Earlier this month lawyers for reputed Detroit drug kingpin and music-label impresario Brian (Peanut) Brown filed a motion with the U.S. District Court looking to retain jewelry and vehicles seized in raids two years ago, which were promptly answered with a response brief filed by the government hoping to block the request. The 47-year old Brown is the target of a giant federal narcotics and money laundering inquiry, but has only been charged with a gun case as of yet and remains free on bond.

Peanut Brown owns BMB Records, an independent label based out of Michigan and home to Motor City rap staple Trick Trick, R&B lothario Ray-J, hip-hop diva Charli Baltimore and up-and-comer Bre-Z, who acts on the hit television show Empire. Back in the 1990s, Brown was busted for drug offenses and did a decade behind bars.

According to court records, the feds are asking the court that the $55,000 worth of jewelry, a classic Cadillac Seville and a custom-built motorcycle Brown seeks to recover be forfeited to the government because they were bought with dirty money. The property was confiscated in multiple raids conducted in Atlanta and suburban Michigan, respectively, in 2015. The car (a 1976 model) and bike are part of Brown’s half-million dollar luxury fleet of automobiles. Since the investigation began over four years ago, the government has seized more than $500,000 in cash and eight kilos of uncut heroin.

Prior to word of a federal criminal probe into his affairs hitting the media in the spring (first reported by The Detroit News), he and his wife were slated to be the stars of a reality TV show on the Lifetime network. The show is currently being kept on-hold by the network until the investigation concludes.

The post Feds Seeking More Forfeiture Of Alleged Motown Drug Boss ‘Peanut’ Brown’s Assets, Including Ice & ’76 Caddy appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Several media outlets, including Gangster Report, inaccurately reported that at last week’s heavily-publicized parole hearing for former Detroit teenage drug dealer and illegal underage informant Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe that Wershe admitted to stashing the eight kilos of cocaine he was convicted of possessing 30 years ago for the first time. In reality, Wershe told the parole board back in 2003 that he threw the box of drugs under an eastside home’s porch, referenced on Pg. 5 and Pg. 7 of a parole hearing transcript.

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 in front of his grandmother’s residence on Hampshire Street on the far eastside of Detroit on May 22, 1987. Last Thursday was his first parole hearing in 13 years.

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. During his circus-like 1988 trial, Wershe’s attorney argued that the drugs found were planted.

According to Wershe, he and his right-hand man Stephen (Freaky Steve) 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 Media Made Mistake In Reporting ‘White Boy Rick’ Wershe Had Not Owned Up To Touching Box Of Drugs During ’87 Bust appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Per sources, accomplished east coast mob hit man Joe (Mad Dog) Sullivan passed away in prison over last weekend at 77 years old while serving a life sentence for a trio of first-degree homicides. Sullivan was a notorious gun for hire in the 1970s and early 1980s, used by more than one Italian crime family to do heavy-duty muscle work, including fighting on their respective behalves in shooting wars that decimated parts of the New York underworld decades ago.

Mad Dog Sullivan’s infamy stretched behind prison walls as well. He is the only person to ever escape from Attica maximum security state correctional facility in New York, going over the wall in the spring of 1971 before being taken back into custody in Greenwich Village three weeks later.

Paroled in 1975, Sullivan went to work for New York’s Genovese and Gambino crime families, helping them eliminate an Irish mob regime in Hell’s Kitchen run by Mickey Spillane, the historic neighborhood’s gangland boss of the era. Sullivan allegedly killed Spillane and his top three lieutenants, Thomas (Tommy D) Devaney, Thomas (Tommy the Greek) Kapatos and Edward (Eddie the Butcher) Cummiskey in a ten-month hit spree that shook the Manhattan mafia hotbed to its core and shifted power in the hardscrabble neighborhood to an upstart band of Irishmen led by Jimmy Coonan and known as “The Westies.” Coonan and his right-hand man Mickey Featherstone had the support of the Italians.

Tommy Devaney was shot to death in a mid-town Manhattan saloon by Sullivan in an execution organized by deceased Genovese mobster George (Georgie the Jet) Barone on July 20, 1976. Barone and Devaney had just attended a wake across the street from the tavern. Exactly a month later, Sullivan gunned down Eddie Cummiskey at the Sunbrite Bar on August 20, 1976. Tommy Kapatos lasted until January 22, 1977 when Sullivan is thought to have caught him on a snowy afternoon walking down 34^th Street and shot him dead. Sullivan was a suspect in Spillane’s assassination, carried out in front of his Queens apartment on May 13, 1977.

Early in the following decade, Sullivan was recruited to Rochester, New York to end a struggle for supremacy in the city’s mob world referred to in the press as the Alphabet War. On December 1, 1981, he blasted labor-union boss and local mafia button man John Fiorino away in the parking lot of the Blue Gardenia Restaurant, a popular gangster haunt in the area for the years. Unfortunately for Sullivan, his getaway car got caught in the snow and he was apprehended near the scene and convicted of the Fiorino hit as well as the murders of Devaney and Cummiskey at a 1982 trial.

The post ‘Mad Dog’ Sullivan Dies Behind Bars At 77, Leaves Legacy Of A Mean, Lean Murder Machine appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The new Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyes On Me will hit movie theatres this week and soon thereafter a film entitled LAbryrinth starring Johnny Depp about the slayings of hip-hop legends Shakur and friend-turned-rival Christopher (The Notorious B.I.G.) Wallace is set to follow in the coming months. The East Coast-West Coast Rap War was a very real and highly contentious squabble between recording artists from L.A. and New York and their respective street gang backers that left more than a dozen dead bodies in its wake during the late 1990s and first half of the 2000s.

Notorious, a biopic chronicling the life and times of “Biggie Smalls” came out to lukewarm reviews in 2009. Newcomer Demetrius Shipp, Jr, who looks strikingly similar to Shakur, will portray Tupac in All Eyes On Me. Rapper Jamal (Gravy) Woolard played Wallace in Notorious and reprises the role in the new Tupac movie.

Tensions between Wallace and Shakur began boiling to the surface in the late fall of 1994 when Shakur survived a robbery and shooting at a New York recording studio where Wallace was present. Upon Shakur being freed from prison on an appeal bond from a sexual assault conviction in October 1995, the ill will simmering in both his West Coast Death Row Records camp and Wallace’s East Coast Bad Boy Records camp broke out into the open.

