Paris and Marseilles, and the major ports of Cherbourg and Le Havre.<br /> <br /> The big and balding Ansaldi dominated the Paris branch of the Corsica/French junta which was based in Marseilles and around the Place Pigalle in Paris, and he had been involved in drug trafficking for over thirty years. One of the reasons behind Giannini’s visit to Europe was to meet up with Ansaldi and consolidate his New York-French connection with him.<br /> <br /> Linked to the European based group in North America was Tony d’Agostino, who headed up and oversaw the importation of cargo into Canada and New York. He was based initially in Montreal from 1946, moving to Mexico City in 1948. He was another major contact that Giannini had developed, and the Algerian-Frenchman also counted many other mob family notables as friends and customers, including Frank Scalice, a senior capo in the New York Mafia family run by Vincenzo Mangano<br /> <br /> With his wife and children, and a big, roomy Cadillac full of product hidden away in secret compartments, Giannini drove up into Canada. Sailing from Montreal early in 1950, he landed at Le Havre in France. This was the first of three trips he would make to Europe in the next two years.<br /> <br /> He first travelled to Paris where he met up with his Corsican connections, and then drove south into Italy and to Naples to touch base with his old friend Charley Luciano, now living there in exile since his deportation from America.<br /> <br /> According to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Luciano was knee deep in drug peddling, acting as a vital link between Italian and American mob interests. He was undoubtedly at the great Mafia gabfest that was held at The Grand Hotel des Palmes in Palermo in 1957, that amongst other things, perhaps helped solidify drug dealing arrangements between the two countries.<br /> <br /> Charley Luciano aka Lucky Luciano aka Charles Ross, aka Salvatore Lucania lived in Italy, not from choice, but by default. Convicted on prostitution charges in 1936 in New York, he was sent to prison, effectively for the rest of his life. By what could be called an amazing series of coincidences, or as some referred to it: ‘Lucky’s Luck,’ he found himself free after ten years, although having to suffer the indignity of forced deportation back to his place of birth.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989867,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
<p> </p>
<div style="text-align:center;font-weight:bold;">Photo: Charley Luciano and two of his young admirers</div>
<p><br /> He left New York early in 1946, on a scuttlebutt cargo ship called the ’Laura Keane’ and stepped off it in Palermo, Sicily. Legend has it, getting on the boat he had $150, getting off, wrapped in his underwear in one of his suitcases was stashed $150,000. Like so many mob fables, this may be true, then again, it may be simple fiction that has turned into fact because it has been repeated enough times over the years.<br /> <br /> Charley in due course, settled in mainland Italy, eventually in Naples where he lived the rest of his life leaving only briefly towards the end of 1946. Using a most circuitous route via Venezuela, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, he travelled to Cuba, arriving there on October 29th.<br /> <br /> He stayed firstly at the Hotel Nacional, and then at a spacious private residence in the exclusive neighbourhood of Miramar, only a few blocks from the home of the Cuban president. This house belonged to General Perez Damera, chief of the Cuban general staff. Indalecio Pertierra, a Cuban parliamentarian and manager of the Havana Jockey Club, used his clout to arrange legal residence for Charley.<br /> <br /> When the FBN discovered Charley was in Cuba, they brought pressure to bear through their own government to have him deported, and he was kicked out on March 20th 1947<br /> <br /> In the meantime, in late December, mob bosses from America- Italian and Jewish- descended on the Nacional and some kind of underworld conference took place over the next few days. We really have no idea what was discussed at this conclave as there is no hard evidence from any reliable source.<br /> <br /> It is logical to assume however, that on the agenda may well have been narcotic trafficking from Italy into America. Luciano had probably decided this was his route to wealth, now that he had lost the jewel in his crown-New York- and this meeting was the rational venue to lay down some rules and maybe establish contacts.<br /> <br /> From that meeting probably grew Luciano’s eventual complex, interlocking network of dealers and managers, who helped him run his drug trafficking business. They included:<br /> <br /> In Sicily, possibly Nicola Gentile and Giuseppe Settecasi in Agrigento; Frank Coppola in Partinico, and Sal and Ugo Caneba, who supervised the many illegal heroin labs located on the island, creating the heroin from the raw materials shipped from the Far East through the ‘Corsican Connection.’<br /> <br /> On the mainland, he had Joe Pici, an alleged former soldier in the Vincent Mangano crime family that was based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He looked after Genoa and Milan, along with Giovanni and Corrado Maugeri; Frank Barone and Joe Arena handled things in Rome. Then, there was Alberts Barras and Antonio, Giuseppe and Sebastiano Bellanca and Tommy Martino another expatriate Mangano soldier, helping to feed the shipments from the ports of Italy into New York, Detroit and Canada.<br /> <br /> A bewildering multitude of men from all over Italy and New York. Short, squat, dark-skinned, black-haired characters who look at you from mug shots with eyes that crepitate with the venom you would expect from serial killers waiting to pounce on their next victims.<br /> <br /> The Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been trying for over 20 years to bust the American Mafia’s hold on the dope trafficking business. They were extremely successful in this respect. Between 1956 and 1964 they were responsible for the arrest and conviction of 206 Mafia members for crimes involving drug trafficking, some of the more notorious being Vito Genovese, Big John Ormento and Carmine Galante.<br /> <br /> The FBN was abolished, and incorporated into the BNDD Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968, and then the DEA Drug Enforcement Agency in July 1973.<br /> <br /> Formed originally in 1930 under its commissioner, Harry J. Anslinger, the FBN had recognized the mob for what it was long before Hoover and his Federal Bureau would even acknowledge that the entity even existed. The FBN believed that the Mafia was ideally situated to operate in the illegal narcotics business which by its very nature is international in dimension. The Sicilian arm of the honoured society liaised with the many Mafiosi who had been deported back into Italy from America and who had the contacts still in place in the major cities like New York. They also used connections in Turkey and the Middle East, as well as their Corsican allies, and their links into the French drug laboratories, to ensure a continuous flow of the raw opium material and its processing into the finished powder base.<br /> <br /> After his stay in Naples, Giannini and his family, motored down through Italy, crossed the Straights of Messina and travelled across Sicily to Palermo. There, a Packard convertible, bought with some of the proceeds of the drugs and counterfeit money, was packed with heroin, stashed away and welded into secret compartments under the car’s wings. The vehicle was taken back into North America by a courier who brought along his aged mother as a decoy for any inquisitive custom agent. The car came ashore in Montreal aboard the S.S. Empress of Canada . It was then driven down into Vermont, where Giannini himself was waiting, having returned from his own travels in Europe. The car and its contents were taken to New York, where the drugs were disposed of.<br /> <br /> The success of this first venture encouraged Giannini into his further visits into Europe, but on these, he travelled alone, leaving his wife and children in New York. During the spring and summer of 1950 he moved between New York, Paris and Palermo. It seems that through the rest of 1950 and into 1951, he organized a steady stream of American-Italian tourists, bringing their big, cavernous automobiles with them, into Europe, mainly via the port of Le Havre, in northern France. Groups which a cynical FBN agent referred to in a report as ‘Giannini’s European Tours.’ The cars would be driven into Paris or Palermo, and while they were being serviced at a pre-selected garage, loaded up with packets of heroin. The couriers would then make their way back via liners such as The Queen Elizabeth or The Queen Mary which would dock in New York. Giannini would also use theSS Scythia , which came into North America at Quebec.<br /> <br /> This routine went on without a hitch until April 1951. Giannini, on one of his European visits, was driving from the French Riviera into Italy, when he was stopped at the San Remo checkpoint by the Guardia di Finanza , the Italian Financial Police, who also operate the custom service and man the border check points. Arrested and taken before a magistrate in Ventimigila, near Liguria, he was remanded to await trial on a charge of complicity in distributing counterfeit money. One of his associates in the scam the previous year had been arrested and had named Gino as his supplier.<br /> <br /> This may have been Pierre Lafitte, who approached the FBN to help him avoid deportation, from New York, by offering to help the agency set up a major sting operation that would help snare Joseph Orsini, the fourty-eight year old fellow Corsican.<br /> <br /> A one-time resident of New York, living in a Brownstone at 26 W. 85th Street, near Central Park, Orsini was now based in France, working closely with a number of major heroin traffickers and their chemists. With his melon shaped head, and pencil-thin moustache, he looked like a worn out version of Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther movies. A former merchant seaman, with a long criminal record and convictions for fraud, robbery and collaboration with the Germans during World War Two, he used his contacts in the maritime trade to have drugs smuggled from Europe into New York, using seamen as couriers.<br /> <br /> He was imprisoned on Ellis Island awaiting deportation as an alien. Knowing he would have to leave America, sooner than later, Orsini persuaded Lafitte, also in custody on the island, to become a partner in his latest drug importing deal that also linked Shillitani, Pat Pagano, Moccio and another drug dealer, Larry Quartiero. Because they both came from Corsica, maybe Orsini felt a bond with the other Frenchman; felt he was a man he could trust because of his roots. He couldn’t have been more wrong as it turned out.<br /> <br /> Concurrently, the FBN’s European office was launching its own investigation into Frank Callace and his major chemist contact, Carlo Migliandi, who was eventually charged with arranging the exportation of over 800 kilos of heroin into America between 1946 and 1953. Through Charles Siragusa, the FBN’s head of its first European office in Rome, the agency kept up so much pressure on the expatriate New York mobsters resident in Italy, that Charley Luciano even confided in his family to check his suit pockets when he died and was laid out, in case agents planted drugs on his corpse!<br /> <br /> Dominic ‘The Gap‘ Petrelli who was a good friend of Joe Valachi, and a previous member of the Mafia underworld in New York, now lived in Italy, having been deported there after his arrest and conviction in 1942 for drug trafficking in Arizona, in one of the first major cases built by the FBN against the mob. He had purchased some of Giannini’s counterfeit dollars, and had been arrested in Naples trying to pass them on. Questioned by the Carabinieri, the Italian military police, he himself then had turned informer and also blew the whistle on Giannini.<br /> <br /> Swamped by this bow-wave of treachery, Gino was imprisoned in one of Italy’s worse penitentiaries: the Poggio Reale Prison in Naples. Held here for ten months as the slow cogs of the Italian judiciary system ground along, he eventually began sending letters to the FBN’s Italian director, Charles Siragasu. Some were abusive, many pleaded for help to get him released. He thought the FBN would oil the wheels of justice for him because in addition to being a killer, a Mafiosi and a drug dealer, Eugenio Giannini had, for a number of years, been a confidential informant for the FBN.<br /> <br /> Although he was selective in what he offered the bureau, they were aware of his strategy and kept a discreet, but close watch on him, while using his information to help nail other drug smugglers. It’s possible he went with them sometime in the 1930s, following yet another arrest, this time in a narcotics-conspiracy case, as a means of mitigating his sentence.<br /> <br /> One of the letters he sent Siragasu, referred in some detail to his knowledge of and transactions with Charley Luciano, and his associates Joe Pici and Frank Callace, in their drug dealing activities, and inferred that Giannini could offer the FBN a lot of confidential information linking Luciano into various narcotic deals that had gone down.<br /> <br /> Giannini finished his dispatch, ‘Destroy this letter after reading it. If it gets into the wrong hands I might as well buy a slot in a cemetery.’ It was a prophecy with an ominous ring of truth about it.<br /> <br /> Early in 1952, he was eventually brought to trial and released for lack of evidence.<br /> <br /> Petrelli, the hood who had originally denounced him, had retracted his testimony, a not unusual occurrence in mob trials. In addition, a New York lawyer had visited Italy and may well have come to an ‘arrangement’ with an Italian member of the judiciary system. Whatever the trigger was, Giannini was released from Poggio Reale in February, 1952.<br /> <br /> Although he had spent months in prison, he had not been idle. Just before his arrest, he had purchased 10 kilos of heroin from Marius Ansaldi, one of the redoubtable members of the Corsican criminal mob, the bald, giant of a man who dominated the Paris drug trade. The money to finance this had been supplied by his New York associates, Shillitani, Reina and possibly his Greenwich Village boyhood pals, Moccio, all soldiers in the Luchese crime family, and Mauro who was linked into Strollo and the Mafia clan of Luciano, controlled by Frank Costello at that time.<br /> <br /> Mauro was tight with Vito Genovese, a man so devious, he kept his right hand in his pocket while shaking hands with his left, and they were both partners in a pin-ball machine company called New Deal Distributors. Mauro also known in the mob as ‘Vinnie Morrow,’ was also a close aid and confident of Tony Strollo, and through him, may well have been involved in the attempted hit on Frank Costello in 1957, acting as the ‘point man’ for the Vincent Gigante the alleged gunman, who couldn’t shoot straight, and although firing a .38 calibre revolver at Frank from no more than ten feet, did no more damage, than to create a new hair parting for the family boss.<br /> <br /> It was not unheard of for mobsters from different crime families to work together on a project like this intercontinental narcotic conspiracy. Giannini had organized for the dope to be taken to Milan and stored in a tailor’s shop on the Via Durmi. He then arranged for his brother-in-law, Giuseppe Pellegrino one of the many expatriate New York mobsters based now in Europe, and who may have acted as a kind of ‘chief-of-staff for Charley Luciano in Italy to visit him in the Naples prison, and asked him to uplift the dope and take it and store it at his own home at #27 via Alfaro in Salerno, south of Rome.<br /> <br /> Freed from prison, Giannini was in no rush to return to New York. His friends Shillitani, et al. had been arrested in late 1951 on a narcotics indictment, and Gino thought it a smart move to stay in Italy and apply for citizenship based on his parentage. But the FBN got wind of his scheme, and brought political pressure down on the Italian government to block the application. Giannini was subsequently expelled from Italy.<br /> <br /> Charles Siragusa, the head of the Rome office, was largely instrumental in organizing Giannini’s deportation. He harboured an especially strong dislike for the drug dealer, to some extent generated by an unusual and capricious event he had experienced.<br /> <br /> He had hired a young, pretty woman to be his secretary. She was an American, living in Rome with her husband, who was studying there under the G.I. Bill. One day, he was dictating a report to her on the drug dealer when she suddenly burst into tears. It transpired she was a niece of Eugenio Giannini, and she hated him with a vengeance. As a teen-ager, he had continually harassed her with his sexual advances and lewd gestures, and it had left an indelible print on her memory. Siragusa could never get over what the odds were that out of the millions of people in Rome, he would choose this particular woman for this job. To him, it simply confirmed what a low-life philistine he was dealing with, and in terms of Eugenio Giannini, we can see to-day, how Murphy and his law, operates at all levels of the spectrum.<br /> <br /> Giannini arrived back in New York, touching down at 12.30p.m. on April 8th, 1952 at Idlewild Airport. As he left the plane, he was taken into custody by FBN agent Al Giuliani. Named as a defendant along with twelve others on the narcotics case that had bagged Shillitani- docket number 136-148 in the Southern District of New York- he was arrested and then released on bail of $15000. He had five months to live.<br /> <br /> From this point on, the details regarding the ultimate fate of Eugenio Giannini comes from the testimony of Joseph Valachi (below), arguably one of the most famous mob turncoats ever. He claimed he was called to a meet with Tony Bender. They joined each other for dinner at Rocco’s, the famous Greenwich Village restaurant run by the Respinto family, on Thompson Street.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236990494,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
<p><br /> <br /> Bender told Valachi that word had come down from Charley Luciano that Giannini was an informer, talking to the ‘junk agents.’ Under normal circumstance, Giannini’s own crime family would have taken care of the problem, but Vito Genovese, back from his self-imposed exile in Italy was working hard to re-establish himself as a power in the New York mob, and regain control of the Luciano crime family, now under the control of Frank Costello, and he was as Valachi explained it, ‘anxious to throw the first punch.’ Luciano being the injured party, and still the titular head of the crime family that Valachi, Bender and Genovese were all part of, created the opening needed.<br /> <br /> Valachi was between a rock and a hard place. He had known Giannini for years, and the little, ugly mobster in fact owned him $2000. He knew that this would be used against him if he tried to shield Giannini in anyway, and so to forestall that, told Bender that he would find him. In the convoluted and devious universe of the Mafia, to ‘find him’ meant to seek him out and kill him. According to Bender he and his associates had been unable to locate Giannini who was moving about town.<br /> <br /> Valachi simply picked up the telephone and dialled Gino’s home, reaching the mobster immediately, proving beyond any doubt that Bender‘s IQ was perhaps not that of a genius..<br /> <br /> They met that night in the Bronx, but Valachi spotted a suspicious looking car parked in the vicinity of the bar where they sat drinking, and called the meeting off. A few days later, Valachi arranged another get-together, and this time, brought along one of the men he had chosen to carry out the hit on Giannini, a mobster called Joe Pagano, the brother of Pat, his drug-dealing associate.<br /> <br /> The killing of Giannini is a classic example of how the hierarchy in the Mafia insulate themselves from any direct contact with their victims. The order may have originally came down from Luciano, safely ensconced thousands of miles away in Naples. His instructions were relayed to Vito Genovese who then passed the word down to his subordinate Tony Bender. He would be nowhere near the scene of the killing however, as he would simply pass on the command to Valachi who himself who not be directly involved.<br /> <br /> For the actual hit, Valachi choose three men: Joe Pagano and his brother Pat, and his young nephew, his sister Filamino's son, Fiore Siano.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236990677,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
<p> </p>
<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Photo: The Pagano Brothers, Pat on the left and Joe on the right</span></div>
