What do imprisoned Detroit mafia associate Mitchell (Steady Eddie) Karam and St. Louis Cardinals legend and MLB Hall of Fame pitcher Jerome (Dizzy) Dean have in common? They were both unindicted co-conspirators in a big 1970 Motor City mob gambling bust, which nailed major Michigan underworld figures, Donald (Donnie Dice) Dawson and Jack (Fat Jackie) Lucido. An unindicted coconspirator is a person the grand jury considers a part of the illegal activity taking place, but doesn’t think there is enough hard evidence against them to earn an eventual conviction.

The colorful and universally-popular Dizzy Dean, 60 years old and a television broadcaster at the time of the February 1970 federal indictment, died of natural causes in Nevada four years later. He sternly denied any links to organized crime in his comments to the press following the news breaking of his ties to the case.

Dawson was a renowned point-spread manipulator in his day. Karam, who learned the tricks of the sports-fix trade from the “Dice Man,” is expected to be sentenced to six years behind bars for his role in masterminding the University of Toledo football and basketball point-shaving scam at the end of the month. That federal indictment came down in 2009 and he pled guilty in 2013. His co-ring leader in the game-fixing operation, Gary (the Cigarette) Manni, was slapped with a six-year term Tuesday. Steady Eddie has been incarcerated on horserace-fixing and bank fraud charges since 2012.

The 58-year old Manni, already serving time for a food-stamp scam being run out of his family-owned grocery store and illegal firearm-and-weapons possession, and Karam, 84, both spawn from the large contingent of Middle-Eastern hoodlums conducting business in the Detroit area. Manni (Iraqi) got his start in the rackets as Karam’s driver. Karam (half-Iraqi-half Lebanese) has allegedly been a part of the Detroit mafia’s notorious Giacalone crew for the last three and a half decades, per sources. Before his incarceration, he had been developing real estate.

Back as an aspiring wiseguy in the 1960s, Karam was schooled by Dice Dawson.

Possibly the largest bookmaker in the whole Midwest when the 1970 indictment was filed and definitely the most prolific handicapper in the state of Michigan, Dawson was an expert game-fixer dating back to the early 1950s. Lucido, tagged by prosecutors as Dawson’s No. 2 in charge of the multi-million-dollar-a-year sports book, would go on to become a capo in the Detroit crime family in the years after the bust. Both pled guilty in the case.

Elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in 1953, Dean was known as a heavy gambler in his days as an All-Star pitcher. While the ace of the Cardinals’ vaunted “Gashouse Gang” of the 1930s, winning MVP of the National League and guiding the franchise to a Word Series championship in 1934. Dean led the “Bigs” in strikeouts four separate seasons and racked up 150 total wins. His jersey No. 17 was retired by the St. Louis organization upon him dying in 1974.

He had some reputed demons though. MLB Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis was so worried about Dean’s gambling habits at the peak of his career in the mid-to-late 1930s, he hired a former FBI agent to keep tabs on him off the field, per court records connected to the gambling case in 1970.

The FBI raided the residences of Dean, Dawson, Lucido and Karam on New Year’s Day 1970. Dean was living in a Las Vegas hotel, the rest in Metro Detroit. Dizzy’s nephew, Paul Dean, Jr. the son of his baby brother, fellow Gas House Gang hurler Paul (Daffy) Dean, was also named an unindicted coconspirator in the case. The indictment alleged Dizzy delivered a $6,000 payoff from a Lansing, Michigan businessman and political powerbroker to the mob in Detroit. According to sources in federal law enforcement close to the investigation, Dizzy cooperated with authorities to avoid being indicted.

The same week the indictment hit in February, Detroit Tigers’ All-Star Pitcher and Cy Young-winner Denny McClain was suspended by MLB for his connection to an underworld gambling ring in Flint, Michigan, a smoky factory town 45 miles north of the Motor City. Rackets in the Flint area were overseen by the Ruggirello brothers (Luigi aka “Louie the Bulldog” and Antonino, Jr. aka “Tony the Exterminator”) in the 1970s. The Ruggirello’s were sent away to prison later on in the decade for attempting to blow-up a renegade numbers operator in a car bomb.

McClain had a Sports Illustrated article in early 1970 tie his foot injury that caused him to miss a key chunk of the 1967 A.L. pennant race to a physical confrontation with Detroit mafia capo Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone over McClain’s unpaid gambling debts. Dean and McClain are the last two MLB pitchers to win 30 games in a single season in the “the Show,” – Dean in the N.L. in 1934, McClain in the A.L. in 1968.

The 1970 indictment brought an end to the gangland career of Dice Dawson, a legendary bookie and king of the point-shave. This is the man that a young Steady Eddie studied under to learn how to fix professional sporting events. Unlike his student, Dawson never got arrested for it. He did like to boast about it though.

In an interview with award-winning author Dan Moldea for Moldea’s book “Interference — How Organized Crime Influences Pro Football” (1989), Dawson admitted to coordinating point-shaving schemes in more than 30 NFL games throughout the 1950s and 60s. His friendships with NFL Hall of Fame quarterbacks Bobby Layne and Len Dawson raised eyebrows in the league office. Dice Dawson admitted to using Layne to fix Detroit Lions games in the 1950s. Len Dawson (no relation to Dice) had his name surface as part of the feds case in Detroit in 1970, pegged a major gambler with the Kansas City mafia in the Missouri area where Dice Dawson held additional interests in gambling operations. Lions Hall of Fame defensive lineman and future Hollywood actor Alex Karras’ season-long suspension by the NFL in 1963 was partially linked to his association to Dice Dawson.

Karras and Layne were often observed in Dice Dawson’s company at Dawson’s restaurant headquarters, The Fox and Hounds, in the heart of swanky Bloomfield Hills, a suburb less than 10 miles outside of Detroit and home to large, neatly-preened estate upon estate of auto executives, CEOs and the old-money manor born. By the late 1950s, Dawson was spending so much time at the restaurant and high-end cocktail lounge, he bought it.

Built in 1927 at the corner of Long Lake Road and Woodward Avenue, throughout its 80-year existence, the castle-shaped Fox and Hounds was a dining staple for high society in Southeastern Michigan. Closing its doors in 2007, the posh restaurant and its grounds have since been transformed into a strip mall.

Born and raised in Detroit, Dawson’s dad owned a string of Chevrolet car dealerships and through business his dad did with the Lions organization he got a job as a ball boy for the pro football franchise as a teenager. Local street lore traces his nickname, “Dice,” to his prowess shooting craps with the players on the team bus and in the locker room. For decades, the Lions held their summer training camp at Cranbrook Kingswood, an east coast-style prep school, a half-mile down the road from The Fox and Hounds, where players as far back as the 1930s used to congregate for long hours of drinking and carousing.

Attending college at Holy Cross and then serving in the Marine Corps in World War II, Dawson returned home to the Motor City after his time in the military to take a job selling cars at one of his father’s dealerships. Within months, he was gravitating towards members of organized crime and in the late 1940s began work as a bookie under the auspice of Fat Jackie Lucido’s uncle and surrogate dad, Salvatore (Sammy Lou) Lucido and Billy Giacalone, the pair of men in charge of all sports gambling for the mob in the Detroit area in the mid-to-late 20th Century. He quickly rose in the ranks to being the most influential and successful bookmaker in Michigan with a stable of mafia goons and no-neck thugs at his disposal for collection and intimidation purposes.

When he was arrested in 1970 along with nine others (added to the five unindicted co-conspirators), the U.S Department of Justice hailed the bust as taking down “one of the biggest and most influential bookmaking rings and bookmakers in the country.” Serving nearly eight years in prison, Dawson was released in 1978 and retired to Las Vegas, allegedly living off his previously-garnered illegal earnings until the day he died of old age in 2012.

Fat Jack Lucido assumed command of Sammy Lou’s crew upon Sammy Lou’s passing in 1985. He died himself in 1995 under federal indictment for a gambling and racketeering case he got hit with two years prior.

As Gangster Report celebrates its one-year anniversary this summer, let’s look back on one of the site’s first long-form investigative pieces, published in the fall of 2014.

THE ART OF THE HEIST – How A Group of Clueless Boston Mob Thugs Pulled Of The Biggest Rare-Art Theft In World History & Never Got Caught

By SCOTT M. BURNSTEIN: GANGSTER REPORT

Part I: Beginner’s Luck

Bobby D probably did the job. It was the biggest art heist in history, a half-billion dollar score. Boston Bobby might have moved the very valuable paintings to Philly. Bobby Boost could have had some, too, and transported them to Connecticut and then off to Maine. Bobby the Cook is said to have taken at least one piece, maybe more, from Bobby Boost in Maine and returned it to Connecticut. The rest of the lucrative haul lay somewhere in hiding, cultural treasures, seminal artifacts from bygone eras in time, buried like dead bodies. Like Bobby D.

The mob had bullied their way into the art game. They proved fast-learners.

In the early-hours of St. Patrick’s Day 1990, about 1:30 in the morning on March 18 to be exact, two armed robbers dressed as police officers talked their way into the Isabella Gardner Museum. The Isabella Gardner is a small, but very elite, privately-funded precious-art museum in downtown Boston, Massachusetts, located near the famous Fenway Park.

Pulling their weapons and tying up the museum’s security guards in the building’s basement, the two men had free access to the place for the next hour and a half, coming away with more than a dozen paintings and drawings that are estimated to be worth a staggering $500,000,000 – confirmed as the largest art-robbery ever, the thieves scored original Rembrandts, Degas, a Manet and a Vermeer, worth tens of millions each.

And if either of them had even the slightest idea of the waters they were wading in, any remote clue of the inner-workings that was the cloak-and-dagger world of fine art theft, they would have come away with a lot more. They succeeded in spite of themselves.

To this day, almost 25 years later, the case remains cold, not a single person arrested, not a single piece of artwork retrieved. Just this past spring, the Boston FBI publically stated that the investigation was open, very active and that several sightings of the missing art had been recently authenticated. One of the suspects was recently sent to prison on an unrelated conviction.

Although no charges have ever been filed (the statute of limitations has expired), the FBI believes it has a pretty good idea of what happened and who did it – according to an interview with lead federal investigator Geoff Kelly in May, the heist was planned and carried out by members and associates of the New England mafia aka the Patriarca Family and the stash of looted masterpieces shuffled between Boston, Connecticut, Maine and Pennsylvania by representatives of both the Patriarcas and the Philadelphia mob. Where they exactly reside today is unknown and remains one of the most fascinating and vexing unsolved crimes in American history

One retired federal agent that worked the case in the 1990s and early 2000s agreed to speak to Gangsterreport.com about his knowledge of the legendary crime.

“The whole thing began with Bobby Donati, they called him “Bobby D,” he was a lifelong wiseguy who belonged to the North End crew,” the former ‘G’ Man said.

Coming up in the mafia under the Angiulo brothers (New England mob underboss Jerry Angiulo and his four sibling lieutenants), when the Isabella Gardner robbery occurred in 1990, Bobby D belonged to a Patriarca regime ran by then-capo Vincent (Vinnie the Animal) Ferrara, a growing power in Family circles at that time and the man that took over the Angiulo’s North End neighborhood operations upon their imprisonment in the 1980s. Donati was known as an accomplished cat burglar and all-around hard-core gangster and hit man, running with a rugged bunch of Beantown burglars, hoods and mobsters (including his brother “Dickie D” Donati) that were unafraid to get their hands dirty and had those hands in multiple gangland rackets across New England.

The FBI believes that Donati got a tip in the years leading up to the heist about the lax security at the museum from an indebted gambler to one of the sports books that he ran on behalf of Ferrara.

“Some degenerate bettor that owed Donati money traded info he had on the museum for a pass on his gambling debt,” the retired agent said. “The guy had the skinny on the joint because he used to work there as a maintenance man and knew what little security they had going on at the place.”

The one problem was that although Bobby D had stolen and fenced a lot of things in his life, he had never stolen artwork and knew nothing about the complicated black market associated with moving such exclusive and rare hot merchandise. So according to what the FBI has been told by informants, Donati brought in an expert. That expert was Myles Connor, a Bostonian considered the No. 1 art thief in the United States by the federal government at his peak in the 1970s and 80s.

Today, Connor, 71, is retired. Sort of – he’s stopped pulling big scores, at least, switching to petty crime. Two years ago he took a pinch for robbing a woman of her cell phone in Rhode Island. He’s authored a book and currently lectures about his life in the Eastcoast underworld and time as a gallivanting pilferer of artistic masterpieces throughout the latter-part of the 20^th Century.

Back then, however, in the late-1980s, Connor was as active as ever and heavily intrigued by Donati’s tip and the mother-load of priceless riches that lied within the confines of the Isabella Gardner.

The two of them planned to take it down. Connor has admitted to the FBI that he and Donati cased the museum in the summer of 1989.

But Connor was locked up in January 1990 on series of racketeering and art-theft charges, sentenced to serve the next 20 years in prison, leaving Donati all by himself on the job.

Bobby D got antsy. He wasn’t intending on waiting another two decades for Connors to get out of prison before acting on the tip.

Enter David Houghton.

Donati and Houghton, a hulking gangland strong-arm and street-tax collector, hung out together at TRC Auto Electric, a car repair shop in working-class Dorchester, Massachusetts, just outside Boston’s city limits, owned by Patriarca Mafioso Carmelo (The Auto Man) Merlino.

“The Auto Man, Carmelo Merlino, told Donati he had a buyer for the score overseas, they got the okay to pull it and the rest is history,” the former Fed says.

The take could have been much larger. The thieves, believed by most authorities to have been Donati and Houghton, both had untrained eyes and bypassed several, even more valuable pieces in the museum.

“Those two didn’t know a Rembrandt from a root beer bottle,” the one-time mob-buster said of the pair. “They were in over their heads on the whole thing.”

FBI records from the early-1990s reveal intelligence coming in from informants on the street pointed to Ferrara and East Boston mob chief and Patriarca street boss and consigliere Joseph (J.R.) Russo as giving the go-ahead for the job to Donati through Merlino.

However, things fell apart quickly. Merlino’s buyer fell through and literally a week after the epic heist Ferrara and Russo, along with 19 others, were swept up in a giant federal racketeering case that sent both of them to prison (Russo would die while incarcerated, Ferrara has been out for a decade and reportedly has gone legit and surrendered any and all of his interests in the mob).

The artwork was placed into storage in Revere, Massachusetts until Donati, Houghton and Merlino could line-up another prospective buyer, according to Massachusetts State Police documents. Revere is a suburb of Boston and known for years to be where many of the Patriarca mob brood held and currently hold residence.

With the indictment and incarceration of Ferrara and Russo, Bobby D and his two accomplices had more pressing concerns to worry about than selling the boosted art. The Patriarca syndicate, which had recently seen tensions calm after a spattering of violence the year before (Boss-candidate Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme survived an assassination attempt and underboss William (The Wild Man) Grasso was killed by the Ferrara-Russo faction of the Family on the same day in June 1989) was back at war. Cadillac Frank Salemme took the reins in Boston from his rival, the departing Russo, and took aim at those he considered responsible for the botched hit on him and were still on the street following the March 1990 bust.

One of the people he turned his attention to was Bobby Donati, 50 years old and tabbed by some as a frontline soldier in the early-stages of the dispute repping Ferrara, someone he sometimes acted as a driver for and escorted around town to the city’s most posh restaurants and clubs in Vinnie the Animal’s heyday as a big shot in the Beantown underworld.

The rare art Donati had access to, his share of whatever was sold, was simply an added bonus, per the former FBI agent.

“Bobby D was in the crosshairs the second Vinnie and J.R. were put away,” he said. “Frank Salemme knew about the Gardner Museum stash, but he would have been killed anyway. Salemme wanted to get rid of anyone he saw as overly loyal to Vinnie Ferrara. Donati fell into that category.”

On September 24, 1991, Donati’s badly-beaten body was found hogtied in the trunk of his car. Massachusetts State Police reports indicate that certain groups in the state’s law enforcement community believed Bobby D’s murder was carried out by East Boston mafia henchman Mark Rossetti, a future New England mob capo who would be outed as a Confidential Informant for the FBI.

“Informant B3467MSPOCU tells Officer redacted name that Rossetti slit Donati’s throat,” it said in one particular MSP file.

Rossetti’s uncle, Boston wiseguy Robert (Bobby Boost) Guarente, was about to get in on the action.

Guarante and two more Bobbys and New England Goodfellas, Robert (Boston Bobby) Luisi, Jr. and Robert (Bobby the Cook) Gentile entered the picture after Donati was murdered and his accomplice, David Houghton, died of cancer a year later in 1992. Merlino needed help moving the artwork on the black market (something he also had zero experience in, since he had no criminal history in the art-heist racket, just as Donati and Houghton didn’t) and according to federal authorities, “The other three Bobbys” would try to help him.

They would find limited success in their endeavors.

Part II; The Three Bobbys

The piping-hot paintings were up for grabs.

It was 1993. In less than three years, the whole back-end of the Isabella Gardner robbery had gone to shambles and wasn’t even close to completed.

The men that pulled off the most infamous and lucrative art heist in history, Boston mobsters Robert (Bobby D) Donati and David Houghton, were both dead, their $500 million dollar score – 13 original paintings and drawings spawned from the hands of Rembrandt, Dega, Manet and Vermeer and stolen from the Isabella Gardner Museum in March 1990 – stashed away, in storage, hidden somewhere in the greater Beantown area.

Two of the paintings alone could be worth over $100 million a pop: Rembrandt’s only seaside work, entitled, “Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” and Vermeer’s “The Concert,” an oil-canvassed masterpiece by the 17^th Century Dutch painter and considered the crown-jewel of the notorious theft.