THE EAST COAST-WEST COAST RAP WAR TIMELINE

November 30, 1994 – The Quad Studios Shooting: Tupac Shakur is robbed, beaten, shot five times and left for dead as he arrived to record a verse on Bad Boy Records affiliate Little Shawn’s album at New York’s Quad Studios in Manhattan. The high-profile shooting and attempted murder sets off a decade of unrest in both East Coast and West Coast rap circles. Puffy Combs and Notorious B.I.G. were at the studio at the time recording B.I.G’s Junior Mafia group side project. Tupac blamed the Bad Boy contingent for either arranging the setup or knowing about it and not alerting him and the war was on, further instigated in subsequent months by Tupac’s accusatory comments to the press related to Combs and B.I.G and his feelings of betrayal and his signing with Death Row Records and aligning with Marion (Suge) Knight, the Death Row founder and CEO known for his thuggish antics.

September 23, 1995 – Suge Knight’s best friend and bodyguard Jake (The Violator) Robles is shot dead outside Atlanta’s Platinum City Club after Knight’s Death Row entourage scuffled with Puffy Combs’ Bad Boy camp inside the establishment with both record labels in attendance for a party thrown by Dirty South hip hop impresario Jermaine Dupree for his birthday. Combs’ bodyguard Anthony (Wolf) Jones is alleged to have pulled the trigger.

November 30, 1995 – Rapper, actor and one-time Tupac confidant Randy (Stretch) Walker is killed in a drive-by behind the wheel of his car on his way home from dropping his brother off in Queens following a night of partying. Walker’s murder fell on the one-year anniversary (almost to the exact minute) of Tupac’s shooting at Quad Studios which he was present for.

September 13, 1996 – The iconic Tupac Shakur succumbed to injuries suffered six days earlier when he was shot in the passenger’s side of Suge Knight’s BMW by an assailant in a passing vehicle while stuck in traffic just off the Las Vegas Strip headed to Knight’s nightclub for an after party thrown on the evening of the Mike Tyson-vs.-Bruce Seldon fight.

September 13-20, 1996 – In the week after Tupac’s death, a series of retaliatory shootings and slayings occurred in Los Angeles, estimated to have caused more than a half-dozen murders and injuries.

November 10, 1996 – Tupac’s childhood best friend and fellow hip hopper Yafeu (Kadafi) Fulu of the Tupac-backed Outlawz rap group is killed in Orange, New Jersey at the apartment of his girlfriend. Fulu was one of the only witnesses in Tupac’s murder.

March 9, 1997 – Oversized hip hop legend Christopher (The Notorious B.I.G) Wallace is shot to death sitting in the passenger’s seat of an SUV by an assailant in another vehicle after departing a party at L.A.’s Peterson Automotive Museum while on a trip to the west coast to promote his new album. Eerily, the album was titled Life After Death.

June 1, 1997 – One-time Suge Knight bodyguard Aaron (Heroin) Palmer – pronounced HAIR-RON – is killed in a drive-by at a traffic light in Compton, California on his way home from attending a Death Row-sponsored barbeque and touch football game

May 29, 1998 – Crips gang member Orlando (Baby Lane) Anderson, the reputed triggerman in Tupac’s murder, is killed in a shootout in front of record store in Compton.

April 4, 2000 – Death Row affiliate and L.A. gangbanger, William (Willie the Chin) Walker, is killed sitting in his van on a desolate dead-end Compton street, shot in the head at close range

April 25, 2000 – L.A. gangbanger Vence (Big V) Buchanan, the reputed triggerman in the “Chin” Walker hit, is kidnapped, tortured, beaten and shot to death, his body left in a Compton graveyard. Buchanan’s brutal murder was reportedly videotaped by the perpetrators, allegedly dispatched by Suge Knight.

March 25, 2001 – Death Row affiliate and L.A. gangbanger David (Tilted Brim Dave) Dudley, believed to be one of the assailants in the heinous Buchanan homicide, is killed in front of a friend’s house in Compton.

April 3, 2002 – Death Row affiliate Alton (Buntry) McDonald, Suge Knight’s best friend and former bodyguard, is killed at a Compton gas station, shot to death as he filled up his tank. Like Dudley, McDonald was a suspect in Buchanan’s slaying. Dudley had been gunned down a year prior in front of McDonald’s home.

June 7, 2002 – L.A. gangbanger Eric (Scar) Daniels, the suspected triggerman in McDonald’s murder, is murdered himself in a retaliatory strike said to be ordered by Suge Knight.

October 16, 2002 – Death Row affiliate Henry (Hen Dog) Smith, Suge Knight’s best friend and former bodyguard, is killed outside a fried chicken joint in Compton sitting in his jeep, shot six times in the head at close range.

July 24, 2003 – Death Row affiliate and L.A. gangbanger Wardell (Poochie) Fouse, the alleged triggerman in the Notorious B.I.G hit, is killed on his motorcycle in drive by shooting in Compton. Fouse had survived at least three other attempts on his life during the previous five years, including being shot in the “Chin” Walker slaying.

November 11, 2003 – Bad Boy affiliate Anthony (Wolf) Jones and an associate of his named Lamont (Riz) Girdy, are killed outside the Atlanta nightclub Chaos after a party thrown by Jermaine Dupree’s SoSoDef Records. Wolf Jones was Puffy Combs’ former bodyguard and allegedly the triggerman in the Jake Robles murder practically a decade prior. Legendary drug kingpin Demetrius (Big Meech) Flenory, the founder and leader of the transcendent Black Mafia Family (BMF), is the No. 1 suspect in Wolf Jones’ homicide.

September 23, 2015 – Crips gang member Terrence (Bubble Up) Brown, the reputed wheelman in Tupac’s murder, and an associate of his named Marquis (Wolf Da Boss) Tann are killed execution style at the Chief Keef Glo Shop marijuana dispensary in Compton owned by rapper Keith (Chief Keef) Cozart. Tann managed the dispensary.

The post Real-To-Reel: Slew Of Murders Tied To East Coast-West Coast Rap War, As Series Of Beefs Moved From Booth To Street appeared first on The Gangster Report.

At the top of the list of pending Iraqi deportees from Detroit in grave danger if he gets shipped back to his former Baghdad home is Lou Akrawi, a one-time sworn enemy of the state when the Baath Party was in power and controversial Christian-Iraqi community leader in Southeastern Michigan for over the past four decades. A lawsuit filed by the ACLU has gotten a judge to stay the deportation orders for Akrawi and more than a 100 Iraqi Christian felons being held under the orders until a court hearing next week.