<p><br /> This second rendezvous took place in a bar in the Bronx, called The Casbah. Joe Pagano was along for two reasons. First to get a good look at the man he was going to kill, and also, to make the next meeting between Giannini and Pagano go down smoothly. Valachi bought the drinks, and even lent Giannini $100 as the gangster claimed he was running short of cash. That must have really hurt Joe, knowing he would never see any of his money again.<br /> <br /> A few days later Valachi learned that Giannini was working as a ‘drop escort’ at a dice game in Harlem. Escorts would meet prospective gamblers a block or so from the actual game, check them out, and if okay, escort them to the game site.<br /> <br /> Valachi decided this would be the window of opportunity he would open to have the hit carried out, but then ran into another problem. The dice game was operated by Paul Correale, a soldier in the same family as Giannini and mob protocol demanded that something like a killing going down in its vicinity had to be cleared through the proper channels. Valachi again contacted Bender who promised to sort it out with his boss, Genovese, who in turn would seek out and clear it with Tommy Luchese, head of the family that Gianni and Correal were part of.<br /> <br /> As it happened, Bender never got around to sorting the problem out, and some time later, Joe Valachi was called onto the carpet by Vito Genovese, who apparently gave him a dressing down at his office in Erb Strapping Company, one of his legitimate fronts at 180 Thompson Street. It operated as one of the largest service companies in the frozen and tin meats business in the Port of New York. It also acted as a major transhipment points for heroin smuggled into New York.<br /> <br /> Correale, also know in the underworld as ‘Paulie Ham,’ was another major junk pusher in the Luchese family, and complained to Genovese that because the murder had been committed so close to his crap game, it had cost him $10,000 to straighten things out with the local police precinct. Just how Valachi, incessantly broke, and Bender tighter than a virgin’s daughter handled this one, was never disclosed.<br /> <br /> Late on the evening of September 19th, Giannini left the terraced row house where he was currently living, at 282 West 234 Street in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, and drove south into Harlem. The 8 mile journey might have taken him 20 minutes, depending on the traffic that Saturday.<br /> <br /> The two Pagano’s and Siano Fiore met up with Giannini at the drop and walked with him towards the site of the dice game which was located close to 112th Street. Somewhere near the game, at approximately 5 a.m. on the morning of the 20th, someone shot him, twice in the head, with a .38 calibre handgun. The classic mob hit: a double-cap.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991460,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />It is almost certain the shootist was Siano (right). Tall and slim, with a shock of thick, black hair, the 25 year old was a hit-man in anticipation, anxious to make his bones for the mob. Valachi knew Siano’s pedigree was just waiting to be proved and it’s more than likely he did just this that early morning in some dark, fetid alley in East Harlem.<br /> <br /> In a police photo he looks at the camera with a sneer across his face; left eye drooping slightly, contempt for law and order emanating from him like the calefaction from his life’s ambition to be a wise-guy, whatever the cost.<br /> <br /> He got his wish in 1954, after the Mafia opened the books-allowing in new membership after a 25 year hiatus. Joe Valachi sponsored his nephew, along with the Pagano brothers and Vincent Mauro, allcugines or young men in waiting, who were made into the crime family now referred to as the Genovese or West Side Mob. He joined a crew of hard-nosed guys, under Tony Bender the skipper, one of whom, down the track, would became relatively famous in the crime family. A thick-set, ex boxer called Vincent Gigante. The same one who spent weeks practicing his marksmanship with a .38 revolver in a cellar in Greenwich Village, and still couldn’t his squat at ten feet when he tried to make Frank Costello go away.<br /> <br /> A year down the track, Siano would again help his uncle Joe kill another man, Steven Franse, in the kitchen of Joe’s restaurant in the Bronx. Siano had a somewhat chequered career in the mob, being arrested numerous times, for burglary and robbery with a gun, and received a eight year stretch in 1954 for violation of the Federal Narcotics Laws. He went down for being as assistant district attorney Fred Nathan claimed: ‘the principal dealer in cocaine along the Eastern seaboard.’<br /> <br /> Fiore disappeared from Patsy’s Pizzeria on 1st Avenue, between 117th and 118th Streets early in 1964. The first pizzeria to open in New York in 1933, it was a preferred mob hangout for the wise guys uptown. Three men stopped by to talk with him and they all left. It’s quite possible, two of the men were the Pagano brothers, as Patsy’s was Joe Pagano’s favourite pizza place in New York until he died. The underworld thought Fiore was talking to law enforcement, always a one-way ticket to somewhere unpleasant for anyone in the mob.<br /> <br /> In Sicily they call it Lupara Bianca, a Mafia killing in which all traces of the victim are removed. The New York underworld inhabited by Italian-Americans referred to it as goingsquadoosh .<br /> <br /> Joe Pagano and his brother Pat, would each eventually become a capo in the Genovese family, and powerful members of the mob.<br /> <br /> In 1959, Joe Pagano landed a job as an 'executive' at Murray's Packing, a meat dealer run by Murray Weinberg. In 1961 he somehow got himself promoted to president of the company. In a 'long-firm' fraud scam "buying heavily from suppliers, selling off everything and not paying creditors" the company went bust. The fraud included the crime family of Carlo Gambino, managed by their financial whiz-Carmine Lombardozzi- and when it went to court, Joe tried to accept full responsibility for the losses incurred: somewhere between $800,00 and $1,000,000. The jury however refused his excuse that he had 'gambled it away.' In a civil law suit brought in 1964, Joe was convicted went to prison, being released in 1970 when he agreed to a token payment in retribution of $70,000. From the meat scam he moved seamlessly into another involving illegally factoring Medicaid claims, mainly in the Bronx.<br /> <br /> He was also very involved in the entertainment business. There is an apocryphal story that when Frank Costello stepped down after the attempted assassination attempt in 1957, Vito Genovese made him pass over his shares in the famous Copacabana Club in New York to Joe. Joe Pagano died of natural causes in 1989.<br /> <br /> His brother Pat, started off his working life as a bricklayer, following in the path of his immigrant father, Donato. The elder brother eventually became a power in Local 59 of the International Bricklayer's Helpers. He worked closely with Tony Strollo managing his interests on the New Jersey docks. He was murdered on April 27th., 1974, in the Bronx.<br /> <br /> His killer was never identified, although brother Joe claimed he knew who did it but had to 'pass on it,' inferring he had been instructed not to get involved by his crime family's administration.<br /> <br /> Back in Harlem, police were alerted by someone to the sound of gunshots in the early hours of Saturday morning, and arrived outside the Jefferson Major Athletic Club on 2nd Avenue between 111th and 112th Streets. There was blood on the sidewalk but no body. Thirty minutes later another call brought a police car to 107th Street, five blocks south, and there, the responding cops found a body lying face up in the gutter.<br /> <br /> A deli owner, opening his shop, had found Eugenio Giannini sprawled in death. Dressed in a light tan jacket, brown slacks and shoes, he was wearing an expensive Swiss watch and had a billfold containing $140 in his pocket.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991500,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
<p> </p>
<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Eugenio Giannini dead on 107th Street</span></div>
<p><br /> At first it was thought the dumping of Giannini on 107th Street was some kind of symbolic gesture, the area being the heartland of the Luchese family, but Valachi confirmed it was much simpler. After his hit squad had done their job and left, two other men working the drop with Giannini had found him still breathing, and were rushing him to the Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital at 5th Avenue and 106th Street, but he died en route and they simply ditched the body into the street.<br /> <br /> That Eugenio Giannini’s body lay cooling in death that early September morning is not in doubt. What is in doubt, is exactly how he came to be in that fetid gutter in Harlem. Joe Valachi’s story has the ring of truth in terms of the mechanics of the hit, but it is entirely possible that the driving energy to see Giannini killed was more about money than honour or dishonour.<br /> <br /> It is a given in the Mafia that the number one abuse of power is betrayal of the oath, and ratting out someone has only one punishment. But screwing a mobster out of his precious money runs a close second. Cosa Nostra might literally mean ‘Our Thing,’ but a more metaphysical interpretation could easily be ‘Our Dough,’ for the mob exists for one thing and one thing only-money.<br /> <br /> It is the Sacred Grail of all made men, the very reason for the existence of the modern day Mafia, and Giannini had broken the boundaries on that second revered covenant. Although Tony Bender had told Valachi that the hit had to go down to avenge the wrong done to Luciano, back in Naples. the FBN believed that Gino was killed not because he was an informant, but because he had tried to screw his associates out of most of their share of that ten kilos of heroin he had purchased just before he was arrested at San Remo.<br /> <br /> He maybe got the clip not because he dropped a dime on Charley Luciano, but because he double-dipped his drug partners. The bureau believed that Giannini had organized someone to visit his brother-in-law, Joe Pellegrino, collect six of the ten kilos and bring them back to America to him alone. To Giannini, this could have been worth almost $100,000 a fortune then, and a huge sum for a man who was terminally broke. The FBN had in fact just this gem of information from another one of their hundreds of informants within the mob who had passed on this tit bit of intelligence to his handler.<br /> <br /> George White, the infamous FBN agent, revealed this piece of information at the State Crime Commission hearings, in November, 1952, although he was perhaps necessarily vague on the actual motive for the killing of Giannini.<br /> <br /> The agency substituted one of their agents, Tony Zirillo, into the role of pick-up man, and he left New York in August and flew to Rome. In a complex sting operation organized by the FBN and the Guardia di Finanza , Pelligrino was arrested with the six kilos of heroin. Although the New York media did not cover the operation, the Italian press did. Within a few days, the men back in New York who had financed the deal, knew what had gone down.<br /> <br /> So it’s quite feasible that Bender, knowingly or otherwise, only told Valachi part of the story. At the end of the day, the semantics of the hit were really less significant than its ultimate outcome. How Eugenio Giannini got it, was perhaps a lot more relevant than why. And we owe a debt of gratitude to Joe Valachi for sharing the details of that with us.<br /> <br /> Informants like Valachi are enduringly important to law enforcement and Mafia historians trying to make sense of the seemingly senseless mob hits that go down with illimitable regularity. He and his like, are a kind of Rosetta Stone, helping to unlock the process of decrypting the almost always impossible code of silence that helps to protect the men who make the decisions to remove the irritants and the killers who carry out the dematerialization.<br /> <br /> In the never-ending saturnine maze that constituted the New York Mafia’s convoluted mob politics, Giannini was more a 60 watt light bulb than a chandelier. When he tried to shine his light into the dark corners, it led him, unerringly down a one-way street, and all too soon, he found himself short-circuited for good. A man who lived a life of unremitting perfidy, lying, cheating, stealing, double-dealing and womanising, wearing his lack of conscience as an attachment deficit like the trousers he pulled on every morning, he found out that treachery was synonymous with betrayal, and both traits could only ever lead to the inevitable two in the head.<br /> <br /> A not uncommon occurrence that occurs with monotonous predictability in the world that people like Giannini inhabited.<br /> <br /> Joe Valachi, who comes in and out of Giannini’s story like a recurring bad dream, gave evidence at a senate hearing on organized crime in 1963. Among the dozens of atoms of mob intelligence and underworld mythology he offered, some true, some not so true, there was this, which probably speaks louder about Mafia mores than any FBI report or Intel ever did:<br /> <br /> ‘In the circle in which I travel, a dumb man is more dangerous than a hundred rats.’<br /> <br /> There is a saying in Ecclesiastes:<br /> <br /> ‘……..and there is a man that prolonged his life in his evil doings.’<br /> <br /> For Gene Giannini it just didn’t work out that way. He never got around to living the long haul. He was a dead man in waiting. His never-ending search for the pot at the end of the rainbow supply chain brought him only a non-returnable one-way ticket out of the remorseless and implacable world of Cosa Nostra . He was a man who had ceaselessly searched for the best room in the mansion of life and always ended up in the bathroom.<br /> <br /> The pay-day for the killing of that brave New York Police officer was eighteen years in the making, but all the more satisfying when it eventually arrived.<br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">Footnote</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">(1) The Origin of Organized Crime in America. David Critchley.</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Taylor & Francis, 2008</span></p>
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The Color Purple: Detroit's Early Mob
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-color-purple-detroits
2010-11-17T14:01:49.000Z
2010-11-17T14:01:49.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> Whatever they amounted to as a bunch of criminals, the derivation of their name is intriguing enough in itself. There seems to be more versions of its origin and meaning, than combinations of a Rubik Cube.<br /> <br /> One story goes that two Hastings Street shopkeepers, whose places had been targets for the gang, said something like:<br /> <br /> 'These kids, they’re tainted, they’re rotten, purple, like the colour of bad meat, they’re the Purple Gang.'<br /> <br /> Detroit Detective Henry Gavin claimed the gang was named after an early leader, Sammy Purple. Another theory that went around suggested that one of the group called Jacob 'Scotty' Silverstein was wearing a purple sweater when they chose the name. One of their more boisterous members, Eddie Fletcher, fought as a featherweight at Harry Harris’s Fairview Club, and he and his seconds wore purple tops, and so this is how the name stuck, or so the legend goes.<br /> <br /> There was a particularly complex explanation that emerged during the Detroit Cleaners and Dyers Wars. Dyers had always been connected to purple dye, since it originated during the Phoenician period, and purple has long been the symbol of dyers. So the 'Purple Gang' became a 'dyers' gang as they operated their protection racket during this 1928 dispute.<br /> <br /> Lou Wertheimer, a gang member, claimed the name originated from a taxi-cab war in Detroit, resulting in attacks and bombings on cabs and depots. One company known as the Purple Line, were successfully protected by a gang of toughs, who became known naturally, as the Purple Line protectors, or the Purple Gang.<br /> <br /> A wag claimed they were called 'Purple' because they were not quite straight, and some gang members even said the name was dubbed on them by the cops. My favourite analogy has to be that some of the men wore purple swimsuits on their week-end breaks away from mugging, hijacking and killing each other. It’s tempting to contemplate where they stashed their .45’s as they frolicked in the swimming baths, or on the shores of Lake St. Clair.<br /> <br /> A group of the gang interviewed in 1929, unanimously agreed to denying the name. Joe 'Honey' Miller told a reporter 'This Purple Gang stuff makes me sick... who got up that name?'<br /> <br /> Probably the same kind of guy who originated 'Murder Inc.' and 'The Good Killers,' a newspaper reporter.<br /> <br /> Whichever way the name came about, that’s what they got tagged with, and it stuck with them until the end. The beginning was somewhere in and around Hastings Street, which lay about six blocks west of where the GM Cadillac Assembly Plant now stands, in Detroit’s lower East Side, and perhaps was sometime around 1915-1917. For some weird reason, this parish became known as 'Paradise Valley.'<br /> <br /> The Detroit News reported that the gang didn’t start up until 1919, but some sources allege origin dating as early as 1908. The Purples came about through an amalgamation of two groups- the Oakland Sugar House Gang, operating out of the Holbrook and Oakland Avenue district and lead by Charles Leiter and Henry Shorr, and a mob under the control of nineteen year old Sammy Coen, who was also listed as George by the DPD, and carried the nickname of Sammy Purple. He, along with Sam 'Sammy K' Kert, subsequently become the overseers of the Purples speakeasies and blind pigs, which numbered over one hundred in and around the city.<br /> </p>
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<p><br /> <br /> At their peak they numbered less than a hundred, out of a Jewish citizenry of over 35,000, so could hardly be called a significant demographic profile in the population of Detroit. Oakland Avenue was a run-down thoroughfare near the Eastern Market in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. Until the Purple Gang came along, nothing of any consequence ever came out of here, an neighbourhood known primarily for its drunks, bums and deadbeats. This Jewish quarter of Detroit, sometimes called, New or Little Jerusalem, or more aptly 'The Ghetto', by the city press, was regarded as so bad, as being unfit to live in. It's not that difficult to comprehend how a gang like this could have developed in the dark, fetid apartments and filthy rubbish strewn streets and alleys that composed this area.<br /> <br /> Irrespective of where they came from, they grew into an extremely effective group. The Detroit police department credited the gang with over 500 killings, a lot more than the Capone mob over in Chicago. Herbert Asbury, the highly respected author of 'Gangs of New York,' called them the most efficiently organized gang of killer in the United States.<br /> <br /> They might easily have left the alleged infamous 'Good Killers Society' for dead. Literally.<br /> <br /> They weren't however invincible. In 1928, a group of them attempted to take over the bootlegging business in Rochester, New York, and were violently repulsed by the current liquor kings- the Staud brothers, Midge, George, Carl and Ed- who allegedly tossed two of them from the seventh story of the Seneca Hotel, and chased the rest of the crew out of town.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236986482,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />There has been much speculation as to the head of the group, but most consensus has it, that if they actually had a leader, it was one of the four Bernstein brothers, Abe (right). He was probably Detroit's first and only Jewish godfather. He was close to Meyer Lansky and Joe Adonis, respectively, two of the biggest hoodlums in America, representing the Jewish and Italian-American fraternities.<br /> <br /> One of the early associates of the Bernstein brothers was Morris Barney Dalitz, best known as 'Moe,' who subsequently moved across to Cleveland and helped organize the Mayfield Road Mob. Dalitz of course, is best known for his Las Vegas connection, and no one every seriously doubted how tough he was. An apocryphal story has it, in 1964, he got into an dispute with Sony Liston at the Beverly Rodeo Hotel, in Hollywood, and told the fighter, 'You better kill me, because if you don’t, I’ll make one phone call and your dead in twenty-four hours.' Liston departed with his tail between his legs.<br /> <br /> Like so many of them, Abe was small, almost dainty in appearance, with soft, feminine-like hands, and delicate features.<br /> <br /> At its peak, in 1932, Detroit Police Department Inspector Charles C. Carmody, had 49 'known' members of the Purples listed on his files. When you look at their mug shots and read the vital statistics, you are struck by the sameness of them all. Most were smallish in stature, hardly any reached six feet, youngish in age, between twenty-three and twenty-eight, and light in weight. Seventy years or more down the track, they stare out on the world with vacant, bleak stares, posing almost like mannequins, for the harsh lights of the police photographer’s bright bulbs.<br /> </p>
