Kingsmen Motorcycle Club leader David (Gutter) Donovan died this week of injuries sustained in a gun fight with members of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club late last month at the annual Leesburg Bikefest in Central Florida. The 41-year old Donovan was the vice-president of the Kingsmen’s Lake County, Florida chapter.

Within hours of Donovan’s death at a local hospital, police traveled to the Outlaws’ Ocala, Florida chapter and arrested chapter president Marc (Not Quite) Knotts for his murder and issued arrest warrants for three of his fellow Outlaws, Jesus Marrero, Greg Umphress and Miquel Torres. Marrero was taken into custody this week as well while Umphress and Torres remain at large.

Donovan was shot multiple times on April 29, 2017 as a verbal altercation between rival biker gangs at the Circle K gas station located down the street from the Leesburg Bikefest’s closing ceremonies turned violent. Knotts, 48 years old and sometimes called “The Knothead” or “NQ,” was struck three times in the shootout and according to reports had been wearing a bullet-proof vest (he can be seen in this article’s cover photo).

The Outlaws are arguably the most prominent motorcycle club operating in Florida, the biker underworld’s unofficial county seat in the nation’s South. The club is headquartered in the Midwest, founded in Chicago. The Kingsmen are a New York-based club and only in recent years began identifying itself as “One Percenters,” for all intents and purposes code for a continuing criminal enterprise.

The post April Shootout Brings May Murder Charges In FLA., Kingsmen MC VP ‘Gutter’ Donovan Dead, Outlaws MC Power In Custody appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The unconscionable three decades spent in prison by 1980s-era Detroit teenage drug dealer and illegal underage federal informant Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe, Jr. can all be traced back to his bizarre bust by local police for possession with intent to distribute over 650 grams of a controlled substance 30 years ago this week.

Today, Wershe, 47, is the longest-serving non-violent juvenile offender in the American prison system. The then-17 year old was arrested at a routine traffic stop in the late afternoon hours of May 22, 1987 outside his grandmother’s house on Hampshire Street near the corner of Harper and Dickerson on the far eastside of Detroit. The arrest followed a post-stop tussle between officers and members of Wershe’s family, Wershe himself dashing from the scene and authorities unearthing a box containing 8 kilos of cocaine almost two blocks away via an undocumented anonymous tip called into the neighborhood Detroit Police Department precinct.

Just three years earlier, according to federal records, court filings and affidavits signed by former law enforcement personnel, a just 14-year old Wershe was recruited fresh out of the eighth grade by a federal narcotics task force to be a paid mole and infiltrate area drug gangs. The relationship lasted until 1986. By the time of Wershe’s arrest in the spring of 1987, he had begun wholesale cocaine-trafficking on his own.

A Hollywood film starring Academy Award winning actor Matthew McConaughey and newcomer Richie Merritt is currently in production and will be released in theatres worldwide next year. The “650 Law” Wershe was convicted under which employed a mandatory life prison sentence was ruled unconstitutional ten years later. He has a parole hearing on June 8. His January 1988 trial went on amid a media firestorm ramped up by several hot-button issues surrounding his case, such as his young age and skin-color in contrast to his contemporaries in the city’s dope game, a natural swagger and charisma combined with adolescent snarkyness that fascinated the public and reporters alike and his romance with then-sitting Mayor Coleman A. Young’s favorite niece, who was more than six years older than him, were all factors that seemed to bait incessant press coverage.

McConaughey will portray Wershe’s dad in the movie. Richard Wershe, Sr. was a neighborhood street hustler, electronics expert and black-market weapons dealer who was also a federal informant and went to prison in the aftermath of his son’s drug conviction for selling silencers.

The Bust (as told by Wershe himself, his family and official FBI & Detroit Police Department files):

At approximately 4:30 p.m. on May 22, 1987, Wershe and his driver Roy (Bones) Grissom were pulled over in the driveway of a residence belonging to Wershe’s paternal grandmother Vera Wershe for speeding and running a stop sign by Detroit Police patrolmen Rodney Grandison and Jeff Clyburn. Upon approaching the rented vehicle, Clyburn noticed a shopping bag filled with cash in the car’s backseat and took possession of it. Clyburn’s grabbing of the bag of cash brought Wershe’s father and his pregnant sister Dawn out of the house and into a physical altercation with the two police officers.

Wershe Sr. got ahold of the bag of cash during the scuffle and gave it to his daughter, Dawn, who ran with it into her grandma’s residence and locked the door. The younger Wershe took off behind the house and down the block parallel to his grandmother’s heading west.

When the officers finally caught up with Wershe some 10-to-15 minutes later, they took him into an alley near his grandma’s house and severely beat him before slapping handcuffs on him and placing him under arrest for assaulting a policeman as a result of his participation in the immediate post-stop fracas. While Wershe was taken to the police station for processing, members of a Detroit Police narcotics squad arrived on the scene and started combing the neighborhood for drugs they could tie to Wershe. Approximately two hours after the original stop, through a nameless call-in tip that any recording of has since mysteriously been lost, police found a box with eight kilos of cocaine buried under a porch a block and a half away from Wershe’s grandmother’s house and arrested him for possession with intent to distribute narcotics.

Wershe’s fingerprints didn’t match the prints police dusted from the box, however, at trial, neighbors Julie Story and David (Peanut) Golly testified that they saw Wershe bury the box and had even offered them money to take possession of the box and hide on his behalf. In the years following his testimony, Golly signed an affidavit admitting he lied under oath at the trial about seeing Wershe with any drugs in his possession and was physically intimidated into perjuring himself by the Detroit Police. It was also subsequently discovered that arresting officer Grandison perjured himself during his testimony at the winter 1988 trial when he said he didn’t know Wershe (the FBI taped a call between Wershe and Grandison confirming the two had been acquainted with each other prior to Grandison arresting him).

Although denying burying the narcotics that day, Wershe admits he was “responsible” for the eight kilos of coke confiscated. Sources with intimate knowledge of the situation tell Gangster Report the box of drugs belonged to Wershe’s best friend and right-hand man Stephen (Freaky Steve) Roussell, present at Vera Wershe’s residence the afternoon of the traffic stop and subsequent arrest.

Roussell, 20, was slain less than four months later, gunned down in the early morning hours of September 12, 1987 as he slept on his couch by Reginald (Rocking Reggie) Brown, one of the leaders of the infamously bloodthirsty Best Friends murder-for-hire and drug gang in a long-raging beef over a girl. Brown is serving a life prison sentence for Roussell’s slaying.

In 1991, Wershe reconvened his relationship with the U.S. Government and his further cooperation and grand jury testimony aided in the dismantling of the Best Friends and a notorious Detroit Police Department shakedown unit extorting protection payments from drug traffickers doing business in the Motor City in a bust known as Operation Backbone. Intelligence Wershe provided from within a Witness Protection Program wing of an Arizona federal prison also prevented the assassination of then-New York mob boss John Gotti, Jr., scion of iconic east coast crime lord John (The Dapper Don) Gotti.

*Vince Wade, an award-winning investigative television reporter in Detroit in the 1970s and 80s, blogs about Wershe on his website Informant America – The Dime Droppers (view here) and has chronicled Wershe’s arrest and trial, even acquiring the official court transcript.

The post White Boy Rick Saga – The Bust: Modern Day Motor City Tragedy Can Trace Most Of Its Beginnings To Shady May ’87 Arrest appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Chicago mob lieutenant Rudy (The Chin) Fratto will be in court this week disputing the amount of restitution he owes Uncle Sam due to his convictions for federal tax evasion and forklift contract bid-rigging earlier in the decade. Windy City television reporter and Outfit expert Chuck Goudie from Chicago’s ABC affiliate was the first to break the news of Fratto’s financial feud with the U.S. Government 10 days ago. He’ll see his judge Wednesday morning.

The 73-year old Fratto has only paid off roughly $10,000 of the $140,000 he owes since his release from federal prison in late 2013, where he had spent 10 months cooling his heels. In 2016, Fratto discontinued all payments, according to Goudie’s reporting, because he believes that the feds were taking too much of his monthly earnings. The government wants a 25 percent take of his paycheck, while Fratto thinks he should just be forced to forfeit 10 percent of his gross income instead.

Per sources, Fratto is considered an elder statesman out of the Outfit’s Elmwood Park crew. Officially, he works as an electrician for an electrical contracting firm in suburban Darien, Illinois. Most of his day-to-day work is back at his old stomping grounds, the long notoriously mobbed-up McCormack Place convention center on the city’s far eastside. Fratto was convicted of rigging $2,000,000 worth of forklift contracts at McCormack Place in 2012, declaring on an FBI wire, “I’m the boss of this area around here… everything goes through me.”

Although never being charged for any acts of violence, the FBI considers Fratto a dangerous individual. His name appeared on a 2002 list of potential physical threats to Chicago Southside crew hit man-turned-star witness-for-the-government Nick (Nicky Slim) Calabrese compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice and circulated around Illinois law enforcement. A Windy City wiseguy once drove directly to the FBI to turn himself into and seek protection from authorities in the wake of catching Fratto and another seasoned Outfit killer lurking behind him in traffic. According to multiple sources in law enforcement and on the street, he’s a suspect in at least two infamous gangland homicides from the 1980s.