According to Massachusetts State Police records, after Donati and Houghton died, the art haul landed in the sole possession of Carmello (The Auto Man) Merlino, a Boston Mafioso alleged to have conspired with Donati and Houghton to pull off the robbery in the first place. However, Merlino, who ran a series of racketeering operations out of his Dorchester, Massachusetts car-repair business, TRC Auto Electric, had neither, the expertise needed nor the access to the pockets of the black market geared towards historic treasures, to move the art.

Prior to the robbery Merlino thought he had lined up a fence in Europe set to sell it to collectors in France and possibly representatives of the IRA in England, per the MSP files. Neither came to fruition.

The FBI knew via informants early on that Merlino was most likely involved and were watching him with intense scrutiny throughout the entire decade of the 1990s. In 1997, they inserted two agents undercover into Merlino’s crew, coming away with nothing but some innuendo and boasts by Merlino of having access to the hidden score, however nothing concrete to link anybody to.

The most promising intelligence the FBI attained was revealed in an inter-agency memo with the Massachusetts State Police and the Boston Police Department.

“Agent REDACTED was told that MERLINO was given approval by his superiors in the NEW ENGLAND LCN to move pieces of the Isabella Gardner score. MERLINO is alleged to have been passed word of the okay by NEW ENGLAND LCN Consigliere CHARLES (Q-BALL) QUINTINA.”

Throughout the course of the undercover work, the FBI found out of Merlino’s plan to rob an armored car depot and arrested him and two accomplices in February 1999 en route to pulling the job. Questioned about his knowledge of the Isabella Gardner heist, Merlino refused to answer any questions. He would die in prison.

Merlino’s right-hand man was Robert (Bobby Boost) Guarente, a lifelong crook and Boston Mafioso with a lengthy rap-sheet. His first bust was back in 1958 for forging checks. A decade later, he was nabbed for heading a bank-robbery ring and earned his nickname for knocking over some three dozen banks or armored-trucks in his career in the New England underworld.

Bobby Boost was a well-liked wiseguy and often used as a go-between for various east coast mob factions during the 1980s and 90s. His best friend and gangland running buddy was Robert (Bobby the Cook) Gentile, a like-minded gangster and thief that was frequently seen in Guarente’s company. The pair were known to have pulled numerous scores together.

Gentile’s arrest-record dated back to the late-1950s just like his pal Bobby Boost, and included collars for aggravated assault, robbery, receipt of stolen property, bookmaking and counterfeiting. For his legitimate income, Bobby the Cook was in the concrete-pouring business and his company was quite well-regarded for its quality work. His skills in the kitchen were quite well-regarded as well, gaining him his nickname.

Around 1997, Guarente and Gentile went to work for Robert (Boston Bobby) Luisi, Jr., a recently-named capo in the Philadelphia mafia operating in New England. Mainly, they acted as bodyguards and cocaine distributors on his behalf. Boston Bobby lost his father and brother to a November 1995 mob slaying in a Charlestown restaurant, two of the final victims of the long-ranging conflict that engulfed the Patriarca syndicate throughout the late-1980s and into the early-to-mid 1990s.

Luisi, Jr. met some members of the Philly mob in prison and defected for the offer of being made into La Cosa Nostra, something he failed to do while serving under the Patriarca regime. Initiated into the mafia by Philadelphia LCN boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino (no relation to Carmen), Boston Bobby was immediately promoted to captain status and allowed to put a crew together to run in Massachusetts. The “Three Bobbys,” Bobby Luisi, Jr., Bobby Guarente and Bobby Gentile were all inducted into the mafia in the same ceremony.

“Those three were mob vagabonds that anchored their ship to whatever or whoever suited their individual interests the best,” said a retired FBI agent of the threesome of New England goombahs. “Frankly, they were second-rate wiseguys and their involvement in this whole thing demonstrates how desperate things got with trying to move this artwork, to just find any kind of money to show for their efforts.”

According to FBI and Massachusetts State Police records, Luisi, Jr. was given paintings from the Isabella Gardner robbery via Guarente, who in turn had got them from Carmello Merlino (no relation to Skinny Joey), and took them to Philadelphia, possibly selling them to an art collector in suburban Bucks County.

Skinny Joey’s Boston mob crew was short-lived and ill-conceived. Luisi, Jr. was busted in a drug-distribution conspiracy and turned over on Guarente, Gentile and Skinny Joey himself.They all went to prison and the paintings remained unearthed.

When Bobby Boost Guarente got out from behind bars in 2000, he retired to Maine. The FBI believes he brought the Isabella Gardner artwork with him.

In March 2002, Gentile drove from Boston to Portland, Maine to meet Guarante for dinner. It was immediately after finishing their meal at a fancy seafood restaurant on the water that authorities think Bobby Boost passed two of the stolen paintings to Bobby the Cook Gentile in the eatery’s parking lot.

So says Guarente’s widow, Elene. She came forward in early 2010, some half-dozen years following her husband’s death as a result of cancer, and told investigators that Guarente had a stash of the paintings in their cabin in the woods in Maine and removed at least two of them prior to leaving for their 2002 rendezvous, which he handed over to Gentile after they ate but before they parted ways.

Gentile, 77, denies Elene Guarente’s allegations or ever possessing the ripped-off art. However, the case for that argument took a blow in a 2012 federal raid of his Manchester, Connecticut home, where the FBI discovered amongst an arsenal of weapons and a large cache of prescription painkillers that he had no prescription for, a hand-written list of each of the stolen pieces of Isabella Gardner artwork accompanied with their estimated black-market values. Further hurting his cause is the fact that Gentile reportedly failed an FBI-administered lie-detector test.

Facing narcotics and gun charges, Bobby the Cook stayed true to the code of the streets and refused to spill the beans. Instead, he took the fall and last year he was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Gentile was under constant surveillance by the FBI in Connecticut during the 2000s, as his Clean County Used Cars lot was a local Hartford mob hangout.

The paintings remain missing.

The Isabella Gardner Museum displays blank frames in the places on its walls where the 13 stolen pieces once hung. It’s going on 25 years and every single frame is still empty.

“Besides the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance, I think not solving the Gardner heist sticks in the Bureau’s crow more than any other case ,” the former FBI agent said. “And these weren’t super thieves, Thomas Crown-types. They were knockaround guys that fell into the score of a lifetime  by sheer blind luck and didn’t know what the fuck to do with it. Now in the end, everyone’s deprived. The people that got the art aint selling it, or if they did sell some of it, they got a pittance of what they stole. So they aren’t coming out ahead. And then in terms of culture and history, everyone, the whole god damn world, is deprived of appreciating that brilliant artwork because it’s sitting in hiding in someone’s basement, not on display in a museum or where people can view it. Nobody won in this thing, everybody got screwed.”

To this very day, the Isabella Gardner leaves the frames where the artwork once hung from the museum walls empty, (as seen in this story’s feature image).

In the months and years after the disappearance of Teamsters union power Jimmy Hoffa, which famously took place in Metro Detroit exactly 40 years ago this summer on July 30, 1975, Motor City mob chieftain Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone, the prime suspect in the notorious gangland slaying, became Public Enemy No. 1 for the federal government.

Giacalone, the Detroit mafia’s street boss and day-to-day overseer, has been dead since 2001 (kidney failure), but back on the afternoon Hoffa vanished in 1975, he was scheduled to meet the fiery labor leader for lunch at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant – a lunch date Tony Jack didn’t keep, instead spending the afternoon at his Southfield Athletic Club headquarters five miles down the road. The FBI believes that Giacalone sent a crew of assassins to scoop him up and deliver him to his slaughter. Nonetheless, Tony Jack, nor anybody else was ever charged in the Hoffa hit, reportedly carried out for Hoffa’s refusal to retire from union politics at the mob’s request and discontinue his bid to get re-elected International President of the Teamsters after a five-year prison sentence for fraud, bribery and jury-tampering.

Having avoided arrest for his well-known role in Hoffa’s murder, Giacalone had a major target on his back – the feds put him in their crosshairs and went after him full-tilt, intent on bringing him down by any means necessary. They achieved their goal. Twofold.

Before the end of the decade, the steely-eyed and deadly-as-cancer Giacalone (a suspect in over two dozen gangland killings) would be convicted in two separate cases and serve seven years behind bars as a guest of the United States government in an Atlanta federal penitentiary. First, he was found guilty of federal tax evasion charges at a jury trial in 1976. Then two years later, he pled guilty to extortion charges following being the lead suspect in a racketeering case out of Saginaw, Michigan, a working-class community roughly 100 miles north of Detroit. He served his pair of prison sentences concurrently.

The tax case was Al Capone-style, who’s bloody Prohibition Era-reign in Chicago as the country’s first true gangster celebrity came crashing down in the wake of his ordering the iconic St. Valentines Massacre (the killing of seven Irish mob rivals), for not paying enough income taxes, not murder.The feds in Detroit took the same approach in their campaign to incarcerate Tony Jack in the aftermath of the Hoffa ordeal.

Giacalone was convicted for not paying proper taxes in the calendar years of 1968, 1969 and 1970. While the government calculated Giacalone’s net-worth at well over a million dollars, he was only reporting less than $75,000 annually.

“We’re talking about a man who enjoyed the finer things in life and that just didn’t match up with what he was claiming to the government ever year on his tax return,” former U.S. Prosecutor Richard Zuckerman recalled. “We went into his home and we found a closet filled with very expensive, Italian-made, custom-designed suits and shoes. He was eating at the best restaurants in town every night and traveling all over the place. He liked the job he had, he liked and reveled in being a mob boss. He liked scaring people. But got he got sloppy with his finances or at least accounting for them. And that gave us an angle to go after him on the tax indictment. Everyone knew he was responsible for probably countless murders, put the whole Hoffa execution together, however, he was always able to cover his tracks. In this particular case, he didn’t and we nailed him.”

Shortly after Giacalone’s conviction, his son, Anthony (Fat Tony) Giacalone, Jr, at that time an aspiring mob thug who often acted as his dad’s driver, was indicted and eventually jailed for perjury – he testified untruthfully at his father’s trial that the $25,000 the FBI found in Tony Jack’s bedroom upon his arrest was cash that belonged to him and was money he received as part of the more than $125,000 he got as presents at his wedding years earlier.

His brother’s car, Tony Jack’s youngest boy, Joseph (Joey Jack) Giacalone’s maroon, four-door mercury marquis sedan is believed to be the lone piece of physical evidence recovered in the Hoffa case – it resides in the basement of FBI headquarters in downtown Detroit. Joey Jack’s Mercury is suspected to have been used by the killer’s in Hoffa’s kidnapping and possibly for the transportation and disposal of his dead body (traces of his DNA were discovered in the vehicle’s backseat and his scent detected in the trunk by police dogs).

Tony Giacalone boasted a lengthy arrest record (a rap sheet with a litany of offenses dating back decades), however up until his pair of convictions in the late 1970s, he hadn’t done much prison time. Plucked off the streets of Eastern Market (the epicenter of Detroit’s one-time Little Italy) by longtime Michigan Godfather Joseph (Joe Uno) Zerilli in the early 1940s, Giacalone came up in the Motor City rackets as Zerilli’s bodyguard and go-to enforcer.

Tony Jack’s troubles in Saginaw resulted from a satellite crew the Detroit mob had operating in the area since the Prohibition years. The Giacalones had family ties in Saginaw, located in the heart of the Tri-City area, between Flint and Bay City, like the so-called “Sagnasty,” hardscrabble regions with lunch-pail mentalities and high crime rates.

Giacalone’s father-in-law was Giacomo (Big Jack) Provenzano, the Saginaw crew’s leader from Prohibition until his death of natural causes in 1970. Provenzano, a produce-business owner, was first cousins with New Jersey-based Genovese crime family captain Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, the other top suspect in organizing the Jimmy Hoffa assassination beside Giacalone and his baby brother and fellow capo Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone.

Tony Pro, a close friend-turned-bitter-enemy of Hoffa’s, as well as a powerful Teamsters union boss on the east coast, was supposed to be at the lunch meeting at the Red Fox that never happened alongside Hoffa and Tony Jack, but rather was playing cards at his union hall in New Jersey. He’s thought to have sent members of his crew to Michigan to help clip Hoffa instead.

After Big Jack Provenzano passed away, the Detroit mafia’s Saginaw crew was inherited by Big Jack’s grandson and the Giacalone brothers’ nephew, a brash, polished, thirstysomething mobster named William (Billy Lee) Loiacano. Stationing his affairs at the Pasta House restaurant in Saginaw, Billy Lee and his ragtag inner-circle made up of a rogue’s galley of goons, thieves, scam-artists, bookies, shylocks and drug dealers, known on the streets as “The Pasta House crew,” ran roughshod over the Tri-City underworld, invoking fear in the community not felt since Big Jack’s early days and enforcing a street tax on narcotics transactions and black numbers houses, a pair of businesses Big Jack had stayed away from in the past.

Billy Lee and his boys began to get the reputation as cowboys, the exact opposite of the traditional Detroit mob mold, a picture of stability and relatively low-key behavior, which always came in vast contrast to the other La Cosa Nostra franchises across the country.

“That Tri-City up there was pretty rough for a period in the 70s, we’d send word all the time to the Giacalones’ nephew, Loiacano, to quiet down and stop making so many waves,” said one former Giacalone crew member. “I actually think Tony and Billy Jack liked it, they certainly weren’t discouraging it as much as they could. They wanted to empower the kid up there, make him a big shot. He started to act like his uncles and in those towns he was operating up there, it sticks out more, attracts more attention. It didn’t do any of those guys any favors, they all got pinched and Tony was right there with them.”

In addition to his own rackets, Loiacano was also in charge of watching over the Tri-City interests of his uncles, Billy and Tony and other Detroit Mafiosi like Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco and Anthony (Tony the Bull) Corrado. Tocco was the acting boss of the syndicate in the 1970s. Tony the Bull was his cousin and a capo in the regime. They co-owned Robertson Linen Service, a prominent business brand in the Tri-City area back then. The Giacalone brothers staked Loiacano’s gambling and loansharking operations.

When people in the region got out of line, they got dealt with swiftly and forcefully. Numbers runner and drug pusher David De La Rosa wouldn’t pay tribute and owed money to the mob for his gambling debts, so he got whacked out by Loiacano’s top muscle, Norman (Pete the Arm) Crawford at Crawford’s after-hours club. Local car dealer owner Robert Dean testified in front of a grand jury investigating the crew and Loiacano dispatched two of his soldiers, the LeBreche brothers (Bruce and Brent), to deliver a vicious beating. Contractor Gerald Yeager wouldn’t cough up a street tax for construction jobs he was working and the LeBreche brothers paid him a visit for a pummeling, too.

Sometimes Loiacano would reach out to his uncle Tony for help in collecting. The incident that led to Giacalone’s ensnarement in the Saginaw crew’s racketeering case stemmed from a business relationship-gone-sour and law suit involving Loiacano and Tony Dambro, a local builder. Dambro sold Loiacano the liquor license for the Pasta House and agreed to construct the restaurant for him. The problem was once Billy Lee assumed ownership of Dambro’s liquor license and the eatery opened for business, he decided against forking over all the money. In the end, Dambro was paid less than the agreed upon amount for the liquor license fee and flatout stiffed him in the construction job, Loiacano deeming the craftsmanship insufficient. Feeling he had no other options, Dambro sued Billy Lee and his wife and Pasta House co-owner, Tony Jack’s niece, for payment of the outstanding debt.

Bumping into each other at a restaurant in the weeks after the lawsuit was filed in early 1978, Loiacano threatened Dambro.

“This time you went too far, we chop motherfuckers like you up, put you in a box and dump you in the river,” Billy Lee said to Dambro.

A phone call a few days later, heard Loiacano tell Dambro, “We’re waiting outside your house ready to blow your fucking head off.”

A run-in at a mutual friend’s office saw Billy Lee scream at Dambro, “Don’t you know who I am and what I can do to you, cocksucker?”

It only got worse. To Dambro’s surprise and great discontent, Tony Jack himself showed up at his apartment and in Sicilian demanded $100,000 to lift the multiple murder contracts that were on his head. That was all he could take. Terrified for his life, Dambro dropped the lawsuit and paid the Giacalones and Loiacano the 100k. Then he called the FBI.

Arrested in the fall of 1978, Billy Loiacano’s Pasta House crew were all tried in 1980 and convicted on racketeering charges. Today, the 75-yeart old Loiacano is retired from the mob and living in Tampa, Florida, having hung up his gangster spurs a long time ago in exchange for work as owner of a chain of fruit markets.

Released from prison in 1986, Tony Giacalone continued his rein atop the Detroit mafia until the day he died in 2001, not shockingly, under indictment and awaiting trial on another racketeering case. Billy Giacalone, suspected by the FBI of being his older brother’s “rep” on the Hoffa hit, pled guilty in that case, admitting his membership in the mafia as part of a plea deal, and died of natural causes in 2012.

According to FBI records and informant logs, in the weeks after Tony Jack was sprung from the clink in January ’86, he and Jack Tocco (by then the Family’s official don) led an induction ceremony, “making” his two sons, Fat Tony and Joey Jack Giacalone. Alleged to be included in the Detroit mob’s “Class of ’86” was Billy Giacalone’s son, Jack (Jackie the Kid) Giacalone.

Fat Tony Giacalone died in 2013 of cancer. Per several sources, Jackie Giacalone, 65, assumed the Family’s boss’ chair from a dying Jack Tocco last year and Joey Giacalone is one of his most-trusted capos.

Top-ranking Chicago mob associate Michael (Mickey D) Davis is clearing his schedule, possibly for the next few decades. The 58-year old Davis, at times over the years a driver and bodyguard for Outfit heavyweights such as Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis and Peter (Greedy Petey) DiFronzo, was found guilty last week in federal court of extortion, connected to his hiring a DeLaurentis lieutenant to break the legs of a debtor and could get a 40-year prison sentence.