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<p><br /> <br /> The heaviest was Sam Bernstein, a squat five-five but solid two-twenty five pounds, referred to by the gang, not unnaturally as 'Fat Sammy,' and the smallest was the dainty Sam Davies, 24 years old, barely five feet and a paper weight one hundred pounds, who for some reason was referred to incongruously, as 'The Gorilla.' Sammy was a tough Jew, with a lengthy police record that included robbery, armed extortion and the ubiquitous 'violating the U.S. Codes!' He also murdered one Harry Gold on the evening of February 17th., 1932, and was clearly a lot more violent than he appeared.<br /> <br /> Most of the crew were children of immigrant Russian Jews, with names like Ziggie Selbin, Abe 'Abie the Agent' Zussman, Jacob Willman, Jack Budd, Charles 'The Professor' Auerbach, Hyman 'Two Gun Harry' Altman, Jack Stein, Issac Reisfield, Michael 'One Arm Mike' Gelfand, Isadore 'Uncle Izzy' Kaminski, or Sam Potasink; what a name to conjure around. I wonder if he ever shot out a basin in rage, against the cruel irony of a gangster with a moniker like that?<br /> <br /> You can image Abe the boss telling him, 'Hi Sammy, go shoot out that porcelain basin that’s late with the vig.'<br /> <br /> Starting out as small-time hustlers, thieves and malcontents, the Gang grew into manhood with the emergence of Prohibition, an act of political madness that was the alchemy turning the streets of concrete into pathways of gold for the mobsters of the 1920’s.<br /> <br /> The 18th Amendment was ratified in 1919, to take effect from January 16th, 1920. It had been passed in 1917 through the Senate by a one-sided vote after only thirteen hours debate. A few months later, the House of Representatives debated it for a full, whole day!<br /> <br /> A poem in the New York World newspaper summed up America’s reaction to one of the most pathetic acts of any American federal administration, an bill that would create more damage and dislocation to America than almost any action of any government before or since:<br /> <br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it. It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop. We like it. It’s left a trail of graft and slime, It’s filled our land with vice and crime, It don’t prohibit worth a dime, Nevertheless we’re for it.</span><br /> <br /> The Act closed down Detroit’s 1500 saloons, but by 1925 there were over 15000 speakeasies, or 'blind pigs' as they were called, and many of them came under the control of the Purples.<br /> <br /> According to reporter Malcom Bingay, 'it was absolutely impossible to get a drink in Detroit, unless you walked at least ten feet and told a busy bartender what you wanted in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar.'<br /> <br /> By 1929, smuggling, making and distributing booze had become Detroit's number two industry, after motor car production. Larry Engleman in his book 'Intemperance,' estimated its gross revenue worth as in excess of $300 million a year. Using the C.P.I as an indicator, that's over $3.5 billion dollars in to-days money!<br /> <br /> Estimates suggest that 75% of all liquor smuggled throughout the United States, during Prohibition, first passed through Detroit. Not only did the gang play a vital part in controlling liquor supplies and prices in Detroit, they became the leading supplier of illegal alcohol to the New York and Chicago underworld. The Purple's principal link man into the Big Apple underworld was Samuel 'Uncle Sam' Garfield.<br /> <br /> An academic study of ethnic groups involved in bootlegging operations in the United States at this time, found 50% were Jewish, 25% Italian, and the remaining 25% split between Irish, Polish and other minority groups. The Italians, although they had a minor percentage compared to the Jews, had the major advantage in that they were evolving into regional organizations based on Mafia affiliations, which would give them enormous power and leverage.<br /> <br /> The FBI reported the Purples as,' a group of choice racketeers and hoodlums who derived the greater part of their income through bootlegging, shakedowns, and hold-ups of gambling house, bookies and places of prostitution.' They also made a lot of money by controlling the malt industry, owning breweries, smuggling whisky from Canada and dope trafficking.<br /> <br /> In all likelihood the Gang was never a structured crime family such as the kinds operated by the Mafia, but more a loose, shifting allegiance of professional, career criminals, who came together and drifted apart when the needs arose. Although primarily Jewish in makeup, there was at least one Gentile in among them, Salvatore Mirogliotta. He'd found his way into the Purples from his association with the Oakland Sugar House Gang. He came originally from Ohio, where he was wanted for the murder of a police officer.<br /> <br /> In January, 1927, the Gang were the prime suspects in the murder of another police officer Vivian Welsh, shot nine times either in, or next to a Chevrolet coupe. Welsh, a crooked cop, had been putting the squeeze on a bootlegger allied to the Purples. Abe and Ray Bernstein were arrested. The Chevrolet belonged to Ray. However the case folded for lack of evidence.<br /> <br /> In March 1927, Eddie Fletcher and Abe Axler, two of the Gang who had joined it from New York, rented a suite at The Milaflores Apartment Building at 106 East Alexandrine Avenue. It was to be a meeting place, convened to settle a dispute between the Gang and three men who had set themselves up in opposition to the Purple’s activities. The men-Frank Wright, Reuben Cohen and Joe Bloom-were ex-members of the famous St. Louis mob, known as 'The Egan’s Rats.' They had moved to Detroit, and started muscling in on the Purple Gang’s local interests, becoming such a pain, that soon, people were referring to them as 'The Third Avenue Terrors.'<br /> <br /> When the three men arrived at the apartment building, they were machine-gunned to death, over 100 shots perforating them and the apartment. Fletcher and Axle, along with Fred 'Killer' Burke, were subsequently arrested, but no charges where ever laid. Burke, also at one time, part of 'Egan’s Rats,' was most likely one of the gunners at the infamous Chicago St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, two years later; it is also quite possible, that the other killers in this Detroit 'massacre,' were Phil and Harry Keywell and George Lewis, all part of the Purple Gang at one time or another. Some sources maintain this was the first time the Thompson sub-machine gun had been used in s gangland killing in Detroit. There may well have been more to the killings that just the settling of business disputes. Three months earlier, in December 1926, Wright had allegedly killed Johnny Reid, a good friend of Abe Bernstein's.<br /> <br /> It was rumoured that the killing of the Moran gang that day in North Clark Street, Chicago, in 1929, was triggered by them hijacking a load of Capone’s Old Log Cabin Canadian whiskey which had been supplied by the Purples. Another version has it that Abe Bernstein set up the hit by telephoning George Moran the day before the killing, and then arranging to deliver a shipment of liquor into the garage that day, hoping Moran would be there himself, to receive the delivery. Some sources contend that Police records confirmed that four members of the Purples, the Fleisher and Keywell brothers stayed at a boarding house at 2119 Clarke Street, directly across from the garage where the killings took place, before, during and after the shooting. They were there for a reason, that's for sure. Assuming of course they were there.<br /> <br /> Helmer and Bilek in their book 'The St. Valentine's Day Massacre claim that only one of the Keywell brothers was 'partially' identified by a witness, from a police photograph, but subsequently, the woman, Mrs. Michael Doody, changed her mind.<br /> <br /> The triple Detroit shooting in March 1927, was incredibly, the first of two such incidents that involved the Purple Gang, helping to create part of the myth about their savagery and lawlessness.<br /> <br /> Fletcher, known also as 'Honey Boy,' ( which always confused the cops, because there was another Gang member called Joe Miller, alias Joe 'Honey' Miller, who was really Sal Mirogliotta,) was one of the most proficient killers found in the Purples. He had served his apprenticeship in New York, and was particularly well known for a killing he supposedly carried out there in 1921. On March 19th., he allegedly stabbed to death one Eddie McFarland in a movie theatre called The Para Court, in Brooklyn.<br /> <br /> 'Honey Boy' had been commissioned for the job by Frankie Uale (Yale,) a leading mob boss in New York's Italian underworld. 'Charleston' Eddie McFarland had been part of a group that had killed five people at a dance hall on Coney Island a few weeks earlier, which in turn was retaliation for a shoot-out at a ballroom on Smith Street, in Brooklyn. It all revolved around in-fighting between Yale’s Italian mob and the Irish toughs led by William 'Wild Boy' Lovett.<br /> <br /> There is a wonderful description handed down about the sartorial elegance of Fletcher, who was described as dressed in a dark gray Chesterfield overcoat, pearl-gray spats over patent leather shoes, wide-brimmed gray fedora and snazzy mauve double-breasted suit, whose lapels where made from pale purple satin. To finish off the outfit, he had a 4 carat diamond stickpin securing a yellow silk ascot in place. And this is what he wore to go to the movies and kill a guy!<br /> <br /> In the what-goes-around-comes-around philosophy, more commonly referred to these days, as degrees-of-separation theory, Fred Burke, who could have shot down the ex Egan Rats at the Milaflores Apartments along with Eddie Fletcher, may well have been the man who gunned down Frankie Yale, (who had once employed Fletcher as a hired killer,) on a Brooklyn street, in July 1928.<br /> <br /> It is indeed, a small world.<br /> <br /> The Purple Gang consolidated its reputation in the late 1920’s with their involvement in what came to be known as 'The Cleaners and Dyers War.' In 1925, Sam Polakoff, president of the Union of Dyers and Cleaners, and another cleaner, Sam Sigman, led a group that wanted to increase their charges. They knew it would only work provided all the other cleaners in Detroit joined in with them. Those that rejected, had their premises attacked, and sometimes bombed, by members of the Purples. The 'War' dragged on for over two years. Polakoff and Sigman were murdered, and after this, the whole thing spluttered out. A number of Gang members, including two of the Bernstein brothers, Irwing Milberg, Harry Keywell, Eddie Fletcher, along with one of the militant cleaners, Charles Jacoby, were indicted and tried in 1928, but acquitted.<br /> <br /> Towards the end of the 1920's, the Purples were steaming.<br /> <br /> From May 3rd., until the 16th., 1929, reports claimed them as being attendees at the Atlantic City Crime Conclave. Along with the top men from Chicago, Kansas City, Cleveland, Boston, Rhode Island and New York, and probably other places as well, they spent hours in discussion with their peers trying to work out some kind of franchise of consent-divvying up liquor and gambling concessions, and trying to work out ways to reduce the inter-gang violence that was causing them all so much aggravation from law and order. Ignoring the Cleveland Meeting of two years earlier, this may well have been the first major meeting of the mob held in America, and The Purple Gang were there in all their finery. They had truly arrived!<br /> <br /> In 1930, Philip Keywell murdered 15 year old Arthur Mixon, an ice-peddler, who they found poking around in one of their 'cutting plants,' buildings where liquor was watered down to produce higher volume. Arrested and indicted, he was possibly the first Purple gang member to be convicted of murder.<br /> <br /> In 1931, an inter-gang dispute resulted in the second triple murder committed by members of the Purple Gang. Three of the gang worked together in a separate clique that associated itself with another group that was known as the 'Little Jewish Navy.' They owned and operated several power boats that they used for rum running across from Canada. They and the three other men, formed a group that went into competition with the Purples, who came to believe that the trio were hijacking shipments of alcohol that was destined for Al Capone in Chicago. They were also selling off bootleg into territory that was claimed by the Purples and in addition, extorting 'blind pigs' and bookmakers that were under the protection of the Purple Gang. The three men were Herman 'Hymie' Paul, Joe 'Nigger Joe' Lebovitz and Isadore Sutker. They had all originated out of Chicago, before linking in to the Purples in 1926.<br /> <br /> Ray Bernstein got a local bookmaker, Solly Levine, a long time acquaintance of the Purples, and the man who originally brought Sutker, Lebovitz and Paul into the gang, to take the three men to Apartment 211 at 1740 Collingwood Avenue, a few blocks from the Gang’s home base on Oakland Avenue. There was a big business convention on in Detroit, and the meeting was seemingly called to discuss liquor supplies. Ray got the guys comfortable. They lit up cigars and were puffing away merrily when three of the Gang present, blew them into eternity. The shooters were Irving Milburn, Harry Fleischer known to the gang as 'H.F.' and young, eighteen year old Harry Keywell. They made sure they missed out on Solly, who made his own way from the apartment at a rapid pace.<br /> <br /> Leaving their victims sprawled in death-- one had tried to crawl under a bed as bullets were pumped into his back, and the other two lay face down in the hall way between the main room and the bedroom—the killers rushed out, down the back stairs, colliding with young Frank Egan and his pal Chick, who were on their way into the building to deliver groceries from the local A&P store. When the two young boys walked down the hallway of the second floor, they came across the open door of room 211, its entrance pooling blood into the passage, and saw the three bodies scrunched over like broken, discarded dolls. When the cops arrived, they found the murder weapons in the apartment kitchen, dumped into a pail of green paint, with the serial numbers filed off, and any finger prints, well and truly erased.<br /> </p>
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<p><br /> <br /> Although Bernstein and his boys had been extra careful in getting rid of the guns, they were less than circumspect in their treatment of Solly Levine, the patsy who had set up the hit. For some unknown reason, they let him go. He was soon arrested, and coughed up the quartet as the killers. Little Frank was more than anxious to help the cops and quickly laid the finger on them from police mug shots.<br /> <br /> Bernstein and Keywell were arrested on September 15th., and Irving Milburn was caught four days later. Harry Fleischer disappeared, resurfacing some months later. In November, with Solly Levine as the main prosecution witness, the three Purples were found guilty of the triple homicide and sentenced to life by Judge Donald Van Zile, who commented: 'The crime which you have committed was one of the most sensational that has been committed in Detroit for many years. It was, as has been said, a massacre.' He sentenced them to life. Fleischer was subsequently charged, but never convicted of the Collingwood Avenue shooting.<br /> <br /> The judge had a short memory, or perhaps he was new to Detroit. It was only four years since the Purple Gang had carried out a similar 'massacre,' only three miles to the east of where they had whacked their three latest victims. Six in four wasn’t a bad score by any underworld reckoning.<br /> <br /> In 1932, the Purple Gang were even suggested as a possible link in the infamous March kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. The baby’s nurse, Betty Gow, was the sister of Scotty Gow who was one of the Gang’s ace fences. In addition, on March 4th., 1932, newspapers announced that the baby had been kidnaped for the purpose of helping in the release from prison of Al Capone, and the Purples were representing Al in the kidnap plot. However the investigators in the crime could not come up with any evidence directly connecting the Purples. The newspaper reports were simply speculation or hot air, no doubt hoping to increase circulation because of the huge interest the baby's disappearance had generated.<br /> <br /> By now however, the mob was starting to implode under the weight of its own momentum.<br /> <br /> Irving 'Little Irv' Shapiro (photo below) had been killed and dumped from a car onto Taylor Avenue. It was thought he was being turned by the police and would become an informer. Another theory had it that he'd threatened some other members of the gang over a a scheme that had turned sour.<br /> <br /> He was only twenty three, but was one of the toughest of the gang. On one occasion, involved in a dispute with a man, he sorted the problem by simply gouging out one of the man's eyes. Small in size, he made up for that with a violence out of all proportion to his build. His forte was 'putting the muscle' on the blind pigs, and he made the gang thousands each year from this. At his death, he had a police record that included twenty-four arrests for almost everything, including murder. He'd extorted construction sites through control of a plumbers union, earning up to $8000 a month from this one scam, alone. He ran a kidnap gang, specializing in seizing businessmen, and a protection racket that was another huge earner for the gang. He may well have been the first Purple to be taken for a one-way ride, getting three behind the ear for aggravating someone.<br /> </p>
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<p><br /> <br /> Zigmund 'Ziggie' Selbin, one of the gang's enforcers, was gunned down in the doorway of a blind-pig on 12th Street in April 1929. No one really cared too much about 'Ziggie,' he was over the top even on a good day. He had been drinking one night with a good friend, admiring the man's ring. When he refused to surrender it, Jackie solved the problem by decking the man and simply slashing off the man’s finger with a razor sharp knife he always carried.<br /> <br /> Sid Markman was one of the few Purples who got it from the law. He was executed in New York in 1930 for the murder-robbery of a Jewish merchant, Isadore Frank, in Brooklyn. Moe Raider shot down Earl Passman on Oakland Avenue in July 1931 and went to prison for life.<br /> <br /> Henry Schorr disappeared in December 1933, after having dinner with Harry Fleischer at a restaurant on 12th. Street. He may have been killed by Izzie Swartz and Charlie Leiter as a favour for Harry.<br /> <br /> In 1934, according to the FBI, Tony Frigi, Bill Mylan, Johnny Gallo, Al Paradis and Joe O'Donnel fled to California and set themselves up in business there. They formed the Co-op Dairymen’s Loan Association and a dry-cleaning association, intimidating other cleaners to join them by blowing up the premises of those that refused. A classic example of transferring business skills, interstate. The Los Angeles police kept them under close observation and noticed that they often frequented Al Lang’s Gymnasium where they seemed to spend more time exercising their drinking skills than their muscles.<br /> <br /> Lou and Al Werheimer had also moved west, earlier, in 1930-31, opening up the Clover Club, one of Los Angels’ finest gambling houses, with a branch of their activities in Palm Springs, called 'The Dunes.'<br /> <br /> Harry Fleischer, who had started his career as a driver for George C. Goldberg, one of the leaders of the Oakland Old Sugar House mob, finally got his, along with brother Sam, in 1936. They each got eight years in the slammer for liquor violations. Convicted again in 1944, not long after his release, ( you can’t keep a good dog down,) he eventually came out of prison in 1965, aged sixty-two. The third brother, Louis, went away in 1938, and was paroled in 1957, but was back inside again by 1958, where he died in 1964. He had long been looked upon as the court jester of the Purples. One of his pranks was to drive his car at his friends walking across Twelfth Street, near to where the Purples favourite restaurant was located, pretending to knock them down. If that didn't work, he would career after them, sometimes down the sidewalk.<br /> <br /> Must have been a hoot to watch.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236987865,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Harry Millman was blown all over the place, as he stood drinking with some friends at Boesky’s Deli on Hazlewood and Twelfth, perhaps the gangs favourite drinking place in Detroit, one November night in 1937. It was said that his two killers who strolled in and really shot up the place, perforating not only Harry, but five other people, were the Mutt and Jeff of Murder Inc., Harry Strauss and Happy Maione. According to a report in the Detroit Press, dated November 28th., Harry was clipped, it was rumoured, because he was knocking off whore-houses under the protection of the Detroit Mafia, and they had arranged his removal. <br /> <br /> In fact, the thing that got Harry killed, was a dispute he'd created with Pete Licavoli. He was a hoodlum, who would eventually become a major power in the Italian-American underworld of Detroit. With a record dating back to 1912 for everything and the kitchen sink, he was hardly a man to be trifled with. He was close to a man called Joe 'Scarface Joe' Bomarito and the two got into a beef with Harry who mistakenly thought he was entitled to a piece of their action. Abe Bernstein tried a number of times to smooth things over between the three men, but it all came to a head when Millman sucker punched Bommarito in a bar scuffle, creating a deep gash on the right corner and upper lip of Joe's face, and hence the lifelong knick name. The two Italians got the okay from Abe. They would never had gone ahead without his sanction, and the hit was in.<br /> <br /> The newspaper also stated that Millman was the last survivor of the Purple Gang. He wasn’t of course.<br /> <br /> Abe Bernstein kept going for years. By 1939, he had a luxury suite at the Book Cadillac Hotel, where he lived until he died peacefully, in March 1968, well into his seventies. He and his brothers, Joe and Izzie, made big dough running a race track wire-service in Detroit.