Two sources claim Fratto “made his bones” with the 1985 murder of mob soldier Charles (Chuckie English) Inglese. Two additional sources link him to the 1983 bump-off of high-ranking Outfit associate and labor union powerbroker Allen Dorfman, one of those sources tagging him as a “crash car” driver near the scene. One of the sources that connects him to the Chuckie English hit say he was one of the shooters in that particular slaying.

Inglese had angered his mafia superiors by returning to the Windy City from retirement in Florida. Dorfman, who looked after the crooked Teamsters union pension fund, was headed to prison on racketeering and pension fund fraud, and mob bosses in the Midwest worried he could be tempted to flip.

The FBI believes Fratto was inducted into the Outfit alongside fellow current mob bigwigs Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis and John (Pudgy) Matassa at a 1988 Father’s Day button ceremony hosted in the basement of The Como Inn Italian restaurant on Milwaukee Avenue on the city’s near Northwest side. DeLaurentis, 78, is alleged to be the acting boss of the Chicago mafia in 2017. Matassa is a reputed top advisor for DeLaurentis and other modern-day Outfit leaders.

Fratto allegedly acts as a liaison for Outfit administrators to organized crime factions in Ohio and Iowa. Fratto’s two uncles, Frank (Frankie One Ear) Fratto and Lou (Cockeyed Louie) Fratto, were the Chicago mob’s crew bosses in Des Moines, Iowa in the mid-to-late Twentieth Century.

The post Paying The Piper: Chicago Outfit Figure Rudy Fratto Fights Feds Over How Much Restitution He Owes appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Highwaymen Motorcycle Club in Detroit, the state of Michigan’s biggest and only traditional homegrown biker gang, took a major hit 30 years ago with a 1987 federal racketeering and drug indictment which took down close to two dozen club members and administrators. It was the first significant dent made by law enforcement in the Great Lakes region in their tireless fight against the unruly Highwaymen, founded in Southwest Detroit in 1954 by the area’s original biker boss, Elburn (Big Max) Barnes and known to be on the wild side, even for “One Percenters.”

The ’87 indictment and subsequent incarcerations of key club rank-and-file in Southeast Michigan might have floored the chopper chiefs of Detroit, but it proved far from a knockout blow. The Motown Highwaymen contingent was back up and running at a high level within a few short years.

The club has been back in the headlines lately with the recent revelations that New Millennium Highwaymen leaders could have grounds to appeal lengthy prison sentences they’re in the middle of serving based on the uncovering of a possible mole in their defense camp at trial in 2010. Two of those currently behind bars hoping to leverage the new information into a new trial for themselves, Highwaymen Godfather Leonard (Big Daddy) Moore and the club’s former national president Joseph (Little Joe) Whiting, were nailed as part of the 1987 bust too.

The feds No. 1 target in the Highwaymen in the Reagan Era was Jason (Reaper) Gray, Big Max Barnes’ protégé and successor as national president upon Barnes sudden death from a massive heart attack in the summer of 1980 when he was just 48. Barnes’ funeral was an elaborate affair, including hundreds of bearded, leather-clad biker brethren gathering to pay their final respects in a ceremony officiated by the club’s then-sergeant-at-arms, Norman (Terrible Tyrone) Yono and a dramatic 21-gun salute preceding Barnes being buried in a sterling-silver plated coffin.

Under Gray’s reign, the Highwaymen dipped deeper into narcotics and away from the extensive prostitution network the club had used to keep its coffers flush with money in its first quarter century of existence. As part of a DEA and ATF raid of the Highwaymen’s “mother ship” headquarters in Southwest Detroit in August 1987 authorities confiscated 15 pounds of cocaine, one pound of PCP, $165,000 in cash, an estimated $40,000 in stolen jewelry and 120 weapons, most of them automatic guns in varying degrees of size and caliber.

The indictment finally landed on October 15, 1987, charging 22 Highwaymen and Highwaymen associates with 15 racketeering counts, including drug trafficking, robbery, kidnapping, assault, attempted homicide, arson and witness intimidation. The 72-year old Gray, who authorized a murder contract on an area police officer and a bombing campaign aimed at a rival criminal faction, was convicted and did four years in prison. He was released from federal lockup in March of 1991.

The Highwaymen maintain chapters in Michigan, Indiana, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, New York and New Jersey. There are eight chapters in the state of Michigan alone – Downtown Detroit (SW), Eastside Detroit, Westside Detroit, Northwest Detroit, Downriver, Ann Arbor, Lansing and Monroe. The national president for the club traditionally resides out of Highwaymen Country Ground Zero, the Southwest Detroit clubhouse on Michigan Avenue.

The post Highwaymen MC Flashback: Fearsome Detroit Biker Gang Bit Dust Three Decades Ago, Quickly Resurfaced appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Despite initial reports, it was an execution, not a shootout. According to police in Florida, Kingsmen Motorcycle Club leader David (Gutter) Donovan was killed execution style on April 29 at the behest of Outlaws Motorcycle Club chief Marc (Not Quite) Knotts in an effort by the Outlaws to either absorb or eliminate all other biker gangs in the Sunshine State. Knotts was shot by another Kingsmen in retaliation minutes later.

Donovan, vice president of the Lake County, Florida Kingsmen, died at 41 years old early last week after 16 days in a hospital’s intensive care unit and Knotts was immediately arrested for first-degree murder at the Outlaws’ Ocala, Florida clubhouse. The 48-year old Knotts, sometimes referred to as “Knothead” or just “NQ,” is president of the club’s Ocala chapter and faces life behind bars if convicted.

Originally, the altercation, which occurred at a gas station, had been described in media accounts as an impromptu shootout, not a gangland execution. Ocala chapter Outlaw Jesus (Ace) Marrero was also arrested alongside Knotts. Arrest warrants have since been issued for fellow Ocala Outlaws, Greg (Stinky) Umphress and Miquel (Toe Jam) Torres, but both currently remain at-large.

Based out of the Midwest, the Outlaws are one of the most powerful biker gangs in the world. They planted a flag in Florida in the late 1960s and have long dominated the region’s vast biker landscape. In contrast, the Kingsmen are headquartered in New York and only in the past few years declared themselves a “One Percent” club, essentially eschewing legality in their affairs.

The two clubs ran into each other at the Circle K gas station in Leesburg, Florida on April 29 in the closing hours of the annual Leesburg Bikerfest and per a police report obtained by The Orlando Sentinel this week, several members of the Outlaws attacked Gutter Donovan as he exited the gas station’s convenient store after buying a pack of cigarettes, placing a knife to his throat and making him kneel on his knees in front of Knotts. Upon Knotts demanding Donovan remove his Kingsmen colors and vest and Donovan refusing, Knotts instructed the Outlaws physically detaining Donovan to “shoot that motherfucker,” according to the police report. Who actually pulled the trigger in Donovan’s murder is unknown to the public at this time.

Donovan was shot twice in the back and once in the head at point-blank range. Subsequently, Knotts himself was shot three times in the back by a Kingsmen sniper who had taken shelter inside the gas station and opened fire on Knotts from the front door as Knotts and his Outlaws prepared to depart. Airlifted to a hospital, a bullet-proof vest clad Knotts survived the shooting and was discharged within 48 hours.

David “Gutter” Donovan

Marc Knotts aka “Not Quite” aka “Knothead”

The post Breaking Biker News: Kingsmen VP Slain Execution-Style On Orders Of FLorida Outlaws Pres., Per New Report appeared first on The Gangster Report.

As just a teenager, deceased Detroit mob captain Matthew (Mike the Enforcer) Rubino pulled the trigger in one of the Motor City’s most infamous gangland assassinations and as reward for a job well done was inducted into the mafia by legendary Midwest dons Joseph (Joe Uno) Zerilli and William (Black Bill) Tocco the very next day, according to freshly-unearthed FBI records by author and historian Daniel Waugh. The records, citing a well-placed confidential informant, claim a then-18 year old Rubino killed West Side crime lord Chester (Big Chet) LaMare inside LaMare’s own mansion on February 6, 1931, which brought an end to the so-called Crosstown Mob War and birthed the Tocco-Zerilli crime family and modern-day Detroit mafia.

Mike Rubino died at 62 of a heart attack on August 7, 1972 while in the middle of serving a federal prison sentence for tax evasion in Leavenworth, Kansas. He had been considered a capo in the Tocco-Zerilli clan since the late 1940s, taking over a crew formerly ran by Detroit mob founding father Peter (Horseface Pete) Licavoli, who departed Michigan and relocated to the west coast and a state-of-the-art palatial ranch in Arizona.

Licavoli came to Detroit from St. Louis in the 1920s and established a bootlegging empire known as the River Gang at the height of Prohibition. Early in the following decade, he teamed with Joe Zerilli and Black Bill Tocco and their East Side Gang to square off with Big Chet LaMare on the West Side for control of the city’s underworld in a bloody street war that claimed more than a dozen lives.

Rubino spawned from West Side Gang roots and his father and two older brothers fell victim to a previous, significantly smaller crosstown conflict in the summer and fall of 1926. Per the FBI records obtained by Waugh, Rubino’s dad and siblings were killed by Zerilli and Tocco’s top hit man Pietro (Machine Gun Pete) Corrado. Zerilli, Tocco and Corrado were all brothers-in-law.

After his father’s murder, Rubino moved in with LaMare lieutenant Joseph (Moonlight Joe) Marino and subsequently became Marino’s driver and bodyguard before his 16^th birthday. The rough-and-tumble Rubino became acquainted with the Detroit Police Department at an early age – he got hauled into his local police precinct as a mere 7-year old for severely beating a rival paper boy.