The 69-year old Akrawi fled Bagdad in 1968 after being on the frontlines of a failed political coup hatched to remove Saddam Hussein and his Baathists from office and replace the Baath Party with the Iraqi Socialist Party in which Akrawi and members of his family belonged to. Akrawi’s brother-in-law, who wasn’t a part of the Socialist Party or part of the plot to overthrow the Baathists, died from injuries sustained from being tortured by Baath Party agents in the wake of the coup attempt and Akrawi escaping to Turkey and then eventually to Michigan, where he raised his widowed sister’s four sons as his own.

Prompted by President Trump’s hardline stance on immigration, the U.S. Department of Citizenship and Immigration recently ordered their Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch to aggressively clear their backlog of immigrants with criminal records and deport them to their respective countries en masse as soon as possible. Ethic concerns come into the equation when the country the immigrant is being shipped back to appears to pose serious bodily threat to that person due to their race or religion, such as in the case with Christians in Iraq right now being persecuted, tortured and executed for their non-Muslim beliefs by radical Islamic groups that dominate large portions of the region. Over the last month, ICE has swept up 150 Iraqi Christians with felony convictions on their records in Metro Detroit, sent them to a holding facility in Youngstown, Ohio and informed them they will all soon be placed on a plane returning them to Baghdad.

Lou Akrawi was one of the first to be taken into custody. For most of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Akrawi was a prominent Chaldean (Iraqi Christian) cultural staple in his adopted American home of the Motor City, playing multiple roles to multiple people in multiple sub-cultures. To many local Chaldeans (Detroit has more Iraqi Christians than any city in the United States), Akrawi served as a beloved businessman, restaurateur and overall neighborhood luminary. To law enforcement, he was the alleged Godfather and founder of the so-called Chaldean mafia or Iraqi mob. To Hussein, and the long-reigning Baath Party, he was the No. 1 political activist in North America, feverishly lobbying the U.S. government in the 70s and 80s to cut ties with the Hussein regime by organizing frequent marches and demonstrations.

Akrawi was released from a 20-year stint in state prison for manslaughter last year. He was convicted of hiring a gunman to shoot-up a rival’s grocery store in September 1993 in retaliation for an alleged attempt on his life the day before. In the attack, an innocent bystander named Michael Cogburn, waiting in line at the store to purchase a gallon of milk, was accidentally shot and killed. The Cogburn family supported Akrawi’s parole in early 2016.

During the 15 months he was free, Akrawi kept a low profile, quietly spending time with his family at his oldest son’s Macomb County café and espresso bar, trying to stay as far away from trouble as possible.

“I just want to be able to be with my boys (five sons) and my grandkids, who I’ve only gotten to know this past year, that’s all that matters to me……they need me around and I want to be there for them,” Akrawi said. “Is this what the U.S.A is? Taking people away from their families, making fathers leave their sons, grandfathers leave their grandchildren, husbands leave their wives, brothers leave their sisters and nieces and nephews and sending them somewhere where they are hated for what they believe?”

The government doesn’t seem so sympathetic.

“Each of these individuals received full and fair immigration proceedings, after which a federal immigration (board) found them to be ineligible for any form of relief under U.S. law and were therefore ordered to be removed (from the country),” a representative of ICE told the press this week.

The post Iraqi-Christian Felons In Detroit Being Ripped From Their Families & Told They Are Being Deported To Very Dangerous Ground appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Festering animosities in St. Louis Syrian mafia boiled over in the early 1980s resulting in a bombing and shooting war that lasted almost two years and crushed the city’s Middle-Eastern mob contingent made up of Syrian and Lebanese gangsters which dated back decades. Crafting a formidable reputation for himself during Prohibition as a leader of the notorious Cuckoo Gang, James (Horseshoe Jimmy) Michaels ruled as St. Louis’ undisputed Syrian Godfather for more than 30 years and was backed by the city’s Italian mafia – Horseshoe Jimmy can be seen in this article’s featured image in a Prohibition era mug shot. When mafia don Anthony (Tony G) Giordano died from a bout with cancer in the late summer of 1980, Michaels’ enemies, specifically the half-Syrian, half-Lebanese Leisure family, led by aspiring boss Paul Leisure, his brother Anthony and his first cousin David, who were former bodyguards of Horseshoe Jimmy’s and blamed him for allowing the murder of Richard Leisure, Paul and Anthony’s oldest sibling, years earlier to go unpunished, used it as the green light to challenge him for control of a criminal organization focused around gambling and labor-union racketeering.

Even before Giordano’s passing, bodies had begun dropping. Within three weeks of Tony G being put into the ground, Michaels was slain and all hell broke loose in the St. Louis underworld

THE ST. LOUIS SYRIAN MOB WAR TIMELINE (1979-1983)

November 8, 1979 – St. Louis Italian mobster John (Sonny) Spica is killed in a car bombing in his driveway. Spica had been placed into a position in Local 42 of the LIUNA as Tony Giordano’s eyes and ears months earlier.

August 29, 1980 – Nationally-respected St. Louis mafia don Anthony (Tony G) Giordano dies after a two-year battle with lung cancer, opening the door for those unhappy with the current Syrian mafia structure to take action.

September 17, 1980 – Longtime St. Louis Syrian mob boss James (Horseshoe Jimmy) Michaels is blown up in a car bomb while driving home on Interstate 55 after eating lunch at St. Raymond’s Church with his grandson, fellow Syrian wiseguy and primary representative in Local 42, James (Jimmy Beans) Michaels.

August 11, 1981 – New Syrian mob boss and Michaels’ successor Paul Leisure has parts of both his legs blown off in a car bombing. “Jimmy Beans” Michaels is eventually convicted in the attempted murder and is smacked with a five-year prison sentence.

September 11, 1981 – Syrian mob figures Johnny Michaels, Jimmy Beans’ brother and Dennis Day, are each shot by Anthony Leisure as they leave a lunch meeting at the Edge Restaurant in St. Louis, but survive the attack.

October 16, 1981 – St. Louis Syrian mob figure George (Sonny) Faheen, Horseshoe Jimmy’s nephew, is blown up in a car bomb planted in his Volkswagen while parked in the garage of his Mansion House apartment complex.

October 18, 1981 – Leisure faction lieutenant Mike Kornhardt is arrested for Faheen’s murder, matching an eye-witness’ description of a man leaving the scene of the crime.

June 5, 1982 – St. Louis mafia boss John (Johnny V) Vitale, described as one of the last of “the gentlemen gangsters,” dies of a heart attack. Vitale was Tony G’s underboss, successor and an FBI informant at end of his life when he sat on the throne, helping the feds lay the ground to bust the Leisure family.