The debtor, R.J. Serpico, the nephew of Melrose Park Mayor Ron Serpico, took out a street loan from Davis in late 2011 for $300,000 to open a car dealership. When by 2013 he had still failed to pay the money back, Davis reached out to an intermediary to retain Lake County gangster Paul Carparelli and cronies that worked for Carparelli to carry out an attack on Serpico that never wound up occurring due to one of Carparelli’s subordinates being an FBI informant.

“Solly D and Mickey D gave me $10,000 to throw this guy a beating,” said Carparelli to his wired-up underling.

Carparelli pled guilty to overseeing another extortion plot last month out of Lake County, the longtime stomping grounds of DeLaurentis, reputed “acting boss” of the Windy City mafia today. Serpico testified that he knew Davis to be friends with Solly D and would often see him chauffeuring Greedy Petey DiFronzo around town in DiFronzo’s Cadillac Escalade SUV. Mickey D threatened Serpico and his wife and children in a verbal confrontation that took place at used car lot in Melrose Park in January 2013.

Greedy Petey is a semi-retired capo in the Outfit’s Elmwood Park crew and longtime top advisor to his older brother, Chicago mob don John (Johnny No Nose) DiFronzo, the boss of the syndicate since the early 1990s said to be pretty much out of the day-to-day mafia game. Johnny No Nose’s name made it into testimony at the Davis trial as well.

Davis admitted being a social acquaintance of Solly D’s knowing and being friends with the DiFronzo brothers for years, however denied working for them, insisting instead they were merely golfing and fishing partners (see feature image on a fishing boat in Costa Rice with Pete DiFronzo).

“Mickey D has a lot of trust with those guys, Johnny and Petey would use him to shuffle messages to Solly, he was one of the only people that didn’t have a button that had their ear like that,” said one strret source.

FBI and Chicago Crime Commission sources tell Gangster Report that Rudy (the Chin) Fratto is looking after the Elmwood Park crew on a daily basis for the DiFronzo brothers these days and DeLaurentis assumed control of the syndicate in an acting capacity two years ago.

Detroit mob restaurant opens, draws area mafia elite, show’s Big Paulie is back on top

Paul (Big Paulie) Corrado is on a roll. A few years ago, he got out of prison after serving more than a decade, mostly for the sins of others, proving he’s the last of dying breed in the mafia in the New Millennium – a genuine standup guy, who lives by the code of the oath he took and kept his mouth shut in a situation where many of similar ilk have folded like cheap suits.

Per insider sources, the 58-year old tride and true wiseguy recently got a bump-up to a capo’s seat and beat a cancer scare. Now, he’s got a brand new restaurant to brag about with his Goombah buddies. Back in the winter, Big Paulie Corrado and his cousin Mark, with additional alleged financial “backing” from reputed Detroit mob street boss Peter (Specs) Tocco, opened Dominic’s Italian Restaurant in Macomb County, off Jefferson Avenue.

Big Paulie and Tocco run the Italian-American Retirees Social Club together. According to sources on the Detroit’s “east side,”, the duo has been spending more and more time at Dominic’s, named after Big Paulie’s dad, deceased Motor City mafia capo Dominic (Fats) Corrado, and Michigan mob brass like boss Jack (Jackie the Kid) Giacalone, underboss Anthony (Chicago Tony) La Piana and consigliere Anthony (Tony Pal) Palazzolo, have all made appearances at the eatery since its’ opening in January. These sources call the 67-year old Tocco, “Big Paulie’s biggest cheerleader.” The pair are cousins.

The Corrado clan has a rich gangland heritage in Detroit. Big Paulie’s grandpa was Pietro (Machine Gun Pete) Corrado, a legendary presence in the area’s underworld of the first half of the 20th Century who led the crime family’s takeover of the city’s black policy racket in the late 1940s and died of a sudden heart attack in 1958. Machine Gun Pete was an original captain in the Family and following his death his crew was assigned to his sons, Big Paulie’s father, Fats Corrado and his uncle Anthony (Tony the Bull) Corrado.

Fats Corrado died of natural causes in 1985 and Big Paulie and Tony the Bull were both indicted in the infamous 1996 Operation GameTax, a federal legal assault that busted almost the entire Detroit mob administrative hierarchy. Tony the Bull died in prison in 2002, while Big Paulie, merely a foot soldier carrying out orders, didn’t see the light of day until 2010, having done 12 years behind bars while then-don Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco did less than two and then-underboss Anthony (Tony Z) Zerilli served five.

Black Jack Tocco, Pete Tocco’s uncle, died in the summer of 2014. Tony Zerilli died this past spring. Jack Tocco’s retirement two-to-three years ago resulted in Pete Tocco’s “upping” to street boss after street boss Jack Giacalone became boss succeeding Black Jack, per sources. Big Paulie Corrado replaced Pete Tocco as capo of the long-standing Tocco crew, once headed respectively by Black Jack and his brother and Pete’s other uncle, Anthony (Tony T) Tocco (passed away in 2012), before they reached administration status. Pete Tocco is alleged to have taken the reins to the Tocco crew in the early 2000s when Tony Tocco was promoted to consigliere.

Tucked away in a federal prison cell awaiting trial on racketeering charges filed nearly two decades ago, former Indiana Outlaws Motorcycle Club president Randy (Mad Dog) Yager is a suspect in the gruesome murder of his older brother Gerald earlier this month, according to exclusive Gangster Report sources in Illinois law enforcement. Sixty-eight year old Gerald Yager, also a full-patch Hoosier State Outlaw MC member, was found brutally slain June 6 in the Yager family home in Gary, Indiana, the same residence he once shared with his baby bro. Gerald was beaten, his throat was slit, his wrists handcuffed and his house set ablaze.

“Mad,” as he’s known to close friends and amongst club personnel, is being looked at by authorities for possibly ordering his elder sibling’s execution and contracting the wet work to Outlaws in Northwest Indiana’s Gary chapter, per sources. Yager relatives have told the FBI that Randy was sending threats Gerald’s way from behind bars, where he’s only been for less than a year after being apprehending by authorities in Mexico following 17 years on the run from the law – while Yager went quietly during his apprehension by arresting officers last October in a bar in the town of Rosarito, his girlfriend and fellow fugitive Margie Jelovic fled and was killed in an ensuing car chase with police.

The FBI and ATF raided an Outlaws hangout in Calumet County, Indiana last week as part of their investigation into the Gerald Yager homicide. Back in 1997, Mad Yager was indicted in a giant RICO case out of federal court in Milwaukee, one of 17 Outlaws tripped up by the feds on a slew of charges. Everyone but Yager has been convicted. Amid the multitude of racketeering charges Yager currently faces rest murder and murder conspiracy counts.

“Mad” Yager at the zenith of his power in the Outlaws MC Midwest hierarchy in the 1990s, opposed to the story’s featured image snapped in 2014 upon his arrest

In the 1990s, Yager was one of legendary biker boss and Outlaws International President Harry (Taco) Bowman’s top lieutenants and the club’s “Chicago region” or “Windy City region” leader, overseeing club activity in the states of Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois. His arrest jacket dates back to the early 1980s. He’s been previously convicted of a pair of assaults (1984, 1985) – in one of the incidents he attacked a cop in his home base of Gary. Over the years, he has been suspected of committing arson, murder, attempted murder, gun-running, grand larceny and narcotics trafficking, among other felonies.

“He relished the rough stuff” said U.S. Marshal Patrick Amerson of Yager’s rule. “People were afraid of him because they thought he was crazy.”

When the Chicago Outlaws chapter was having trouble dealing with a Hells Angels sub-group known as the Hells Henchmen in 1994, Taco Bowman summoned Yager to his house in Detroit and personally tapped him to take care of the problem and lead a fire-bombing campaign against the Henchmen.

Bowman, like Yager, was indicted in 1997 and went on the lam. Unlike, Yager, his time on the run was relatively short lived, getting nabbed in June 1999. Mad Yager is expected to go to trial in Wisconsin by early 2016 on his case and is looking at life in prison if convicted.

Philadelphia mob captain Michael (Mikey Lance) Lancellotti is recovering from a bout with cancer and aiding the top levels of the mafia in the City of Brotherly Love in running the former Bruno-Scarfo crime family on a day-to-day basis, according to “insider” sources in Philly. In fact, per these sources, one of syndicate boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino’s first stops on his recent return to his hometown neighborhood of South Philly was a face-to-face with Mikey Lance to discuss Lance’s newfound responsibilities as street boss Steven (Handsome Stevie) Mazzone’s “main relay-man of messages to the other capos.”

Merlino, 52, came back to Philadelphia earlier this month to attend the high school graduation party of his close friend and local reputed mob associate Raymond (Ray Wags) Wagner’s daughter and while home he’s been taking meetings.

“Joey saw Lance early on in his visit to town, he needed to go over things with him, let him know what he wanted,” said one source. “The Skinny One wasn’t shy showing his face around, he was meeting with everybody he had to out in the open.”

The handsome, fearless and charismatic Merlino relocated to South Florida in 2011 after being released from a dozen-year prison sentence on racketeering charges. He was jailed for three and a half months this winter and early spring for a parole violation that took place last summer when Skinny Joey had dinner at a Boca Raton cigar bar and nightclub with his alleged “acting” underboss John (Johnny Chang) Ciancaglini – the feds failure to notify Merlino of the violation in a proper manner led to him walking out of a Miami federal prison and back onto the streets to continue running his Pennsylvania mob kingdom from afar three weeks early).

When he left his jail cell in April, Skinny Joey was off any form of government supervision for the first time since 1999. Lancellotti, 51, was inducted into the mafia by Joey Merlino in the 1990s, while at the same time aiding Merlino and his closest gangland confidant 52-year old Stevie Mazzone in fighting and eventually winning a war for control of the Family against Sicilian-born Godfather John Stanfa, who was put behind bars for life in the middle of the decade for racketeering and murder.

Skinny Joey and Mikey Lance are both suspects in the infamous 1993 attack on Stanfa underboss Joseph (Joey Chang) Ciancaglini, Jr., an early-morning shooting at the diner Ciancaglini and Stanfa held court at, leaving Ciancaglini disabled and shelved (its the only mob ambush ever caught on FBI surveillance, as the feds had a camera stationed directly out in front of the greasy spoon captured the assailants rushing into the diner and opening fire on Joey Chang in the kitchen).

“We heard Lance was possibly one of the shooters in the Joey Chang hit and Merlino planned it and was in a car nearby monitoring things,” said one retired FBI agent.

Another suspected shooter: Michael (Mikey Chang) Ciancaglini, Joey Chang’s baby bro and Merlino and Mazzone’s best friend.

Johnny Chang, the eldest of the three Ciancaglini siblings, and the patriarch of the Chang clan, Joseph (Chickie) Ciancaglini, currently reputed to be the underboss of the Philly mafia, were each in prison at the time of the war, helpless to stop the simmering hostilities which pitted brother-vs-brother and son-vs-son. Mikey Chang was killed in August 1993, slain in a barrage of bullets as him and Merlino crossed the street in broad daylight. Merlino was wounded in the attack by Stanfa-sent gunmen.

The notoriously tight-knit Merlino camp’s play for the crown was “sponsored” by an imprisoned Ralph Natale, a one-time labor-union fixer and top enforcer for legendary don Angelo Bruno in the 1960s and 70s. Natale became boss following his release from prison in 1994, however ended up joining Team USA and testifying against Merlino, his former cellmate and protégé, in court in a high-profile 2001 trial. Mazzone was caught up and convicted in the same case.

Michael Lancellotti – gray sport coat

Mikey Lance is reportedly doing increasingly better in his bout with cancer and can carry more of a workload now that his health is improving, one of the reasons for the upping of his duties, per sources. Unlike his gangster cohorts like Merlino and Mazzone, Lancellotti hasn’t done much time in the can, though he has taken assault and gambling pinches in his underworld career. His most recent run-in with the law came in 2007 when he was arrested in a New Jersey sports-betting case spawning from activity in Atlantic City’s Borgata casino.

The Philadelphia mafia is in a delicate state in 2015, with the crime family basically split into three distinct and potentially dangerous factions, one led by Merlino, Mazzone and the Ciancaglinis, one led by Phil Narducci (1980s Nicky Scarfo-era soldier) and the other led by Joseph (Joey Punge) Pungitore (another Scarfo-era soldier). According to Gangster Report sources, Mazzone is the one keeping everyone in-line by garnering respect from the two factions he doesn’t belong to, while Mikey Lance is of similar temperament and gets along with both Scarfo-era groups and that’s why he’s being used in the capacity of Mazzone’s new “buffer.”

Deceased Detroit mob underboss Peter (Horseface Pete) Licavoli did a year in prison for trying to move a historically-significant piece of artwork on the black market in the years before his death in the early 1980s – it was his fourth and final trip to the clink. Licavoli, a titan in underworld circles around the country dating back to the Prohibition Era, was indicted in 1976 in Arizona federal court and eventually convicted at trial in 1978 of receiving and the attempted sale of stolen property, tied to charges of attempting to sell the world-famous “Lucretia,” a 500-year old painting, to an undercover FBI agent. The Lucretia was painted by Rembrandt in the 16th century and recently sold at an auction for five million dollars.

The then-75 year old Licavoli earned a reputation as a killer and a huge money maker during the 1920s as founder and leader of the River Gang bootlegging syndicate in Detroit – his arrest record boasted nearly 40 collars. When the Motor City’s various bootlegging factions came under one umbrella with the creation of La Cosa Nostra (the American mafia) in 1931, Horseface Pete was tapped a capo and given a large series of in-state and out-of-state rackets to run on behalf of Michigan mob administrators. By the 1940s, he had relocated to Arizona, watching over his rackets in the Midwest via his main lieutenants in Detroit, specifically men like Joseph (Scarface Joe) Bommarito, Joseph (Joe Misery) Moceri, Matthew (Mike the Enforcer) Rubino and Max (Big Maxie) Stern. Licavoli was promoted from capo to the organization’s underboss role in 1969.

“Pete Licavoli lived out of town, however he was still able to keep his presence felt in Detroit through a series of intermediaries, guys we knew very well and were almost equally as juiced-in as he was,” retired FBI agent Oscar Westerfield recalled. “They spoke for him and that voice spoke loud, even if he was out in the Arizona desert. He could touch anyone he wanted from thousands of miles away and people back in Michigan were still ungodly scared of him.”

Westerfield was the head of the FBI OC Division in Detroit during parts of the 1970s and 80s, finishing his mob-busting exploits as head of Tampa’s OC Division into the 1990s.

“Licavoli had as much respect and say as most bosses in the U.S. at his height,” Westerfield said. “He wasn’t a don, he might as well have been though with the reverence he was afforded in Detroit circles and well beyond.”

Scarface Joe Bommarito was the crime family’s first street boss until he was forced into retirement due to sickness in 1960 (he died in Florida from MS in 1965). He and Licavoli grew up together in St. Louis prior to surfacing as a tandem of terrors on the streets of Detroit and making their initial fortune in smuggling and selling illegal booze. Joe Misery, a Licavoli first cousin, numbers whiz and River Gang co-founder, ran his own crew, but frequently shuffled messages back and forth between the powers that be in Michigan and Horseface Pete in Tucson (he was killed in 1968).

Mike Rubino was Licavoli’s bodyguard as a young River Ganger and served as acting capo of his Detroit crew – upon his death in 1971 of natural causes, Joseph (Joe the Whip) Triglia took over those duties, being aided by Horseface Pete’s baby brother Dominick. Big Maxie Stern was another protégé of Licavoli’s and the syndicate’s overseer of all Jewish gambling rackets until he died of a heart attack in the early 1970s.

Arriving in Arizona on a permanent basis in around 1944, Horseface Pete built the picturesque, opulent and state-of-the-art, 75-acre Grace Ranch, an estate in Tucson that housed his residence as well as several other buildings, such as an art gallery, bowling alley, nine-hole golf course, airplane and helicopter landing strips and quite appropriately a shooting range. Grace Ranch was named after Licavoli’s wife, Grace, the sister of Joseph (Long Joe) Bommarito, another Detroit gangland figure who came out west himself to be in charge of the crime family’s interests in Las Vegas.

It was activity occurring on the Grace Ranch property in the 1970s that Licavoli’s last arrest sprouted from and landed him back behind bars (his prior stints were for bribery, contempt and tax evasion). Informants were telling the FBI that Horseface Pete was using his art gallery as a waystation for fenced merchandise, such as jewelry and precious stones, resulting in the feds bugging the telephone line in his gallery office headquarters as well as his desk and sending an undercover FBI agent in to set up a sting. It didn’t take long. Within a month, Special Agent Don Mason was meeting face-to-face with the imposing member of Midwest mob royalty in the cozy confines of his plush office.

In the midst of negotiating the purchase of a shipment of “hot” diamonds, Licavoli offered Mason a chance to buy the Lucretia, an extremely rare piece of artwork boosted from a Cincinnati,Ohio mansion the year previous (conversations picked up by the government-planted bug).Taking Mason, masquerading as a rich classic art collector, on a tour of the breathtakingly-beautiful gallery, set in the shadows of the Sierra Mountains, Horseface Pete showed him the Lucretia hanging in a frame in the foyer and newspaper clippings vouching for the Rembrandt’s authenticity.