Moonlight Joe Marino was responsible for unloading LaMare’s smuggled booze from Canada, which he would do late at night under the light of the moon (hence his nickname). By the time Mike Rubino reached 18 he had almost a dozen arrests on his police sheet. He was questioned by police in a pair of high-profile mob hits in the months leading up to the Big Chet LaMare assassination, not to mention being detained by authorities in the wake of his mentor Marino’s suspicious death.

In the summer of 1930, Rubino was brought in for questioning in the murder of Detroit radio personality Jerry Buckley inside the lobby of the LaSalle Hotel. On January 2, 1931, he was arrested for trying to kill Detroit Police Inspector Henry Garvin, the head of the department’s mob squad, in a drive-by shooting. The charges against him in the Garvin shooting were eventually dismissed.

Marino popped up dead in his own house on September 27, 1930 and Rubino was present and shipped off to the police precinct for questioning until Marino’s son came forth and told detectives he had accidentally shot his dad in the den. Whether Marino’s offspring was being truthful or was forced into coming forward to take the rap for Rubino is still unclear today.

Around this same time, Big Chet LaMare’s second-in-command Angelo (The Chairman) Meli defected to the East Side Gang. Meli was a labor-racketeering whiz, having arranged a number of lucrative vending contracts with automobile magnate Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company for LaMare and the West Side Gang in the years preceding his departure.

So what prompted Meli to jump ship from Big Chet’s camp?

Just weeks before Buckley was killed for his anti-mafia and political-corruption rants on his nightly radio broadcast (despite his own gangland affiliations), LaMare orchestrated the Vernor Highway Fish Market Massacre, the machine-gun slayings of two East Side Prohibition powers, Gaspare (The Peacemaker) Milazzo and Salvatore (Sasha) Parrino. Milazzo and Parino were lured to their death under the pretense of attending a peace conference. Sent from New York, Milazzo was acting as Joe Zerilli and Black Bill Tocco’s primary advisor during the war against LaMare and his West Siders.

However, Milazzo and his bodyguard Parrino weren’t LaMare’s intended targets. Big Chet had wanted to bump off Zerilli and Tocco. When he wasn’t successful, Meli, always the pragmatist, saw the writing on the wall. Knowing LaMare had made his play and lost, Meli bolted for the East Side.

Mike Rubino would soon join him. He was recruited east by Meli and Pete Licavoli, already in the process himself of merging his River Gang with Zerilli and Tocco’s East Side Gang. Meli and Licavoli set up a meeting for the trigger-happy teenage Rubino with Joe Uno and Black Bill to see if they could work out an arrangement. They did.

Zerilli and Tocco offered to “make” Rubino into the mafia immediately if he killed LaMare for them in exchange for Rubino agreeing to not take vengeance on Machine Gun Pete Corrado for Corrado’s involvement in the murder of his father and two brothers five years before, according to the federal files Waugh found. Rubino agreed.

Besides Meli and Rubino, LaMare’s own wife, bodyguard and right-hand man Joe Amico and go-to enforcer Elmer Macklin, a former member of St. Louis’ Egan’s Rats Gang, betrayed him and conspired with the Eastsiders in his assassination. LaMare’s young bride left the LaMare estate in the early-evening of February 6, 1931 and Macklin and Amico told the armed guards at the entrance of the estate to stand down and go home, leaving the front door unlocked for an assailant to enter, per a number of police informants. Rubino walked into LaMare’s mansion unabated that night, went into the kitchen where Big Chet was having coffee with Amico and Macklin and shot him dead, according to the informant in Waugh’s records. Rubino was officially inducted into the mafia the next day in a ceremony presided over by Zerilli and Tocco, while being sponsored by Licavoli and Meli.

Zerilli, Tocco, Amico, Macklin and LaMare’s wife were all arrested the week of the LaMare hit, with Amico and Macklin eventually going on trial on first-degree homicide charges and being acquitted. Upon LaMare’s murder, Zerilli and Tocco brought all the city’s bootlegging regimes, including the remnants of the LaMare-controlled Westside group, Licavoli’s River Gang, the East Side-affiliated Downriver Gang, based out of Wyandotte, and the iconic all-Jewish Purple Gang under a single banner known locally as “The Combination” or “The Partnership.”

Zerilli and Tocco ruled the mafia in Detroit side-by-side and unchallenged for the next four and a half decades, dying peacefully in 1977 and 1972, respectively. Angelo Meli and Pete Licavoli did the same in 1969 and 1984, respectively. In 2015, author and historian Dr. James Buccellato, discovered LaMare’s status as a confidential federal informant amongst a trove of U.S. Government files housed in Maryland.

Macklin and Amico were the gunmen in the Vernor Highway Fish Market Massacre. Amico vanished in 1937. Meli and Licavoli took over and split LaMare’s rackets following his death.

Rubino was assigned to Licavoli’s crew and became his main muscle until he assumed command of the crew in around 1946 when Licavoli left Motown for the Phoenix area. He had done five years in federal prison in the 1930s for counterfeiting and in early 1941 was shipped back to the pen for narcotics trafficking in a case Meli, by that time, the Detroit mob’s underboss, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. By the end of the summer of 1942, Rubino had returned to the streets and was doing Licavoli’s bidding again.

Case in point: the Eddie Sarkesian situation.

The 29-year old Sarkesian drew Licavoli’s ire by robbing a series of his gambling houses and placed Rubino on the job of eliminating the problem. Sarkesian was slain walking in downtown Detroit on Cadillac Street on August 16, 1944, shot five times in the head, face and neck at close range. Rubino and former Purple Ganger Morris Raider were arrested for Sarkesian’s murder and held for two weeks before being released and charges dismissed when witnesses refused to testify against them.

The very next year Rubino used his reputed participation in Sarkesian’s execution to extort a local gas station owner.

“You better pay up or you’ll get what Sarkesian got,” he told the man.

A majority of Rubino’s further legal hassles were with the IRS. He was busted for tax evasion in 1955 and then again in 1968 and was sentenced to federal prison terms in both, the latter of which he’d never make it back to the Motor City from. His 1955 arrest stemmed from his ownership of the Navaho Building downtown and a pair of jukebox distribution businesses (Moss and Chester Music) with fellow Detroit mob capo Salvatore (Sammy Lou) Lucido and the majority stock holding in the Torosian Oil Company with then up-and-comer and future crime family consigliere Michael (Big Mike) Polizzi, a gangland wunderkind with an accounting degree from Syracuse University.

Rubino owned large amounts of real estate as well. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was known to often hold court at his Double D Horse Ranch.

*Daniel Waugh (Off Color: The Violent History of Detroit’s Purple Gang, Egan’s Rats) is an author and historian who focuses on early American mob activity in Detroit and St. Louis.

The post Breaking Historical News: Detroit Mobster Mike Rubino Got Button For Bumping Off Chet LaMare To Close Crosstown Mob War appeared first on The Gangster Report.

No stranger to being accused of heinous acts of violence, Outlaws Motorcycle Club member Greg (Stinky) Umphress, Jr. is a fugitive of the law in Florida, wanted for murder. The 32-year Umphress had an arrest warrant issued for him last week on first-degree murder charges stemming from the execution-style killing of Kingsmen Motorcycle Club chieftain David (Gutter) Donovan at a gas station in Central Florida back in April, but has fled authorities’ attempts to detain him.

Seven years ago, he walked away virtually unscathed from attacking a bar patron with a ball-peen hammer in a fight over food. Umphress was initially charged with attempted murder and then aggravated assault by prosecutors in Florida for the November 2009 beating, which occurred outside of the Papa Bear’s Den bar and grill in West Palm Beach after Umphress grabbed a handful of French fries off a random customer’s plate as he left the establishment.

The customer followed Umphress, flanked by a group of Outlaws, to the parking lot to confront him regarding the gesture and Umphress proceeded to take the hammer from its hiding place in a storage compartment on his Harley Davidson bike and slam it into his victim’s face. Two more Outlaws allegedly jumped into the altercation, smacking the victim over the head with a beer bottle and stomping him several times as he lay cowering and in pain on the pavement.

At trial in June 2010, Umphress was found not guilty of the aggravated battery charge, but guilty of a lesser battery count. He wound up doing less than six months in the county jail. His dad, former Florida Outlaws member Greg (Hoss) Umpress, Sr., died four months later in the days before Thanksgiving.

The younger Umphress is one of four Florida Outlaws indicted in Gutter Donovan’s slaying. The Ocala, Florida Outlaws chapter president Marc (Not Quite) Knotts and Ocala chapter members Jesus (Ace) Marrero and Miquel (Toe Jam) Torres have also been charged in the case. Knotts and Marrero are in custody. Torres, like Umphress, remains at large and is currently on the run.

According to a police report from the incident obtained this week by The Orlando Sentinel, Umphress, Marrerro and Torres put a knife to Kingsmen vice president Gutter Donovan as he exited a Circle K gas station in Leesburg, Florida on the evening of April 29 and forced him to his knees on the side of the building facing Knotts. When Donovan, the No. 2 man in the Lake County, Florida Kingsmen chapter, refused Knotts’ demand that he remove his Kingsmen colors and cut (rocker vest), Knotts ordered him murdered, imploring his Outlaw underlings to “shoot that motherfucker.”