July 31, 1982 – St. Louis Syrian mob enforcer Mike Kornhardt is killed on a farm in St. Charles, Missouri by Lesiure henchmen Bobby Carbaugh and Steve Wougaman. Kornhardt is lured to the piece of rural property under the pretense of a burglary and instead has his head blown off by a shotgun blast.

August 4, 1982 – St. Louis Syrian mob enforcer David (Bozo) Leisure is arrested for Sonny Faheen’s murder. Three years later, he is indicted for planting the bomb that killed Horseshoe Jimmy Michaels in 1980 and sentenced to die by lethal injection. In the fall of 1999, Leisure becomes the first organized crime member to be put to death via capital punishment since the 1940s

April 13, 1983 – The Leisures and several associates are indicted on federal racketeering and murder charges. Paul and Anthony were both convicted and received 55-year prison terms. Anthony Leisure, 70, was released from behind bars in 2007, less than a decade removed from his brother Paul dying of cancer in a Springfield, Missouri prison hospital.

The post The St. Louis Syrian Mob War Timeline: Leisure Clan Took Shot At Brass Ring In Early-1980s Blood Feud appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Willy Falcon, the most infamous of South Florida’s Cocaine Cowboys during the 1980s, accused of smuggling literally billions dollars-worth of blow onto American soil from the Caribbean on a fleet of speedboats, was released from almost 20 years in federal prison for money laundering over the weekend – and promptly picked up by U.S. Immigration officials in order for the government to decide whether the 62-year old former drug don will be deported back to his native Cuba.

Falcon moved to Miami with his family as a young boy in the 1960s and attended Senior High School until he dropped out to push marijuana. In the late 1970s, he teamed with his childhood pal Sal Magluta to form “The Company” and spearheaded the Reagan era coke boom by pumping tens of thousands of kilos (approximately 75 tons) into South Florida over the next dozen years, flooding the city’s burgeoning narcotics market with the help of their partners in the Colombian and Bolivian cartels.

Magluta, also 62, is doing life behind bars. The pair was known in Miami underworld circles as “Los Muchachos,” (“The Boys”) for their young age and ambitious ways. By the start of the 1990s, they were filthy rich and notorious beyond belief.

Los Muchachos and a number of their “Company” henchmen were indicted in a massive 1991 drug conspiracy case. Both Falcon and Magluta were acquitted at a fixed trial in 1996 before being indicted three years later in a money laundering and murder case in which Falcon copped a plea, pleading guilty to hiding and washing his illicit gains, and Magluta got popped by a jury when he decided to roll the dice at another trial.

The judge gave Magluta 250 years, however, an appellate court reduced it to 195. Back in April, Gustavo (Tabby) Falcon, Willie’s 55-year old baby brother, was apprehended by U.S. Marshals after 26 years on the run from the law as a fugitive. He’s pled not guilty to the charges against him and is currently awaiting trial.

According to their 1999 indictment, Falcon and Magluta hired three hitmen to kill a former lawyer of theirs named Juan Acosta, gunned down in the days prior to him being scheduled to take the witness stand in a September 1989 grand jury proceeding. Federal prosecutors think the Acosta slaying was one of three executions and five shootings connected to Falcon and Magluta’s 1991 indictment.

Many members of The Company, including Falcon and Magluta were world-class and globally-ranked powerboat racers. Throughout most evenings at the height of their power and gangland prestige in the 1980s, Los Muchachos could be found holding court in a private booth at the nightclub located inside the swanky Mutiny Hotel or at Cat’s, a Coconut Grove disco.

Acclaimed Cocaine Cowboys documentarian Billy Corben is releasing a third sequel in the Cocaine Cowboys franchise next year focusing on Falcon and Magulata’s rise and fall. Per a spokesperson for Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), Falcon will be sent to a detention center in either Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee or Louisiana while the decision on whether to deport him is considered.

The post Legendary Cocaine Cowboy Willy Falcon Walks From Prison….Into Arms Of Immigration Dept., Faces Deportation To Cuba appeared first on The Gangster Report.

History has seemed to have forgotten all about former Detroit drug dealer Charles (7 Mile Chuck) Lewis, the one-time partner of iconic 1980s Motor City teenage narcotics trafficker and government mole Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe. Lewis’ name came up at Wershe’s parole hearing last week, as the now-47 year old Wershe took questions from the parole board and a representative of the Michigan Attorney General’s Office about his days running around the Motown underworld during the crack era for both himself and before that, virtually unthinkably, at the behest of the U.S. government. The parole board is expected to issue a decision on Wershe’s fate in the next couple months.

Wershe is the longest-serving non-violent juvenile offender in the American prison system, going on practically 30 years behind bars for a single cocaine possession charge stemming from a routine traffic stop when he was just 17 in May of 1987. Between the summer of 1984 and the summer of 1986, Wershe worked as a paid underage informant for a federal task force consisting of representatives from the FBI, the DEA and the Detroit Police Department, infiltrating drug gangs as a precocious, colorful and intelligent young teen instead of attending high school.

The coverage of his case, both back three decades ago and again today, has developed into a genuine media and pop-culture phenomenon, attracting attention and interest across the country and abroad – Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey and newcomer Richie Merritt are starring in an upcoming movie based on Wershe’s life. But nobody seems to remember nor ever talk about his partner, “7 Mile Chuck” Lewis.

Two months prior to Wershe being arrested, Lewis was indicted under the same “650 Lifer Law” Wershe would be charged with and convicted of. The state’s 650 Lifer Law was wiped off the books almost 20 years ago, ruled unconstitutional in a 1998 court ruling. Lewis, a former high school football star, walked free more than a decade ago. Up until this current shot at parole, Wershe has been rejected all three previous times he was eligible.

Wershe, Lewis and Wershe’s best friend Stephen (Freaky Steve) Roussell teamed up in the late summer of 1986 and went into the wholesale cocaine business together. Cultivating supply sources in Miami, the three had marginal success for a short period of time, before Lewis was busted in March 1987, Wershe went down in his May 1987 arrest and Roussell got killed in a beef over a girl with notoriously trigger-happy Best Friends drug gang leader Reginald (Rocking Reggie) Brown that coming fall. Brown shot Roussell to death as he slept on his couch in the early-morning hours of September 12, 1987 and is doing life behind bars.