Licavoli’s had deep blood and criminal ties in the Buckeye State – his younger brother, Thomas (Yonnie) Licavoli, first cousins, James (Jack White) Licavoli and Calogero (Leo Lips) Moceri and his brother-in-law Frank (Frankie C) Cammeratta operated with impunity in various patches of the Ohio underworld in their respective mob heydays that spanned the 1920s into the 1980s. Jack White and Leo Lips assumed leadership of the Cleveland mafia in the mid-1970s, promptly entering into a war with the city’s Irish mob group.

At almost the exact time Jack White and Leo Lips took power in Cleveland, government-mole Mason was providing Licavoli a $1,000 down payment for the Lucretia and was subsequently indicted and incarcerated for 13 months of an original 18-month sentence.

“We knew he was conducting rackets out in Arizona and in Michigan, he was booking bets, giving out loans and investing in all kinds of land and oil deals, all while chumming around with Joe Bonanno, the New York Godfather that had fled west in the 60s, amongst other hoods in the region,” commented Westerfield.

Horseface Pete (81) walked free in 1981 and died of heart failure three years later. After he was arrested and his ranch raided in the spring of 1976, the Rembrandt Lucretia was immediately seized off the wall at the art gallery and returned to its rightful owner, Charna Signer.

A notorious unsolved California mafia murder prevented Jerry Tarkanian from coaching the “Showtime” L.A. Lakers of the 1980s.Tarkanian, a legendary college basketball coach who led University of Nevada-Las Vegas to back-to-back NCAA championship games and the 1990 national title, was about to sign on as the Lakers new coach in the summer of 1979 until his agent and close friend, west coast mob associate Victor Weiss, was brutally slain. Weiss’ murder was carried out right after he left a meeting at a Beverly Hills hotel in which he had negotiated the final details of Tarkanian’s contract with Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke and owner-to-be Jerry Buss. Nobody has ever been arrested in the case and today, 36 years later, it remains a mystery.

Following Weiss’ trussed, decomposing corpse being found in the trunk of his maroon-colored Rolls Royce in a North Hollywood parking garage on June 17, 1979 – he was shot twice in the back of the head –,Tarkanian removed his name as a candidate for the Lakers coaching job and stayed on the Strip to build his UNLV Runnin’ Rebels into a national power in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Jack McKinney was hired by Lakers management instead. Paul Westhead took over from McKinney early in the 1979-1980 campaign (McKinney was badly injured in a bike accident and forced to step down) and spurred the Magic Johnson-and-Kareem Abdul-Jabbar-headed Lakeshow to their first of five crowns in the next eight years. Eventual Hall of Fame coach Pat Riley grabbed the reins on the bench from Westhead in the 1981-1982 season and steered L.A.’s ship to its last four NBA-title banners of the era, capped by repeat championships in 1987 and 1988.

The easy-going, quirky and quick-to-give-kids-a-second-chance “Tark the Shark” had his near-two-decade rein atop the Las Vegas sports scene come tumbling to the ground due to his UNLV program’s connection to infamous east coast gangster and point-shaver Richard (Richie the Fixer) Perry, a convicted New York racketeer tied to the Genovese and Lucchese crime families. Forced to resign in 1991 in the aftermath of pictures of Rebels players in a hot tub and on a custom-made backyard basketball court with Perry being printed in the paper and further news of Perry’s links to the UNLV athletic program surfacing in the media. Tarkanian finished out his coaching career with a brief stint in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs and finally with a successful twilight tenure at Fresno State in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Weiss, 51 at the time of his death and a frequent social companion to the movie, television industry and pro athlete elite, was a businessman (real estate, insurance, car dealerships), sports and concert promoter and a part-time agent and alleged to have had at least one foot in the underworld, per FBI informants, engaging in financial transactions with a number of mobsters and drug dealers on the west coast in the years before his execution. Born in Pennsylvania and moving to Pasadena in his late teens, he and Tarkanian were longtime friends and college classmates.

Tarkanian was the toast of the town in Vegas in the late 1970s, a citywide celebrity and growing local cultural iconoclast equal to that of Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack, Elvis Presley and Siegfried & Roy. His 1977 Rebels club was ranked No. 1 in the country and advanced to the school’s first-ever NCAA Final Four.

In 1979, the Lakers saw Jerry West step down from his head coaching position to accept the historic franchise’s general manager role instead. As Jack Kent Cooke prepared to sell the team to Jerry Buss, Buss set his sights on the fan-friendly, fun-loving and quick-witted Armenian with the face of a bulldog and the penchant to allow his players to be free spirited and have his club’s run-and-gun on the basketball floor at every opportunity. Kent Cooke had done the same in a fruitless endeavor two years prior. Of similar demeanor and mindset, Buss, like Kent Cook did, fell in love with the idea of luring Tarkanian away from the college ranks and into the coach’s chair at the Fabulous Western Forum (the team’s then-hip and glamorous home arena).

He was on the verge of doing just that. But Tark the Shark backed out on the eve of signing the contract – set to make him the highest-paid coach in NBA history – when Weiss showed up dead. During the final years of his life, Weiss was seen palling around with Anthony (Tony the Ant) Spilotro, the Chicago mafia’s wild and crazy west coast representative stationed in Las Vegas and is suspected to have been possibly acting as a courier of skimmed cash for the Spilotro crew, whose violent exploits were portrayed in the Martin Scorsese movie Casino (1995, starring Oscar-winner Joe Pesci as Spilotro).

Tony Spilotro c. 1970s

According to the FBI records, Weiss was also a big gambler, in debt to the mob for a substantial amount of money and was being accused by the mafia of “skimming the skim,” taking portions of stolen money from the Vegas casinos for himself while delivering it to Spilotro and Spilotro’s crew, some of whom were located in the Los Angeles area where he lived. The reason he was couriering the cash in the first place, per the FBI records, was to work off his gambling debt. FBI surveillance logs show Weiss meeting with both Spilotro’s primary California lieutenants, Joey Hansen (L.A. rep) and Chris Pettit (San Diego rep) in the days leading up to his murder.

In the mid-1970s, Weiss brokered an endorsement deal for Tarkanian with Royal Reservations, a mob-controlled casino-and-hotel junket business ran by Dave Bliss, a buddy of Spilotro’s who eventually was nailed for bribing public officials and testified against Spilotro crew loanshark Eathel (Tex) Gates in court. Gates was sent away to prison for eight years, based mainly on Bliss’ testimony.

Spilotro was heard on FBI wiretaps placing a murder contract on Bliss’ head that was never occurred. Tony the Ant was executed in a suburban Chicago basement for his incessant insubordination in Nevada in June 1986.

Additional California State Police files peg Weiss an associate of the L.A. mafia, noting his dining on a regular basis with known Dragna crime family soldiers Ross Lantieri and Joe Sica and his business dealings with both of them, including Weiss allegedly running bookmaking and gambling “layoff” rackets in partnership with Lantieri and holding mutual interests in the prize fight game alongside Sica, a heavily-respected gangland figure in LaLaLand dating back to the 1940s and 50s and his days as a bodyguard for Hollywood Jewish mob icon Mickey Cohen. Sica and his brothers oversaw their own faction of the California underworld in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

Howie Steindler, an associate of Weiss’ and Sica’s in the west coast boxing world, was found as “trunk music” in 1977, killed in the same fashion Weiss would be two years in the future. Sica was a suspect in the Steindler hit, however never charged. He died peacefully, a free man in 1992 on his ritzy ranch just outside L.A.

Joe Sica

Gregarious, garish and husky, Weiss had a late-afternoon meeting with Kent Cooke and Buss at the Beverly Comstock Hotel bar on June 14, 1979 and left in his Rolls with a fully negotiated contract in his Gucci leather briefcase. On his way to hook-up with his wife Rose for dinner at Monty’s, a favorite restaurant of theirs’ in the San Fernando Valley, he disappeared.

Three days later, his body was discovered – North Hollywood Police were called to investigate an abandoned Rolls Royce emanating a foul odor in a parking structured adjoining a Sheraton Hotel. Found in the trunk with his hands and feet tied behind his back, his killing was almost immediately ruled organized-crime related by the FBI because of his background, criminal associations and the fact that his murderers left behind all of his jewelry (diamond pinky ring, a solid-gold Rolex watch given to him as a present from a music-industry starlet) and money in his pocket ($38,000). What was missing was the briefcase with the contract inside.

Investigators were able to trace Weiss’ route from the Beverly Comstock to Encino in the San Fernando Valley, where witnesses saw him pull his car over on the side of the road and engage in a shouting match with three men in a Cadillac, who had pulled over behind him. The men in the Cadillac (one described as 6-foot-5, with sandy blonde hair) eventually got into Weiss’ Rolls Royce with Weiss at the wheel and were seen pulling out back into traffic and heading north on the Hollywood Expressway. These men have never been identified, Weiss was never seen alive again. Police speculate he was done away with shortly thereafter, possibly within minutes.

At least three suspects in the Weiss murder were murdered themselves in the decade that followed – none connected to the case though: Jeff Rockman, a jewel thief and bank robber in the Federal Witness Protection Program formerly known as Anthony Starr, feared Wonderland Gang boss and lunatic drug lord Ron Launius and Horace (Big Mac) McKenna, a one-time cop-turned drug dealer, bookie and pimp. All three interacted with Weiss and are thought to have been doing business with him in some form or another. Weiss’ name came up in money-laundering investigations involving a number of treacherous characters like Rockman-Starr, Launius and McKenna.

Ron Launius

Rockman was killed on April 1980, probably for his testifying in court against his former gangster chums in Detroit.

Launius and three others were heinously bludgeoned to death in the grisly Wonderland Apartment massacre in July 1981 on orders of L.A. crime boss Eddie Nash for their armed robbery of his mansion days earlier.

McKenna, a flashy former Spilotro Southern California mercenary, was killed by machine gun fire in March 1989 as a result of a falling out with his business partner in a chain of strip clubs.

Unfortunately, Weiss’ family has continued to endure hardship well after Victor Weiss’ untimely demise. His son died fighting in Iraq in 2004, his widow was murdered by their own daughter in 2008. Tarkanian passed away of natural causes earlier this year. Inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013, Tark the Shark closed his career with over 700 total wins and a legacy of revolutionizing the college cage landscape with his wide-open, fast-paced style of play and groundbreaking “ameba defense.”

Longtime Detroit mob captain Dominic (Fats) Corrado died of a nagging heart ailment 30 years ago this week, laying the groundwork for the grisly gangland slaying of his brother-in-law and renegade Michigan Mafioso Peter (Fast Pete) Cavataio less than two weeks later in early July 1985. Fats Corrado was the eldest son of the crime family’s numbers kingpin, Pietro (Machine Pete) Corrado, a beloved racketeer and feared Prohibition Era enforcer who married the sister of legendary Detroit don Joseph (Joe Uno) Zerilli and went on to lead one of the syndicate’s original crews until he died of a sudden heart attack in January 1957 while vacationing in Miami over the New Year’s holiday.

Current Motor City wiseguy Paul (Big Paulie) Corrado, a reputed capo in the modern-day Michigan mob, is Dominic’s son. Big Paulie Corrado opened a restaurant in the winter called Dominic’s, named in honor of his dearly departed dad.

Collapsing from a massive coronary on New Year’s Day 1957, Machine Gun Pete died at 54. His equally-respected son and successor to his mob empire, Dominic, beat his father by a single year. He was 55 when he died in 1985 and passed the reins of the Corrado crew to his younger brother, the magnetic and super-sized Anthony (Tony the Bull) Corrado.

The moment Fats Corrado took his last breath on June 26, 1985, the notoriously reckless Pete Cavataio, a one-time up-and-comer in the Detroit underworld that had fallen out of favor with a number of fellow local goodfellas in the years before his vicious execution, but had always averted death because of his close friendship with Fats, was living on borrowed time. Unlike his recently-deceased sibling, Tony the Bull Corrado despised Cavataio and was fed up with his antics. After Fats Corrado dropped dead, he made sure Fast Pete, rumored to have stolen syndicate funds, racked up personal gambling debt and engaged in romantic affairs with a slew of wives and girlfriends of imprisoned Michigan hoodlums, wasn’t far behind.

Fast Pete Cavataio was kidnapped and killed on the afternoon of July 8, 1985, snatched by baseball-bat wielding thugs in a van outside his Southfield apartment building, down the street from his newly-opened BBQ joint, and discovered the next morning in a Southwest Detroit garage, his body battered, tortured and shot in the head.

Nobody has ever been charged in Cavataio’s homicide, although an indictment loomed in the early 1990s when an area goon and possible-participant in the hit temporarily turned witness for the government before changing his mind and recanting his grand jury testimony.The torture was a result of his killers unsuccessfully trying to pry the whereabouts of a multi-million dollar stash of cash people believe he had access to out of him prior to murdering him.

“Tony the Bull wasn’t going to protect Cavataio the way Fats did, so everybody who wanted a piece of him bided their time until Dom Corrado died,” one former FBI agent recalled. “Then it was like a bunch of wolves coming out of their caves smelling fresh meat, the second Dom kicked, it was a race to Tony the Bull’s doorstep to get his permission to whack Pete Cavataio. He was a goner, he had nobody watching his back anymore. Plus, everybody knew he was sitting on a boatload of money hidden away somewhere. They all thought they could clip Pete and walk away with the dough. Well, they clipped him alright, beat him up bad, stabbed him with a hot blade all over, but he never gave up the cash.”

Pete Cavataio

Cavataio was a mob prince like the Corrado boys. He was raised around the Corrado crew, his father, Dominic (Dom the Baker) Cavataio, being a top lieutenant in Machine Gun Pete’s inner-circle. The Corrado crew was headquartered, first under Machine Gun Pete himself at the Grecian Gardens Restaurant in the middle of Greektown (Detroit’s downtown entertainment district) and then under the leadership of Fats and Tony the Bull on the outskirts of Greektown at the St. Antoine Coffee Shop.

The Corrado brothers and Pete Cavataio each got their “button” (formally inducted into the mafia) at an early age – All in their 20s:Fats Corrado was made in 1951 at 21, Tony the Bull and Fast Pete four years later together in a late-1955 ceremony, per state police records, at 22 and 25 respectively.

To “make his bones,” Fats Corrado killed a knock-around guy from Greektown caught freelancing named Jack George, according to FBI documents, in 1950, with his father (Machine Gun Pete) and grandfather (Joe Zerilli) watching. After the rope he was strangling his victim with broke, Zerilli, per the FBI doc, walked over to his grandson and handed him a pistol to finish the job. The younger Corrado proceeded to shoot George in the back of the head. Following their respective fathers’ passings within five years of each other, Fats and Tony the Bull became well-liked capos and well-known earners while in stark contrast, Fast Pete floundered, never raising past the rank of soldier and consistently upset his superiors in the mob with his erratic and incorrigible behavior – his flagrant narcotics trafficking with former Purple Ganger Sammy (the Mustache) Norber of particular note at the end of his run .

The federal government estimated the post-Machine Gun Pete era Corrado crew was raking in almost 100 million dollars a year in illegal profits by June 1985 when Fats was felled by his faulty ticker. Cavataio just pissed people off. Fats had a soft spot for his brother-in-law and frequently got him out of jams. Tony the Bull didn’t feel the same way and after Fats died he cleared the path for Fast Pete’s assassination. Fast Pete Cavataio was the last “made” member of the Detroit mafia to be slain.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office is pretty confident they know, at least partially, what transpired and that the then-crew of Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone was responsible for Cavataio’s death. Giacalone died in 2012, but his right-hand man, Frank (Frankie the Bomb) Bommarito remains alive and a prime suspect in the unsolved-slaying, as does reputed current Detroit mob boss Jack (Jackie the Kid) Giacalone, among others.

The FBI believes Billy Giacalone tasked Bommarito with organizing the hit. Jackie Giacalone, 65, got his button soon thereafter, in a February 1986 ceremony, per state police records. The 85-year old Bommarito was captain of the old Billy Jack crew up until three years ago. Another name to surface in the investigation was Outlaw Motorcycle Club President Harry (Taco) Bowman, in prison for life on murder and racketeering charges and a high-level Detroit mafia associate in his heyday as one of the world’s most powerful biker bosses and a confidant of Bommarito’s.

In 1992, the feds thought they had cracked the case. Giacalone crew member John (Crazy Johnny) Pree flipped and started naming names in sealed grand jury testimony. Pree was under indictment alongside Bommarito’s son, Carlo, his best friend, on charges of running an armed robbery and home invasion ring targeting high-end suburban drug dealers under the Giacalone banner and torching rival sanitation companies of Giacalone-crew business owners.

As the U.S. Attorney’s Office prepared a RICO indictment featuring the Cavataio murder to levy against Billy Giacalone and his inner-circle, Pree recanted his testimony, claiming he lied at the behest of the FBI agents he was trying to help to wiggle out of his own pending 25-50 year sentence. Serving a little more than 20 years behind bars, Pree was released last fall. Cavataio’s arrest record included pinches for overseeing a food stamp scam, bookmaking, assault. At the time of his murder, Fast Pete was under indictment for bank fraud and under heavy investigation by the DEA for illicit drug activities.

Tony the Bull Corrado died in prison in 2002, in the midst of doing time on a racketeering conviction. His son Dominic (Chicago Dom) Corrado was caught up in a federal gambling case in 2006.

“Everybody loved Dom and the Bull, nobody could stand Pete Cavataio though, he was on thin ice from the second he took his oath (got made),” said one Motor City underworld old timer. “The Bull couldn’t talk about him without going into a rage. Dom and Tony were people persons, Pete wasn’t. He couldn’t get along with anybody and thought incorrectly that he was untouchable. I honestly don’t think he realized that Dom dying was putting him at dire risk. He wasn’t taking the kind of safety measures you’d think he should considering the circumstances. I heard somebody told him to leave town after Dom passed and he said they’re going to have to carry me out of this city in a bodybag. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Rumored ties between the White House and the mafia date back to the JFK era and even beyond. Two potential future United States Presidents, both considered top candidates for the job in the 2016 Election, have, at the very least, tangential connections to the American mob. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, an early Republican Party front-runner who threw his proverbial hat into the ring last week, has an uncle via marriage that was a high-ranking member of New York’s Genovese crime family and current U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, projected as a possible No. 1 choice for the Democrats come next summer’s convention, won his inaugural bid to the U.S. Senate in the early 1970s with a little, albeit unknowingly, strong-arm chicanery from the then-mobbed up Teamsters union.