Donovan was shot in the head and the back, dying after a two-week fight for his life in the hospital. Which Outlaw Knotts had actually pulled the trigger in his execution is unclear. Knotts was then shot three times in the back from the gas station entranceway by a Kingsmen brother of Donovan as he went to get on his bike and leave the scene.

Per recent statements by police, the Outlaws are in the midst of staging a campaign to assume complete control of the state of Florida’s biker world, a region the club has maintained a stronghold in dating back a half-century – according to informants, the Outlaws, headquartered out of the Midwest, but gangland powerbrokers across the American South, have started to demand all other biker groups either disband, be absorbed into the Outlaws or openly wear an Outlaws “support patch” on their rig and gear.

The Kingsmen, a club based out of New York, only declared itself a “One Percent” gang (an organized criminal endeavor) four years ago. Kingsmen national president David (Big Dave) Pirk, who lives in Florida and triumphed in a club civil war for the right to become part of the One Percent Nation, is currently under indictment for racketeering and murder.

The post On The Run: Florida Outlaws MC Member ‘Stinky’ Umphress Wanted In First-Degree Murder Case, Once Beat Man W/ Hammer appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Chicago mafia power John (Pudgy) Matassa, Jr. is in hot water with the feds. The 65-year old Outfit advisor who has deep ties in the crime family’s Westside, Southside, Elmwood Park and Cicero crews was indicted on eight counts of fraud earlier this week, with four counts arising from alleged labor-union racketeering out of Local 711 of the Independent Union of Amalgamated Workers. He’s due in court for a plea June 1.

Matassa, booted out of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) in the late 1990s for his connection to organized crime, is Local 711’s Secretary and Treasurer. Among other infractions, he’s being accused of providing his wife a “no-show” job at the union and having her paycheck deposited into his personal bank account as well as fraudulently applying for and receiving early retirement benefits via Social Security.

Back in 2009 at a federal trial he wasn’t a part of, Matassa was revealed as the go-between for disgraced U.S. Marshal John Ambrose and Chicago mobsters in the Outfit’s ultimately unsuccessful quest to locate and kill Southside crew hit man turncoat Nicholas (Nicky Slim) Calabrese before he could reach the witness stand in the Operation Family Secrets case two years prior. Matassa’s dad was a Cicero police officer and part-time bodyguard and chauffer for slain Outfit don Sam Giancana, assassinated in his own home in 1975 after returning from years in exile out of the country.

According to FBI files and Chicago Crime Commission records, Matassa came up through the ranks of the Chicago mafia in the now-defunct Northside crew, acting as a go-to enforcer for deceased Northside capo Vincent (Innocent Vince) Solano and a driver, emissary and overall right-hand man for long-departed mob porn boss Michael (Mikey the Fireplug) Glitta before being made into the Outfit at a 1989 Father’s Day induction ceremony conducted in the basement of the old Como Inn on Milwaukee Avenue. Glitta was Matassa’s uncle.

Sources tell Gangster Report, today Matassa is a top advisor to current Outfit boss Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis – made alongside Matassa at the ’89 Como Inn button bequeathing – and for a period of time earlier in the decade was considered the syndicate’s acting consigliere. He beat a federal extortion rap in the 1980s. DeLaurentis, 78, hails from the Chicago mafia’s Cicero regime.

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The Gangster Report has obtained an FBI document and attached Chicago Crime Commission memo from 1999 pertaining to the underworld affairs of Chicago mobster John (Pudgy) Matassa, Jr., which cites several confidential informants and sheds light on Matassa’s activities and history in the Outfit. The CCC memo, dispatched to federal and state law enforcement agencies in Illinois, was drafted to chronicle Matassa’s recent removal as president of Local 2 of the LIUNA for his ties to the mafia. Matassa, 65, was indicted for labor racketeering and social security fraud related to his current work as secretary and treasurer of the Independent Union of Amalgamated Workers’ Local 711.

Here are the highlights:

CI says Matassa is a capo of the Outfit’s Northside crew and his father was a Cicero cop and bodyguard for former Chicago mob don Sam Giancana

CI says Matassa and his father came up in organized labor circles through Local 750 of the Chicago Truck Drivers’ Union and that deceased Northside capo Vincent (Innocent Vince) Solano got him appointed to spot his spot in the LIUNA – he became a part of the union in 1985, voted in as business manager in 1987 and president in 1989 before ascending to vice president of the union’s entire district council and its’ auditor and committee coordinator in the wake of Solano death in the early 1990s.

CI says Matassa was an enforcer for Vince Solano on the Northside for many years and was often used by Solano to relay messages to the Outfit’s other crews.

CI says Matassa was primarily groomed in the Outfit by his “uncle”, Michael (Mikey the Fireplig) Glitta, one of Vince Solano’s top street bosses and the king of the Chicagoland pornography racket, who was actually his second cousin.

CI says Matassa does all of Glitta’s collections and is Glitta’s driver and bodyguard.

CI stated that Matassa began work at Schulman Air Freight in 1976, around same time he became a driver and bodyguard for Mike Glitta.

CI saw Matassa meeting with then Outfit underboss John (Jackie the Lackey) Cerone at Brookwood Country Club in suburban Chicago in the spring of 1983.

CI saw Matassa meeting with Cerone and then-Outfit boss Joseph (Joey Doves) Aiuppa at restaurant located inside the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Rosemont in the fall of 1982.

CI says Matassa helped oversee and operate a backdoor casino at the Grand Plaza Hotel in Rosemont in the 1980s.

CI says Matassa is the Northside crew’s liaison to Southside crew in the sharing of Asian gambling lieutenant Ken (Tokyo Joe) Eto.

CI says Matassa was made into the Chicago mob at a 1989 Father’s Day induction ceremony held at the Como Inn on Milwaukee Avenue.

CI saw Matassa meet with Outfit figures Michael (Big Mickey) Marcello and Alphonse (Al the Pizza Man) Tornebene at Horwath’s on numerous occasions in the mid-1990s.

CI says Matassa got into verbal altercation with Al Tornebene at Andrea’s Restaurant in 1994 and angrily waved his finger in Tornebene’s face requiring a sit down and Matassa being assessed a cash fine.

CI says Matassa, along with his cousin and fellow Outfit figure Thomas (Skinny Tommy) Matassa co-owned National Consolidated Industries on North Shore Drive – “NCI” provided optical services to labor unions.

CI says Health Marketing, Inc., a labor-union health-care services company, paid Matassa’s kickbacks for contracts obtained and he personally witnessed him laundering and siphoning money through NCI at NCI offices and then distributing payouts to surrogates every Sunday at Harbor Point Towers condo complex located at corner of Michigan Ave. and Randolph Street.

CI says Matassa takes meetings at Lino’s and Magnum’s on West Ontario and Manny’s Deli on Jefferson and Roosevelt, Mr. Edward’s  Restaurant on West Diversey Ave., Sally’s Waffle House on North Harlem Ave. and Gianotti’s in suburban Norridge.

CI says Matassa had a sitdown at Gianotti’s to settle beef between Matassa and rival Chicago mobsters Joseph (Joe Kong) Cullotta and Marco (The Mover) D’Amico over vending machines placed in a social club on Irving Park Boulevard on the city’s Northside. According to the CI, Matassa boasted of his recent making at the meeting and the sitdown resulted in a favorable outcome for Matassa.

CI says Marco D’Amico and D’Amico loyalists Robert (Bobby the Truck Driver) Abbinnati, Robert (Rocco) Dominic and Anthony (Tony D) Dote bad mouth Matassa because they don’t believe he should have been made.

CI says Matassa and fellow Outfit soldiers Victor (Popeye) Arrigo and Frank (Babe) DeMonte were a shakedown team for Vince Solano and Mike Glitta in the Northside porn racket of the 1970s and 1980s – Matassa admitted in a Chicago District Council hearing collecting four thousand bucks from the owner of an after-hours gay bar called Carol’s Speakeasy on behalf of DeMonte when DeMonte was sent to prison, but denied it was a street tax.

CI says Matassa collected street tax for Vince Solano’s second-in-command and the Outfit’s Rush Street entertainment district boss, Joseph (Little Caesar) DiVarco.

The post FBI Records Raise Veil On Chicago Mob Figure ‘Pudgy’ Matassa As Outfit Labor Union Expert Feels Heat Again In Fraud Probe appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Godfather of Southern Rock, Gregg Allman, the founder of the culturally transcendent Allman Brothers Band, died over Memorial Day Weekend at 69 of liver cancer in Georgia, the same state he drew the ire of the Dixie Mafia in back in the 1970s during the peak of his band’s fame. According to FBI records, the Macon, Georgia branch of the Dixie Mafia placed a murder contract on Allman’s head for agreeing to testify against alleged Dixie Mafia enforcer and drug dealer John (Scooter) Herring, his own former bodyguard and band road manager, at a highly-publicized 1976 federal narcotics trial.

Allman’s decision to take the witness stand broke up the Allman Brothers Band in the months surrounding his court appearance pointing the finger at Herring for supplying copious quantities of illegal drugs to large portions of the Southern Rock scene in the 1970s. Herring, who was tied to Georgia Dixie Mafia boss John (J.C.) Hawkins, was found guilty and sentenced to 75 years behind bars, but eventually had the conviction tossed on appeal and after taking a plea, was home by the end of the decade. Before taking his job as Allman’s head of security, he was Hawkins’ driver and right-hand man, per police informants at the time.