<br /> <br /> Abe was highly regarded by the Italians, they used him as a kind of 'counsellor' within the various Mafia factions, and Joe Zirelli himself, thought so much of Abe, he arranged to have his Cadillac Hotel housing dues and personal effects charges sent to him for payment.<br /> <br /> The fourth boy, Ray, was of course still doing time in Marquette state prison for his part in the Collingwood Massacre. He came out in January 1964, in a wheelchair, and died two years later.<br /> <br /> In March 1950, the FBI interviewed ex Purple, Joe Arbus, who claimed that he was in retirement, but did admit that the gang originally formed around himself, Abe, Ray and Joe Bernstein, Eddie Fletcher, Abe Axler and Irving Willberg.<br /> <br /> Off all the bodies falling down, the killings that fascinate me the most were the murders of Eddie Fletcher and Abe Axler. These two, who had set up and probably committed the 'Detroit Massacre, circa 1927,' both served time, getting two years in 1927 for liquor offenses. They had built up a fearsome reputation doing the crimes together and the jail times together. Fletcher, a New York hoodlum, had left Brooklyn and moved to Detroit in 1923. He had fought as a featherweight boxer at 118 pounds. Axler moved to Detroit in 1925.<br /> <br /> In the Detroit underworld, they were known as 'The Siamese Twins,' and were considered the top hit-men for the Purples.<br /> <br /> Fletcher had been a non-event as a boxer, but developed into a top gunman for the gang. Of the two, Axler was in fact the more vicious, a stone-killer, who could also be handy with his fists as and when it was required. Some reporter in the Detroit Times, described them as 'sawed-off Napoleons with dark, furtive, beady eyes and ears beaten out of shape (Fletcher,) or in Axler's case, overgrown by nature.' They had what was referred to as 'crazy nerve,' in other words, they were probably psychopathic, or more likely by to-days understanding, socio-paths.<br /> <br /> At 3 a.m. on the morning of November 26th., 1933, Fred Lincoln was doing his rounds as the residential policeman of Bloomfield Township, to the north of Detroit. Down a quiet lane in Oakland County, near to the fashionable Bloomfield Hills estates, he came across a motor car parked by the roadside, close to the Quarton and Telegraph Road intersection.<br /> <br /> Flashing his torch, Fred crept up to the vehicle expecting to surprise a couple of 'petters.'<br /> <br /> At least that’s what his report said. Perhaps he got his late night kicks at what he found in the back of autos, down dark rural roads. What he found in this car must have been a major shock. Sprawled on the back seat, clutching each other’s hands, but more in morte than amore, were two men. According to Fred, when he touched the bodies, they were still warm. According to an autopsy, they had been dead maybe 30 minutes at this time.<br /> <br /> They had each been shot numerous times, at close range, mostly straight into their faces, their bodies scattered with powder burns, indicating that they had been killed up close, probably by the driver and front seat passenger. The two men had only been back in the city ten days, after skipping bail on various charges.<br /> <br /> The bodies were identified as Axler and Fletcher, Detroit's Public Enemies numbers one and two. They had spent the previous night drinking in a Pontiac beer garden. As they were leaving, they were joined by two other men and drove off into the night.The car belonged to Abe’s wife, Evelyn, and of course the identity of their killers has never been established, or why the two men died, holding each other in their final embrace, like lovers going off on one big, last adventure. <br /> <br /> Which I guess, in a way they were. Not lovers in the sexual sense, but two gangsters who simply embraced the inevitability of one double cross too many, and held each other tightly into eternity. Friends in life and friends in death. <br /> <br /> It was generally believed that the Detroit Mafia had set up the hit, using Purple friends, because the two men were muscling in on the mob's narcotic business. It's as good an explanation as any.<br /> </p>
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<p><br /> <br /> Although the Purple Gang were essentially based in Detroit, some of their members moved around. In August 1935, Louis Fleischer moved to Albion, a small, country town about 90 miles west of Detroit. He rented an apartment at 108 South Monroe Street. He and Sam Bernstein bought a junk yard, called Riverside Iron and Metal Company from a M. Pryor. Sam lived at 803 East Caso Street. Louis’s brother, Sam, also moved to the town, but in April 1936 went down on tax and liquor charges.<br /> <br /> The gang members who came to visit, would hang out at the Streetcar Tavern on Austin Avenue, and two of the Purples, Abe 'Buffalo Harry' Rosenberg and his brother, another Louis, owned the apartment building that the bar was located in. The Purple Gang had been coming to Albion since the advent of Prohibition to buy homemade grog on Austin Avenue and at the Parker Inn. Albion was also a chosen drop off point for mobsters travelling to and from Chicago, a kind of gangster’s truck stop, where they could freshen up, grab some chow and check their side arms, prior to hitting the big city, whichever one they were heading for.<br /> <br /> Sam Fleischer would often visit the local cinema called the Bohm Theatre, with his girl friend, who the locals called 'Flapper Susy,' along with groups of out of town strangers- hard looking guys, with snappy suits and well creased fedoras. The local police believed the Gang used the cinema to conduct business meetings, out of sight and sound of the law.<br /> <br /> Early in the hours of Wednesday, June 3rd., 1936, a massive police raid by 25 officers at the junk yard, resulted in the recovery of a Graham-Paige sedan that had been used extensively by a gang of raiding burglars, roaming across southern lower Michigan. The police arrested Louis Fleischer and his wife Nellie, and Sam and Lillian Bernstein.<br /> <br /> They found the car stacked with house breaking tools and weapons of all kinds and calibres. It also had a dozen bullet holes in it, evidence of running fire-fights with the Michigan police.<br /> <br /> Following the raid, Louis and Nellie were both tried and convicted for various offences and sentenced to 36 years in prison.<br /> <br /> By the end of the 1930’s, the Purple Gang had outlived its usefulness, fragmented and become simply a memory to lawmen and the people whose paths had crossed theirs.<br /> <br /> The memory they evoked, would be rekindled in 1960, with the release of an Allied Artist’s movie about them, called, not surprisingly, 'The Purple Gang.' It starred Barry Sullivan, and Robert Blake, who hit the news in connection with the mysterious killing of his wife, Bonny, in 2001.<br /> <br /> A reference to the gang turned up in one of Ian Fleming's immortal Bond novels. Helmut M. Springer, noted as a member of The Purple Gang of Detroit, is a character in 'Goldfinger,' hired to help with the Fort Knox robbery.<br /> <br /> They even found immortality in of all places, a 1957 rock and roll song by Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber, when Elvis Presley sang:<br /> <br /> …The drummer boy from Illinois went crash, boom, bang,<br /> <br /> the whole rhythm section was The Purple Gang.<br /> <br /> A so called new Purple Gang emerged in New York in the late 1970’s, involved with large scale drug distribution and extortion in the South Bronx and Harlem. Membership was apparently mainly restricted to young Italian-Americans who came from Pleasant Avenue and its surrounding streets in East Harlem. Originally affiliated with the Luchese crime family, they had links into the Genovese and Bonanno families also, according to the NYPD, and had a membership at their peak, of over one hundred They were so vicious, they even intimidated mainstream Mafia mobs. Among other things, the new Purples became famous for pioneering the use of low calibre .22 pistols as hit weapons, as they went about killing and eliminating their rivals.<br /> <br /> Daniel Leo who reportedly took over the leadership of the Genovese crime family in 2006 was one of its members, as was Vincent Basciano, who assumed the top role in the Bonanno family when Joe Massino was arrested and imprisoned. Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri, a powerful Gambino captain, was also a Purple Gang affiliate in the early 1970's.<br /> <br /> One of its most notorious members was non-Italian, Joseph Meldisch, who police suspected of at least one hundred murders across the eastern seaboard.<br /> <br /> No group ever rose up out of the East Side Detroit Jewish community to take the place of the Purples. Although they had plenty of muscle and weren’t afraid to kill, they lacked the essential organizational and management skills of the Sicilians who would replace them in the Detroit underworld for the next 70 years.<br /> <br /> To-day, Hastings Street where it all began is gone, buried under Interstate-75, along with the memories of Jewish gangsters and their wild women, the scent of rot gut whiskey and the dreams of those who gave a whole new meaning to the colour purple.<br /> <br /> 'Shalom aleichem.’<br /> <br /> Many thanks to Scott M. Burnstein, author and crime historian, for his usual invaluable help into the dark corners of Detroit.<br /> </p>
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Being Ernest: The Life and Hard Times of Ernie 'The Hawk' Rupolo
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/being-ernest-the-life-and-hard
2010-11-17T14:00:00.000Z
2010-11-17T14:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> I think he is one of my favourite mobsters of all time. The one-eyed killer who couldn't shoot straight.<br /> <br /> Most people have never heard of him. He never achieved any immortal status as a big player in the Mafia crime families of New York, although he longed for and lusted after it. He was probably the rule rather than the exception when it came to setting the standard for the street hoodlums that made up the rank and file of organized crime. A grifter, struggling through the interminable days that made up a year in a journeyman crook's life, constantly looking for the perfect score and never finding it. Doing the dirty jobs for a pittance and getting screwed from every angle by whoever was higher up the rank in the mob hierarchy than he was, which was basically everybody. He had a reputation for being a tough guy, but Ernest Rupolo was basically an idiot looking for justification for his very existence. Alan Block in his book East Side, West Side, calls him a dope and a criminal incompetent; Peter Mass, in The Valachi Papers, says, ' Rupolo apparently carried around his own built-in banana peel.' <br /> <br /> I mean he had dreams of being the head of the Mafia, at least according to his de facto wife, Eleanor. She'd said to him how could he tell anybody what to do, he couldn't even tell her what to do. Talk about a ram butting a dam. High hopes indeed. Still, there was something about him that makes me feel he deserved better than the multiple gunshot holes and knife cavities all over the place, and a concrete block to go skateboarding on in Jamaica Bay.<br /> <br /> Whatever you say about 'The Hawk,' he did achieve a certain kind of fame in a way. Because of him, one of the toughest mob bosses in New York, who ran away, with his tail between his legs, and then came back, almost went to prison, which would have dramatically changed the future of organized crime in New York; and in death, he almost got even with a mobster, a guy he really hated, who ultimately spent more time in jail than Willie Sutton. And at the end, he was centre stage in a courtroom drama that was unique for its rareness. So perhaps his life was not completely a wasteland of opportunities lost. Fourty years plus after the event, I'm probably looking at it all with the eyes of a weary cynic, who has searched too long and too hard to find some kind of redemption in a class of unredeemable people.<br /> <br /> The real mob. The Godfather it ain't.<br /> <br /> Being one of the underworld's least charismatic people, or spectacular successes, there is little information about the man, except, a beautifully written section, in a book by an associate editor of Life magazine, called James Mills. That, and an article in the same magazine, plus there's also a bit in Dom Frasca's book about Vito Genovese, the odd, old newspaper report, and that seems to be the best there is to search out the painful history of a man who seemed destined to always be the guy to get the sand kicked into his face, down on the beach.<br /> <br /> It began for the law on a hot, sultry day-- August 24th., 1964-- off Breezy Point, the terminus of the Rockaway peninsular, at the entrance into Jamaica Bay, in Queens, New York. A body was found, floating in the shallow waters by two men, Nicky Caputo and Butch Spyliopolous, and dragged ashore. There is a photograph of this misshapen, bleached white, bloated heap that was once a human being. It lies face down in the sand, washed by the ebb-tide. The hands are lashed together with rope or plastic line, a dirt stained shirt is clinging to the torso. The lower limbs are nude, although it looks as though his trousers have collapsed around the ankles, and there is a large, concrete building block at his feet. The head is bald: presumably the action of the water along with the decomposition of the body, has leached the hair from his head because in life, he had a full head of hair, dark, though greying at the temples. His right eye socket is open, glaring up at the world in indignation at being exposed like this. 'Go away, and leave me alone,' he seems to be saying, 'I'm just having a break between scams.' According to the pathologist's report, the body had probably been water bound for at least three weeks.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236988853,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
<p> </p>
<div style="text-align:center;font-weight:bold;">Ernie's dead body</div>
<p><br /> The corpse was taken to the 100 Precinct of the Queens, NYPD, on Rockaway Beach Boulevard. There was enough in the way of identity items to make the police believe it was the body of a known criminal, Ernest Rupolo, and his brother Willie was contacted and brought in to try and confirm this. Willie, a mob groupie, and part-time bookie found it hard to be sure.<br /> <br /> 'It was just-like a skeleton with some stuff on it,' he said.<br /> <br /> But he told the cops to check on a mesh in the stomach, a relic from a hernia operation his brother had when young, and that also, when he was just a kid, a punk had shot out his right eye, and the bullet was still in there, somewhere. Willie also identified the clothes on the body as his own. His brother had been so broke, he had loaned him a shirt, pair of pants even some shoes. Being semi-destitute was par for the course for Ernie, the big-time gangster.<br /> <br /> An autopsy carried out by Medical Examiner Milton Helpern, revealed that Ernie had gone down hard. He had been shot in the head and upper chest four times, and stabbed another eighteen. Digging in among the macerated and putrid flesh, the doctor found five misshapen slugs: four .38 calibre and one, a .45. The big one had in fact been inside Ernie's head for at least forty years since the day he had got into an argument with another young tough, who had settled their dispute by clocking him with a .45 automatic. Somehow, Ernie survived that one, although he lost his right eye, and for the rest of his life had to go around with a patch stuck over the empty socket. True to the underworld code, Ernie would not identify his assailant, but promised to even the score in due course. This proved a lot harder said than done, as whenever Ernie was out on the streets, the punk was in jail and vice-versa. Somehow, the dispute never seemed to get resolved. It was Ernie's first encounter with the fickle finger of fate that would dog him for the rest of his life.<br /> <br /> He was born in New York, in Borough Park, in 1908, and grew up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. There is little concrete evidence about his early life. Dates and places are vague. He claimed he left school at twelve, fudging his birth certificate, making out that he was in fact fifteen. He got his release from school, and started to do what he always wanted to do, a career of crime.<br /> <br /> His first foray, was to organize a gang, and they racked up perhaps as many as 100 burglaries, before he got arrested at thirteen, receiving a three year suspended sentence. He kept going, and eventually was caught and sentenced to 1-3 years in the New York Reformatory. He was out in ten months, and the first thing he did was buy himself a gun.<br /> <br /> Seemingly, it didn’t help, because the law caught up with again, this time allocating him eight months detention. Sometime during this period, he acquired the nickname, 'The Hawk' because when out robbing, he never missed anything of value to steal. Before he turned twenty, he had a record of six juvenile arrests, and had served two terms in the reformatory.<br /> <br /> By the time he was sixteen, he was a well-seasoned street criminal. At some point during this period, he found himself in a west side Manhattan hotel having a barney with a group of his associates that somehow involved a young girl. According to the way Ernie recalled it, when he told this guy to stop bothering the girl, the response was: 'Shut up. Mind your own business or I'll let you have it.' And Ernie says, 'You punk I wouldn’t' care what you did.'<br /> <br /> So the guy, who was called Eddy Green, pulls open a drawer in a desk, takes out a .45 and wham, locks one onto Ernie. As he goes down, he remembers, the radio in the room is playing 'My Blue Heaven.' Somehow, he survives the shooting, but looses the eye. A reasonable trade I guess, under the circumstances. According to brother Willie, after Ernie was shot, and his face was disfigured, he didn't really care anymore, about anything. That's when he went on the mob's payroll and from the age of seventeen, became a hit man.<br /> <br /> By his late teens, he acquired a reputation as a wild cannon, forming a gang of four that specialized in robbing members of the mob, holding up their bookies and terrorizing their numbers runners. Just why the bosses allowed him to get away with this is a bit of a mystery. Ernie claimed he was often called on the carpet and warned by the top men, but somehow, always avoided the obvious fatal consequences of such acts. Brother Willie, claimed that the bosses were afraid of his brother, the kid was good at his job, and if they missed him the first time there would be no second chance, and he did good work for them after all. But he knew it couldn't go on forever. When he got drunk ( which apparently was often,) he would say to his brother, 'You know, Willie, I'm living on borrowed time. How much more do you think I can go around takin' people?'<img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236988497,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /><br /> <br /> The events that gave Ernie (right) his moment of fame began sometime in 1932. The huge, underground earthquake that came to be known as 'The Castellammarese War,' was over by then, and the New York Mafia had settled down into five well-defined groups: criminal enterprises that would go on, developing for the next seventy years. <br /> <br /> One of the bigger mobs was led by Charlie Luciano, and his alleged underboss, Vito Genovese. Vito had a good friend, fellow gang member, Anthony Strollo, also known as 'Tony Bender.' He was robbed one day, while attending one of his bootleg liquor stashes at a garage he leased. Two men, Ferdinand 'The Shadow' Boccia and Willie Gallo, relieved Tony of $5800. This was an act of madness by the men, who were basically taking on what could well have been the most powerful organized crime group in America. Genovese decided Ferdinand and Willie had to go, and Ernie Rupolo was approached to handle the hit. 'The Shadow' was apparently brassed off with Genovese, because a scam he had created and which brought in $116,000 was shared by everyone and his dog, except him. The strike on Bender was something in the way of compensation in lieu. <br /> <br /> Underworld hits are often convoluted, complicated exercises that can drag on for months, and this one was no exception. There was, however, an added ingredient here, and that was the ineptitude of the principal assassin. Numerous meetings held in bars, coffee shops, and dance halls across Brooklyn, all led, finally to a rendezvous in a restaurant on the corner of Mulberry and Kenmare Streets, in Manhattan's Little Italy district. This was in early spring, 1934. The program was delayed by 90 days, when Rupolo was arrested on a vagrancy charge and locked up in jail. While there, he bumped into an old pal, Rosario Palmieri, known also as 'Solly Young,' and offered him time shares in the killing. For $1000, Solly was happy to be in on the hit.<br /> <br /> At the meeting on Mulberry Street, Ernie was promised $5000 for the killing of Gallo, but only received a down payment of $175 from Michele Miranda, an associate of Vito Genovese, and also one of the major beneficiaries of the Boccia scam. It was unfortunately, all he would ever see in the way of a reward. Fortunately for the organizers of the hits, the Shadows' contract was hired out to other killers who turned out to be seriously good at their job.