Chris Christie & The Greek: Christie’s aunt was married to a brother of feared Genovese Family captain Tino (the Greek) Fiumara, who died in 2010 of pancreatic cancer. Fiumara, known as incredibly shrewd, handsome and deadly, was in charge of all Genovese rackets in the state of New Jersey until the day he died five years ago. The cherubic and charismatic Christie has admitted to a pair of meet-ups with Fiumara, one at a birthday party for his aunt and the other in a visit at a federal prison in 2000.

At the time of his death, Tino the Greek, also sometimes referred to as “Good-Looking T,” was a suspect in a dozen gangland homicides over his half-century career wreaking havoc on the streets, a list of murders most recently added to with the 2005 execution of a protégé of his and a series of slayings he was still being investigated for when he died on September 16, 2010 at 69.

Tino Fiumara (right) walking with NYC mob icon Joe Adonis in the late 1970s

Alleged to have been made into the mafia in the mid-1960s, by the mid-1970s he was heading a Genovese sub crew and on-call assassin squad called “The Fist.” Incarcerated in 1979 for racketeering, he served 15 years before being freed in 1994 and returning to increased responsibilities within the Genovese clan. The 1990s saw Fiumara promoted to the full-time capo of syndicate affairs in the Garden State.

Imprisoned again between 1999-2003 on parole violations, towards the end of his life he ran his crew using an intermediary, first Lawrence Ricci and then Michael (Mikey Cigars) Coppola. Fiumara and Coppola are the prime suspects in Ricci’s 2005 murder.

Ricci, 60, was Fiumara’s acting capo when Fiumara was away “at school” in the early 2000s. Investigators speculate he was slain for his refusal to take a plea deal in a labor-union racketeering case he was a co-defendant in. Coppola, already in prison on a murder conviction, is believed to have been the shooter in Ricci’s 2005 mob hit, with Fiumara thought to have been the one that gave the order at a time Christie had graduated from New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney to the Governor’s chair.

Per the indictment he was on trial for when he was killed, Ricci was Fiumara’s point man on the New Jersey waterfront, where his crew controlled the docks. Disappearing in October 2005, Ricci’s body wasn’t discovered until December 1. His corpse was found in the trunk of his car in the parking lot of a New Jersey restaurant. Ricci’s replacement as Fiumara’s soldier overseeing the waterfront, Stephen (Stevie Beach) Dipiero was busted, too.

Joe Biden & The Irishman: A native of Delaware, Biden, 72, will end his two-term run as Barack Obama’s VP in January 2017 when Obama leaves office. In November 1972, Biden became the sixth youngest person ever elected to a Senate seat by edging incumbent republican and former Delaware governor, J. Caleb Boggs, in dramatic comeback fashion. He trailed the Richard Nixon-backed Boggs by as many as 32 points in the polls in the months before Election Night, but rallied with a high-energy campaign that featured his attractive family and a vocalized desire to champion progressive causes and deviate from Boggs ‘politics-as-usual’ methods.

According to his own admission, deceased mafia associate and legendary organized labor goon Frank (the Irishman) Sheeran, the man who might have personally killed Jimmy Hoffa, blocked the delivery of newspapers in the Wilmington area on the day of the election preventing crucial Boggs campaign advertising spots from getting in front of hundreds of thousands of voters eyes prior to heading to the voting booths. Sheeran was president of the Teamsters in Delaware and the main muscle for Pennsylvania mob dons Russell Buffalino of Scranton and Angelo Bruno of Philadelphia in their labor union dealings. An admitted hit man and racketeer, Sheeran was the mafia’s go-to enforcer in the unions on the east coast throughout the 1960s and 70s.

The Delaware Teamsters supported Biden because of his pro-labor stance and a bunch of well-received talks he gave to the union rank-and-file in the stretch run of his campaign in the fall. Boggs’ public relations team took umbrage with some of the comments Biden made about his voting record and sought to state it for the record with a series of campaign ads in a paid-for insert in the two biggest Delaware newspapers, which happened to be owned by the same company, a company Sheeran had links to.

Coordinating with his moles at the paper (but without Biden’s knowledge), the Irishman organized an “informational picket” of both the papers’ staff for unfair labor practices and his Teamsters’ truck drivers honored the protest by not delivering the papers on the day before and the day of the election. Biden wound up winning by a mere 1.5 percent of the vote, less than 3,500 cast ballots.

The big and burly Sheeran worked directly for the mafia and took orders from only the Teamsters boss himself, infamous mob associate Jimmy Hoffa, who had built the Teamsters into the most powerful labor union in the world with the help of his friends in the underworld and was based out of Michigan. Hoffa gave up his presidency while in prison for bribery, fraud and jury tampering, however wanted it back upon his release to the chagrin of the mafia content with his successor, Frank Fitzsimmmons, Hoffa’s one-time vice president and someone considerably easier to puppet.

Frank Sheeran (right) speaking with Jimmy Hoffa

Hoffa’s refusal to back down from his plan to run for the president of the Teamsters resulted in his notoriously unsolved kidnapping and murder in the summer 1975. Sheeran (d. 2003) claimed in a book written about him that he was the man given the contract on Hoffa and pumped two bullets into the back of his head on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 at a northwest Detroit residence after luring his close friend and confidant to his slaughter promising to watch his back at a purported meeting with a menacing mobster (Genovese crime family capo Tony Provenzano) that Hoffa was feuding with. FBI agents working the Hoffa case today dismiss Sheeran’s boast, published in author Charlie Brandt’s 2004 book “I Heard You Paint Houses”, as untrue.

The post The Mafia & The 2015 American Presidential Election appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Reputed New England mob consigliere Anthony (Ponytail Tony) Parillo saw his best friend and gangland running buddy, tough-as-nails Irishman Dennis Roche, killed in late 1981, while Parillo himself was in prison. Minus Ponytail Tony by his side, Roche was left exposed to his enemies, which by the time of his death were rapidly gaining in numbers due to his boorish behavior and constant bragging about murders he had participated in, including the brother of an associate who finally snapped.

Anthony (Porky) DeCiantis and Ricky Silva, a pair of then-aspiring Patriarca crime family enforcers, are believed to have carried out Roche’s slaying, per Rhode Island State Police records, in or around the Providence area. Porky DeCiantis is currently serving life behind bars after his conviction for the homicide in 1984. Silva was never indicted on the Roche case and is currently in prison on racketeering charges spawning from a bust eight years ago.

Roche admittedly killed Porky DeCiantis’ brother, Rocco, in 1978 and would constantly needle Porky about it and how he could be next. The year before, Roche and Tony Parillo clipped a drug dealer named Ronnie Leone and an innocent bystander that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Leone had ripped off Parillo and Roche on a previous narcotics transaction.

Parillo was away in prison for the Leone hit when Roche was executed on December 4, 1981 and is alleged to be the Patriarca Family’s consigliere, as well as a reported candidate for the “acting” boss position if Anthony (Spucky) Spagnolo is jailed on the extortion charges he’s facing in the near future. La fall, Spagnolo was the seventh straight boss or acting boss of the New England mob to be indicted by the feds.

According to court files and state police documents, Porky DeCiantis, Ricky Silva and another unidentified man kidnapped Roche in broad daylight using DeCiantis’ car. An onlooker jotted down the vehicle’s license plate number. The following evening, Roche’s badly-battered corpse was found in a Providence trash dump. He had been shot, stabbed, beaten and repeatedly ran over by a car.

Just like Roche had done when he was alive, Porky DeCiantis had trouble keeping his mouth shut about his wet work. Three different witnesses at his June 1984 trial testified that DeCiantis boasted of he and Silva’s rubbing out of Roche and beamed with pride doing so.

Roche’s murder was unsanctioned and per FBI informants, if he hadn’t been arrested for it, he would have been offed by New England mob brass for insubordination. Specifically, Patriarca soldiers, Vito (the Ox) DeLuca and Frank (Bobo) Marrapese, wanted Porky dead, for they were the ones that gave Roche the contract to kill Porky’s brother in the first place and thought Porky was more trouble than he was worth. DeCiantis was said to have worried for his safety in the months leading up to his indictment in the Roche hit, openly questioning if DeLuca was looking to harm him.

The 71-year old Vito DeLuca was imprisoned for three years in the 1990s on weapons charges. His younger brother is Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca, the former Patriarca underboss-turned-government witness in 2011. Bobo Marrapese, a partner with Vito DeLuca in a series of loansharking, sports gambling and shakedown operations, is one of the most feared men to ever walk the streets of Rhode Island. He’s serving time in the can for racketeering and has only been free on the outside world for three of the past 28 years.

Back in 2006, Ricky Silva was caught on FBI surveillance receiving an offer to carry out a murder contract placed on Bobby the Cigar DeLuca’s head by his bitter Providence underworld rival Anthony (Tony the Saint) St. Laurent, a then-capo in the New England mafia regime. Silva was also intercepted rejecting the offer, refusing to take part in the killing of a made man without explicit approval from the syndicate boss, at that time which was Luigi (Baby Shack) Manocchio.

“You can’t kill a made guy and not have justification, fuck that shit, Tony, that’s playing with fire, man,” said Silva to St. Laurent. “Twenty thousand dollars aint worth a life bid or a bullet in the head.”

Manocchio, recently sprung from the joint on an extortion beef, retired in 2009, handing the reins of the aging and under-siege Patriarca empire to his then-consigliere Peter (the Crazy Horse) Limone based out of the Boston faction of the crime family. The Crazy Horse, 81, favors ruling by proxy, utilizing an “acting boss” as a buffer between him and the organization’s street level.

Ponytail Tony Parillo is a disciple of Manocchio’s, and plies his trade in the same Federal Hill neighborhood 87-year old Baby Shacks did for decades – Federal Hill is Providence’s Little Italy and the former home to the headquarters of Family namesake Raymond Patriarca, Sr. (d. 1984). Parillo, 63, runs his affairs out of his bar and restaurant, an establishment called Club 295.

Doing 12 years on his murder conviction, Ponytail Tony returned to Rhode Island in 1993 and went to work as a Teamster, getting jobs on multiple movie productions shooting in the New England area as a bodyguard for actors such as Alec Baldwin and Jim Carrey. In Parillo’s office at Club 295, per state police sources, he displays a photo of him and Roche snapped in the late 1970s.

The post Providence Mafia Figure Tony Parillo Lost Best Friend To Brutal Mob Hit As He Served Time appeared first on The Gangster Report.

In late January, two of the biggest drug dealers ever convicted in U.S. court were sentenced in downtown Chicago; but despite moving an estimated 70 thousand! kilos of cocaine and heroin and sending $2 billion in cash back down to Mexico, the twin brothers Pedro and Margarito Flores will be walking the streets in another 5 or 6 years, and most of the drugs they helped flood the streets of America with were sold during the time these two 34 year old Mexican-Americans were working directly for the US Government.

Were the Feds consciously turning a blind eye to the twins’ continued drug dealing, drug dealing that fell outside the scope of their informant duties and violated their agreement to work for DEA and FBI to help capture the world’s most wanted man Juan “El Chapo” Guzman? Were they allowed to continue dealing to enrich themselves all the while they were setting up both their bosses in the Sinaloa Cartel and their own customers? In the lead up to their sentencing, it came out that the brothers had engineered at least one massive drug deal without telling the DEA or Justice Department… for 600 pounds of heroin, which the Flores brothers claimed was done merely out of necessity so they could pay off an old drug debt and maintain their relationship with their Cartel connections. One detail the Feds and the Flores’ couldn’t explain away in court very well concerned the purchase of a new $300,000 Bentley for on the twins’ wives during the time of their informant work.

Despite this, the Flores brothers were granted one of the most generous plea deals of all time in exchange for help in capturing the world’s most wanted man-Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who was finally captured in February 2014. But was it worth it? if the U.S. government empowers one drug dealer so they can bring down another, isn’t the “War on Drugs” just an elaborate piece of performance art that gives the appearance of effective action but really just shuffles the deck at the top levels of the global narcotics trade while turning America itself into the world’s largest prison state for small-time drug dealers and users?

“You and your family will always have to look over your shoulder,” the judge said as he sentenced the brothers. “Any time you start your car, you’re going to be wondering, is that car going to start or is it going to explode?”

Security was so tight at their sentencing, and around the Flores brothers generally during their time in custody, that the names of their public defenders were never made part of the official record and they don’t seem to have even been present at their clients’ sentencing.

Prosecutors had actually asked for an even more lenient sentence for the twins, but the Judge gave them 14 years instead of 10 because of the 600 pound heroin shipment they distributed in the Windy City while – a crime that, under normal circumstances, would normally entail numerous life sentences for the key players and decades in prison for anyone with the slightest involvement…for the Flores twins it just meant a few extras years in prison…and several million dollars in extra profits.

“As two of the most well-known cooperating witnesses in the country, the Flores brothers (and their families) will live the rest of their lives in danger of being killed in retribution,” Prosecutors wrote in their sentencing recommendation to justify the ultra-lenient deal.

“The barbarism of the cartels is legend, with a special place reserved for those who cooperate.”

Maybe. But the same prosecutors and Justice department bosses that cut this deal have sentenced tens of thousands of Americans to much lengthier prison terms for drug crimes that pale in comparison to what the Flores brothers dis.

The Flores brothers’ cooperation has had other, more serious, repercussions. Not long after word got out that the brothers were working with the DEA in 2009, their father, Margarito Flores Sr., returned to Mexico despite being warned by his sons and the Feds.

Within days, the father was kidnapped and presumed to be murdered, A note found at the scene of his disappearance said “his sons are next.”

The Flores Brothers Take Over Chicago

The Flores twins got their start in the gang infested Pilsen neighborhood of West Chicago, one of the largest Mexican-American communities in the country. Pedro and Margarito ran with the Latin Kings gang and developed ties to a wide network of Hispanic and black dealers across the Midwest and east coast, and even Asian customers as far away as Vancouver, Canada.

Their family, especially their father, had a long history of moving wholesale quantities of heroin and cocaine for various Mexican cartels for three decades, and when the brothers got in the game in the late 90’s they ascended rapidly. Their family ties gave them entre into wholesale loads coming up to Chicago directly from Mexico, and by 2000 the they began branching out from Chicago, especially to Milwaukee. Their operations in Milwaukee went south when one of the brothers was kidnapped for a ransom of 150 keys of cocaine…which was paid, and the brother was released. A Federal indictment for their operation in Milwaukee followed on the heels of the kidnapping and the twins, only in their mid-20’s at the time, fled to Mexico.

Here’s where the story gets more interesting: being wanted in the States and hiding out in Mexico actually proved a boon for their narcotics career. Their travails in Wisconsin with kidnapping and indictments left them in major debt to the higher-ups in Mexico, as the drug business at the top levels often runs on consignment- the dope is given to the distributors up front and the distributors pay when they sell it. Some sort of meeting was set up in ’05-’06, possibly brokered by their father, with the highest echelons of the Cartel alliance of Sinaloa and the Beltran-Leyva brothers. Not only did the Flores brothers owe money for drugs lost and stolen in the U.S., various Cartel lieutenants and their smuggling groups had been recently busted and the Cartel bigwigs were desperate for new distributors in the States.

Cartel: noun; an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition

The Mexican drug Cartels are not a hierarchal top-down organization like the Mafia, with each layer of power directly answerable to an immediate superior in layers all the way up to a top “boss”. Many different organizations-some small, some large- provide various services to each other as part of the complex infrastructure of moving billions of dollars in drugs through multiple countries and into the U.S., then laundering the money. One group, for example, may provide political protection through their ties to corrupt politicians, another group may be expert in smuggling, other people may be responsible for selling the drugs and collecting the proceeds to be turned over to a team that handle the money laundering, and specialized death squads, such as the infamous Zetas may exist only for security and murder services. This decentralized and amorphous structure is what makes a criminal cartel so impervious to law enforcement.

At the time of the Flores’ meeting in Mexico the Sinaloa Cartel, which included “El Chapo” at the top level of responsibility for transporting his and other allies’ drugs into America, and the Beltran-Leyva brothers had just forged what would be a very lucrative alliance that made them the largest drug trafficking group in the world, and the 20-something year old twins would come to be integral to the operation. After “opening their books” to Sinaloa underboss Vincente Zambada-Niebla, and proving how much coke and heroin they had moved in Chicago, the Flores’ were given cheaper prices and direct access to the product in Mexico and became a vertically integrated organization, involved in the smuggling and sales of drugs in a vast operation that the FBI says supplied wholesalers throughout North America; from Vancouver to Detroit, New York, Philly and Washington, D.C.

Court filings estimate that their annual income in the mid 2000’s at $700 million; the twins would shrink-wrap the cash with food saver machines and hid it inside the homes of family and girlfriends throughout Chicago and its suburbs.

To give you another idea of how important the Flores operation was, compare their $700 million estimated annual income to the estimated street value of all the drugs seized in Chicago according the Chicago Police: $208 million in ’09, $139 million in ’08, $118 million in ’07.

When the twins’ operation was finally shut down for good in ’08, the wholesale price for kilos of cocaine shot up from $18 thousand to $29 thousand overnight; their absence from the scene had caused an immediate drought.