The Dixie Mafia, sometimes referred to the “Cornbread Mafia” or “Hillbilly Mob”, was a loosely-fitting “catch-all” term for any non-Italian continuing criminal enterprise operating in the American South in the 20th Century, some of which were tangentially connected, others not.

Formed by siblings Gregg and Duane Allman in their home state of Florida, the Allman Brothers band moved its base of operations to Macon, Georgia in 1969 and signed with a local fledgling label and early Southern Rock music-pioneer Capricorn Records. Putting out five platinum and 11 gold-selling albums, the group would go on to spearhead a movement in rock-and-roll in the deep south and be elected to the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.

Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident in October 1971, just as the group was ascending and finding success on a national and international level. Already a heroin addict, Greg Allman acquired a heavy cocaine habit while coping with his brother’s untimely passing and dove head first into the tailor-made-for-the-tabloids romance with then-TV star and recording artist Cher (they were married for four years – 1975-1979 – and Cher would win an Oscar on the silver screen for her work in 1987’s Moonstruck).

Allman was introduced to Herring at a Macon bar in 1973 and the pair became fast friends. Herring quickly jumped on tour with the band and became their No.1 dope dealer. He also acted as Allman’s bodyguard and soon thereafter was coordinating tour schedules for both the Allman Brothers group and Greg’s side project, the Greg Allman Band.

Herring’s wholesale supplier was another Dixie Mafia associate named Joey Fuchs, who provided Herring with cocaine, heroin and Demerol that Herring fed to the bands he helped manage. Fuchs, who often partied with and sometimes sold directly to Allman, was a licensed pharmacist and he was selling so much of his wears on the black market, he was forced to organize a fake burglary of the pharmacy he owned to account for all his missing stock. DEA documents from 1975 pegged Fuchs the main furnisher of narcotics to J.C. Hawkins and his Peach State Dixie Mafia faction.

“Scooter” Herring

The beginning of the end for Hawkins’ Hillbilly Mob organization and the original incarnation of the Allman Brothers band can each be traced back to a Georgia State Police investigation into political and city police corruption in Macon opened in April 1974.The inquiry uncovered links and pay-offs between Hawkins and politicians and law enforcement. However, that wasn’t all. It also revealed the connection between Hawkins and his Dixie Mafia gang and Herring and Fuchs and then in turn Herring and Fuchs’ tie-in to the Allman Brothers camp.

The FBI and DEA hoped by targeting Herring and Fuchs, they could get to Hawkins, their ultimate goal and soon-to-be prized head on their proverbial trophy wall. Both Herring and Fuchs were indicted and arrested on May 30, 1976. Herring was taken into custody at the Allman Brothers’ Macon office headquarters, Fuchs at his nearby home.

The first to flinch was Fuchs. He got a 10-year plea deal and agreed to testify in court and wear a wire.

Herring wouldn’t budge though. He refused to give up Fuchs, his pals in the Allman Brothers Band or his former boss, J.C. Hawkins in the Dixie Mafia. So the FBI let Fuchs loose, sending him wired-up into meetings with Herring and Hawkins.

Scooter Herring’s refusal to turn against his friends and business associates obviously wasn’t reciprocated. Greg Allman and Fuchs were the star witnesses at Herring’s June 1976 trial. A RICO indictment against Hawkins was filed that same month.

The street was talking. Informants began telling the FBI that Hawkins wanted Allman and Fuchs dead and was offering $100,000 apiece to hit them before they could testify. Protected and watched around-the-clock by federal agents, Allman took the stand in Herring’s trial for two days of riveting testimony. In between his first and second day of testimony, a Macon newspaper baring the headline, “Allman under heavy guard, death threats reported” made its way into court and back into the jury room, enough grounds for getting the conviction eventually thrown out two years later for a tainting of the jury pool.

J.C. Hawkins went to trial that fall and was convicted of an array of RICO predicates (arson, counterfeiting, running a car-theft and truck-hijacking ring, extortion, drug trafficking and insurance fraud). Although he didn’t wind up murdering Allman or Fuchs, Hawkins is believed to have had a lieutenant of his who he suspected of being a police informant killed: Dixie Mafia member Jimmy Reeves was shotgunned to death on May 27, 1974. In the days before the slaying, Hawkins was intercepted by a federal wiretap telling an associate of Reeves’, “That fink son of bitch won’t be around much longer.” The Reeves hit was allegedly carried out by Hawkins’ brother.

Following his release from prison in 1979, Scooter Herring went back into the music industry and managed a number of rock bands before he died of natural causes in 2007, including Allman Brothers offshoot Sea Level. Popular and gregarious, rumor has it Jim Henson based his “Scooter” character in the Muppets TV show and movies on Herring after meeting him at a benefit concert in the 1970s prior to launching his innovative and hugely-successful children’s franchise. Scooter on The Muppets was the manager of the show’s fictional rock-and-roll band.

The Allman Brothers reunited in a variety of formations in the coming years (1976, 1982, 1988). Gregg Allman, 67, today, portrayed an elusive and lethal Texas drug kingpin in the 1992 film Rush, co-starring Jason Patric, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Sam Elliott. He last released a solo album in 2011 and still regularly tours. His autobiography came out in 2012 where he spoke frankly about Herring’s 1976 drug trial, his personal battle with narcotics and choice to cooperate.

The post Gregg Allman & The Dixie Mafia: Legendary Southern Rock-&-Roll Star Stood On Shaky Ground With Mobsters In 1970s appeared first on The Gangster Report.

According to federal informants and court filings, Dixie Mafia boss John (J.C.) Hawkins had Jimmy Reeves, a witness against him in a pending theft case, murdered in 1974, two years before he put a hit out on Southern Rock god Gregg Allman, the founder and leader of The Allman Brothers Band for testifying in the trial of Hawkins’ former bodyguard. The Jimmy Reeves homicide has never been solved, although it was a predicate count in Hawkins’ 1976 racketeering indictment.

The 69-year old Allman died this weekend of liver cancer in Savannah, Georgia. J.C. Hawkins ran the Macon, Georgia wing of the loosely-intertwined Southern crime syndicate known as the Dixie Mafia in the late 1960s and a big chunk of the 1970s until a racketeering conviction ended his reign in 1977. Started in Florida, the Allman Brothers Band based its affairs out of the Macon area during that time period and split up in the wake of Gregg Allman’s problems with the Dixie Mafia.

Allman, who helped convict his band’s tour manager John (Scooter) Herring, a one-time lieutenant working under Hawkins prior to going into the entertainment field, of drug trafficking in 1976, survived the Dixie Mafia’s wrath and was never harmed despite Hawkins’ widely-reported intent to wipe him off this earth before he could take his seat on the witness stand. Jimmy Reeves wasn’t so lucky.

Reeves was a lieutenant of Hawkins’ and on September 24, 1973 helped Hawkins and his Dixie mob crew steal two pieces of construction equipment from a construction site near Atlanta and then the following day summoned him to help sell it on the black market. Unbeknownst to Hawkins, Reeves was a confidential informant for the Bibb County Sherriff’s Department and Hawkins was indicted for the heist.

On the morning of May 27, 1974, Reeves skipped breakfast with his wife and rushed to a meeting at a nearby church parking lot, where he was shot-gunned to death inside his pickup truck. Ballistic reports showed that he had been killed at close range.

In the weeks preceding Reeves’ slaying, another Dixie Mafia turncoat recalled to investigators Hawkins’ commenting that he had backed out of a deal for hot antique watches and guns with Reeves because he was a “fink son-of-a-bitch” and that prosecutors “won’t have a witness” when his trial on stealing the construction wear comes about. Two days after the Reeves hit, the informant was present at a conversation between J.C. Hawkins and his brother and lieutenant Recea (R.C.) Hawkins pertaining to the details of Reeves’ execution in which R.C. Hawkins admitted being the triggerman.

“First shot out of the barrel and he didn’t know what was happening, he never saw it coming,” R.C. Hawkins allegedly said to his brother in response to J.C. asking for specifics.

An eyewitness placed R.C. Hawkins’ car, a blue-colored Oldsmobile parked on a dirt road across from the church parking lot in the time surrounding the murder. R.C. Hawkins would go on to be indicted alongside his brother in the spring of 1976 and subsequently

The post Dixie Mafia In Macon, GA. Killed Jimmy Reeves In Years Leading Up To Trying To Kill Rocker Gregg Allman appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Notorious Dixie Mafia hit man Billy Birt died this spring having spent the past 43 years in a Georgia state penitentiary serving a life prison sentence for murder. Authorities speculate that the 80-year old Birt was responsible for dozens of gangland slayings in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s down in the Dirty South.

The imposing racketeer and strong arm was the Dixie Mafia’s top muscle in Georgia in his heyday. The Peach State’s wing of the Dixie Mafia (a loose-knit conglomerate of criminal groups hugging the nation’s Southeast coastline dating back a half-century) found its way back into the news last week with the death of music legend Gregg Allman. The rock icon and beloved adopted son of the Georgia planes dodged attempts by the Dixie Mafia to bump him off back in the late 1970s.

Allman, 69, passed away from liver cancer. At the peak of his fame in 1976, he angered Macon, Georgia Dixie Mafia boss John (J.C.) Hawkins for cooperating with prosecutors in a large-scale narcotics case against his own road manager John (Scooter) Herring, who once worked as a bodyguard for Hawkins and other Dixie Mafia brass in his younger years before getting into the rock-and-roll industry.