The post Detroit Flashback: Why Doesn’t Anybody Ever Discuss ‘7 Mile Chuck’ Lewis In ‘White Boy Rick’ Tale? appeared first on The Gangster Report.

As cocaine exploded onto the scene in America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Miami, Florida blossomed into the epicenter of the U.S. drug market. The rapidly expanding consumer base throughout the country birthed the so-called Cocaine Cowboy era of rampant narcotics trafficking and reckless violence with various sophisticated and trigger-happy criminal organizations jockeying for position in the newly-created underworld business mecca and gangster playground of South Florida. Much of the debauchery and destruction was chronicled in the acclaimed 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys.

THE COCAINE COWBOY WARS MURDER TIMELINE (1978-1989 – The Highlights – Or Lowlights If You Will -, Of South Florida’s Down & Dirty Drug Era):

April 23, 1978 – South Florida gangland figure Jamie Suescun is killed for engineering a burglary of a rival drug dealer’s house the week prior and strangulation of his maid (four others die in an ensuing shootout as the hit team goes to dump Suescun’s hogtied body, including Ruben Echeverria, Julio Gaona, Jorge Luis de Campo and Osear Penagos Rios). Suescun robbed the feared Panesso family of cash and kilos of cocaine on April 17. He worked for Miami drug kingpin Carlos Panello Ramirez.

July 11, 1979 – The Dadeland Mall Massacre – Drug kingpin Jimenez Panesso & his bodyguard and driver Juan Hernandez are killed in mall’s Crown Liquor Store for crossing Panello Ramirez and his ally in the local underworld, “The Godmother,” Colombian-born American narco czar Griselda Blanco, who was in debt to Panesso and Hernandez.

September 18, 1979 – Armando Gonzales, Angel Acosta & Raemundo Martinez are killed in a house in West Miami after getting into a beef with Cuban drug boss Rafeal Rodriguez.

May 7, 1980 – Drug dealer Carlos Murcia Fajardo is gunned down in front of Miami International Airport by a man on a motorbike.

July 14,1980 – Drug runner-turned-ATF informant Larry Nash is butchered to death with a chainsaw in a South Florida motel on orders of local narco boss Orlando Cicillias, inspiring the iconic chainsaw scene in the 1983 film Scarface.

Summer 1981 – Drug kingpin Octavio (The Mattress) Mejia is murdered inside the Pan American Mall in South Florida after his son Luis (Papo) Mejia starts an offshoot drug network in New York against Griselda Blanco’s wishes and she has his entire 11-member crew killed.

February 6, 1982 – Cocaine Cowboy Jesus (Chucho) Castro’s 2-year old son Johnny is accidentally killed in attempt on his own life in a drive-by shooting.

May 26, 1982 – Drug-dealing married couple Alfredo & Griselda Lorenzo are murdered in their home on orders of Griselda Blanco over a drug debt.

July 24, 1982 – Miami drug world lieutenant Domingo Hernandez is slain for failing to foot the bill for a lavish party thrown for a visiting narco don from South America.

August 17, 1982 – Female drug lord Leonela Arias, a one-time partner of Griselda Blanco, is machine-gunned to death in Colombia behind the wheel of her car on her way to the funeral of a mutual friend.

September 15, 1982 – Aspiring drug lord Luis (Papo) Meija is stabbed by Blanco hitmen 10 times with a bayonet as he leaves the Miami International Airport, but miraculously survives.

October 18, 1982 – Griselda Blanco’s brother-in-law Diego Sepulveda is found shot to death in a motel in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida 1983 – Griselda’s third husband Dario Sepulveda is killed in Colombia the following year after a feud over his romantic dalliances with other women leads him to flee the U.S. with Griselda’s youngest son. Blanco had her first and second husbands murdered, too (Albert Bravos was shot to death and Carlos Trujillo was poisoned to death).

Griselda “The Godmother” Blanco in the 1990s

December 20, 1982 – Miami drug dealer Ricardo (The Monkey Man) Morales is killed in Cherries bar and lounge in Key Biscayne, Florida.

March 18, 1983 – Miami drug dealer Rodriguez Seferino is fished out of Biscayne Bay, bound, gagged, shot in the back the head.

February 2, 1984 – Marta Ochoa, of the notorious Ochoa drug network in Colombia, is tortured and killed when her business relationship with Griselda Blanco goes south over a 1.8 million dollar debt Blanco owes her.

July 6, 1984 – Drug chief Rodrigo Arturo Atehortua is found slain in hiding in California on orders of Griselda Blanco over a debt and refusal to give up whereabouts of another enemy of hers in hiding.

July 7, 1984 – John Garcia, Atehortua’s 16-year old nephew is killed, to eliminate the only eye-witness to the Atehortua hit the day before.

December 1, 1984 – There are seven drug-related killings in one night in a single Miami neighborhood.

February 19, 1986 – Barry Seal. a major U.S. based operative for the Colombian Medellin cartel, master drug smuggler, money launderer and double-agent working for the DEA, is killed by assassins in Louisiana as he did court-ordered community service on a Baton Rouge Salvation Army facility.

February 3, 1987 – Powerboating icon, racer and designer Don Aronow is assassinated in Miami, gunned down behind the wheel of his car as he left a meeting at his 188th Street office on orders of a spurned business associate. The speedboat race circuit was a “whose who” of the drug smuggling trade in South Florida in the 1980s.

February 17, 1987 – Oscar Piedrahita, the former export lieutenant for Griselda Blanco’s organization, is executed while in hiding after extorting Griselda for one million bucks in a kidnapping of her son. Piedrahita is machine gunned to death at his infant son’s wake.

September 19, 1989 – Juan Acosta, a former attorney for ‘Los Muchachos’ (the original Cocaine Cowboy poster boys Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta) is killed on the eve of testifying at a grand jury investigating Falcon and Magluta’s drug empire.

The post The Cocaine Cowboys Hit List: Murder & Mayhem Commonplace During 1980s Miami Drug Boom appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all. New England mafia don Peter (The Crazy Horse) Limone died early this week of cancer at 83, having successfully avoided going back to prison after being sprung nearly two decades ago following serving 30 years on a wrongful murder conviction and allegedly jumping back into Patriarca crime family affairs with both feet. Hailing from the crime family’s Boston faction, Limone reportedly was named consigliere of the Patriarca clan in 2002 and bumped up to the boss’ chair in 2009.