Six years of harmony existed between the Leyva brothers and the Sinaloa cartel, but in 2008, the alliance began to crumble, and the Flores brothers were the reason. Pedro and Margarito were bringing in so much cash in Chicago, sometimes moving as much as 2,000 kilos a month, that “El Chapo” and “Boss of Bosses” Arturo Beltran-Leyva were at each other’s throat over how the hundreds of millions in profits that the Flores’ were sending down from the States should be divvied up. As the tension and distrust between the two factions grew, one of the brothers, Alfredo Beltrán-Leyva, was arrested in Mexico.

The Beltran-Leyva faction blamed El Chapo for tipping off the Mexican Federales and the Beltrán-Leyva brothers took their revenge in the streets of Culiacán, state capital of Sinaloa, where 387 people were murdered in the summer of 2008.

The Flores’ Turn Snitch

According to court documents, the Flores’ were caught in the middle; the Sinaloa and Beltran-Leyva factions both pressured them with threats of violence if they didn’t continue to move huge amounts of heroin and cocaine for them. Around this time, the Feds infiltrated the twins’ operation and were able to close the noose on them in Mexico and the brothers quickly chose to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement; by 2008, the twins were relaying sensitive information about their Cartel suppliers to federal authorities…while they were still selling massive amounts of drugs and pocketing at least part of the proceeds.

In November 2008, the brothers found themselves negotiating a heroin deal over the phone in Mexico with none other than Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman himself, who had become the most wanted man in the world by that time.

Pedro did the talking, convincing Guzman to take a cheaper price for 40 kilos of heroin. 30 minutes later one of “El Chapo’s” underling was on the phone giving instructions on how and where to make the $1 million cash payment. What the Sinaloa kingpin didn’t know was that U.S. federal agents were listening to the phone calls that night and the 40 keys of heroin had been picked up in Chicago by an undercover agent.

According to their sworn statement in the Federal grand jury proceedings designed to indict Guzman, El Chapo would load the planes with clothes and other goods and fly “humanitarian” missions to South America. Once they landed in South America and finished off-loading their humanitarian aid, the planes would be packed with as much as 12,000 kilos of cocaine and sent back to Mexico City international airport where high ranking Mexican military and police officials would unload and transport the cocaine all the way up to the U.S. border. 12,000 kilos would have been worth $250 million wholesale in Chicago, and worth well over a billion dollars once it was sold as baggies of powder and dime rocks across America.

U.S. Government Culpability

There is more, and this is the part that casts a dark pall over all the bureaucratic minions of our Federal government, the Federal Agents and Prosecutors and Judges, all those levers and gears that compose the great machine of mass incarceration in America that falls so heavily on certain groups, especially black males. Not only were Pedro and Margarito Flores allowed to sell tons of cocaine and heroin while in government employ, upon their return from Mexico after a several year absence from Chicago, the twins orchestrated a massive reverse sting on their drug customers, mostly hailing from cities like Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Detroit. Phone calls were made to let various junior varsity kingpins around the country that “The Twins” were back in business. Enticing deals were offered- bring enough money for 10 keys and we’ll give you another 40 on consignment, offers no sane drug dealer could refuse. Of course, when the various dealers showed up to the deals in parking lots and side-streets around Chicago, Federal agents were waiting to pounce.

Many of the dealers being set-up by the Flores twins ended up with longer prison terms than the brothers themselves, despite the fact that they would have had no dope to sell without the government facilitating the Flores’ operation, a deep injustice if there ever was one. And on top of that, the brothers were likely still doing deals off-the-record to make money for themselves.

At least one shipment — a 276-kilogram load of heroin- made it to Chicago and was distributed on the streets…the Feds claimed they didn’t know anything about it when the story came out during later court proceedings. The brothers claimed they needed the cash to keep the Cartel happy so they could keep working as secret agents. Maybe.

Let’s estimate, conservatively, that each kilo was diluted into 4 kilos and each gram went for $100 on the street…that’s $100 million in dope from that deal alone and it’s unlikely that was the only deal the twins worked outside the parameters of their plea agreement as informants.

Vicente Zambada-Niebla

The key domino that fell thanks to the Flores brothers’ work in Mexico was that of Vicente Zambada-Niebla. Zambada-Niebla was the highest ranking executive of the Sinaloa cartel in US custody until “El Chapo” Guzman’s arrest in 2014 , and his father, known as “El Mayo” is now considered the most powerful single narco-trafficker in Mexico since “El Chapo’s” arrest. During their undercover work, the Flores twins had secretly tape recorded Vicente in Mexico orchestrating the delivery of huge drug shipments, and Zambada-Niebla was indicted. When he was captured and brought to Chicago, “El Mayo’s” son claimed he was immune from prosecution because he, too had been working for the D.E.A., providing intelligence reports on rival cartels in exchange for the FBI and DEA allowing “tons of illicit drugs continued to be smuggled into Chicago and other parts of the United States.” Quite a shocking defense, and, frankly, a very believable one, considering the evidence of the Federal overnments complicity in the Flores brothers drug operation.

The circumstances of Zambada-Niebla’s arrest point a finger at more US government dirty work. A few hours prior to being taken into custody at his Mexico City safe house, Zambada-Niebla had a meeting with two DEA agents in an upscale hotel directly across the street from the U.S. Embassy! This shocker comes from court documents filed by both the prosecution and the defense. Zambada-Niebla was joined at the DEA meeting by Humberto Loya-Castro, in-house counsel for the Sinaloa Sartel, whom Vicente’s defense team argued was there to serve as intermediary between the DEA and the Cartel.

“Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel, through Loya [Castro], was to provide information accumulated by Mayo, Chapo, and others, against rival Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations to the United States government,” Zambada Niebla alleged in his court pleadings. “In return, the United States government agreed to dismiss the prosecution of the pending case against Loya [Castro], not to interfere with his drug trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel, to not actively prosecute him, Chapo, Mayo, and the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, and to not apprehend them.”

These stunning revelations were initially published by Narco News, and prompted the US Federal prosecutors to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), usually used only in cases with classified intelligence materials, e.g. from the CIA or other US covert operations.

Despite attempting to block the public release of Zambada’s claims of a secret deal between the Sinaloa Cartel and the U.S. government, then-U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, dismissed the claims. “Contrary to [the] defendant’s claim, no immunity was conferred upon him… Nor was any immunity conferred upon Loya-Castro,” Fitzgerald declared in documents filed with the U.S. District Court in Chicago. But if there was no deal and Zambada made it all up, why was he meeting with the DEA at all and why did the Federal government attempt to block his assertions from being part of the public record?

In 2014, Vicente reached a sugary-sweet plea deal with Federal prosecutors where he confessed to being a key member of the Sinaloa cartel and a “surrogate and logistical coordinator” for his father, and helping smuggle hundreds of tons of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin into the U.S. The deal establishes that Zambada will spend as little as 10 years in prison and surrender $1.37 billion in assets—a number Zambada did not contest; was some of this massive fortune also accumulated with the acquiescence of the U.S. government just like his old partners the Flores brothers? Seems likely. He certainly joined them in receiving a shockingly light prison sentence for his truly gigantic drug dealing activities, especially when you consider that a mere 28 grams of crack cocaine carries a mandatory 5 year prison term; 1 ton of cocaine is about 1 million grams- the Flores twins and Zambada-Niebla moved hundreds of tons.

El Chapo is Captured

Within hours of “El Chapo” Guzman’s 2014 capture in Mexico, U.S. officials announced that they would seek his extradition to face trial in Chicago; if the Sinaloa chief ever does end up on trial in the Windy City, which seems somewhat unlikely, Vicente Zambada will likely be a key witness against him, along with the Flores twins. Ironically, since Zambada already has served 5 years in prison, he would likely be finishing up his own sentence and preparing for release to the free world by the time “El Chapo” showed up in an Illinois Federal courthouse.

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is escorted to a helicopter in handcuffs by Mexican navy marines at a navy hanger in Mexico City, Mexico, Saturday, Feb. 22, 2014. A senior U.S. law enforcement official said Saturday, that Guzman, the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, was captured alive overnight in the beach resort town of Mazatlan. Guzman faces multiple federal drug trafficking indictments in the U.S. and is on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most-wanted list. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

Since “El Chapo’s” arrest there doesn’t appear to have been any decline in the availability of cocaine, heroin, or marijuana in the U.S.

Pedro and Margarito Flores are now in the Federal Witness protection program, their immediate family members were given new identities and $300,000 to pay for living expenses.

During the “takedown” of the Flores organization the government seized more than $4 million in drug profits and prosecutors wrote in a court filing that, after an exhaustive investigation, they do “not believe that the Flores brothers are hiding assets.” But rumor on the streets of Chicago are that the twins have millions of dollars hidden around the city with close friends and family, safe from the prying eyes of the Federal government; after studying the case, I believe that the government knew all about the Flores’ brothers sideline dealing and tacitly turned a blind eye to it as an “off-the-books” reward for helping bring down El Chapo and his organization and that they will have far more than $300,000 waiting for them when they return to the free world.

The post The Flores Brothers: How the Feds helped Flood Chicago with Drugs appeared first on The Gangster Report.

It may amaze the reader exactly how similar organized crime and nations are. These sorts of sentiments have found resonance in our times of mandatory taxation on any and every thing. Claims of armed robbery in the collection of tax as a last resort are close enough for most people and that is where the thought ends for most. Truth is, organized crime throughout history has in turns replicated and undermined that most recognizable status quo: the governmental apparatus. This subject and the subsequent branches can’t be taken on in one article: it’s something that can’t be dealt with properly in a single book. What I would like to begin with this article is to start on the philosophical foundations of both entities, and that would be the primitive accumulation of power.

In the West there is a narrative of governmental formation that governments share because it’s very convenient and helpful, even. The unifying myth begins as conquests of liberation or civilization, or a genocidal action against people who are nearly animals and it couldn’t be helped anyway. But a coming together brings this grouping of people by happenstance of geography into a nation with a shared destiny. America accomplished this by abusive royalty countered by Enlightenment ideals, with a great struggle against the hegemon of the world ending in a righteous defeat for freedom. The Middle East and Levant have their version thanks to various stewardships of Islam and holy places.

Once the claim of legitimacy has been established by the power, in this case a government, a whole new era of demands begin. That is for another article. Suffice it to say that governments are founded by enterprising and ruthless individuals who control murder and have murdered themselves. Political power does grow from the barrel of a gun. Let’s pause and consider all this versus organized crime…

In the so called underworld no one wants to help a potential competitor: as a matter of fact most would prefer to prevent competition however that may come about. This can come about from murder, informing to the government, and what I will call drafting. Drafting is a talent assessment of strong points or earners in a crew with an eye towards acquiring their talent for another. The result is a weakened or destroy gang that never saw its full potential. So, much like an encroaching power must fight to survive and perhaps win, the “OGs” have to carve a niche into the environment. These individuals are predators amongst predators who could perfect themselves into Apex Predators like the Five Families of old days. Territory for a nation is the Cartesian idea of space in 3D: for organized crime it may be blocks, streets, cities, or just simply tacit permission to move where they please. But this ability must be earned and maintained against everyone inside the group and outside.

The uniting myth of organized crime is usually at least partially racial or ethnic. I don’t know of a real white Blood nor an Asian Gambino made man. Along with a racial aspect is a familial one: gangs pull in peer family members of similar age and often down through generations like a secret society. Finally, the next most common is geography. If your neighborhood has a lot of Latin Kings and you’re the right shade of Latino, chances are overwhelming that’s who you will clique up with. Of course, it isn’t uncommon that many of these play into the final product such as the Rollin 40s Crips, a geographically centered black gang.

So what is the day to day grease that fills in when patriotic pride or neighborhood love just isn’t enough? For the nation it is economic and individual stability, access to services, and a judiciary. You can access a contractor for repairs because IEDs aren’t blowing everything up, and if you get ripped off you can bring a suit. If someone beats you, you can call on the police for intervention. A sense of regularity and norms to follow, in other words.

On the other hand for organized crime, the primary is cash. The macro level of societal stability gives way to the desires of the individual. If the crew is weak and cannot protect its drugs, dealers or other pipelines no one can make money. They won’t quit robbing, they’ll move on to who has the stroke to handle business. The next is the sense of family which may be true in sentiment or fact. Gangs replace families for those with awful ones and become a sense emotional stability for someone who has very little stability in any other aspect of life. These ties can be enduring and as important as other intense relationships. In the case of the Italian Mafia, the family ties are often real, as in by blood, which is also an incredible tie that binds. Betrayal in either case represents instant anomie and all the downstream issues associated with it. There is a reason almost all former gangsters report deep depression and suicidal ideation for years after leaving the gang, and that is it. Putting former friends away is not as rough to deal with as simply having no one to remember the good times with. The good times that are also over forever.

Either of these structures could become a city state or nation given enough time and the right choices. The paranoia and greed inherent in organized crime prevents any sort of higher aims beyond not ending life in a prison cell. Organized crime is not an ideological organization that can inspire genius and a willingness to sacrifice for the greater common good. It is a parasite that operates outside the law and society, extracting its life from the Society it is not a part of. Similarly, the government feeds itself off the population at large in the same way, outside of conventional life but yet all around it. It, however, has successfully brought together an establishment that perpetuates the model, like organized crime, but also inspires many to regard it as something like God. The national myth, history, a sense of greatness and a desire to share this with their children constantly regenerate this imaginary. The theme to The Godfather doesn’t bring tears to an average persons eye, but The Star Spangled Banner just might.

As readers of Gangster Report know, organized crime was denied outright or not the subject of intense investigation for decades. The reasons for why vary according to who you ask, but my guess is corruption is the first reason and a sense of inevitability a close second. Once upon a time in Europe, certain classes of people where given a break on certain offenses. Poor women didn’t often get arrested for casual prostitution, and men with a still were allowed to sell their hooch as long as it wasn’t killing people. These sort of things were thought of as part of the condition, and it was counterproductive and pointless to stop it within permissible limits. Law enforcement in this country probably took a similar attitude, and at any rate the Communists were trying to kill capitalism so… there were more pressing concerns. At some point this changed. Why? The mafia went political.

Cartels today are efficient profit driven institutions that excel in global logistics. Their bread and butter isn’t card tables and whorehouses, but the part their cog plays in a machine of impressive complexity. From farming coca or poppy to the crude pastes created by those same farmers, to the morphine kitchens to the custom subs, and then to be stomped on in the street… How the world is kept supplied is an amazing feat. If you have noticed the lack of civic pride and charity, it is because people involved aren’t warm and cuddly men looking for warm and cuddly relationships. The philosophy isn’t raising all boats, but silver or lead. Do it and get paid, don’t and someone will kill you. Make your money and get out.

Without a grander vision for society or even members, the only appeal to be made is one to violence. Discipline and consequences keep the cartel going because otherwise there is no point not to just take the first big payday you can. Death, jail and betrayal aren’t attractive to many as a new way of life, so government can be assured that there will not be a peer competitor for power from a cartel. As long as it stayed that way, there was a tacit allowance of existence. A realist expenditure of resources says that those who have aims smaller than being peer competitor can get dealt with on the state level, but once you’ve crossed a threshold you can’t go back.

Some may say that the Kennedy Assasination destroyed this social contract because the mafia killed a head of state. I am less convinced: investigation could have also resulted in arrests and it may be nothing more than that. Robert Kennedy talked a lot about the mob but we’ll never know how that would’ve actually went in execution. What we are left with is conspiracy theory and guesswork, which is fun for thought but not something we can build a criminal case from.

What we do know is Joe Columbo began a political experiment with the Italian rights group he founded. Most people explain this away as a ploy to muddy the water for future prosecution by creating a perception of bigotry amongst FBI and others. I’m sure this is true. In sword fights, however, a deft parry can open up opportunities for tactical improvement or even victory. Defensive becomes offensive. What Joe was beginning, whether he had it planned or not, couldve ended up with him and his group as legitimate political powers given criminal cover from this power. This becomes an improving cycle as one helps the other.

Not only was it through the standard channels that he could’ve benefited. By achieving recognition he achieves also solidarity with other Italians throughout the nation. The organization was “for them, by them” much like the NRA has come to equal in many eyes the second amendment. Looked at as if it was an onion, the racial layer is closer to the core than the patriot layer, if it exists at all. Governments don’t like these sort of problems, as it is very likely ethnicity will win out over a distant beauracracy most of the time. Now you have a non criminal membership who’s allegiance is tied up with someone’s DNA instead of legionaire hierarchy on penalty of death. And it’s above the table.

Political power and cover, an ability to penetrate areas of society and government totally out of reach of just a crime family means the difficulty in dealing with the group increased many magnitudes. Those in government saw this, as did some of the craftier mob bosses. Warnings to Joe to back off and keep a low profile as is said in retelling this story were rooted in the knowledge that Washington would not tolerate a turn to pseudo legitimacy without a fight. This was a fight no one wanted but saw coming if Joe’s plan fell into place. The dominant narrative is that other people weren’t willing to go to prison for Joe’s ideas, and may have played a role in putting him down as an example for others. I’d say people saw Columbo taking the symbolic torch from a dying Gambino and wasn’t having any of it.

However, after this scheme fizzled out we see that shortly afterwards a serious and sustained project began that knocked the Mafia off a pedestal it had occupied for decades. The families are constantly being clipped back and disrupted by law enforcement, satisfied in crippling that it cannot kill. If you look around, many other organizations that take political positions are targeted and given a room at Club Fed, hoping to break them mentally or at least age them out of crime. If you don’t snitch forget it, you aren’t breathing air as a free man again. Snitching is pennance to the God of the state and your only hope to be saved.

In closing, if you want to be Scarface, you can’t be Obama too.