Good thing for Gregg Allman by the time he made his way into the Dixie Mafia’s crosshairs, Birt was already behind bars, found guilty of three first-degree homicides – the 1972 murder of Don Chancey and the 1973 torture-killings of elderly married couple Reed and Lois Fleming – and sentenced to die in the electric chair. The convictions were however tossed on appeal in 1979, but Birt was once again found guilty of the Chancey slaying at a second trial in 1980 and hit with a life term.

Chancey and Birt were longtime partners in bootlegging moonshine and gasoline for the Dixie Mafia. The Flemings were targeted for robbery inside their home by Birt and two accomplices, Bobby Gaddis and Charlie Reed.

The post Dixie Mafia Figure Billy Birt Dead At 80, Leaves Reputation As One Of South’s Most Feared Hoodlums Ever appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Relations between the mafia in the Empire State and their counterparts across the George Washington Bridge in the Garden State took a step backwards around the dawning of the New Millennium when New York mobsters Steven (Stevie Wonder) Crea, Dominic (Crazy Dom) Truscello and Joseph (Big Joe) Datello were indicted and had to do prison time in the early 2000s for labor-union racketeering due to the cooperation of New Jersey Godfather John (The Eagle) Riggi’s son-in-law, DeCalvacante crime family associate Sean Richard. The investigation and subsequent bust became known as “Operation Textbook.”

Current leaders in New York’s Lucchese Crime family, Crea, Truscello and Datello are back in trouble with the law. They were part of a round-up of close to 20 Lucchese clan bosses, capos, soldiers and associates this week in a federal racketeering, drug and murder case that was filed Wednesday. Crea, 69 and a one-time acting boss, is considered the syndicate’s underboss right now, while the 83-year old Truscello is a captain of the Borgata’s Prince Street crew in Manhattan. Datello, 66, is Truscello’s trusty right-hand man, a longtime Lucchese soldier and seasoned goon in the labor unions.

John Riggi ran the New Jersey mafia from the 1970s until his death of natural causes two years ago at the ripe old age of 90. He had based his affairs out of Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he controlled Local 394 of the LIUNA, a construction workers union that came to dominate the industry in the region. Nailed for a variety of racketeering offenses in 1990, Riggi was smacked with a 12-year prison sentence, however never surrendered his title as don, running his organization from behind bars via a series of intermediaries.

That’s where Sean Richard came into the picture.

Born and raised in the Bronx and hailing from meager, lower middle-class beginnings, Richard was a non-mob connected carpenter and labor foreman when he met and started dating John Riggi’s daughter, Sara, in 1995. Soon, Richard and Sara Riggi were living together and opened a construction business together called S&S Contracting. The business was started with money provided by an incarcerated John Riggi, who Richard met for the first time in a Maryland prison visiting room and quickly became the jailed don’s eyes and ears in the union.

Richard married John the Eagle’s little girl in 1996 and the couple gave the rough-around-the-edges crime lord two granddaughters. With his new father-in-law’s counsel, backing, and encouragement, Richard transformed himself from a thirtysomething-nobody working stiff to the point man for all the New Jersey mob’s construction rackets along the entire eastern seaboard.

From his office at S&S Contracting and using Riggi’s deep union ties, Richard spearheaded kickback, bribery, bid-rigging and extortion schemes and the creation of slush funds and no-show jobs in the construction industry in both New Jersey and New York. He enjoyed the perks of his newfound mobster status, too – throwing his weight around at every opportunity, spending extravagantly and hooking up with a stripper girlfriend on the side.

Many of the construction scams Richard and the DeCalvacante clan were engaging in were being done in tandem with New York’s Lucchese crime family. Richard was dealing directly with a number of Lucchese luminaries, including then-street boss Stevie Crea, Crazy Dom Truscello and Big Joe Datello, in these illicit transactions which the government estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Things began unravelling for Richard in the summer of 1999. The FBI raided Richard’s home and S&S Contracting, informing him a federal indictment with his name on it was forthcoming. Sensing the walls closing in, Richard descended into a heavy depression fueled by copious amounts of alcohol, cocaine and heroin. He also started skimming money he was responsible for couriering between DeCalvacante administrators and Crea and Truscello in the Luccheses.

By the late fall of 1999, Richard knew he was in trouble, suspecting he would have zero wiggle room in the pending indictment coming his way and the Lucchese had uncovered his dipping into the till. In November of that year, he bolted a meeting with Truscello and Datello, who was Truscello’s driver and bodyguard at the time, believing it to be a set-up and that he was about to be killed.

Around the Christmas holiday, fearful of prison time and the Luccheses, not to mention his father-in-law Riggi, who he thought had signed off on the Lucchese’s hit attempt, Richard had his attorney reach out to the government to arrange a cooperation agreement, offering up Riggi and the DeCalvacantes and the Luccheses to boot. The feds jumped at the chance to use Richard to bag the mobsters he was connected to.

Wiring-up, Richard taped incriminating conversations with Riggi, Crea, Truscello, Datello, and others, concealing a recording device in a cast on his right arm. Adding insult to injury for Riggi, his son-in-law wasn’t only a rat, he was a lousy husband and parent to his daughter and grandkids, deciding to enter the Witness Protection Program with his stripper girlfriend instead of with his wife and children.

Stevie Crea and Crazy Dom Truscello both pled guilty after the September 2000 indictment finally dropped and did six years in prison apiece. Datello served a five-piece. Riggi pled out in a separate case that was filed that same year against a drove of DeCalvacantes and was highlighted by Richard’s recordings and Riggi’s ordering of a 1989 gangland slaying (mob associate Fred Weiss). He eventually walked free in the fall of 2012.

Richard remains in the Witness Protection Program today at 53. He testified in close to a half-dozen successful federal prosecutions between 2002-2010.

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The disturbingly-senseless double-murder of Morris and Ruth Gauger, an elderly married couple in Illinois, was finally officially solved 20 years ago this week with the arrests of Wisconsin Outlaws Motorcycle Club members Randall (The Madman) Miller and James (Preacher) Schneider as part of a gargantuan legal assault unleashed against the infamous biker gang by the feds in the late 1990s. The Gaugers were brutally slain on their farm in 1993 in a ruthless robbery-homicide that rocked the small community of Richmond, Illinois in McHenry County.

Gary Gauger, the couple’s adult son, was originally found guilty of the crime and sentenced to the death penalty before his conviction was tossed and Miller and Schneider, both members of the Outlaws’ Milwaukee chapter, came into the picture. Miller and Schneider were two of the 17 Midwest Outlaws indicted in June of that year, the first of a staggering 1-2 punch of major busts the club endured in an eight-week span in the summer of 1997.

Milwaukee Outlaws president Kevin (Spike) O’Neill, Northwest Indiana capo and overall Midwest regional club boss Randy (Mad Dog) Yager and Southside Chicago club chief Carl (Jamming Jay) Warneke were all ensnared in the first bust, a 34-count indictment charging multiple gangland murders, attempted murders, robberies and arsons. The then-Outlaws’ Detroit-headquartered international president Harry (Taco) Bowman, the club’s dynamic, violence-obsessed leader for a majority of the 1980s and 1990s, would go on to be indicted in August.

Bowman and O’Neill are currently behind bars for life. Warneke went into the Witness Protection Program. Yager was apprehended in Mexico in 2015 after almost two decades on the run as a fugitive and pled guilty to the charges against him last year.

The June 1997 bust traced its roots back two years to the first part of 1995 and the cooperation Wisconsin Outlaw Mark (Crash) Quinn, who got caught up in a drug case and cut a deal with the feds to a wear a wire and testify in court against his biker brethren when the case reached trial. Crash Quinn was the sergeant-at-arms of the club’s State Line chapter located in Janesville, Wisconsin, near the Wisconsin-Illinois border. In addition to providing a treasure trove of other intelligence on club affairs, Quinn clued the FBI into the real story behind the murder of the Gaugers.

The day after the Gaugers were heinously butchered in the spring of 1993, Miller bragged to Quinn of killing the couple with Schneider. Quinn eventually recorded a number of conversations with Miller discussing the double homicide with Miller boasting of pulling off the “perfect crime.” Miller told Quinn, “I had it all covered, we didn’t leave spec of evidence behind.”

According to court records and trial transcripts, Madman Miller and Preacher Schneider targeted the Gaugers under the belief that 74-year old Morris Gauger, the owner of a popular motorcycle parts and repair business in McHenry County, a cluster of suburbs northwest of Chicago, kept a safe with tens of thousands of dollars inside at his farmhouse residence in Richmond. In the weeks leading up to the murders, Miller stole $1,000 in cash from a hiding place in the back of Gauger’s shop.

After staking out the property for two days, Miller and Schneider arrived at the farmhouse’s backdoor at around 6:00 a.m. on the morning of April 8, 1993 and encountered Morris Gauger tending to a chicken coup and his wife Ruth Gauger, 70, preparing coffee and breakfast. While Miller held Morris at gunpoint, Schneider took Ruth into an adjacent trailer on the property which doubled as a traveling trinket sales depot and bludgeoned her with the butt of his .357 Magnum and then slashed her throat.