According to exclusive Gangster Report sources, the younger generation in the New England mafia called Limone, “The Crazy Horse” due to the fact that some people thought he was nuts for returning to the fold in the mob in the wake of receiving 26 million bucks by way of a civil lawsuit filed against the government for wrongful imprisonment. In the end, Limone got the last laugh. Expect for a brief brush with the law in the 2000s, he stayed out of trouble…..and out of handcuffs and the clink.

Born and raised on Boston’s Westside, the Crazy Horse became a fast-riser in the area’s underworld at a young age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, being groomed by the crime family’s then underboss Enrico (Henry the Referee) Tameleo. In 1968, Limone, Tameleo and two others were found guilty of the 1965 gangland slaying of Boston Irish mobster Teddy Deegan based on the testimony of infamous Patriarca syndicate enforcer and informant Joe (The Animal) Barboza, who as it later turned out was lying for personal reasons.

Tameleo died behind bars in 1985, 16 years before two of his co-defendants were exonerated and walked free in 2001. Barboza was murdered living under an assumed identity in San Francisco, California in 1976. Per informants, the man driving the getaway car in the Barboza hit was Limone’s one-time acting boss Anthony (Spucky) Spagnolo, slated for release from prison on a federal extortion conviction later this year.

Limone pled no contest to racketeering charges in state court in July 2010 and received a light sentence of five years of probation. He resided in the Boston suburb of Medford, Massachusetts for most of his adult life and is the third New England mob figure to die of natural causes in the last several months – Patriarca soldier Ralph (Ralphie Chong) Lamattina and Patriarca captain Anthony (The Saint) St. Laurent each passed recently. Lamattina spawned from the Family’s Boston wing, dying in the spring. St. Laurent ran a crew in Providence, Rhode Island and controlled gambling activity in parts of southern Massachusetts prior to losing a long battle with failing health last fall.

Mobologists on the east coast expect Carmen (The Big Cheese) DiNunzio, Limone’s acting boss and protégé, to be immediately promoted to full-fledged Godfather status. DiNunzio, 58, had been the Patriarca’s underboss from 2004 until his own racketeering bust in 2008 and subsequent six-and-a-half years of incarceration. Based out of the Gemini Social Club in Boston’s North End, the Big Cheese was sprung from the can in 2015 and will officially be off parole in July.

The post Crazy Like A Fox: New England Mob Boss Pete Limone Lived Life On Own Terms, Passes Away At 83 appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The historic Family Secrets trial began 10 years ago this week in Chicago, finally bringing to justice Midwest mobsters responsible for an alleged 18 combined gangland murders. Among the murders solved as a result of the near decade-long investigation and subsequent high-profile, emotionally-charged courtroom drama was the famous double-homicide of Tony (The Ant) Spilotro, the Chicago mafia’s point man in Las Vegas, and Spilotro’s younger brother and protégé Michael, a gruesome execution depicted in the movie Casino.

The indictment, filed in April 2005, named a total of 14 defendants, only five of who made in front of a jury at trial in the summer and early fall months of 2007. Four of those five men, however, were some pretty notable figures in Chicago mob circles at that time: acting boss James (Little Jimmy) Marcello, consigliere Joseph (Joey the Clown) Lombardo, southside crew leader Frank (Frankie the Breeze) Calabrese and the crime family’s west coast representative, Paul (Paulie the Indian) Schiro, stationed in Arizona since the 1970s. All of them were found guilty and sentenced to hefty prison terms.

Operation Family Secrets was jumpstarted in the summer of 1998 when imprisoned Chicago wiseguy Frank Calabrese, Jr. wrote a letter to the FBI offering to help the government build a case against his father, mob hit man and Southside crew chief Frank Calabrese, Sr., who he was locked up with in a federal correctional facility in Michigan as they both served time for racketeering. Placing a wire in his portable Walkman, the feds had Frank, Jr. record his dad telling gangland war stories for more than two years while the pair exercised in the prison yard.

By 2002, Frankie Breeze’s baby brother, Nick (Nicky Slim) Calabrese, also a seasoned mob executioner, joined Team U.S.A. in its effort to dismantle the Chicago mafia and the Calabrese street crew in one fell swoop. Nicky Slim was the first made member of the Chicago “Outfit” to ever become a witness for the government and proved the key to Operation Family Secrets being a resounding success. He admitted to carrying out more than a dozen mob-related slayings with his older sibling, as well as copping to participating in the 1986 killing of the Spilotro brothers and the follow-up murder of Giovanni (Big John) Fecarotta two weeks later in which evidence left behind at the scene authorities would use to leverage his cooperation in the future.

Diminutive, yet equally ferocious and ambitious, Tony Spilotro had angered his bosses “back home” with his loud, insubordinate behavior overseeing Vegas and on June 14, 1986 he and his brother were lured to a basement of a house in Bensenville, Illinois and viciously beaten, stomped and strangled to death. Big John Fecarotta found himself marked for death in the weeks that followed for botching the burial of the Spilotros (they were discovered within the week in a shallow grave in Northwest Indiana) and for sharing too much sensitive Outfit intelligence with his wife and girlfriend.

Tony Spilotro & his so-called “Hole In The Wall Gang” in the early 1980s

The Calabrese brothers received the Fecarotta murder contract and in the process of killing him in vestibule of a bingo hall, Nicky Slim was shot in the shoulder and dropped a bloody glove as he fled to a getaway vehicle driven by Frankie the Breeze. Upon Frank Calabrese, Jr. flipping, he told the FBI that it was his uncle who left the glove at the Fecarotta murder scene and taped his dad telling him that he had signed off on the Outfit’s decision to kill Nicky in prison to keep him from talking.

Both Nicky and Frank Calabrese, Jr. took the stand at the 2007 Family Secrets trial, delivering riveting, heartfelt testimony, admitting their own wrongs and implicating Frank Calabrese, Sr. in a myriad of heinous acts of violence. Throughout most of their testimony and the whole trial, Frankie the Breeze didn’t appear all that phased by the proceedings going on around him, frequently chuckling and breaking into a wide grin whenever he was tied to a beating or murder by a witness or prosecutor.

Frank Calabrese, Sr. died of natural causes in 2012 at 75 years old. Frank, Jr. and his uncle Nicky Slim currently reside under new identities in the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Little Jimmy Marcello of the Outfit’s Cicero crew was convicted of driving the Spilotro brothers to the Bensenville home of another mobster so they could be slaughtered. The colorful and quip-loaded Joey the Clown Lombardo, the Windy City’s longtime “Godfather of Grand Avenue,” testified on his own behalf at the trial to no avail and was convicted of killing Danny Seifert, a former close friend and business associate-turned-government informant, in 1974, to prevent his testimony in a pension fraud case. During Tony Spilotro’s reign in Las Vegas in the 1970s and 1980s, he reported directly to Lombardo, then the capo of Chicago’s Westside.