<br /> <br /> It was decided to set up the murder of Boccia at a card game, and that would be orchestrated by one Peter LaTempa also known as Petie Spatz. The killing would go down on September 19th., 1934. At least two, possibly three shooters had been allocated that one. Gallo was to be hit simultaneously by Ernie and his pal, Solly. <br /> <br /> On the day before, Peter DeFeo, apparently the mob's armourer, later to be a powerful capo, or crew chief in the Genovese crime family, and indelibly linked in through a relative to the infamous 'Amityville Horror' case of the 1970s, supplied Ernie with two .32 automatic pistols. He also delivered two guns to George 'Blah Blah' Smurra and Cosmo 'Gus' Frasca who had been earmarked as the killers of Boccia, who was to be hit at his uncle's coffee shop at 533, Metropolitan Avenue, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.<br /> <br /> Ernie stashed his two guns in the cellar of a friend, Louis 'Chip' Greco, who lived on 65th. Street, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Later, he met up with Solly who was chaperoning Gallo, and the three men spent the next twenty four hours eating, drinking and partying from Bensonhurst to Coney Island and back to Williamsburg. Gallo decided he wanted to visit the sister of Boccia, and there, something occurred, something so Kafkaesque in its conception, as to almost defy believe.<br /> <br /> They arrived at the house about seven in the evening, and mixed with the people who were partying there. At some time that night, Gallo, for some reason, decided to try on a suit of Boccia's that was hanging in a closet. Ernie claimed it didn't look right on him, and suggested that he himself try it on. So Ernie takes off his own suit and gives it to Gallo, and then puts on the suit of 'The Shadow.' When Ernie testified some years later in a King's County court, Judge Samuel Leibowitz asked:<br /> <br /> 'You gave Willie Gallo, the man you were going to kill, your suit?'<br /> <br /> 'Yes.'<br /> <br /> 'Was he wearing your suit when he was found on the street full of lead?'<br /> <br /> 'Yes, sir.'<br /> <br /> 'And you were wearing 'The Shadows' suit, the other man who was killed that night?'<br /> <br /> 'Yes, sir.' <br /> <br /> No one ever bothered to find out who was the final recipient of Gallo's original suit.<br /> <br /> Following this grotesque charade party, Rupolo, Gallo and 'Solly Young' and a couple of young ladies, headed off to the movies. Half way through the program, Ernie, the consummate hit-man, suddenly remembers that he has forgotten to bring along the pieces. He slipped out of the theatre, called a cab, raced to 65th. Street, retrieved the guns, and raced back to the cinema.<br /> <br /> Now you can see why I love this guy?<br /> <br /> Dropping off the girls, the three men then began another interminable migration around New York, first across the East River to Hester Street in Manhattan, then back to Coney Island, and then finally, by subway up to 71st. Street in Bensonhurst, the place Ernie had chosen as the killing field. On the way into Little Italy by subway, he slipped his pal, Solly, one of the automatics.<br /> <br /> It was now, about 2 a.m. on the morning of September 20th., 1934. 'The Shadow' was already dead; he had been dispatched with maximum efficiency by Gus Frasca and George Smurra over in Williamsburg, hours before. Although there were eleven witnesses to the shooting, nobody, as usual in a mob hit, knew anything. <br /> <br /> Walking north from the subway station, Ernie’s group reached the corner of Sixty-eight Street and Fourteenth Avenue. At this point, Ernie pulls out his gun, shoves into Gallo's ear and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Again, zilch. Third time, nada. Gallo, even though drunk, wonders what is going on. 'What the hell you doing?' he asks Ernie. 'Nothing,' says 'The Hawk,' I'm only kidding you, the gun ain't loaded.' It was of course, it just wasn't co-operating. <br /> <br /> Now even drunk, and having a gun stuck in his face, Gallo shows consideration for his friend, telling Ernie with his record, he shouldn't be wandering around with a gat in his belt, what if the cops stop him? So Ernie promises to get rid of it and walks away a few blocks. In fact, he went back to his friend 'Chip' Greco's home, banging on the door, getting his bleary-eyed friend out of bed, and demanding some oil to grease up his weapon.<br /> <br /> 'Hello,' Ernie says, ' get me some gun oil quick, I'm in need of a fix.' Greco obliges, and Ernie douses the weapon, checks the slide and mechanism, and off he goes for try number two.<br /> <br /> He meets up with Solly, and says, 'We'll get the bastard this time, and just don't forget, this is a double-banger.' They walk Greco down to Sixty-sixth street and on the corner of Thirteenth Avenue, out come the pistols, and bang, bang, bang.<br /> <br /> When Judge Leibowitz asked Ernie:<br /> <br /> 'How many times did you fire at Gallo?' Ernie replied ' Oh, about nine times, but we had some misses.'<br /> <br /> Picture the scene: A street corner in Brooklyn, maybe the moonlight reflecting off shop windows, street lamps dimly lighting the shadows, two men shooting vainly at a standing target, weaving in a drunken stupor, from perhaps only inches away, and still they manage to miss with some of the shots. Talk about the gang that couldn't shoot straight!<br /> <br /> Gallo goes down at last, according to Ernie, gasping out the immortal words all good New York hoods part from this mortal coil with, ' Oh, Ma!' just like Jimmy Cagney in the movies. Solly and Ernie drift off, and go and get a few hours well deserved sleep at the home of poor old 'Chip' Greco. The next day, Ernie goes over to Manhattan to collect his reward for a job well-done, and receives the bad news from an understandably irate Miranda. After all that time and energy expended, Gallo is still alive. Genovese arranged for Ernie and Solly to go into hiding, and they were sent up to Springfield, Massachusetts. After a few days, Solly cuts loose and returns to the city. A couple of weeks later, Ernie follows suit. As he gets off the train at Canal Street, the cops are waiting there to pick him up. Gallo has identified him and Solly as the men who shot him.<br /> <br /> Ernie was taken to Gallo's bedside in the King's County Hospital, where he is literally fingered by the wounded man.<br /> <br /> Gallo says to Ernie, ' Why did you shoot me?'<br /> <br /> Ernie's response is, 'Why did you tell on me?'<br /> <br /> Gallo remonstrates, 'But that ain't the question I am asking you?'<br /> <br /> To which Rupolo replies, 'What's the difference what I shot you for? You could get revenge later on, instead of talking, saying I shot you.'<br /> <br /> In gangland, you can do anything but be a rat informer. You can rape and pillage and loot and murder and double-cross, but woe betide anyone who has the temerity to tell the truth to the law, especially about another member of the fraternity. And so, Ernie goes away to prison for eight years and six months. When he comes out in 1942, he is twenty-seven years old. <br /> <br /> In 1944, operating a luncheonette in Borough Park, Brooklyn, which he had somehow found the funds to purchase, he gets involved in another situation this time with a target he later described as 'a real-good looking guy, one of my best friends.' He was Carl Sparacino, and he had got on the wrong side of the mob, holding up and robbing their organized dice games. He led a group of two-bit mobsters, including Louie and Al Leffredo and Dominick Carlucci, who had hit a number of games including one operated by Andy Ercolino, at his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn, on March 28th., 1943. So Ernie gets the contract, which pays him $500, and he and the target go off one night in Sparacino's car, and Ernie shoots him four times. But as usual, in Ernie's case, the heart was willing, but the aim was weak. The victim survived long enough to finger Rupolo, and he is arrested, tried, convicted and it looks like he is going off for another long prison spell again And this is when it gets really interesting. <br /> <br /> In prison, on his second botched shooting, Ernie Rupolo decided to reveal his role in the Gallo shooting and the details behind the killing of Boccia, in the hopes it might work towards mitigating his sentence. Here he was back in jail yet again, leaving his wife behind at their home at 1947 65th. Street, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. No doubt he was broke as usual. As in the Gallo shooting, the mob bosses had assured Ernie that he would only serve short time for the Sparacino hit, and as usual they were wrong. Facing another long session of jail time, forty to eighty years as a second offender, lacking any confidence in the promises of the guys who always seemed to promise but not deliver, Ernie probably thought, what did he have to lose?<br /> <br /> Since in the absence of physical proof, New York State laws required corroborating witnesses in the planning and carrying out of crime, Ernie's statement in itself was not enough, but he came up with the name of Peter LaTempa, who under pressure, reluctantly confirmed Rupolo's story.<br /> <br /> One of the reasons both men may have agreed to testify, was that the prime target of the murder inquiry, Vito Genovese, was no longer in America, and the authorities had no idea where he was.<br /> <br /> In fact, where he was, was Naples, Italy. He had gone there in 1937, hefting a suitcase packed with $750,000, at least according to his wife, Anna. He had decided to disappear when District Attorney Thomas Dewey had started a probe into the murder of Boccia on December 1st., 1937, as part of an intensive investigation into Genovese and his associates. Dewey had successfully prosecuted Luciano, who had been sent to prison for 30 odd years, and the DA's office was now after the second tier management of the crime family. Vito takes a powder until things cool down. The family business is left in the capable hands of Frank Costello, a.k.a. 'The Prime Minister,' and things are cool until 'The Hawk' starts stirring up the pond with his tales of death and deceit.<br /> <br /> Among the various titbits of information that emanated from Ernie, was one concerning the mob itself. According to Turkus and Feder in their book Murder Inc., Rupolo confirmed that Genovese was a national power in what he referred to as the Unione Siciliano, an organization, Ernie claimed that was the self-appointed successor to the Mafia. Ernie had been involved with the crime family of Genovese for at least twelve or thirteen years, so it is interesting to speculate on what he had to say. He also confirmed the legend of the Night of the Italian Vespers, the so-called mass killings of the old moustached Petes of the American Mafia, across America, following the murder of Salvatore Maranzano in 1931, but that one has, I think, been firmly put to bed as an old-wives tale. The other myth about the Unione, continues to be debated to this day, but it seems safe to assume that it's fiction based on fantasy as well. Like most of the guys at his level in gangland, Ernie heard gossip, but rarely the true facts about anything. <br /> <br /> Ernie started talking to the DA's office, initially with A.D.A. Edward A. Hefferman, on June 13th., 1944. He first gave up the three men involved in the dice game stick-up, the Leffredo brothers and Dominick Carlucci, then started verbalizing about the Boccia case. The man who would be largely responsible for trying to put together a case against Genovese and his accomplices in the Boccia killing, was Assistant District Attorney Julius Helfand, the city lawyer who would gain notoriety as one of the leaders in the investigation into the New York Police Department corruption probe involving bookmaker Harry Gross, in 1950.<br /> <br /> It was Helfand's probing that finally surfaced LaTempa as another independent witness to the events that night in the coffee shop on Metropolitan Avenue. It is interesting that the DA's office thought he was a suitable candidate for this role. Under New York Law, in order to obtain a conviction, it is necessary to secure a second witness who had nothing to do with the commission of the crime. Clearly, Petie Spatz did not fall within that category; he was in fact an accessory or accomplice to the crime. There were however, eleven other witness to the murder, but none were ever called to fill that role. Nevertheless, with Ernie's testimony identifying Genovese as the man behind the hits on Gallo and Boccia, and Petie Spatz to back it up, Helfand seemed sure he had a way to go. Subsequently, a Brooklyn Grand Jury indicted Genovese, Miranda and four others, De Feo, Smurra, Frasca and Sal Zappola for the killing of 'The Shadow.' <br /> <br /> The problem was Vito was still incommunicado, and then, wham, like a miracle, two months later, who should come out of the woodwork, but the man himself. On August 22nd ., he was arrested in Naples, Italy, on charges of running a black market ring. It was another nine months before the maze of official red tape could be untangled enough for extradition proceedings to begin, and he was escorted back to New York to face trial. But by then, the case against him had gone out of the window. LaTempa had been taking pain-killers to relieve his distress from gallstone problems. On January 15th., 1945, in his cell at the Brooklyn Civil Prison, he had his usual dose, and dropped dead. An autopsy disclosed he had taken enough poison to kill eight horses. Vito Genovese docked in New York aboard the S.S. James Lykes, on June 1st.<br /> <br /> For him, summer had indeed arrived early.<br /> <br /> When he finally came to trial on Thursday, June 5th. 1946, in the King's County Courthouse, in Brooklyn, it was almost a foregone conclusion he would beat the rap. Four days after the trial opened, a bullet riddled body was found in underbrush off Highway 303, about fifteen miles north of the George Washington bridge. It was identified as Jerry Esposito, a thirty-five year old criminal, recently paroled from Elmira Reformatory, 200 miles north-west of New York City. He was scheduled to appear as a witness in the case against Genovese. For the Mafia boss, it was another loose end safely disposed of. On June 11th., Judge Leibowitz, after having studied the evidence and law governing the area of corroborating testimony, dismissed the case against Genovese. <br /> <br /> In his closing comments, the judge said:<br /> <br /> 'I cannot speak for the jury, but I believe if there were even a shred of corroborating evidence, you would have been condemned to the electric chair. By devious means, among which were the terrorizing of witnesses, kidnapping them, yes, even murdering those who would give evidence against you, you have thwarted justice time and time again.'<br /> <br /> Genovese smirked, and walked out of the courtroom. He must have felt immune from the law by now.<br /> <br /> Earlier, during trial proceedings, Judge Leibowitz questioned Ernie at one time:<br /> <br /> 'What was your occupation?' he asked.<br /> <br /> 'I was a gambler,' Ernie said.<br /> <br /> 'And a killer?' queried the judge.<br /> <br /> 'Oh, sure,' 'The Hawk' confirmed.<br /> <br /> On September 23rd., 1949, Rupolo because of his testimony and cooperation, was released from Dannemora Prison in accordance with the promises made by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, and went back into the jungle. And for some strange reason, Ernie was allowed to live. One account says that the bosses sat down and agreed that he had given up plenty of years, and for that he got a reprieve, or as they call it in the mob, a pass. Willie Rupoli claimed in later years that Michele Miranda, now a very powerful member of the Genovese family administration, had said to his brother, 'Take care of yourself, kid. Don't worry about nothin. If you need anything, come to me.'<br /> <br /> There is another scenario as reported by newspaper reporter Ed Newman of the New York Journal-American. He claimed that while having a drink with Ernie in a Borough Park tavern one day, he questioned why Ernie was still alive and well. 'Whatta you mean? Ernie asked, 'you mean when I testified against Vito. He beat the rap didn’t he? The other guys got off the hook too, didn’t they?' He looked slyly at the reporter out of his good eye and added: 'Don't you know I did Vito a big favour. A man can't be tried twice for the same murder.'<br /> <br /> And so, Ernie Rupolo, big time gangster who couldn’t shoot straight, faded into the obscurity of the naked city, with its eight million stories. He operated as a shylock and a bookmaker, and made up his income by muscling in on bars and whatever other opportunities presented themselves. Sometime by 1957, he had left his wife and moved in with another woman, a big, brassy, loud-mouthed babe with a hair-trigger temper called Eleanor. His pet name for her, was 'My Heaven.' Maybe she reminded him of the Popsicle he was with the night he became one-eyed Ernie, all those years ago.<br /> <br /> They had a baby girl they called Ellen, and according to Eleanor's later testimony, seemed to spend an awful lot of time moving from one apartment to another across Brooklyn. His relationship with Eleanor was less than placid, and six, seven times a year she would kick him out. Perhaps during this period, Ernie was still carrying out work for the Genovese family, if so he must have either improved his marksmanship, or developed a much more circumspect profile, because as best as I can figure, he did not appear again in any major police investigations, until the final one.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989083,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />He was last seen alive early in August, 1964 (photo right). Six months before he disappeared he had told his de facto wife that he knew he was going to get killed. 'Honey,' he said, 'there gonna kill me. Eleanor recounted a strange tale about Ernie having papers that another woman was holding in her safe. '<br /> <br /> ‘They will never do anything to me because I've got these papers,' he would say. 'Then all of a sudden, the stuff she's holding for about eight years is gone. And two weeks later, so was Ernie.'<br /> <br /> At the time he was killed, having been kicked out yet again by Eleanor, he was living in an apartment that belonged to his best friend, Roy Roy, on Berkley Place, just off the Grand Army Plaza, west of Prospect Park, Brooklyn. He made his last visit to Eleanor on Friday, the last day in July. He spoke to her by telephone on the Sunday night, and that was the last time she ever heard from him. Both she and Ernie's brother Willie, were convinced that Ernie was set up by his best friend Roy Roy. 'That's what they do,' Willie said, ' they take your best friend, and he has to do what they say, even if he is your best friend. Roy Roy had to be the one.'<br /> <br /> The murder of Ernie 'The Hawk' Rupolo would probably have been just another unsolved gangland killing, one of the hundreds that have littered the New York crime scene since the turn of the twentieth century, except for four men who got themselves arrested in October, 1965 for bank robbery. They would be the focus of a murder inquiry that would take almost two years before it came to trial. The man they would finger as the force behind the hit on Ernie Rupolo, the man they claimed was their boss, was a top echelon mobster in one of the five Mafia crime families that dominated New York's underworld. This group was led by Joseph Colombo, and his right-hand and obvious successor, was one of the toughest gangsters ever, John 'Sonny' Franzese.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:left;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236988694,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Born in Naples in 1919, he was one of eighteen children, and grew up in Brooklyn, working as a youth for his father, who owned and operated a bakery. ’Carmine the Lion’ Franzese was a feared member of the mob, and legend has it that he disposed of his victims by converting them to dust in his bakery oven. By the time he was thirty, John Franzese (left) was a soldier in the Mafia family, then run by Joseph Profaci. He was sponsored into it by a capo, Sebastian Aloi, and quickly rose to a position of power following the promotion to the boss position of Joe Colombo at the death of Profaci. One of the bank robbers who would later finger Franzese, claimed he was so powerful that an FBI agent had let slip that 'J. Edgar Hoover would give his left nut for Sonny Franzese.'<br /> <br /> But why would a senior member of the Colombo family get himself involved in the killing of an insignificant artisan like Ernie Rupolo? Surely there were plenty of killers in the Genovese family that could have eliminated 'The Hawk' if that was the wish of Vito Genovese, as he languished in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, serving out a sentence for drug trafficking. Searching for the truth in matters of the mob is often like trying to eat spaghetti with chopsticks, possible, but most times, too exhausting to contemplate. In the case of Ernie's whack-out, perhaps the truth was a lot more simple. Brother Willie probably put the finger on it.<br /> <br /> 'I don't think Genovese had a thing to do with killing my brother,' he said. 