Hit me up on Facebook: eye am Eamon Parks… www.facebook.com/caleb.parks.796

The post How Joe Colombo Killed The Mob appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The coming summer days will be some interesting ones in the Philadelphia mafia. At the end of the week (Friday to be exact), one-time syndicate consigliere George (Georgie Boy) Borgesi will be “off paper” and free from government restrictions for the first time since 2000. Next week, fellow former Philly mob administrator Marty Angelina (pictured in this story’s featured image), will walk free from a halfway house following four and a half years behind bars on a federal racketeering bust. With their return to the fold, the Bruno-Scarfo crime family is practically in full-form – pretty much all the major players in the Family are out on the streets together, a state of affairs not seen in the area in decades.

“We’re approaching a very fragile situation in organized crime circles in the city of Philadelphia,” remarked one retired FBI mob buster of the 90s and 2000s of how he observes the current predicament in the Philly mafia, a syndicate today divided into three separate, yet loosely-connected groups melding mobsters from different and rival eras of the past jostling for control of the region’s fading rackets kingdom. “I don’t see things coexisting for the long haul, there are too many factors you can’t control with these type of people. Georgie specifically stirs the pot even more now with him full-time in the mix again. He’s a lightning rod. Marty’s no saint, either. They are a couple of serious individuals, they’ve both put their lives on the line for the mob and taken lives for the mob. I don’t see either of them hanging up their spurs any time soon. Everybody’s been making nice, lately. It’s a balancing act that I think will be hard to keep up going forward.”

The 51-year old Borgesi was released from a 14-year prison sentence in January 2014 and after beating a racketeering indictment he took while he was locked up on his initial RICO conviction from 2001. He’s been reportedly vocal about his displeasure with how certain things were handled on the street while he was away, per exclusive Gangster Report sources in the South Philly underworld, and eager to get face-to-face with local mob higher-ups to plead his case to regain his prior standing.

Certain mafia figures at the forefront of decision making in the syndicate, according to these sources, feel that Borgesi “brings too much heat” with his antics. Some others within the power structure, understand and sympathize with his plight (doing more than a dime piece and keeping your mouth shut only to come home to find you have nothing but scraps).

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Georgie Boy was the Family’s No. 3 in charge and overlord of the rackets in lucrative Delaware County. He bragged to one associate-turned-snitch of committing 11 mob murders. On Friday night, all his old friends will host a party in his honor, a get-together expected to draw acting boss Stevie Mazzone and acting underboss Johnny Ciancaglini and capo Mikey Lancellotti, all longtime mob confidants he’s been barred from associating with.

South Florida-based syndicate boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino, seen in the Philadelphia area this summer, could be there as well. As could Borgesi’s uncle and reputed crime family consigliere Joseph (Uncle Joe) Ligambi, Borgesi’s actual uncle and Merlino’s one-time acting boss throughout the entire decade of the 2000s, while Merlino sat on ice for a dozen-years as a guest of the government. Reports of tensions between Borgesi and Ligambi surfaced during Borgesi’s prison term.

Georgie Boy Borgesi

Angelina, 53 and the syndicate’s underboss in the late 2000s, was entangled in the same bust that took down Borgesi 15 years ago as well as his most recent in 2011. They are part of the same Skinny Joey faction of the clique-heavy Philadelphia mob, headed by suave, chic and always-on-the-make 52-year old mafia don Joey Merlino.

Relocating to Florida after his release from prison a few years ago, Skinny Joey is alleged to be running his crime family through a series of on-site proxies as he oversees operations at his trendy bistro in Boca Raton, posing for Instagram photos with the legions of patrons descending on the privately-financed restaurant called Merlino’s to see the legendary American gangster icon live and in person.

The notoriously hot-tempered Angelina landed in a halfway house in Philadelphia back in the winter. Borgesi’s soldiers on the outside looking after his underworld interests while he was locked up butted heads with Angelina, who was trying to hoard in on Borgesi’s rackets, per court records. Georgie Boy’s main aide-de-camp on the streets in the 2000s, Louis (Bent Finger Lou) Monacello, feuded heavily with Angelina and sought permission to kill and then beat him up, requests that got mere-associate Monacello marked for death for trying to harm a “made” man and led to him to flip.

Johnny Ciancaglini took over responsibilities for Delaware County in the mid-2000s, per state police memos. One of the main things Borgesi is “pushing for,” with Merlino and Mazzone, according to multiple sources, is a regaining of territory in Delaware County.

The infamously tight-knit Merlino contingent seized power in the Philly mafia by force in the 1990s, fighting and winning a prolonged and bloody war against sitting Sicilian-born Godfather John Stanfa, concluding with Stanfa’s incarceration on racketeering and murder charges in 1994. Merlino and his crew, a handsome and fast-living bunch of street corner goodfellas, partied their way into the city’s tabloid news coverage of the Italian gangland soap opera during that era, littering the street with bodies of those who didn’t fall in line behind them (they’re collectively suspects in planning and/or carrying out over a half-dozen homicides between 1990 and 1996).

The group of mobsters that came up and “made their bones” in the 1980s Philly mafia of then-lunatic boss Nicodemo (Little Nick) Scarfo make up the other two factions of the crime family’s 2015 version, one led by Phil Narducci and another by Joseph (Joey Punge) Pungitore, both released from lengthy prison stints in recent years and quickly reestablishing their foothold in the underworld.

Merlino’s faction of the Family is linked to the Scarfo days, too – Skinny Joey’s father, Salvatore (aka “Chuckie”) was Scarfo’s underboss, Johnny Ciancaglini’s father, Joseph (Chickie) Ciancaglini, alleged to be Merlino’s official underboss right now, was a top-ranking Scarfo capo and Joe Ligambi was inducted into the mob by Scarfo and used to take his eager-to-learn nephew Borgesi on Little Nicky’s famous Florida Family getaways on his boat, the Usual Suspects, when Georgie Boy was just a teenager.

The post Philadelphia Mob Enters New Era, Borgesi, Angelina Set To Return To Action Immediately appeared first on The Gangster Report.

One-time Chicago mob heavyweight Michael (Big Mike) Spano is a free man. The 74-year old Spano, the former captain of the Outfit’s powerful Cicero crew, was released from a Windy City halfway house earlier this week, returning home to his west-suburban digs after over 12 years in federal prison. Big Mike was convicted in 2002 of pilfering 12 million dollars from the city of Cicero, a mafia hotbed since the high-profile Prohibition Era tenure of Scarface Al Capone, in a well-publicized racketeering case that also brought down notorious Cicero tough guy James (Jimmy I) Inendino, the town’s police chief Emil (Nick the Badge) Schullo and Mayor Betty Loren-Maltese.

Spano has told numerous people he is officially retired from the mob and that his days in the upper-echelon of the Outfit are over. He led the Family’s historic Cicero regime through the entire 1990s, replacing his mentor Ernest (Rocky) Infelise when Infelise was jailed in the “Good-Ship Lollipop Bust” at the beginning of the decade. Big Mike spent most of his imprisonment in a correctional facility in Michigan before landing at the halfway house back in the fall.

“Mikey has been pretty adamant his last few years in the joint that he’s calling it quits, most people believe him,” said one active Outfit insider. “The end game is money with him. He never got off on the violence like a lot of guys in his field of work. That was never his thing, he kept his head down for a while. The government got him ’cause of his greed, not for tuning guys up, putting people in the ground and stuff. Word is he had a nice amount of cash stashed away for when he got out that the feds never touched.”

Big Mike Spano c. 2001

Spano’s older brother and fellow wiseguy Paul was busted alongside Infelise in the Good-Ship Lollipop case and did four years in the can in the early 1990s. Paul Spano, per Chicago Crime Commission reports, occasionally acted as a driver and bodyguard for both Infelise and Ferriola, Godfather of Illinois in the late 1980s. Infelise’s crew of hoodlums, henchmen and hitmen referred to themselves jokingly as the Good-Ship Lollipop.

Inendino, 72, is alleged to be captain of the Cicero crew right now. He was Big Mike Spano’s primary enforcer during his reign atop Outfit’s Cicero branch. The rugged and respected Jimmy I, a seasoned mob vet, reputed killer and member of the syndicate’s famed and feared “Wild Bunch” assassin squad, was released from prison in October 2008 and became capo in Cicero when his predecessor, then-street boss Michael (Fat Mike) Sarno, was locked up in December 2010 after being convicted of extortion and the ordering of a pipe-bombing of a rivals’ business.

Schullo, 68, has been out of prison for four years and is suspected of aiding Inendino in running the Cicero crew, per law enforcement sources in Illinois. Loren-Maltese, the widow of Chicago mob sports gambling specialist Frank (Baldy) Maltese, got out in 2010. She had become acting mayor in 1992 upon the sudden death of her predecessor and was elected to the post in an official capacity in April of the next year.

In 1996, the FBI, IRS and Illinois State Police created an organized task force to investigate wrongdoing in Cicero City Hall. Spano was cousins with the deceased Baldy Maltese, Cicero’s town Assessor and one of the state’s largest bookmakers at the peak of his career in the tumultuous Windy City underworld. Baldy Maltese died of pancreatic cancer in 1993. John LaGiglio was Spano’s conduit to affairs in the city’s political structure. They stole money from the city’s coffers through a series of insurance fraud scams.

The Spano brothers got their start in the cartage industry, founding and co-owning Flash Trucking, a produce hauler on Laramie Avenue in Cicero, which served as a front and hangout for Chicago mob powers Joe Ferriola and James (Turk) Torello. Opened in 1970, Flash Trucking accounted for the legitimate incomes of Ferriola, a future Outfit boss, Torello and Rocky Infelise.

According to FBI and Chicago Crime Commission files, the 1981 Outfit slaying of 37-year old mafia associate Michael Cagnoni, a young southside trucking magnate, was tied to a dispute with the boys over at Flash. In addition to being shaken down himself by the Spanos and Ferriola, Cagnoni was their emissary to the rest of the local cartage industry in a giant extortion racket where produce-shipping routes to the east coast and northeast were being street taxed. Cagnoni was observed by FBI surveillance units driving to Flash on a bi-monthly basis and delivering bundles of cash to Mike and Paul Spano.

After refusing a demand to raise his own tribute payments and being suspected of skimming from the shakedown proceeds he was in charge of couriering, Cagnoni was blown up in a car bomb — his gleaming new silver Mercedes Benz exploded into pieces as he drove onto the entrance ramp to the Tri-State Tollway heading southbound off Ogden Ave in DuPage County on early the afternoon of June 24, 1981. The Southside sibling hit team of Frank (Frankie Breeze) Calabrese and Nick (Nicky Slim) Calabrese carried out the Cagnoni murder, planting and detonating the car bomb provided to them by Outfit “techie” Ronald (Ronnie Balloons) DeAngelis.

Mike Cagnoni’s Mercedes after he was blown up in it

Frank Calabrese was convicted of the Cagnoni hit at the 2007 Family Secrets Trial based on testimony by the government’s star witness Nick Calabrese, the first Chicago mafia member to ever flip and turn against the Family in court. Frankie Breeze died in prison, as did Rocky Infelise, despite Big Mike Spano trying unsuccessfully to filter a bribe to get him out in the 1990s. DeAngelis committed suicide in 1987. Both Ferriola and Torello died of cancer. Nick Calabrese is out of prison and living in the Witness Protection Program.

The post Big Mike Spano Free At Last In Chicago, Says He’s Hanging Up His Mob Spurs appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The strip club king of Detroit hasn’t received a very loving welcome to the City of Brotherly Love, especially not so by the notoriously unfriendly Philadelphia mafia. Alan Markowitz, Michigan’s biggest topless bar owner and legal flesh peddler, opened a Penthouse Club in Philly five years ago and has fended off multiple extortion attempts by the area’s Italian mob, according to exclusive Gangster Report sources. Exactly how Markowitz, currently starring in the Cinemax reality television show, Topless Prophet, has been successful in getting the Philadelphia mob family, also referred to as the Bruno-Scarfo syndicate, to back off is unknown.

“The Philly guys were pushing pretty hard, applying a lot of pressure for Alan to kick up to them, but he never has,” said one law enforcement source. “He’s got balls and in that business you need to have balls. Alan Markowitz might be a lot things however a mark, someone you can just muscle easily, he’s not.”

Did the eccentric and flashy Markowitz, a man that has dodged at least three attempts on his life in the past and invented the concept of the high-end strip club in Detroit, reach out to mobsters in his hometown of the Motor City for help in resolving the situation? It’s possible. There are ties between the mafia contingents in Detroit and South Philly.

Reputed Detroit mafia captain Paul (Big Paulie) Corrado was cellmates in prison in the 2000s with Philadelphia mob associate and New Jersey restaurateur Angelo (Fat Angie) Lutz. The 56-year old Corrado and the 51-year old Lutz served time together at a federal correctional facility in Milan, Michigan on a pair of separate racketeering convictions. Corrado was indicted with almost the entire Detroit mob administration in 1996, while Lutz was indicted with the whole Philly crime family power structure in 2000.

Fat Angie was basically a gangland gopher and compulsive gambler who grew up with Philadelphia mob don Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino and is far from a goon, as opposed to Big Paulie who cuts more of your traditional Mafioso figure and was a strong-arm, shakedown artist and loyal foot soldier during his “come-up” in the rackets in the 1990s at the height of the Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco regime.

Lutz was released in 2008, Corrado in 2010. In a cooking video Lutz posted online prior to opening his Kitchen Consigliere Restaurant in Collingswood, New Jersey a few years ago, Fat Angie prepared for his viewers Big Paulie’s favorite dish and showed a photo from Corrado’s wedding.

During the first year of his 12-year prison bid, Corrado was on the same cellblock with soon-to-turn Philadelphia mafia boss Ralph Natale and became buddies for a short period of time with the old school Godfather about to enter the Witness Protection Program. Per sources, Natale was recently debriefed by FBI agents in Detroit and Philadelphia regarding conversations he had with Corrado in prison.

Black Jack Tocco, Corrado’s cousin and a sitting Godfather for 35 years, died of natural causes last summer. Tocco was named the Detroit mob’s acting boss in 1974 and then ascended to official boss’ chair in 1979. FBI agents followed Tocco and Big Paulie’s dad, long-deceased capo Dominic (Fats) Corrado, on a trip to Pennsylvania in the months after he took the throne to break bread with Philadelphia mafia boss Angelo Bruno, the first stop on a multi-state swing to introduce himself in person to several east coast dons. Bruno and Joseph (Joe Uno) Zerilli, Tocco’s uncle and predecessor, sat on the mafia’s National Commission, the American mob’s now-defunct governing body, made up of all the most powerful dons in the country – Bruno and Zerilli were two of only a select few non-New York bosses to hold seats.

In the mid-1970s, the Detroit and Philadelphia Families joined forces on a horse-race fixing operation in Michigan, using stables, thoroughbreds and jockeys at mob-controlled tracks to manipulate outcomes. Bruno’s representative in the lucrative scam was Pasquale (Pat the Cat) Spirito, inducted into the Philly mob in the early 1980s and killed shortly thereafter. Bruno himself was assassinated within weeks of having dinner with Jack Tocco and Dominic Corrado at a popular South Philly eatery in January 1980.

Big Paulie Corrado was promoted to a capo post last year, per sources on the street and in law enforcement in Detroit. Earlier this year, he opened a restaurant called Dominic’s, named in honor of his father, in Harrison Township off Jefferson Avenue.

One of the things Corrado was convicted of at trial in 1998 was for overseeing the Detroit mafia’s strip-club extortion racket, in charge of looking after the crime family’s point-man in the industry, John (J.J.) Jarjosa, tasked with collecting the street tax from his fellow strip-club owners and also convicted in the case the feds titled Operation GameTax. Jarjosa is of Iraqi descent. Jarjosa’s son, John (John John) Jarjosa, Jr., was slain gangland-style in 2001 as his dad served his time in prison.

Around the time Jarjosa was murdered, Alan Markowitz was negotiating to buy the Jarjosa family’s topless bar, the Body Shop, along 8 Mile Road, “strip-club row” in the Motor City (the deal was never made). Jarjosa, Jr. was running the family business with his father away in the slammer and was felled minutes after departing the Body Shop, the car he was driving boxed in at a traffic light and gunned down by a masked assailant.

Markowitz, a fixture in the Detroit strip club scene since the late 1970s and someone people call the Hugh Hefner of Southeast Michigan, has sidestepped death on three separate occasions. First, in the early 1980s, he was shot in an attack by an angry stripper. A dozen years later, he was shot again – this time in the face by a drunk off duty cop harassing one of his dancers. In 1993, Markowitz’s partner, alleged Detroit mob associate Freddy Giordano, was arrested for putting a murder contract on Markowitz’s head.

Freddy Giordano (right)

According to the indictment, Giordano hired a pair of hit men, Dino Tilotti and Alan Howard, to kill Markowitz (pictured in this story’s featured image). Howard, who lived in Boston, got cold feet though and went to the FBI instead. He did three years behind bars. Tilotti, a Detroiter with ties to both Italian and Arab organized crime factions in Michigan, as well as links to the area motorcycle gang landscape, did a decade in prison on the case. Giordano was acquitted of the charges (partially attributed to Tilotti falling apart as a witness against him). Today, Giordano owns several bars and restaurants in Metro Detroit, including one with a nephew of Jack Tocco.

Created by The Fast and The Furious director Rob Cohen, in 2014 Cinemax premiered the reality tv series Topless Prophet, based on Markowitz’s self-published biography of the same name and following his day-to-day life as a high-profile Motor City strip club impresario. Besides the pair of Penthouse Clubs he has in Detroit and Philadelphia, Markowitz owns the plush and extravagant Coliseum on 8 Mile and his flagship Flight Club (formerly 747s) by the airport. His first club, the Booby Trap, was a staple for area sports figures and celebrities as well as touring rock-and-roll stars in the 1980s.