Lombardo, 88, and Marcello, 73, are doing their life prison terms in a Colorado “supermax” federal correctional facility. Marcello was behind a thwarted attempt by the Chicago mafia to locate the now 74 year-old Nick Calabrese and kill him before he could reach the witness stand in the Family Secrets case.

Nicky Calabrese

The post Operation Family Secrets: Chicago Mob Under Siege By Feds, Infighting In 2000s, Epic Trial Celebrates 10-Yr. Anniversary appeared first on The Gangster Report.

According to informants for law enforcement in Illinois, the 1981 car-bombing murder of Chicago mob associate and fledgling trucking magnate Michael Cagnoni was linked to a fight for control of mafia affairs in the Windy City suburbs involving reputed current Outfit boss Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis. Informants for multiple agencies have opined that besides a beef over produce shipping routes from California to the Midwest, Cagnoni’s problems with the Outfit had ties to his siding with a DeLaurentis rival in the feud for power in the rackets in Lake County and parts of McHenry County in the early 1980s.

On the morning of June 24, 1981, the 37-year Cagnoni was blown to bits as he drove his 1979 silver-colored Mercedes-Benz towards the Tri-State Tollway near the border of Hinsdale, Illinois and Western Springs, Illinois, right outside of Chicago, and a bomb planted underneath the car was detonated as he made his way onto the entry ramp. The Cagnoni slaying was included in the epic Operation Family Secrets indictment, charging 14 Chicago mobsters with various racketeering offenses and 18 gangland executions spanning back almost four decades.

The Family Secrets trial started 10 years ago this week, eventually convicting Outfit leaders James (Jimmy the Man) Marcello, Joseph (Joey the Clown) Lombardo and Frank (Frankie the Breeze) Calabrese of a series of cold-case mob murders. Calabrese and his younger brother Nick (Nicky Slim) Calabrese were nailed for blowing up Cagnoni, as well as a dozen other hits. Nicky Slim was the government’s star witness. Frankie the Breeze passed away in prison in 2012, five years following his conviction.

Solly DeLaurentis, 78, avoided indictment in the Operation Family Secrets case, having already gone down in Operation Good Ship Lollipop a decade and a half earlier. DeLaurentis was released from federal prison in March 2006, three months prior to the Family Secrets trial beginning, and allegedly became day-to-day boss of the mafia in Chicago around 2012.

The Good Ship Lollipop was the nickname of the wing of the Outfit’s Cicero crew DeLaurentis belonged to in the 1980s which oversaw mob affairs in suburban Lake County. Per FBI records, Mike Cagnoni had been paying the Cicero crew a street tax for protection in his trucking routes in the years leading up to his homicide. FBI agents observed Cagnoni delivering tribute envelopes of cash to Cicero wiseguy Michael (Big Mike) Spano at Spano’s Flash Trucking Co. which were then filtered up the latter to Cicero capos Ernest (Rocky) Infelise and Joe Ferriola, the crime family’s future don.

Spano became boss of the Cicero crew once Infelise was incarcerated and Ferriola died. Today, he is alleged to be retired from the Outfit, walking free from his own racketeering conviction two years ago.

In the wake of Cagnoni’s death, at least two police informants told authorities he had gotten caught in the crosshairs of a battle for gambling, prostitution and extortion territory in Lake County, pitting DeLaurentis, Infelice’s protégé and his Lake County liaison, against longtime suburban crew boss Joseph (Black Joe) Amato. Bolstered by support from Infelise, a former war hero and paratrooper in the military, per Chicago Crime Commission documents, DeLaurentis set his sights on deposing Amato and absorbing his rackets in addition to expanding deeper into bordering McHenry County.

Cagnoni’s car-bomb murder may have been the first salvo in a mini mob war featuring the use of explosives as the weapon of choice. Black Joe Amato’s driver Nick Sarillo survived a car-bombing attack in 1982. Infelice and DeLaurentis ordered a string of fire-bombings of Amato’s gambling and massage parlors throughout the second half of 1981 and all of 1982, tactics responded to in kind with Amato ordering the bombing of DeLaurentis-affiliated businesses and properties, according to the CCC files.

“We’re taking over Lake County, we’re grabbing the whole thing” DeLaurentis and his best friend and mob running buddy Louis (Louie Tomatoes) Marino were recorded boasting to a wired associate of theirs in a restaurant booth less than six months after Cagnoni’s murder.

Reacting to the Cicero crew’s demand that he raise his monthly tribute amount to them due to the squashing of a beef on Cagnoni’s behalf removing pressure from other area mob crews upset at Cagnoni’s cartage-hauling company undercutting produce shipping prices from the west coast, Cagnoni reportedly resisted and tried to take refuge with Amato, per a pair of informants. Amato allegedly promised Cagnoni protection from Infelise and Ferriola in exchange for a lesser street tax..

It took a sit down held in 1983, moderated by then Outfit boss Joseph (Joey Doves) Aiuppa, to settle the bad blood between Amato and Infelice, Ferriola and DeLaurentis, according to files in the CCC document archive. The result of the sit down was Amato basically being forced into semi-retirement and DeLaurentis and Louie Marino gaining their desired foothold in Lake County.

Amato died of natural causes in 1998. Marino did the same earlier this year. Ferriola succumbed to cancer in 1989 only a few years after he took the throne and Infelise passed away in prison in 2005, doing time on the Operation Good Ship Lollipop bust.

The post Family Secrets Slaying May Have Been Connected To Heated Tensions Between Chicago Mob Boss ‘Solly D’& Old School ‘Black Joe’ appeared first on The Gangster Report.

It’s like the whole city has turned purple out in the Big Apple. New York’s notorious Purple Gang, a junior varsity multi-ethnic mob syndicate based out of East Harlem and the Bronx in the 1970s and early 1980s, specializing in drugs and muscle-for-hire jobs, has been back in the news lately. The New York Purple Gang was named in honor of Detroit’s iconic and bloody Purple Gang, an all-Jewish mob contingent during Prohibition known as much for its body count than its prowess in the bootlegging trade.