'You see, Ernie knew Sonny from when they were kids. And he hated him. The reason, he said, "While I was away doing sixteen years that bastard was out making money." Sonny never did a day, so Ernie figured Sonny was reaping the harvest while he was away doing time. They hated each other. They really, really did. Also, I think Ernie was stepping on Sonny's feet. Ernie couldn’t make money in Brooklyn anymore and he needed money and he figured he'd go out into Queens and start in Queens in whatever Sonny was doing-bookmaking, muscling in on bars, whatever. And Sonny didn’t want that.' <br /> <br /> So rather than an act of revenge on a man who had the temerity to expose a mob boss for what he was, the hit on Ernie Rupolo was simply an act of housekeeping, clearing the streets of an inconvenience. <br /> <br /> On November 2nd., 1967, the trial to determine the guilt or innocence of the men accused of the murder of Ernest Rupolo, began in the Queens County courthouse. It was the first time in twenty years that a murder trial involving the Mafia had come before the courts in New York. The defendants were, John Franzese, Joseph 'Whitey' Florio, William 'Red' Crabbe and Thomas Matteo. There was a fifth defendant, the chauffeur and bodyguard of Franzese, a man called John Matera, but he was not in court, as he was serving time in a Florida jail, for armed robbery.<br /> <br /> The main witnesses for the prosecution were, Charlie Zaher, Richie Parks, Jimmy Smith and John Cordero, all members of a robbery team that specialized in hitting banks in Queens and Brooklyn. Cordero, was now the live-in boyfriend of Eleanor, the ex-de facto wife of Rupolo. It was her hair-trigger temper and rumbustious nature that triggered off the events that led to all these people being gathered in the courtroom on this day in the first place. <br /> <br /> In July 1965, Eleanor went drinking with her new boyfriend, John Cordero, in a bar in Queens called the Kew Motor Inn, frequented by the mob. She started bad-mouthing Joe Florio, who was a soldier in the crew led by Franzese, accusing him of being the murderer of Ernie. Cordero hustled her out, and in the car park, an altercation developed and shots were fired, Florio disappeared, and Eleanor and Cordero were picked up by Charlie Zaher, a friend of Cordero, who drove them away. <br /> <br /> The next night, 'Sony' Franzese called a 'sit-down' at another mob hangout, the Aqueduct Motel. He called into the meeting, Cordero, Zaher and Florio, who testified as to what had happened at the bar. Cordero and Zaher were allegedly part of the gang that Sonny supervised, who specialized in robbing banks. Apparently, during this rendezvous, Franzese made a number of incriminating remarks linking himself to the murder of Rupolo. And that became the heart of the case that the Assistant District Attorney for Queens, James Mosley, began to build, to indict Franzese and his gang of four for the murder of Ernest Rupolo. When Cordero and his group were arrested in connection with the bank robberies, they had not only implicated Franzese in that one, they also dragged him into the killing of 'The Hawk.''<br /> <br /> The four bank robbers had originally offered up as the sacrificial lamb for their cause, one Tony Polisi, who was arrested, tried and convicted. However, that didn't get them quite the reduction in sentence they were looking for, so their next gambit was Franzese. On the basis of their evidence, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit bank robbery. Although every man and his dog was adamant Franzese would never be mixed up in something like this, the government tried the case, the robbers testified and Franzese was found guilty and sentenced by Judge Jacob Mishler to fifty years in prison. Sonny was out on bail, pending an appeal when he was arrested and charged with ordering the hit on Rupolo.<br /> <br /> According to evidence presented at trial, from the chief witness, Ritchie Parks, the four defendants, John Florio et al. arrived at a car park behind the Skyway Motel, in Queens, at about 2 a.m. in a car. They pulled Ernie's body out of the trunk, and as they were transferring it into the rear of another car, this one previously stolen by Parks, Ernie apparently came back to life, screaming 'No!' 'No!'<br /> <br /> Red Crabbe snatched a knife from Florio's hand, knelt over the body and repeatedly stabbed it in the chest. Finally dead, The Hawk was bundled into the stolen car and three of the men, Matera, Crabbe and Thomas Matteo drove off into the night, to dispose of the body.<br /> <br /> The way Willie Ruppoli, Ernie's brother, saw it, the killing was set up by Roy Roy, Ernie's best friend. Roy Roy may have been at this time, part of the Joey Gallo crew, over in Red Hook, along with Kid Blast, Bobby Boriello, Tony Bernardo and Louis Hubela, among others. Ernie had hung around with these guys, off and on for years, and had in fact at one time been arrested along with them. Roy Roy had a cafe on President Street, which was the ‘hang-out‘ spot for Joey Gallo and his crew .<br /> <br /> Willie said his brother was conned into the killing zone. 'That's what they do,' he claimed. 'They take your best friend....and they make him walk you into something.....wine and dine you first, then walk you into it. Roy Roy had to be the one."<br /> <br /> Maybe Willie wasn't such a mob groupie after all. <br /> <br /> More than likely, Roy Roy had driven Ernie to the Aqueduct Motor Inn, in Queens, owned by Polisi, another member of Franzese's crew, and the hit had gone down there, before Ernie's body was transferred to the getaway car. Franzese used this motel for meetings with his men, so it's logical to assume that is where they would take him.<br /> <br /> To paraphrase a saying of a famous New York cop, 'When you live in the sewers, you don't mix with bishops.' Franzese was less than fortunate, not only operating in the sewers, but cohabiting with some of the worse kind of low lives imaginable. Although he would go down on the robbery conviction, entering a federal prison in 1970, he and his co-defendants were acquitted on the Rupolo charge after a four week trial. Sonny would be back with his wife and family in their Long Island home for Christmas. With the best will in the world, D.A. Mosley was pushing it up a hill, trying to convince the jury on the evidence of a bunch of shiftless drug addicts and scum bags that made up the thrust of his case. He was also badly handicapped by a judge who bent over backwards to help the defence.<br /> <br /> I have no idea what became of three of the principal witnesses for the prosecution. On the basis of their backgrounds, they are probably dead or serving time in prison.<br /> <br /> Crabbe, Florio and Matteo have disappeared into oblivion. Johnny Matera was listed as a soldier in the Colombo Family as recently as 1988. However, some sources indicate that Johnny 'Irish' stayed on in Florida following his robbery case, and based himself in Fort Lauderdale. He subsequently became a capo in the Colombo Family, following the death of Nicholas 'Jiggs' Forlano, of a heart attack at a racecourse, in 1977.<br /> <br /> A few years later, goes another scenario, Johnny was possibly killed by the Colombos for a major breach of mob protocol. He had flown up to New York to attend a meeting with the family boss, Carmine Persico, at a house on Long Island, and failed to notice he was being tailed by FBI agents. As a result, Persico was arrested for violation of probation conditions, and imprisoned. Matera disappeared in June 1980, and is presumed dead. The Broward Sheriff's Office claims his body was cut up and buried at sea by Bert Christie, a Jewish bodybuilder and gym owner.<br /> <br /> So as so often in the convoluted world of the hoodlum, there's always money to be paid, and choices to be made.<br /> <br /> John 'Sonny' Franzese is now over ninety, not only still active in mob affairs, but back in prison yet again on another parole violation. He has been in and out of jail a half a dozen times since 1970, but is apparently still fit, and tough and just as dangerous as he was all those years ago.<br /> <br /> If she is still alive, Eleanor Rupolo/Cordero will now be well into her seventies. Perhaps she is holding on to her memories, somewhere in Queens or Brooklyn, of the one-eyed gunman who couldn't shoot straight, or maybe waiting for her latest paramour to return from the lock-up.<br /> <br /> And Ernie, The Hawk?<br /> <br /> In 1931, Ernie was a good looking kid, and the world was his oyster. Then, it all changed with that shot to his eye. From then on, he stumbled through life like a blind roofer. When he died, he was burnt-out, old before his time, and, as usual, so broke, he had to clothe himself in someone else's threads. Maybe he is wandering around in the gangster's afterlife, searching desperately for someone with a roscoe that works, and a target that will just accept the slugs and then lie down like all good victims are supposed to, so Ernie can spend the rest of eternity dreaming of being the boss of the Mafia.<br /> </p>
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Unrest within the New York Mob
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/unrest-within-the-new-york-mob
2010-11-06T16:43:28.000Z
2010-11-06T16:43:28.000Z
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<div style="text-align:center;font-weight:bold;">In three days one mobster dead, another wounded</div>
<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> Posted June 25, 2007<br /><br /> On Tuesday morning, June 5, Robert DeCicco got in his father's fiancé's Cadillac DeVille after picking up a prescription at Dolinsky's Pharmacy. As he sat in his car another car rolled up beside him. Inside it sat a masked gunman who pulled out a fire arm and opened fire. Bullets hit DeCicco in the arm, one even grazed his head. Trying to escape the hail of bullets DeCicco got out of the car, and ran for the pharmacy. The gunman fled the scene, leaving behind a wounded DeCicco. The motive for the shooting wasn't entirely clear, but one thing was very clear: it was mob related.<br /> <br /> Robert DeCicco is the son of long time Gambino mobster <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-capo-george-decicco">George DeCicco</a>, and was among a group of mobsters arrested in January. He is currently out on $500.000 bail. George DeCicco was a capo at the time of the Jan 30 bust but has allegedly been demoted to the rank of soldier. Indicating that he has lost respect of the Gambino Family leaders. His son Robert never had the respect of his fellow mobsters. He was a messenger for his father, and had gambling debts. His personal life didn't bring him any respect either, he is divorced, and collects $710 in Social Security and $150 in food stamps. He owes $10,000 on his credit card. Not a success at age 56. A motive for the hit attempt on DeCicco could be that he is blamed for the January indictment, because he introduced the man who would become an informant. Bringing an informant into the Family got you killed in the old days. Most mobsters don't live by the old rules, except those who come from the old country: Sicily. Two of the men indicted with father and son DeCicco are associates of the Sicilian Mafia. Could they be behind the hit attempt? Or did DeCicco's gambling debts force people over the edge?<br /> <br /> Two days later on Thursday June 7, Genovese soldier and loanshark Rudolph "Rudy Cue Ball" Izzi, 74, was found dead in his bed in his Brooklyn home. He had been shot once near his ear, in the back of his head. Izzi's home was less than a mile and a half from the spot where DeCicco was shot at. Izzi had been in life threatening trouble before. In 2001 police came to his home after they received reports of gunfire. Izzi told the cops that a gunman had barged into his home and pistol-whipped him, and that the intruder’s gun went off after he tried to wrestle the man to the ground.<br /> <br /> Could the same man have come back to finish the job? And are the two mob shootings in three days related? Law enforcement found no proof of that but did put out a warning to the mob Families, saying there should be no more suspicious shootings. "One more shooting, and they'd start a task force to investigate," a law enforcement source said. If the past tells the mob one thing it is this: mob wars bring heat. With the heat on, will things quiet down, or will things come to a boiling point? We will wait and see.</p>
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The Teflon Don: Profile of Gambino crime family boss John Gotti Sr.
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-john-gotti-sr
2010-11-06T16:32:05.000Z
2010-11-06T16:32:05.000Z
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<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> Posted in 2001<br /><br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236975292,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />John Gotti was born October 27, 1940 in the Bronx, New York. When Gotti was twelve he and his family move to a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, Gotti took to the streets more and more and he finally dropped out of school in the 8th grade. On the streets Gotti got involved with gangs and committed several small crimes. Gotti would continue his small crimes and eventually started moving up in the underworld. By 1966 Gotti had hooked up with the Gambino Crime Family. Gotti's 'thing' was hijacking trucks, he would make loads of money for the Gambino's, hijacking freight from Kennedy Airport. By now Gotti had moved up in stature inside the Gambino Family. He became close to Gambino Underboss Aneillo Dellacroce and it became clear Gotti was going to get to places but before he started his cilmb he was arrested in 1969 for a hijacking and sentenced to three years in prison.<br /> <br /> When he got out Gotti continued his life of crime and decided it was time to take some steps forward. In 1973 Gotti took on the contract of James McBratney, McBratney had allegedly killed a nephew of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-carlo-gambino">Carlo Gambino</a>. Allegedly or not, to Gambino it is clear he is guilty and Gotti happily takes the job. After the killing the cops close in on Gotti again, present at the murder were two eyewitnesses. He was arrested. At the trial however he somehow manages to reduce murder to second degree manslaughter and only serves a two year prison sentence. While serving his time inside the prison, outside within the Gambino Family there are some serious changes happening. Carlo Gambino is on his deathbed and appoints his successor: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-paul-castellano">Paul Castellano</a>. Gotti supported his mentor Neil Dellacroce for the top job and was angered to see the job go to Castellano. That anger would never die down and would be one of the ingredients that would fuel Gotti's drive to power.<br /> <br /> When Gotti got out of prison he went back to work which included drugdealing. Already unhappy with Castellano Gotti would experience real tragedy in 1980 when his son Frank dies in a car accident. Frank was driving his bike when a Gotti neighbor drove his car down the street, didn't notice him and hit the young Gotti. Frank died from the hit and the neighbor was considered a dead man. After receiving several threats via mail and phone and one time being attacked by Gotti's wife with a baseball bat, Gotti's neighbor decided to move but before he could occupy his new home a van filled with Gotti goons pulled him off the street never to be seen again, at the time of this murder Gotti and his wife were in Florida. Gotti was never charged with the murder. Throughout the '80s Gotti moved up within the Gambino crime Family eventually becoming capo. Gotti still only saw one man as the rightful boss of the Gambino Family, Neil Dellacroce. Under the protection of Dellacroce Gotti kept running his narcotics business with his crew. Castellano knew about it and wanted it to stop, he wanted to demote Gotti or have him whacked but Dellacroce always kept the peace. On the other side Gotti wanted Dellacroce to step up and demand his position as boss but Dellacroce again kept the peace and told Gotti to keep quiet.<br /> <br /> In 1985 things came to a boilingpoint, Castelano was indicted in the commission case where wiretap evidence from bugs from within the Castellano mansion was used. And members of Gotti's crew were indicted on narcotics trafficking. All in all you knew, someone had to die. Castellano wanted evidence about the narcotics trafficking so he could have Gotti's crew whacked or disbanded and demoted but Dellacroce kept stalling for time. Gotti on the other hand started saying Castellano might flip under the F.B.I. pressure and thought he should be whacked. Dellacroce kept the two sides from hitting each other, when Dellacroce died in 1985 it became clear the hit on Gotti or Castellano was near. And it was, Gotti acted first. He won the support from the other capos in the Gambino Crime Family and also got support from three of the four other New York Families. Gotti assembled a hitteam and on December 16, 1985 Castellano and his new Underboss Tommy Bilotti were gunned down in front of Sparks Stake House in Manhattan. After this hit Gotti became the new boss of the Gambino Family.<br /> <br /> Running his empire from the Ravenite Social Club Gotti right away made clear he wasn't a low key gangster. At his trials he didn't shun the media, he actually loved them. He loved being a gangster. He would show up wearing flashy $2000 dollar suits and that all important smile for the cameras. After winning several trials (one thanks to a bribe by his Underboss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-underboss-salvatore">Salvatore Gravano</a>) Gotti became a media icon. He got nicknamed the Teflon Don and the Dapper Don. He got on the cover of TIME magazine. He felt invincible. While conducting his business out of his social club Gotti wanted all his employees to come by to pay their respects. When asked if that wouldn't bring attention from the feds he answered "what's weird? Just some Italians getting together, it's our tradition". <br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236975461,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />So it went ahead, people who didn't show ended up getting whacked or had some serious explaining to do and the ones who showed had their picture taken by the F.B.I. After several years of observing and listening (they eventually bugged the whole Ravenite building and taped Gotti's conversations) the feds moved on Gotti for the final blow. He was indicted and told they had him on tape. When Gravano heard Gotti badmouth him on one of the tapes it pushed him towards and eventually made him decide to flip. With the evidence from the bugs, the photos and the testinmony of Gravano Gotti's fate was sealed and on April 2, 1992 Gotti was convicted on charges that included five murders and sentenced to life in prison without parole. <br /> <br /> In prison Gotti did heavy time, he spent over nine years in maximum 23 hour lockdown. To make his life even worse, several years into his sentence he got cancer. Gotti however kept fighting, the cancer, the system and the feds, Gotti wouldn't go down. On June 10, 2002 however Gotti's fight was over and he died of cancer. A big funeral was held in New York attended by around 130 members of the Gambino Crime Family and his personal family and friends. </p>
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Profile: Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-paul-castellano
2010-11-06T16:26:46.000Z
2010-11-06T16:26:46.000Z