The post Detroit Strip Club Mogul Weathers Philly Mob Shakedown Efforts appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The car-bombing of a brand-new Lincoln Continental sedan belonging to Teamsters union executive Richard (Little Fitz) Fitzsimmons 40 years ago this week laid the groundwork for the infamous July 30, 1975 mob assassination of American labor icon Jimmy Hoffa. Little Fitz was the son of Teamsters International President Frank (Big Fitz) Fitzsimmons, Hoffa’s former protégé and then-bitter enemy in his quest to reclaim power in the union he had built into a worldwide juggernaut before he gave up his own presidency while imprisoned (bribery, fraud & jury tampering) in a successful ploy to gain an early release from behind bars in the years prior.

Upon gaining his freedom in December 1971, Hoffa squared off against his one-time allies in the mafia in a bid to return to office. Tucked away in a federal prison cell in Pennsylvania for a half-decade, his original backers in the Italian mafia (both in his hometown of Detroit and beyond) had grown to prefer Big Fitz, a man considerably easier to puppet and less of an overall headache to deal with, in the crucial leadership position.

The younger Fitzsimmons was almost caught in the crossfire. His car blew up in the parking lot of Nemo’s, a popular Detroit watering hole down the street from Tigers Stadium, on July 10, 1975. Luckily for him, neither he nor his father were in it. They were leaving the bar and walking towards the vehicle when it exploded prematurely, a scene depicted on the silver screen in the 1992 movie Hoffa with Jack Nicholson portraying Hoffa and character actor J.T. Walsh playing Frank Fitzsimmons.

The mob saw the attempt on the Fitzsimmons’ lives as an act of war and according to FBI files related to the Hoffa case, it directly led to Hoffa’s slaying exactly 20 days later. Some experts believe Hoffa didn’t order the bombing, but rather his enemies did it to make it look like he had gone over the edge and initiate the fast-tracking of his murder.

Hoffa vanished from a suburban Detroit restaurant parking lot on the afternoon of July 30, 1975. He had been stood up for what was to be a lunch meeting with Michigan mob lord Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone, east coast mob captain Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano and well-known Jewish organized crime associate Leonard (Sports Club Lenny) Schultz and disappeared after witnesses saw him get into Tony Jack’s son Joseph (Joey Jack) Giacalone’s car, a maroon-colored Mercury Marquis, with three unidentified men and drive away. His body has never been found and no charges have ever been filed in the case.

Hoffa’s early release from prison came via a Presidential Pardon doled out by Richard Nixon, arranged personally by Fitzsimmons and unbeknownst to Hoffa containing a clause in it barring him from running for Teamsters President until 1980. Many close to Hoffa say he viewed the clause as a double-cross on the part of Fitzsimmons and that it was the opening of the rift between them that lasted until the day Hoffa died.

Hoffa and Big Fitz circa 1966

Per sources, Hoffa began informing on the mob for the FBI in what he believed was the best and quickest way of getting the ban on his running for office in his pardon ruled unconstitutional by the courts. When his parole restrictions were lifted in late 1973, he embarked on a national media tour proclaiming his intention of ridding the Teamsters of mob influence if allowed to run for reelection in 1976. Teamsters insiders at the time were of the opinion that Hoffa would probably eventually be able to throw his hat into the ring for the 1976 race and were confident if he was, he’d win.

Besides the pardon clause, Hoffa had two additional major obstacles he needed to hurdle to put himself in position to take back the union. First, he had to mend fences with Tony Provenzano, a capo in the New Jersey branch of the Genovese crime family he was once close to but was feuding with over a huge prison fall-out regarding Teamster insurance benefits. Second, he needed to stabilize his own powerbase at Detroit’s Local 299 where Little Fitz Fitzsimmons was angling to unseat longtime Hoffa-loyalist Dave Johnston in the race for the 299 presidency.

While Hoffa gallivanted across the United States campaigning to become boss of the Teamsters again, unspooling his new hardline anti-mafia stance, the Teamsters itself went on the offensive, creating a team of union thugs whose specific purpose throughout 1974 and into 1975 was to disrupt Hoffa’s attempt to seize power using intimidation tactics geared at Hoffa and his inner circle. This so-called goon squad was headed by legendary Teamsters leg-breaker Rolland (Big Mac) McMaster, like Tony Provenzano, a one-time Hoffa confidant and ally turned hate-fueled adversary. McMaster’s top lieutenants in this ominous endeavor were Jim Shaw and Larry McHenry.

Rolland McMaster circa 1975

The three of them were suspects in a series of bombings, beatings and shootings surrounding the internal union unrest of the mid-70s. On May 17, 1975, Dave Johnston’s boat exploded, harbored on the Detroit River. Two days later, shots were fired into his car parked in his driveway while he slept. On May 28, Teamster official and staunch Hoffa loyalist Ralph Proctor was severely beaten in the parking lot of Nemo’s, a frequent gathering spot for Teamsters in Local 299, being that it was located only a few blocks away, and the future bombing site of Litte Fitz’s Continental.

As Frank and Richard Fitzsimmons departed Nemo’s on the late afternoon of Thursday, July 10, 1975, Little Fitz’s car was blown to bits, either on sanctioning by Hoffa in an attempt to kill his father-son tandem of rivals or the work of McMaster and his goon squad to accelerate tensions between Hoffa and the mob to the point of no return. Either way, that’s where things went. And fast.

Less than three weeks after the bombing of Little Fitz’s car, Hoffa, well aware his life was in danger, was lured out into the open with the promise of a conciliatory breaking of bread with Tony Provenzano, the man that controlled a critically-important delegate block of Teamsters votes in the upcoming election and someone he had to make peace with if he planned on returning to his perch atop the labor union he literally loved more than life itself.

Tony Giacalone, the Detroit mob’s cunning and steely-eyed street boss was Hoffa’s liaison to organized crime in the Motor City and brokered the purported sitdown, scheduled for mid-afternoon July 30 at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. Tony Jack was related to Tony Pro via marriage – Giacalone’s wife was Provenzano’s niece – and it made sense to Hoffa that Tony Pro would be in town that week because nationally-renowned criminal attorney William Buffalino, the Detroit mafia’s in-house counsel, was marrying off his daughter and invitations had gone out to a cavalcade of American mob luminaries spanning both coasts.

Neither Giacalone, Provenzano, nor Lenny Schultz for that matter, showed for the lunch meeting at the Red Fox. Investigators speculate that Hoffa got into Joey Giacalone’s Lincoln Mercury with the promise of linking up with Tony Jack and Tony Pro at a nearby residence. He was killed by still-unknown assassins instead.

Giacalone, Schultz and Provenzano had airtight alibis. Tony Jack was at his home base, the Schultz-owned and run Southfield Athletic Club, five miles away from the Red Fox. So was Schultz (d. 2013), a diminutive, yet feared labor consultant groomed by the historic Purple Gang. Tony Pro was said to be playing cards at his union hall in New Jersey.

The only piece of physical evidence recovered in the case was the younger Giacalone’s car, which currently sits in the basement of FBI headquarters in downtown Detroit, on the same street and within walking distance of Nemo’s. Hoffa’s DNA was found in Joey Jack’s vehicle. Today, Joey Giacalone is alleged to be in charge of his father’s old crew.

McMaster died of natural causes in 2007 at 93 years old, like Giacalone (d. 2001) and Provenzano (d. 1988) before him a prime suspect in Hoffa’s homicide. Back in 1975, he was on the ticket with Richard Fitzsimmons in the race for the presidency of Local 299 as Little Fitz’s VP candidate. His formerly-owned Hidden Dreams Ranch in Wixom, Michigan was searched for Hoffa’s remains in 2006, a barn on the property excavated in hopes of finding his remains based on a tip from Don Wells, an incarcerated McMaster union associate who lived on the ranch with McMaster at the time of Hoffa’s death.

In 1984, McMaster’s name arose as a suspect in the gangland-style murder of Ralph Proctor, the Hoffa ally attacked in Nemo’s parking lot in the weeks leading up to the Hoffa hit. Reputed modern-day Detroit mob barons Peter (Specs) Tocco and Anthony (Chicago Tony) LaPiana are also suspects in the never-solved Proctor slaying.

Another fiercely-loyal Hoffa friend and Teamsters executive to meet a grisly fate in the aftermath of the Hoffa hit was Otto Wendell, slain in 1978, possibly for beefing with LaPiana’s deceased father-in-law, Vincent (Little Vince) Meli, who like his son-in-law now was a high-ranking Midwest Mafiosi known as a master labor-union racketeer.

The tumult in Local 299 was settled with concessions on both ends of the dispute: Johnson remained president and Little Fitz became his vice president. Stricken with cancer in the late-1970s, Frank Fitzsimmons finally succumbed to the disease in the spring of 1981.

Little Fitz got into big trouble in the years following the Hoffa ordeal and did five years in federal prison for taking kickbacks in a health care fraud case involving Teamsters insurance plans. He’s 85.

Several of Tony Provenzano’s underlings (Sal & Gabe Briguglio and Steve & Tommy Andretta) were considered suspects in the Hoffa investigation, however, only one of them (Tommy Andretta) remains alive. Tommy Andretta resides in Las Vegas and believed to be retired from his life in the mob. Tony Jack’s brother and fellow Detroit mafia czar Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone was also a top suspect in Hoffa’s disappearance and execution. He was unaccounted for by his normal FBI surveillance unit that fateful day 40 years ago. Billy Giacalone died of old age in the winter of 2012.

The post Attack On Fitzsimmons Straw That Broke Camel’s Back In Hoffa Saga appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Paul (Big Paulie) Corrado has reached out to Gangster Report through multiple conduits to set the record straight. He says Gangster Report’s categorization of him as a newly-promoted captain in the Detroit mafia is false and that he is retired from his days as a Motor City Goodfella and simply trying to run his new restaurant as a legit local businessman.

Corrado, who was jailed for 12 years in the notorious and expansive Operation Game Tax RICO case of the late 1990s, recently opened an eatery in Macomb County called Dominic’s, named for his dad, departed legendary Detroit mob capo Dominic (Fats) Corrado. Either way, wiseguy still or not, Big Paulie is one surefire stand-up guy, a relic of a bygone era where real men of honor embodied the code of the street. The younger Corrado, a mere foot soldier when the Game Tax case dropped in 1996 and in his mid-50s today, did over a dime piece in the can without saying a peep, while all his superiors in the crime family did considerably less time behind bars. He’s been free for five years now.

Some are suggesting that the info of Big Paulie’s alleged capo bump-up (the one he adamantly disputes) spawns from within his own family, which I can say unequivocally is untrue. The source of the info, whether true or not, came from the street and from connections within area law enforcement, not a Corrado kin.

Bred from a rich Michigan gangland pedigree, Big Paulie traces his roots to the very start of the famously stealthy syndicate during the Prohibition Era: his grandfather and great uncles respectively were crime family ‘founding fathers,’ Pietro (Machine Gun Pete) Corrado, Joseph (Joe Uno) Zerilli and William (Black Bill) Tocco. He got his start in the rackets in the 1980s, doing double duty as an up-and-comer in the Detroit underworld and as part of the Midwest mob contingent in Las Vegas – in Vegas, Big Paulie used to pal around with Desert Don Tony (the Ant) Spilotro, a Chicago crew leader that assumed command of the Strip in the 1970s and 80s and was immortalized in Hollywood movie lore by Joe Pesci in the Martin Scorsese-helmed film Casino.

Gangster Report wishes Big Paulie and his beautiful wife and kids nothing but the best of luck with the restaurant. I’m sure Papa Dom is looking over it with a smile!

The post Detroit’s Big Paulie To Gangster Report: ‘You Guys Got It All Wrong!’ appeared first on The Gangster Report.

R&B music producer Damon Thomas, the ex-husband of the undisputed queen of reality television Kim Kardashian, gambled with his life 10 years ago when he cooperated with the FBI, DEA and IRS in helping the federal government bring down the notorious Black Mafia Family (aka BMF), America’s most prolific drug gang of the New Millennium. Thomas and Kardashian, now wed to hip-hop superstar Kanye West, were married from 2000-2004, at the peak of Thomas’ career as one half of the multi-platinum selling production duo The Underdogs (along with Harvey Mason, Jr.).

Back in 2005, Thomas testified at a grand jury proceeding against BMF co-founder Terry (Southwest T) Flenory, claiming he had conspired with Flenory to hide ownership of millions of dollars worth of jewelry from the IRS. Flenory and his brother and fellow BMF boss Demetrius (Big Meech) Flenory pled guilty in a wide-reaching narcotics-conspiracy and racketeering race in 2007 and both received 30-year prison sentences.

A protégé of R&B producer icon Kenneth (Babyface) Edmonds,Thomas went out on his own in 2000, joining forces with Mason, Jr. of megawatt late-1990s hip-hop producer Rodney Jerkins’ Darkchild crew, and going on to pump out hit records for Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, R. Kelly, Chris Brown, Tyrese, Jordan Sparks and Jennifer Hudson.

The Flenory brothers started the monolithic drug-dealing organization in the early 1990 in their hometown of Detroit – one fated to grow to be the largest urban crime conglomerate in our country’s history to this point -, before expanding across the United States, setting up hubs in Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis and St. Louis while parading in the early 2000s as a fledgling rap-music label. The magnetic and boisterous Big Meech headquartered his activities out of Atlanta, the more subdued and low-profile Southwest T out of L.A, with their childhood friends Benjamin (Blank) Johnson and Eric (Slim) Bivens tasked with looking after gang affairs in the Motor City. They were all indicted, along with more than two dozen of their subordinates, in October 2005, charged with distributing close to 3,000 kilos of cocaine nationwide per month. The feds wound up seizing almost 300 million dollars from BMF bank accounts.

Big Meech & Southwest T

Thomas,45, met the Flenorys around 2003 when he was hired to produce music for BMF-sponsored rappers. He was unwittingly drawn into their case on July 11, 2005 after Southwest T and Slim Bivens were pulled over driving on an interstate expressway in Illinois en route to a St. Louis concert by close BMF associate and southern rap royalty Young Jeezy and confiscated 22 pieces of expensive designer jewelry totaling five million dollars in estimated value. Taken into custody and questioned by the DEA, Flenory told the agents that the jewelry belonged to Damon Thomas, his music producer who was getting ready for a video shoot and planned on using the bling bling as props.

Southwest T felt he could successfully pawn off responsibility for the set of jewelry on Thomas because Thomas was already laundering money for him with other jewelry purchases through the famous New York diamond king Jacob Arabo, known to hip-hop fans everywhere simply as “Jacob the Jeweler,” name-checked in countless rap tunes and eventually embroiled in the BMF case himself, like Thomas, for aiding BMF in hiding their assets. Immediately following their release from custody, Southwest T and Bivens holed up in a luxury hotel in Cleveland and quickly made contact with Thomas and Arabo, corralling their cooperation in validating a cover story and filling them in on the details for how to pull it off.

Arabo told authorities he loaned the jewelry to Thomas and Thomas told them the same thing. Until he didn’t. Facing threats of indictment by the feds if they didn’t flip, Arabo didn’t fold, Thomas, fearing time behind bars, did, testifying in front of the grand jury in the fall of 2005 which led to the whole BMF ship crumbling into pieces a month later.

Staying true its word, the government included Arabo in a superseding indictment in 2006 that ensnared another 16 BMF members and co-conspirators. Pleading out in the case before trial, Jacob the Jeweler did two years in prison and was released in 2010. Per FBI informants in January 2007, Thomas was taking safety precautions in anticipation of a possible retaliatory strike from Southwest T and his BMF bandits. Such acts of violence, weren’t necessarily a calling card for the gang, however was far from unprecedented.

In 2003, Big Meech was the No. 1 suspect, but never charged in the double homicide of Anthony (Wolf) Jones and Lamont (Riz) Girdy at the Atlanta nightclub Chaos. The following summer, BMF’s de-facto consigliere and third-in-command, Fleming (ILL) Daniels allegedly killed Rashannibal (Prince) Drummond, execution style, in the parking lot of Atlanta’s Velvet Room after Daniels’ car almost struck Drummond’s Porsche and Drummond smacked the vehicle Daniels was driving with his fist in anger. A trio of BMF members, led by reputed “new era” syndicate leader Darnell (Coo Coo) Cooley, beat a club patron to death in an assault that took place in August 2009 at a suburban jazz club and then maybe ordered the execution of the only witness to the beating weeks later on the eve of the witness ready to testify in front of a grand jury investigating the jazz club attack and “post-Meech & T” BMF activity in Michigan.

Big Meech, 47, and Southwest T, 45, weren’t on speaking terms at the conclusion of their epic reign atop the U.S. underworld, millionaires several times over and leaders of separate factions of the BMF syndicate, but at the end of the day they both stayed loyal to each other – refusing to turn and point the finger in the other direction in the face of getting slammed with stiff sentences. The Flenorys won’t be eligible for parole until 2032.

Kardashian and Thomas split in 2004 (a good three years before ‘Princess Kimberly’ and the rest of the Kardashian clan hit the air) amid rumors of physical and verbal abuse, crazy hotel sex parties and a reported photo of a threesome between Thomas, Kardashian and Kardashian’s big sister and fellow reality tv diva Kourtney.

The post Kardashian-Ex Damon Thomas Tempted Fate W/ GJ Testimony In BMF Case appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Gangster Report is in the book business. The exciting world of Ebooks to be specific. Support Gangster Report with a purchase of Scott Burnstein’s new book The Hit List

The post Check Out Gangster Report’s First EBook, ‘The Hit List’ appeared first on The Gangster Report.