Returning to the farmhouse, Miller lied to Morris and told him his wife was unharmed and tied up in the trailer and the only way he’d see her alive again was if he emptied his safe for them. Claiming he had no safe to open for them, Morris offered up a tray of silver coins that Miller threw to the ground before bashing in his victim’s head with his gun and slitting his neck ear-to-ear.

The pair of coldblooded bikers walked away from the scene with a paltry fifteen bucks that they used on breakfast in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin en route back to Milwaukee basically empty handed. Schneider, 54, flipped following his arrest and appeared alongside Crash Quinn as a star witness for the government at Miller’s 2000 trial (where Miller was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison) prior to entering the Witness Protection Program. Madman Miller is 58 years old today and resides in a federal correctional facility in southern Indiana.

Besides the Gauger slayings, Miller killed drug dealer Don (Domino) Wagner execution-style in 1992 in a dispute over money at a Burlington, Wisconsin boat dock, attempted to kill Minneapolis Hells Angel president Pat Mattar and teamed with Milwaukee Outlaws leader Spike O’Neill in a bombing campaign aimed at blowing up properties owned by Hells Angels and Hells Angels affiliate clubs in Illinois and Wisconsin from 1993-1995. Throughout the 1990s, the Outlaws and Hells Angels were in fierce combat across several Midwest states as the west coast-based Hells Angels tried pushing into the Chicagoland area, a longtime Outlaws’ administrative nerve center.

The post The Farmhouse Murders: Case Of Milwaukee Outlaws MC Members Killing Married Couple In Illinois Cracked 20 Years Ago appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Sporting a literal murderers’ row of hitters, the Philadelphia mafia’s softball team is back in action on the local South Philly rec diamond. A photograph of the squad in uniform recently surfaced on-line, many of them wearing white-colored jerseys with 9^th & Christian printed across the chests in reference to the crime family’s new clubhouse at the corner of 9^th and Christian.

Back in the late 1990s, the Philly mob fielded a softball team representing then-gangland hangout Gino’s Café owned by boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino. Two decades and several prison stints later, the team has returned and it appears to be captained (pun intended) by George (Georgie Boy) Borgesi, the Philly mob’s former consigliere when the club first hit the diamond in the Clinton Era and now a capo and street-faction leader. A number of the wiseguy softballers were wearing Merlino’s Ristorante t-shirts, commemorating the swaggering  boss’ ill-fated Italian eatery in Boca Raton, Florida, where he resides these days under bond restriction facing another round in the ring with the government over allegations of bookmaking and health fraud.

Borgesi is in the center of the current team photo, alongside aging acting boss Joseph (Uncle Joe) Ligambi and respected mafia administrator John (Johnny Chang) Ciancaglini. All three have either been charged with or convicted of a homicide in the past. Per one FBI informant, Borgesi bragged of taking part in 11 mob murders.

Ligambi is Borgesi’s uncle and mentor in the mob. Sources tell Gangster Report, a big chunk of the over two dozen Goodfellas pictured in the team photo, are part of Borgesi’s crew and growing powerbase.

In 2014, Borgesi and Ligambi beat RICO charges and Borgesi walked out of federal prison after 14 years. Ligambi, 77, was sprung from a life prison sentence in 1997 following his conviction for murdering high-ranking mob associate Frank (Frankie Flowers) D’Alfonso got tossed. The 55-year old Merlino, Ciancaglini, 61, and Borgesi, 54, beat murder raps at their 2001 RICO trial, but were nailed for racketeering. Merlino spent 12 years in the joint. Johnny Chang did an eight-year bid behind bars.

During the Gino’s Café years, Skinny Joey pitched, Georgie Boy Borgesi manned the hot corner at third base, Uncle Joe played second and underboss Steven (Handsome Stevie) Mazzone showed off his slick glove up the middle at shortstop. Mazzone doesn’t appear in the recent diamond photo-op, two of his nephews do though.

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Reputed Kansas City mafia enforcer, hit man and arsonist Joseph (Joey Rags) Ragusa died of natural causes back in the spring at 78 years old. Despite being considered by authorities one of the more menacing and lethal gangland figures in Missouri in his mob heyday, Ragusa was beloved and revered in K.C. mafia circles.

The pallbearers and honorary pallbearers at Ragusa’s March funeral included a who’s who of current Civella crime family brass, including alleged boss John (Johnny Joe) Sciortino, alleged underboss Peter (Las Vegas Pete) Simone, respected advisor Frank DeLuna and reputed capos Joseph (Joe Pete) Simone and William (Little Willie) Cammisano.

“Joey Rags” Ragusa made a name for himself in the local underworld fighting on the frontlines of the River Quay War in the 1970s, a wild two-year conflict for control of the city’s trendy entertainment center pitting the sitting Civella clan administration versus a breakoff street faction led by soldier David Bonadonna and his muscle, the renegade Spero brothers. The war ravished the recently-remodeled River Quay district with earthshaking bombings, multiple brazen mob murders and overall mayhem for two years, capped by the May 1978 Virginian Tavern Massacre, killing Mike Spero, wounding Joe Spero and paralyzing faction boss Carl Spero.

Confidential FBI informants named Ragusa and his frequent mob running buddy Charlie Moretina as prime suspects in more than half of the eight slayings attributed directly to the warfare. One informant fingered Ragusa and Moretina (died peacefully in 2005) as two of the shooters in the attack on the Spero brothers at their Virginian Tavern headquarters. Another informant told the FBI that Ragusa helped execute David Bonadonna to kick-off the spree of rampant violent in July 1976 and manufactured and planted the car bomb that killed Spero faction enforcer Gary (Thunderbird T) Parker in the summer of 1977.

Ragusa did almost a decade in federal prison in the 1980s for an attempted arson of a private residence in 1979. He walked free in September 1987.

According to experts and current and former law enforcement familiar with mob affairs in Kansas City, the modern-day Civella crime family is a small, quiet syndicate focused on gambling and loansharking and dabbling in narcotics through a string of intermediaries. The Family’s namesake and longtime Godfather Nick Civella died of lung cancer in 1983. Joe Spero was killed in a 1980 explosives incident and Carl Spero was blown away in a 1984 bombing on his used-car lot.

Joey Ragusa

The post Death In The Heartland: K.C. Mobster ‘Joey Rags’ Ragusa Passes Away At 78, Made Bones During River Quay War appeared first on The Gangster Report.

In honor of former New York mobster Larry Mazza’s new book, The Life – A Brooklyn Boy Is Seduced Into The Dark World of The Mafia (purchase here), below is a hit-list timeline of the war that engulfed the Colombo crime family in the early 1990s and Mazza was on the frontlines of as the protégé of legendary Colombo clan killer Greg (The Grim Reaper) Scarpa, a controversial FBI informant. Scarpa, who died of AIDS in prison, captained one side of the conflict, heading an enforcement wing on behalf of the syndicate’s incarcerated boss Carmine (The Snake) Persico against an uprising sprung by acting boss Vittorio (Little Vic) Orena. The war resulted in 10 murders in less than two years.

THE COLOMBO WAR HIT LIST (1991-1993)

November 24, 1991 – Colombo crime family soldier and Persico loyalist Henry (Hank the Bank) Smurra is killed behind the wheel of his car parked in front of a Dunkin Donuts in Brooklyn.

December 2, 1991 –  Aging Genovese crime family lieutenant Gaetano (Tommy Scars) Amato is shot to death in an attack on Colombo associate Joey Tolino on a Brooklyn street corner.

December 5, 1991 – Aging Colombo crime family and Persico loyalist Rosario (Black Sam) Nastasi is slain inside his Belvedere Social Club in Brooklyn as he was playing cards.

December 7, 1991 – Colombo crime family soldier and Orena loyalist Vincent (Vinnie Venus) Fusaro is murdered in front of his house in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn, gunned down as he hung his Christmas lights.

December 8, 1991 – Innocent bystander Matteo Speranza, a teenage immigrant from Sicily, is killed by accident at a bagel shop in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn during an attack on a Persico loyalist.

January 7, 1992 – Colombo crime family captain and Orena loyalist Nicholas (Nicky Black) Grancio is shotgunned to death behind the wheel of his Toyota Land Cruiser SUV on a Brooklyn street corner.

March 25, 1992 –  Colombo crime family lieutenants and Orena loyalists Johnny Minerva & Mike Imbergamo are gunned down sitting in Minerva’s car outside the Broadway Diner in North Massapequa.

May 22, 1992 – Colombo crime family soldier and Orena loyalist Larry Lampisi is shot-gunned to death in his Brooklyn driveway.

October 7, 1992 – Colombo crime family lieutenant and Persico loyalist Steven (Stevie Lightning) Mancusi is killed as he is getting into his car.

October 20, 1993 – Colombo crime family capo and Orena “co-underboss” Joey Scopo is executed in the front yard of his house in Queens, ending the war and keeping power with the Persico group.

View Larry Mazza’s website here.

The post The 1990s Colombo Mob War Murder Timeline: NYC Mafia Clan In Chaos As Jailed Don Fought Off Insurgence appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The first part of the 1960s brought with it the first Colombo crime family war in New York City, as the rogue Gallo brothers (“Crazy Joe,” Larry and Albert aka “Kid Blast”) challenged longstanding don Joe (The Olive Oil King) Profaci for power. Profaci was one of the New York mob’s founding fathers, helping transition to the city’s expansive underworld landscape from individual bootlegging fiefdoms to what became known as La Cosa Nostra or the American mafia. The Olive Oil King ruled a stable and overwhelmingly-profitable Borgata for almost three decades.