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<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> Posted in 2001<br /><br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991087,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Paul Castellano was born Constantino Paul Castellano in Brooklyn on June 26, 1915. His parents were from Sicily and had traveled to the United States to give their children a better life. Castellano's father was a butcher and also controlled a small gambling operation. Castellano was the youngest of three children and the only boy. He dropped out of school in the 8th grade and became a meat cutter with his dad and helped him out with the gambling operation. Being involved in gambling and bookmaking Castellano was bound to come into contact with heavier crimes and at the age of 19 he did. Together with two friends Castellano was involved in an armed robbery, his two friends managed to escape but Castellano wasn't that lucky, he was arrested, convicted and spent three months in prison without naming his two friends. Once he got out he was celebrated as a hero. He had done the right thing and had proven he was a stand up guy.<br /> <br /> After this brush with the law Castellano kept a very low profile. In 1937 he married the sister in law of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/gambino-boss-carlo-gambino">Carlo Gambino</a>, this marriage would almost guarantee Castellano mob glory. In 1957 Castellano was on his way to the important Apalachin meeting a sign of his and more importantly Carlo Gambino's rise to the top. It should've been Castellano's finest moment till date but it turned out to be a disaster and would earn him his second brush with the law and his second prison term. When called to testify about Apalachin before a New York grand jury he again kept his mouth shut and was found guilty of contempt. He was sentenced to five years in prison of which he served seven months. Upon his release back in Brooklyn his stature had grown even more. He had earned respect and again showed what a loyal guy he was. Pretty soon things were back to normal, Castellano was back in business with his meat company called Blue Ribbon Meats. A very succesful meat wholesale company that thanks to mob influence was only doing better and better. Castellano was living the good life.<br /> <br /> As Carlo Gambino's health worsened it became clear he needed to choose a successor. For Carlo it went between his Underboss Neil Dellacroce and Paul Castellano. Carlo chose Castellano and in doing that had sealed Castellano's faith and broke the Gambino Family in two factions. When Gambino died at his Long Island home in 1975 a meeting took place where Gambino's decision was discussed. The result of the meeting was that Castellano would be boss and no one would step up. Dellacroce honored Gambino's choice and was happy to stay on as Underboss. Castellano was now one of the most powerful Mafia bosses in the United States.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991476,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Castellano's reign was a quiet one. He wasn't flashy and lived very enclosed in a mansion in Todt Hill, Staten Island far away from the daily grind of the streets. The mansion was valued at $3.5 million dollars and had the nickname The White House because that's what it resembled. At his "White House" Castellano was isolated and ran his criminal empire. He lost touch with the streets and the basic rules. He started seeing himself more as a businessman than as a boss of a Mafia Family. Because Castellano was up in his white house all day the soldiers on the street started losing respect for him. They were on the street trying to make money and he was up in his house and never showed respect, even siding with rival families against his own. With a faction already unhappy with Castellano from the beginning things only got worse.<br /> <br /> The boss got whacked On February 25, 1985 the bosses of the five New York Families were all indicted in the famous Commission Case. As Boss of the Gambino Family Castellano of course was indicted as well but for Castellano the indictments were double bad news. The indictments had wiretapped evidence coming from a bug in Castellano's mansion. The rebel faction was getting ready to make a move but they were held back by Underboss Neil Dellacroce. However when Dellacroce died Castellano's position became very vulnerable. The rebel faction was led by John Gotti who never liked Castellano and had always wanted Dellacroce to follow in Gambino's footsteps. Gotti was held back by Dellacroce but now with Dellacroce dead nothing could stop him. Gotti started getting support within the Gambino Family to whack Castellano. There were doubts but when Castellano didn't attend Dellacroces wake Gotti had no problems getting support. Plans were made, a hit team assembled and on December 16, 1985 Paul Castellano along with his newly appointed Underboss Tommy Bilotti was gunned down in front of Sparcks Stake House. Castellano's reign had ended in a way typical for most mobsters, he died a violent death. </p>
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Sammy the Bull: Profile of Gambino crime family underboss Salvatore Gravano
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-underboss-salvatore
2010-11-05T17:00:00.000Z
2010-11-05T17:00:00.000Z
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<p><br /> By David Amoruso</p>
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<li><strong>Read: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sammy-the-bull-gravano-is-a-free-man-but-more-importantly-a-poste">Sammy the Bull Gravano is a free man</a>, but also a poster boy for the dangers of dealing with gangsters</strong></li>
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<p>Profile below posted in 2001<br /> <br /> Sammy The Bull Gravano has gone down in Mafia history as the biggest rat ever to walk the streets of New York. No longer is he known as Sammy The Bull but as Sammy The Rat and since he has thrown away his second chance at life outside prison even his friends at the FBI turned on him. Sammy is despised by everyone on both sides of the law, for the same reason: he double crossed them.<br /> <br /> Salvatore Gravano was born on March 12, 1945. Salvatore was the last of five children of parents who were both from Sicily. Gravano and his family lived on 78th street in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York. Both of his parents were honest hard working Americans but Gravano was going in a different direction. At school Gravano had enormous trouble with reading and learning the material, it later turned out that he was dyslexic but in those days there was no knowledge about the problem. As a result of his slow learning Gravano became the kid in the class who everybody made fun of, until Gravano decided to use violence to shut them up. Once when he had a fight with two older kids there were two neighborhood wiseguys standing near observing the fight. Gravano was a small kid and took on older and bigger kids, the wiseguys gave him the nickname The Bull because of his looks and the way he fought. And so Sammy The Bull was born. Pretty soon Gravano started with gang life and ran into trouble with the N.Y.P.D.<br /> <br /> As a teenager Sammy got involved with a gang named the Rampers, he also picked up boxing and body building. The Rampers was a gang that did burglaries and stole cars. As time past Gravano got more violent, he was involved in a shoot out and not long after that was arrested for assaulting an oficer. Thanks to a good lawyer Gravano walked on that one but was soon back in court when he was arrested for a burglary. The judge gave Gravano the choice: enlist with the army or go to prison. Gravano chose the army thinking he wouldn't be drafted. He was wrong and went into service serving at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. When Gravano got out of the army he went back to his Rampers gang. And back with his gang, Gravano got himself into trouble again. While stealing a car with a Ramper pal Gravano was caught in the act by the owner. The owner then pulled his gun and fired shots at the two gangmembers, Gravano was hit by the side of the head but survived.<br /> <br /> Gravano, now 23, had proven his 'skills' and 'balls' and was ready for the next phase of his career. If you wanted to be succesful in crime you needed to be with a different group: the Mafia. After a short talk with Thomas "Shorty" Spero Gravano decided to work for the Colombo Crime Family. Right away Gravano started work. He opened a club of his own in Bensonhurst and started a loan sharking business soon after. A percentage of the money was kicked upstairs to the Family bosses who protected him. Gravano was doing good and making money for the Colombo Crime Family when he received the order to whack somebody. That somebody was Joseph Colucci a member of Shorty Spero's crew. In his book Gravano details the hit: "As that Beatles song played, I became a killer. Joe Colucci was going to die. I was going to kill him because he was plotting to kill me. I felt the rage inside me. You fucking cocksucker, I thought. Even if I wasn’t directly behind him, I felt invisible. I pointed the gun at the back of his head. Everything went in slow motion. I could almost feel the bullet leaving the gun and entering his skull. It was strange. I didn’t hear the first shot. I didn’t see any blood. His head didn’t seem to move, like it was a blank instead of a real bullet. I knew I couldn’t have missed, the gun was only inches from his head, but I felt like I was a million miles away, like this was all a dream." "I shot a second time in the same spot. This time everything was different. I saw the flash. I smelt the gunpowder. The noise was deafening. Now I saw his head jerk back, his body convulse and slip sideways. I saw the blood. Joe Colucci was dead. He looked like he was sleeping. He looked peaceful. You going to blow me away now? I thought." This would be Gravano's first murder 18 would follow on his road to Mafia history.<br /> <br /> After some problems with the Colombo's Gravano was transferred to the Gambino Crime Family and put under the wing of Salvatore "Toddo" Aurello a Capo in the Gambino Crime Family. After a period with the Gambino's Gravano took one last shot at life the legit and honest way. Gravano went into the construction business and did pretty good until he was indicted for murder. Gravano had nothing to do with the murder but a guy he knew had tied him to it and so Gravano was indicted. The costs of the lawyer were too high for Gravano to pay and so Gravano quit his construction job and he and his friend (also indicted in the case) went on a robbing rampage for a year and a half. He also got back with the Gambino Crime Family. Gravano survived the case, he was acquitted but his life was now definitely pointed in one direction: to become a wiseguy.<br /> <br /> His Capo Aurello proposed him for membership and around 1975 Gravano became a made guy in the Gambino Crime Family. Gravano soon found himself in a great position. His invlovement in construction grew and his capo Aurello told Gravano to take all construction dealings directly to the boss. The boss at the time was Paul Castellano and Castellano always had more interest in construction this puts Sammy in a nice place. As the years go on Gravano moves towards becoming acting capo of Toddo Aurello's crew. He's doing good but he too sees that all is not well in the Gambino Family. Ever since Carlo Gambino appointed Castellano as new boss instead of the more streetwise Dellacroce the Gambino Family has been divided. Castellano knew this but didn't care and chose to ignore it. His underlings had mixed feelings about their boss, he was smart and ran the Family in a good way but he wasn't a gangster and he didn't show any respect for his soldiers who did the work. After a while things reached a boiling point and the only thing keeping Castellano alive was Neil Dellacroce his underboss.<br /> <br /> Neil Dellacroce had his protoge called John Gotti. Gotti already had expressed his feelings about Castellano but Dellacroce managed to keep him quiet. Untill he died. Gotti had already been acting capo for Dellacroce's crew but now things would change. Castellano didn't like Gotti and could have him demoted or whacked for his crews drugdealing now Dellacroce was gone. Gotti had plans of his own and when Castellano failed to show at the wake of Dellacroce and pay his respects his faith was sealed. Gotti had already been reaching out throughout the Family for support to whack Castellano and had enough back up, when Gravano was asked to join in he decided to go along with the hit and help plan it. And so the hit on Castellano went through and Castellano and his underboss Bilotti were both whacked on the streets of New York. The hit put John Gotti in the position of boss and Gravano close to the power.<br /> <br /> During Gotti's reign Toddo Aurello decided to step down and Gravano became official capo. Since the hit on the boss was against Mafia rules and one Family, the Genovese, wasn't included in the preperations Gotti and friends still had to watch their steps. Gigante boss of the Genoveses was a friend of Castellano and didn't like the new boss. He would take revenge for his dead ally. Gotti's underboss and Gravano's friend Frank DeCicco was killed by a carbomb. Gotti was supposed to be killed as well but didn't attend the meeting and so only DeCicco was blown up. DeCicco's death left a position and Gotti appointed Gravano and Ruggiero as underbosses. Under Gotti the Gambino Family came under enormous pressure from the FBI and it would'nt be long or Gotti would go down.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236988896,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />In September 1986 Gotti was in court fighting the feds and won, not because of his lawyer but because Gravano got to the jury pool and managed to bribe one of them. As time passed Gravano became more successful in his legitimate businesses, he could sense some jealousy from John Gotti, despite the fact that Sammy claimed he was kicking up $2 million a year to him from his dealings with the Teamsters alone. At this point, while Gotti was actually out of prison for a few years, Gravano was named official consigliere and Frank Locascio named acting underboss of the family this was around 86 87. Life under Gotti was faster than it ever was for Gravano, before Gotti Gravano had killed eight people in fourteen years under Gotti he had killed eleven people in six years. Between November 30, 1989 and January 24, 1990 Gotti would spill enough of the family’s secrets to finally bring the walls crashing down. In January 1990 Gotti went to trial for ordering an assault on carpenter’s union boss John O’Connor. On February 9, 1990 Gotti was acquitted. Overnight the “Dapper Don” had become the “Teflon Don,” and his ego would grow even bigger. But the feds had one more case up their sleeve. The feds had Gotti's headquarters bugged and had him on tape discussing hits, his people and his organization. They even had him on tape badmouthing Gravano.<br /> <br /> When Gravano heard the tapes where Gotti was badmouthing him Gravano flipped for 50% he was almost sure he was going to turn to the FBI but he was having second thoughts. But when Gotti was trying to let Gravano take the fall by claiming Gravano had run wild and started whacking people on his own accord Gravano decided to break Omerta and flip. He turned to the FBI and told them all they wanted to know. He would testify against Gotti and send him to prison for life. Scores of other mobsters went to prison because of Gravano's testimony and he was granted a sweet deal. He got a second life.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:left;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989278,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /> After serving minimal time for 19 murders Gravano was released and went into the Witnes Protection Program and started his new life in Arizona. Most people on both sides of the law would give a lot to have a second chance like Sammy especially those who had done so much bad but Gravano thought nothing of it and wasn't satisfied. He wanted more, and so he started his own ecstacy organization with some help of his son, wife and daughter and a local neo-nazi organization known as the Devil Dogs. Together they ruled the Arizona drugtrade. Life was great for Gravano, he got away with 19 murders, he got away from Gotti's hitmen and he had his own drug organization which was raking in 100.000s of dollars. Life was good for a drugselling rat, but then the bubble burst. On Feb. 24, 2000, Gravano, his wife, son, daughter, and son-in-law were arrested on drug charges by Arizona authorities. Ten months later, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Sammy Bull and son Gerard with buying thousands of Ecstasy tablets in Brooklyn for distribution in Arizona. On May 25, 2001, two weeks before his federal drug trafficking trial was set to begin, Gravano and the Baby Bull pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges that carry about 20 years in prison for Salvatore Gravano, according to federal sentencing guidelines. Their prison terms will be concurrent -- served at the same time -- as whatever sentences they ultimately receive for their crimes in Arizona.</p>
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"I'm funny how?" - Profile of Gambino crime family capo Robert Bisaccia
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-capo-robert-bisaccia
2010-11-05T17:00:00.000Z
2010-11-05T17:00:00.000Z
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<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> <br /> When you ask people about their favorite scene in the classic mob movie Goodfellas, a lot will answer they loved the "You think I'm funny? I'm funny how?" scene. The scene illustrates perfectly how mobsters could go from having a casual dinner where they are laughing, to cold blooded intimidation and perhaps murder, back to joking around. Joe Pesci based his performance on a childhood friend, who by then had become one of New Jersey's most vicious wiseguys. His name is Robert Bisaccia.<br /> <br /> Robert Bisaccia was born on April 17, 1935. His criminal record dates back to 1958 and by the 1970s he was considered a ruthless mobster connected to the Gambino Crime Family. Around 1984, authorities say, he was made a captain in the Gambino Family, and given the task of running the family's New Jersey faction. That faction was involved in gambling, loansharking, drugs, and labor racketeering.<br /> <br /> By the 1980s John Gotti was the new boss and he and Bisaccia got along just fine. According to turncoat Gambino underboss Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, Gotti selected Bisaccia to be the shooter in a hit because he found him "nervy" and good with a gun. Gotti was not disappointed. The victim was found with five bullet holes, one of those between the eyes.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236987884,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />In April of 1989 Bisaccia and his crew were arrested and hit with various racketeering charges. Bisaccia was charged with conspiring to burglarize the northern offices of the New Jersey Attorney General's Organized Crime Task Force and destroy the evidence against his crew by setting the building on fire. In 1993 he and his crew were found guilty. Bobby Cabert was sentenced to 40 years in prison, which later was reduced. But thanks to the testimony of Gravano Bisaccia was sentenced to life for the murder Gotti had ordered years back.<br /> <br /> According to former mob associate Steve Lenehan a lot of people were relieved when Bisaccia went away. "No one said it out loud, but when they gave him 40 years almost everyone, including his own crew said good riddance." Bisaccia was known as a degenerate gambler who would try and get money from anybody. And he didn't mind if you or your feelings were hurt along the way.<br /> <br /> Robert Bisaccia didn't have a lot of good qualities. He lied, robbed, stole, and murdered his way through life. But when it was time to pay the price, that's just what he did. He stood up and went to prison to serve a life sentence. On November 30, 2008 he died of cancer at a federal prison hospital in North Carolina at age 73. </p>
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"Little Nicky" - Profile of Gambino crime family capo Nicholas Corozzo
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-capo-nicholas-corozzo
2010-11-05T16:57:02.000Z
2010-11-05T16:57:02.000Z
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<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> Posted on June 7, 2008<br /><br /> Nicholas Corozzo, nicknamed Little Nicky because of his 5 foot 5 stature, is one of the Gambino Family's most powerful members, and definitely one of its biggest earners. According to Bruce Mouw, who headed FBI's Gambino Squad, Corozzo's earning capabilities are what kept him in a good position with flamboyant boss John Gotti. "They had a very adversarial relationship," Mouw said. Gotti heard rumors that the Corozzo crew committed unauthorized murders. When he asked Little Nicky about it, Nicky would always say those were lies, and pledged his loyalty to Gotti.<br /> <br /> Corozzo stayed loyal to Gotti. He too must have known Gotti's days were numbered. Gotti had become a famous American, and was proud of it, and had no intention of laying low. Corozzo showed his support and because of this became a key member in the Gambino Family's administration, becoming a capo in 1992. When John Gotti was sentenced to life in prison thanks to a combination of his own words caught on a bug and the testimony of underboss Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, his son Junior was assigned acting boss. At age 28 Junior wasn't the most experienced Gambino member and a panel was assigned to help him run the family. The panel consisted of Junior's uncle Peter Gotti, John D'Amico, and Nicholas Corozzo.<br /> <br /> During the mid 1990s the other four New York Families wanted John Gotti to step down because he was unable to run the Gambinos joint operations with other NY families. Influential members were asked who they would like as boss, and one name kept popping up, the name of mob millionaire Nicholas Corozzo. In a conversation that was overheard by an FBI agent (but not recorded) "Corozzo describes how he originally was put up to be the Gambino boss to take over after John Gotti by the family capos. Corozzo indicated at first he did not want the job, but Gene Gotti got in touch with John Gotti, telling him, 'What are you waiting for? He (Corozzo) deserves it, give it to him.' Corozzo relates how he accepted the position only (after) Peter Gotti came with him, supported him. Corozzo says, 'I don't know if I even want it,'"<br /> <br /> But before Corozzo could experience the pleasures, and headaches, that come with being a mob boss he was hit with two seperate indictments. One indictment charged him with federal racketeering charges and attempted murder charges in Florida. Corozzo had been running a South Florida loan sharking ring. Corozzo underlings took care of the daily business with Corozzo flying back and forth when needed.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236985292,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />He pled guilty to the Florida charges in the summer of 1997 and received a five to ten year sentence. The second indictment earned him an eight year sentence. A huge win since he was facing life. The sentence would have to be served concurrently with the Florida sentence meaning he would be out in six years.<br /> <br /> In prison Corozzo shared a cell with Joseph Vollaro. Vollaro was also a trucking company owner. Vollaro was both doing business with the mob and being extorted. The mob's union contacts got him lucrative business, but he had to pay tens of thousands in tribute and extortion fees. Vollaro wasn't happy with the situation, but what could he do? He had a sudden idea what to do when he was caught during a drug deal with a kilo of cocaine. He decided to become an informant.<br /> <br /> Over a period of several years Vollaro recorded conversations with Gambino mobsters and corrupt businessmen. His work eventually resulted in a sweeping February 2008 indictment of 62 Gambino mobsters, including the entire administration, who were hit with charges including murder, extortion, and labor racketeering.<br /> <br /> However one man had managed to evade arrest. Nicholas Corozzo had received a phone call from his daughter who tipped him off because her husband had just been taken in by the feds. In a hurry Corozzo fled his home, leaving behind his wallet.<br /> <br /> Life on the run is hard. Especially when you are in your late 60s, like Little Nicky was. On May 29, 2008 he turned himself in to the FBI. He pleaded not guilty to murder (the 1996 double murder of Lucchese associate Robert Arena and bystander Thomas Maranga, who was shot while sitting next to Arena), racketeering, extortion and gambling charges. He faces a life sentence if convicted of the crimes. </p>
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Profile: Gambino crime family capo Michael DiLeonardo
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-capo-michael
2010-11-05T16:55:03.000Z
2010-11-05T16:55:03.000Z
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<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> Posted in 2003<br /><br /> Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo was born in 1955 in Bensonhurst, New York. He was brought up in a working class family. As a young boy Mikey was bitten in the face by a dog. The attack left a semi-circular scar on his cheek. At school his scarred face attracted the taunts of the bullies who also gave him the nickname: Scars. Early on DiLeonardo took the wrong path in life, as a teenager he joined a street-gang that hung around 15th Avenue and frequented a Gambino social club. As the years rolled on DiLeonardo became a fixture around the Gambino crew and was soon climbing the ladder to mob stardom. By the 1980s Mickey Scars had become close with Gambino mobsters Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano and Junior Gotti and had got himself a job with the mob tainted Teamsters Local 282 a powerful construction union.<br /> <br /> In 1990 DiLeonardo got his button, he became a made guy in the Gambino Crime Family, this is what every associate dreams of, becoming a made guy is a huge moment in any aspiring wiseguy's life. However it wasn't all good news for DiLeonardo, his mob connection got him kicked out of the Teamsters Local 282. Mikey Scars DiLeonardo was a frequent visitor at Gotti's Ravenite Social club, visiting him more than sixty times in the early 90s. As a friend of the Gottis things moved fast for him. In 1992 he was promoted to capo. In the 1990s DiLeonardo was a partner in Junior Gotti's topless clubs extortion scams. Together they extorted the owners of topless bars in New York, Atlanta and all the way down to Florida. In 1994 DiLeonardo began accepting large pay offs around the 100k mark from the Atlanta Gold Club owner Steve Kaplan. The Gold Club had been extorted ever since Gotti's heyday back in 1988. Kaplan`s club was a high class topless bar where many celebrities and athletes sipped $500 dollar bottles of champagne and ran up $1000 dollar tabs, all in all a great cow to milk. In one meeting at LaGuardia Airport in 1997 Kaplan and a cohort gave DiLeonardo a bag of cash made up of $20 bills in bundles of $2000 each in return for the capo's protection from rival mobsters. In 1995 DiLeonardo also accepted pay offs worth $100.000 dollars from Manhattan topless club Scores. Money was pouring in and things looked great for Mikey Scars, so far he had never spent a night in prison, was living in a beautiful $1.5 million dollar home, and as a capo was making serious money, and was in a position of power.<br /> <br /> Then in May 2001 things hit a downward spiral. DiLeonardo was indicted and charged with shaking down topless clubs in New York and Atlanta. DiLeonardo plead innocent and in October 2001 a jury acquitted him of all charges. His lawyer Eric Franz said this about DiLeonardo after the trial: "He handled the Gold Club case like a statesman", "He didn't even break a sweat."<br /> <br /> On June 10, 2002 John Gotti died age 61. A few days later DiLeonardo attended the wake in Maspeth, Queens. Four days after the burial DiLeonardo and three other mobsters were indicted in the 1989 murder of Staten Island businessman Fred Weiss. DiLeonardo was charged with conspiracy to have Weiss killed. The actual killing of Weiss was carried out by DeCavalcante Family mobsters. Two DeCavalcante mobsters and a Gambino guy flipped (turned government witness) and testified against DiLeonardo and the others. DiLeonardo was held without bail at a federal lock up in Manhattan he was refused bail and seen by the judge as a danger to the community. Now tasting prison life for the first time DiLeonardo found out he couldnt stomach it. After several months prison wasn't the only thing he couldn't stomach. Things on the outside were changing fast with DiLeonardo out of the picture. DiLeonardo heard that his cut from the money his crew made wasn't being kicked up to him but channeled elsewhere, and visits from his crew and associates were becoming less frequent. DiLeonardo was becoming angry and disallusioned with each passing second. when he got the word that guys like DeCavalcante boss Vincent Palermo and fellow mobster Dominic Borghese were to testify against him, he started to think self-preservation rather than omerta.<br /> <br /> In November 2002 Mikey Scars DiLeonardo called Atlanta based lawyer Craig Gillen, a former federal prosecutor he had met during the Gold Club trial. With Gillen acting as his advisor DiLeonardo began talking with the feds about making a deal. Now a cooperating witness DiLeonardo was granted a special furlough deal. He was released on bail to visit his sick mother and contact family members. After visiting his mother DiLeonardo, who is divorced, contacted his girlfriend and son and asked them both to join him in the witness protection program, both declined which sent DiLeonardo into a heavy depression. Mikey Scars became so depressed that he attempted suicide by over-dosing on prescription medication. He was placed on suicide watch and given psychiatric counseling. DiLeonardo's future doesn't look great, labeled a rat by his own son and former associates and working with the government not sure that his testimony at any future trial will stand. He will be painted as being a totally unreliable witness due to his current medical condition and his past life as a high-rolling member of the Gambino crime family, it'll be interesting to see how things work out for Mikey Scars.</p>
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Profile: Gambino crime family soldier Charles Carneglia
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-soldier-charles
2010-11-05T16:53:10.000Z
2010-11-05T16:53:10.000Z
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<p><br /> By David Amoruso<br /> Posted on March 4, 2010<br /><br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236983893,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />When Charles Carneglia was arrested on the morning of February 7, 2008, he looked (see photo on the right) like more like Charles Manson than a slick member of New York’s Gambino Crime Family. But though looks can be deceiving, in Carneglia’s case the “Manson look” was pretty appropriate.<br /> <br /> As a Gambino mobster he had committed countless crimes, including several murders. Carneglia started out as an associate of John Gotti Sr. Together with his brother John, Carneglia became a part of the crew led by Gambino captain Carmine Fatico. And when Gotti rose up through the ranks, so did the Carneglia brothers. Whenever Gotti needed a job done, Charles Carneglia had no problem offering his help.<br /> <br /> Like when Gotti’s daughter Victoria had been beaten up by her boyfriend, Gambino mobster Carmine Agnello. At least that is what turncoat mobster Peter Zucarro claimed in court. He testified that in 1979 he joined Charles and John Carneglia when they went hunting for Agnello. "We were instructed to go slaughter Carmine. Find him and slaughter him. Don't kill him," Zucarro said. When they found him, John Carneglia shot him in the buttocks. After that, Zucarro testified, "we all ran up…and beat him down with ax handles."<br /> <br /> But Carneglia’s violent capabilities were also a cause of problems for the Gotti crew. In February of 1975, Carneglia stepped into an Ozone Park diner for a short meet with Zucarro. When he leaned across the table to talk to him, “his suit jacket split apart and there were two pistols in his back," Zucarro said. He immediately told Carneglia to hide the guns because they were showing.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:left;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236984265,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Court Officer Albert Gelb was also at the diner at that time and had noticed the armed man. Gelb was the most decorated court officer in the city at the time, according to the New York Times. He quickly decided to approach Carneglia about the guns. Zucarro testified that he heard shouts and saw him struggling with the court officer. The mafia associate stepped in to help his fellow mobster and punched Gelb to the ground. He expected Carneglia to flee the scene, but instead, he was furious and refused to leave the diner. He shouted that he wanted the court officer arrested right on the spot. Needless to say, it was Carneglia who left in handcuffs that evening.<br /> <br /> The argument did not end that night. Carneglia faced a charge of weapons possession and Gelb was the main witness against him. Zucarro later testified that Carneglia told him he was trying to straighten things out with the court officer so he would decide not to testify against him. Four days before he was scheduled to testify, Gelb was found shot to death in his car. Though all information and testimony pointed towards Carneglia being the killer, he was never convicted of this murder.<br /> <br /> In the years that followed, Carneglia became known as a vicious mob killer. A killer who would shoot first and ask questions later. On November 6, 1977 Carneglia stabbed to death mob associate Michael Cotillo outside the Blue Fountain Diner in Howard Beach. This murder gave Carneglia and the Gotti faction a big headache. Cotillo was the nephew of a Gambino mobster who already was at odds with the Gottis. According to turncoat Anthony Ruggiano there were several sitdowns within the Gambino Family to settle the beef. "They were looking to kill Charlie," Ruggiano said. "I said whatever you do, do it right because Charlie's (Charles Carneglia) no joke." Eventually the beef was squashed and Carneglia got away with murder, again.<br /> <br /> By the 1980s the Gotti crew had achieved a fierce reputation on the streets of New York. Charles Carneglia operated with impunity. In the summer of 1983 18-year-old mob associate Salvatore “Worm” Puma was stabbed to death in front of a crowd of onlookers returning from a feast at St.Helen's Church in Howard Beach. Carneglia had confronted Puma because he was suspected of stealing Gambino money earmarked for the commissary accounts of two crime family associates who were in prison for armed robbery.<br /> <br /> Vincent Rossetti, a Bonanno Crime Family associate turned government witness, testified that he "could see Sal and Mr. Carneglia ... Sal was walking across the intersection holding his chest. He collapsed on the floor. His hand fell away from his chest and he had a blood patch on his shirt." Back in 1983, no witnesses came forward and the murder went unsolved for over two decades.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236984469,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Meanwhile, Carneglia kept doing what he loved: being a gangster. In 1990 he got the order from John Gotti to murder Gambino soldier Louis DiBono. With this murder Carneglia would “make his bones”, which meant that he became a made member of the Gambino Crime Family.<br /> <br /> The following years he continued his criminal activities. He was involved in extortion and even robberies. During an armored truck heist at Kennedy Airport in 1990 he claimed another victim when he shot armored car guard Jose Delgado Rivera. The murders, even the murders of those that did not belong to the criminal underworld, never seemed to bothered him.<br /> <br /> During his trial that lasted from late January to mid March of 2009, Carneglia never flinched when murders and gruesome acts were discussed. He didn’t even flinch when the Judge Weinstein found him guilty of four murders, extortion, and robbery. When given the opportunity to say some last words, Carneglia did not express regret for what he had done. Instead, he told the court he had not received a fair trial. He complained that “liar after liar testified against me and they all had cooperation agreements.” Thanks to those cooperation agreements former criminals like Vincent Rossetti and Peter Zucarro will end up serving very little jail time, whereas Carneglia will serve the rest of his life behind bars. </p>
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Profile: Gambino crime family soldier Samuel Corsaro
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/gambino-soldier-samuel-corsaro
2010-11-05T16:50:26.000Z
2010-11-05T16:50:26.000Z
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<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9930629681?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By David Amoruso<br /> Posted in 2003<br /><br /> Samuel "Little Sammy" Corsaro was born in 1943 in Nutley, New Jersey. Later he moved to Clifton, New Jersey where he would remain till his death. Like all mobsters Corsaro also started out in petty crime but in 1969 he decided to rob a liquor store. During the robbery things went drastically wrong and Corsaro shot the liquor store clerk, the clerk did not survive his wounds. Corsaro was caught and sentenced to prison. In prison Corsaro organized a program in which he taught other inmates the upholstery and interior design trade which prepared them for jobs on the outside.<br /> <br /> Corsaro did his time but hadn't given up on the chance of getting out early. Behind the scenes his lawyers were working hard to gain him an early release. Using among things his upholstery and design program as proof of his rehabilitation they tried getting him pardoned. And in 1983 he finally got his break. Governer Tom Kean pardoned Samuel Corsaro for the 1969 murder of the liquor store clerk. After 14 years of imprisonment Corsaro was now a free man.<br /> <br /> Prison had failed to change him, he wasn't interested in leading a legit life. Back home he started hanging around with the same crowd and focused all his efforts into leading the criminal lifestyle fulltime. Eventually Corsaro ended up with the Gambino Crime Family first as an associate and later as a made guy, a soldier. Corsaro's ride had just begun he was a very powerful mobster listed in an 1988 report by the State Commission investigating organised crime as a Gambino soldier active in loansharking, gambling operations, and drug sales in Essex and Passaic counties. By now he was the second man in the New Jersey faction of the Gambino Family second only to Robert "Cabert" Bisaccia. Things weren't all good, dark clouds were appearing on the horizon for Corsaro.<br /> <br /> In that year, 1988, several New Jersey mobsters were indicted on racketeering charges, Corsaro was charged with conspiracy and racketeering, including an unsuccessful plot to firebomb the offices of the state's Organized Crime Task Force. In a trial that lasted nearly a year unusual things happened. There were courtroom shouting matches that nearly ended in fist fights, three defendants required hospital stays midtrial, and someone shot up a jurors car. In 1993 Corsaro heard the verdict he didn't want to hear: guilty! He was sent back to prison. Due to the unusual events at his trial the appeals dragged on for years eventually he saw some light at the end of the tunnel. In 1999 prosecutors struck a new plea deal with Corsaro. His 26 year sentence was reduced to an 8 to 16 year term. Corsaro was released on parole in 2000. Back on the streets again, things were looking better than ever for Corsaro his close friend and fellow mobster Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri had been moving up through the ranks of the Gambino Family, allegedly climbing to the rank of acting Underboss. And in the mob if you go up you take your friends with you. Just when it looked like "Little Sammy" Corsaro had finally gotten a break, tragedy struck. On July 5, 2002 Corsaro died from an heart attack, he was 59 years old.</p>
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Profile of Colombo crime family underboss William "Wild Bill" Cutolo
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/colombo-underboss-william-wild
2010-11-03T11:00:00.000Z
2010-11-03T11:00:00.000Z
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<p>By David Amoruso<br /> Posted on September 28, 2008<br /> Updated on October 24, 2008<br /> <br /> William "Wild Bill" Cutolo was one of the most charismatic and feared mobsters of the Colombo Crime Family. Born on June 6, 1949 he had risen to become an underboss to <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/colombo-boss-alphonse-persico">Alphonse Persico</a>, the son of imprisoned boss <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/colombo-boss-carmine-persico">Carmine Persico</a>. But the Colombo Family was a dysfunctional family, in the 1990s two factions had fought a war over who would be boss. One faction was loyal to Carmine Persico and his son. The other supported acting boss Vic Orena. Things heated up fast between the two factions creating fireworks on the streets of New York.<br /> <br /> Wild Bill Cutolo was a very respected Colombo Family capo. He was known as a man capable of murder, and a great earner. He had money out on the streets as a loanshark and was heavily involved in union corruption. Using the unions he controlled to hand out no-show jobs to fellow mobsters and steer jobs and money to vendors and resorts operated by men who were connected to the Colombos.<br /> <br /> But Cutolo also knew how to maintain a clean front. He was known as a devoted churchgoer at Our Lady Help of Christians on Staten Island. And raised millions for charity, he even dressed up as Santa during christmas parties. But behind that front was a stone cold gangster.<br /> <br /> When the Colombo war kicked off Cutolo's crew was on the front line murdering two Persico loyalists. He allegedly pulled the trigger in three hits during the war. There were several attempts on Cutolo's life during those years, but he managed to survive them all. When the smoke cleared twelve people were killed, including two innocent bystanders. Fifteen other people were injured in the war.<br /> <br /> The Colombo Family now posed a direct threat to public safety and authorities started hitting scores of mobsters with indictments. Cutolo and six members of his crew were among those charged with various crimes. The mobsters were held without bail in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. According to Jerry Capeci: "They quickly took over their wing, and until the following September, terrorized the inmates as well as the guards. They stole and hoarded food and turned the television room into their private club, hanging up a sign that read: 'Italians Only.'"<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236975284,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236975284,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236975284?profile=original" /></a>In December of 1994 Cutolo and his crew were acquitted of federal murder and racketeering charges. Back on the streets Cutolo was stripped of his capo rank and demoted to soldier status. The Persico faction had 'won' the war and still called the shots. But Cutolo was such a charismatic leader that he was eventually made a capo again. He commanded enormous respect from his men. He had fought beside them during the war. Shown his ability to kill and earn millions. This man had "boss" written all over him. And Alphonse Persico knew it.<br /> <br /> In 1999 Persico (right) made Cutolo his underboss. It was a belated peace gesture, a sign of respect to Wild Bill. Or so it seemed. On May 26, 1999 Cutolo was summoned to a meeting with Persico. He would never be seen again. It became clear very soon that Persico had eliminated a threat to his position. Within 24 hours he and newly appointed underboss John "Jackie" DeRoss were looking for Cutolo's millions. DeRoss later paid a visit to Cutolo's mistress and told her that her married lover may have run off "to get away from everything and everybody."<br /> <br /> On December 29, 2007 Alphonse Persico and John DeRoss were both found guilty of organizing the murder of Cutolo. Both men thought they were off the hook when their first murder trial ended in a hung jury, but the second time wasn't so sweet. In her closing argument prosecutor Deborah Mayer said "Cutolo was coming on like a freight train, acting like he had his own mob. Alphonse Persico had to act." Persico will now spend the rest of his life behind bars, just like his father. On October 6, 2008 authorities found the remains of William Cutolo. His body was buried in a wooded area of Long Island near a stretch of railroad tracks, manufacturing plants and warehouses. The information about Cutolo's burying place is said to have come from an informant.</p>
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