The Gallo crew sensed growing unrest in the syndicate’s rank-and-file due to Profaci’s increasing greediness and growing detachment from the streets and his men, rallied a faction of the organization behind him and went “to the mattress” for control of the crime family which by the end of the feud would claim more than a dozen casualties and bear Joe Colombo’s name.

THE COLOMBO WAR PT. 1 – THE HITS (1959-1963)

November 4, 1959 – Profaci crime family captain Frank (Frankie Shots) Abbatemarco, the syndicate’s Brooklyn-based numbers boss, is slain on Joe Profaci’s orders for refusing to raise his tribute paid to Family administrators, gunned down as he entered Cardiello’s Tavern owned by his first cousin and fellow Profaci clan button man Joseph (Joe Bats) Cardiello. The fallout from the hit lays the groundwork for civil war in the near future, ignited by the fearless Gallo brothers.

August 20, 1961 – Gallo crew enforcer Joseph (Joe Jelly) Giorelli vanishes, a dead fish in bundle of his clothes thrown on the doorstep of a Gallo gang hangout to signify “Joe Jelly sleeps with the fishes,” (a scene immortalized in pop-culture and cinematic lore in The Godfather) and setting off two years of tireless warfare in the ranks of the Profaci crime family.

October 4, 1961 – Gallo crew member Joseph (Joey Mags) Magnasco is shot to death in a physical altercation with Profaci crime family capo Harry Fontana by Fontana’s bodyguard on a Brooklyn street corner.

November 11, 1961 – Profaci crime family soldiers John Guariglia & Paul Ricci are killed inside Ricci’s Brooklyn headquarters, The Hi Fi Lounge, mowed down by a pair of Gallo crew gunmen.

June 6, 1962 – Legendary New York Godfather Joe (The Olive Oil King) Profaci dies of gull bladder cancer, passing the reins of his mob empire to his brother-in-law and top lieutenant Joe Magliocco.

October 1962 – The Gallo crew hit team of Anthony DiCola and Marco Morelli disappear.

June 6, 1963 – Gallo crew financier Emilio Colantuono is gunned down for supplying Gallo faction with weapons and cash to fund its war effort.

June 12, 1963 – Profaci crime family soldier Vincent DiTucci is executed in the front yard of his Queens home.

June 18, 1963 – Gallo crew member and Crazy Joe Gallo bodyguard Alfred Mondella is shot to death.

July 15, 1963 – Gallo crew enforcer and Crazy Joe’s chauffer and bodyguard Ali-Hassan (Ali Baba) Waffa is shot death on the New Jersey waterfront.

August 9, 1963 – Profaci crime family lieutenant Joseph (Joe Bats) Cardiello is killed in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, shot to death behind the wheel of his car.

August 9, 1963 – Gallo crew gunmen Louis (Cadillac Louie) Mariani is killed as he drove in the parking lot of a Long Island shopping mall, himself and his car riddled with bullets by a shooter in a passing vehicle.

*Beleaguered don Joe Magliocco stepped down as boss before the end of the year and capo Joe Colombo took the throne and provided the crime family its’ name.

The post The 1960s Colombo Mob War Murder Timeline: ‘Crazy Joe’ Took On A Boss & Nothing Was Ever The Same Again appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Incarcerated former Detroit teenage drug dealer and illegal underage informant Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe owned up to burying the eight kilos of cocaine he was convicted of possessing almost three decades ago at his first parole hearing in more than 13 years Thursday. The soon-to-be 48 year old Wershe is the longest serving non-violent juvenile offender in the U.S. correctional system, imprisoned since January 1988 based on an arrest he took at a routine traffic stop when he was 17.

Although for years Wershe has claimed responsibility for the box of drugs he was nailed with, he had previously always maintained he never actually physically buried the box of narcotics under a porch in his neighborhood in the aftermath of the traffic stop in front of his grandmother’s residence on Hampshire Street on the far east side of Detroit on the late afternoon of May 22, 1987. On Thursday, at the beginning of an emotionally-charged four-and-a-half hour public hearing in Jackson, Michigan, he admitted he hid the drugs under the porch in a panic following being pulled over.

Wershe’s tragic, complex and utterly-enthralling case has attracted a worldwide audience in recent years, with a big-budget Hollywood film starring Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey and newcomer Richie Merritt currently in production and a steady drum beat of media attention from outlets around the globe. In the summer of 1984, Wershe, at the time only 14 and fresh out of the eighth grade, was recruited by a federal narcotics task force to be a paid mole in the turbulent, primarily African-American Motor City dope game, specifically targeting an east side drug empire being run by Johnny (Lil’ Man) Curry, a suave and politically-connected kingpin who unknowingly took the charismatic mop-topped adolescent on as a protégé.

Wershe worked undercover for two years as a go-to intelligence source for the FBI, DEA and Detroit Police Department. The unholy relationship between the cocky, street-savvy teenager and Uncle Sam ended in the months before his arrest and once Wershe went off and began dealing drugs on his own. Curry, 59, was indicted in March of 1987 and did just under 14 years in prison.

Upon Wershe being stopped in a rented Thunderbird on May 22, 1987, police found a plastic grocery bag with $34,000 on the floorboard in the front seat and a fight for control of the bag ensued between two police officers, Wershe, his dad and sister, leading Wershe to bolt from the scene. In his prior versions of events, Wershe first said the drugs found had been planted by police and then eventually admitted the kilos of coke were his, however, buried by his right-hand man Stephen (Freaky Steve) Roussell.

According to Wershe, he and Roussell had received a shipment of 10 kilos from Miami earlier that day and stashed the shipment in Wershe’s grandmother’s house without her knowledge before removing them in the wake of the traffic stop and together running and ditching the box under a nearby house. Roussell’s fingerprints were on the box, while Wershe’s were not.

A neighbor named David (Peanut) Golly testified at Wershe’s trial that he saw Wershe bury the drugs, but recanted and signed an affidavit accusing members of the Detroit Police Department of coercing him to lie under oath with intimidation tactics. Roussell, 20, was slain that fall in a shooting over a girl.

At the time of his conviction, Wershe was sentenced to a mandatory life prison sentence under the now-defunct and highly-controversial “650 Lifer Law,” which was ruled unconstitutional and thrown off the books in 1998. Since the law was abolished, Wershe has been rejected by the parole board on three separate occasions. This week was his first parole hearing since March 2003.

The parole board is expected to give Wershe its decision in the next few months, possibly as early as late July or August. If freed by the state of Michigan, Wershe still has three years of time behind bars left to serve in Florida for the role in a stolen-car ring he pled guilty to from the Witness Protection Program in 2006 – Wershe entered witness protection in 1992 after reigniting his cooperation with the government and helping the FBI build successful prosecutions against a notorious ring of dirty cops and the infamous Best Friends drug gang, responsible for murdering Freaky Steve Roussell.

The one-time flashy baby-faced dope boy, now well into middle age, ready to celebrate his 48th birthday on July 18, assured the board he’s left his life of crime in the past.

“I can say with confidence I wouldn’t return to that life,” he said in a heartfelt exchange. “Drugs destroy communities, drugs destroy families, they destroyed my family…..I would never sell drugs again. I am as anti-drug as you can get, I’m as anti-drug as a prosecutor.”

As he spoke, Wershe briefly became visibly emotional.

“I let a lot of people down….let me show you I can make a difference in the world, do something positive,” he said. “All I can say is I give you my word as a man…everyday I try to be a better person from a bad place (prison). I am not the person I used to be. I can’t go back (and change the past), I can only go forward.”

The post ‘White Boy Rick’ Wershe Cops To Box Of Dope At Parole Hearing, Trying To Make Amends For Past Wrongs appeared first on The Gangster Report.

New York biker gang leader Doug (Doc) Youmans was paroled from prison this month after serving almost seven years as a guest of the federal government for racketeering and narcotics trafficking. At the time of his arrest, the 54-year old Youmans was the vice president of the Pagan’s Motorcycle Club’s chapter in the Catskills Mountains. He’s residing in a halfway house until late July.

Doc Youmans and then-Pagan’s Sullivan County, New York boss Tracy (L-Train) Lahey were the top two targets and headlining defendants in Operation On The Road Again, a joint FBI, DEA and ATF probe resulting in a 31-count indictment, charging more than a dozen New York and New Jersey Pagans for murder, drugs, extortion, witness intimidation, weapons violations and engaging in a multi-state racketeering conspiracy, which dropped in September 2010. All 17 defendants in the case were found guilty.

Interestingly, Youmans and the Pagan’s in the Catskills Mountains region partnered with the Mongols Motorcycle Club in a drug-dealing enterprise moving cocaine and prescription painkillers. Youmans worked directly with the Mongols’ liaison to the operation, Robert (Comanche) Santiago. In 2009, Youmans made a hand-to-hand sale of cocaine to an undercover federal agent

Lahey, 40, and Santiago, 50, were released from prison in July and October of  2014, respectively. Santiago was a member of the Mongols’ South Side New York chapter, the west coast-based club’s lone satellite in the Empire State. The Pagan’s are headquartered in Pennsylvania.

The post The Doctor Is In: NY Pagan’s MC Luminary ‘Doc’ Youmans Walks Free From Seven Years Behind Bars appeared first on The Gangster Report.