Former Bronx Purple Gang leader Mike Meldish’s alleged killers were indicted this year, two of the reputed shot callers in the 2013 hit busted late last month and just this past week the incomparable Gangland News broke the story that Meldish’s fate had actually been sealed a year prior with an unadvisable love affair he engaged in with fellow former Purple Ganger Michael (Mikey Nose) Mancuso’s girlfriend while Mancuso is away in prison. Then, on Thursday, one-time Purple Ganger Angelo (The Horn) Prisco died of natural causes.

When the New York Purple Gang disbanded in the mid-1980s, the syndicate’s 50-to-100 members dispersed to the city’s Five Families of the Italian mafia. The Bonanno, Lucchese and Genovese crime families brought aboard the bulk of the ex-Purples.

Mancuso, 62, is currently the reputed boss of the Bonanno clan, finishing up a sentence for a 2004 mob murder – he’s got a year and a half left to serve. The husky, dark-skinned 77-year old Prisco had been a capo for the Genovese Borgata stationed in New Jersey. Another former Purple Ganger, 75-year old Daniel (Danny the Lion) Leo, was the acting boss of the Genovese Family for a portion of the 2000s. Meldish, 62 at the time of his murder on November 15, 2013 and long sporting a reputation for ruthlessness and as an expert assassin in his own right, had worked mainly with the Lucchese Family.

Lucchese powers Matty Madonna and Steven (Stevie Wonder) Lucchese, the Family’s acting boss and underboss, respectively, were indicted for ordering Meldish’s execution back on May 31. According to Gangland News, Meldish refused to heed warnings to discontinue his relationship with Mancuso’s girlfriend and took a public beating administered by Mancuso’s men at a 2012 Harlem street festival to which he responded by trying to kill Bonanno soldier Enzo (The Baker) Stagno in an unsuccessful, poorly-executed attack that led to his own slaying.

Meldish and his brother Joe were two of the New York Purple Gang’s top enforcers and hit men. Unlike his east coast Purple Gang contemporaries Mikey Mancuso, Danny Leo and Angelo Prisco, the Meldishs could never be inducted into one of the Five Families because they weren’t full-blooded Italians.

Mikey Mancuso in a present day prison photo

Historians speculate New York roots held by the original Purple Gang in Michigan led to the East Harlem and Bronx-headquartered Purples a half-century later naming themselves in honor of the collection of murderous Jews from the Motor City.

“The New Yorkers took the name out of respect and admiration,” said Paul Kavieff, the foremost authority on the Prohibition era in Detroit and the Purples specifically. “They knew that the guys in Detroit traced some of their families to New York, some of them had spent their early childhood in Brooklyn and the Bronx before coming to the Midwest. They heard the stories….. and let’s face it, the Purple Gang is a pretty catchy moniker.”

Founded by the four Burnstein brothers (Abe, Joe, Ray & Izzy), Detroit’s Purple Gang sprouted up in the mid-1920s and quickly grew to dominate the Great Lakes bootlegging industry. Fresh off the boat from Russia at the turn of the 20^th Century, the Burnstein family settled in Brooklyn before establishing a homestead on the eastside of Detroit. The Burnstein brothers and their friends who eventually became the Purple Gang had gotten their start in the local rackets as apprentices in the old Oakland Sugar House Gang, the first vestige of the Jewish mob in Detroit and early pioneers in the illegal-booze business, if only for the fact that Michigan was the first state in America to “go dry.”

Abe Burnstein, the undisputed boss of the Purple Gang until voluntarily merging the group with the city’s Italian mafia in the mid-1930s after the repeal of Prohibition, forged strong business and social relationships with not just the Italians in Motown, but with major mob powers in New York too, such as Meyer Lansky, Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, Charles (Lucky) Luciano and Joe Adonis, as well as joining forces with Al Capone in Chicago. Headquartered out of the Book-Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit, Burnstein’s “gentleman gangster” demeanor belied a bloodlust responsible for either directly ordering or sanctioning hundreds of homicides in his reign that lasted less than a decade.

Eddie Fletcher and Abe Axler, a pair of hoodlum imports from New York, were the Burnsteins’ go-to team of hit men and became known on the streets of Detroit as the “Siamese Twins.” Fletcher and Axler were the prime suspects in the March 1927 Milflores Apartment Massacre, the murder of three hired hands from St. Louis in which was the first documented use of a machine gun in a gangland murder on Michigan soil. Two years later, Fletcher and Axler, at the behest of the Burnsteins, helped Capone carry out the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in the Windy City, acting as set-up men, location scouts and lookouts for Capone’s Southside Gang in his slaughtering of seven Capone rivals from the Northside mostly-Irish mob.

Ray Burnstein, Abe’s second-youngest sibling and the head of the Purples’ enforcement and shakedown units, was sent to prison in 1931 in the wake of orchestrating the Collingwood Apartment Massacre, the purging of the three lead members of the Little Jewish Navy, a Purples’ subunit of booze smugglers looking to breakoff and start their own bootlegging syndicate. He wouldn’t be a free man again until 1964, dying of natural causes within months.

His three brothers all made it out of Prohibition alive, out of jail and incredibly rich. They all went into semi-retirement following the country “going wet” again, Abe remaining in Detroit, while Joe and Izzy relocated to California. With the advice and aid of their close ally Meyer Lansky, the Burnsteins invested much of their illicit gains from the bootlegging rackets into the oil business, simultaneously cleaning their dirty cash and making them vastly more wealthy than in their days as gangsters.

Harry Millman, Abe and Joe Burnstein’s protégé and one-time bodyguard, was the lone Purple who refused to take orders from his new bosses in the Italian mafia. Millman openly feuded with Detroit mob street boss Joseph (Joe Scarface) Bommarito and on Thanksgiving 1937, he was gunned down as he had a post Turkey Day feast drink at a local bar by Harry (Happy) Maione and Harry (Pittsburgh Phil) Strauss, two Murder, Inc. assassins brought in from New York for the job. At the time of his death, Millman was one of the main suspects in the murders of the Siamese Twins, Fletcher and Axler, four years earlier.

Harry Millman (center) attending a court hearing

Abe Burnstein died of a heart attack in 1968 in his penthouse suite at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, where he was known to hold court with local and national underworld luminaries alike for the years after hanging up his mob spurs. Joe and Izzy Burnstein both passed away peacefully on the west coast in 1984 and 1985, respectively.

For decades after it disbanded in the 1930s, the Purple Gang and its lore sustained as pop-culture touchstones in multiple mediums, including film, television, book and music. Elvis Presley sang about them in the song and accompanying movie Jailhouse Rock in 1957 and Purple Gang characters began appearing as villains in James Bond novels and films like 1935’s Public Enemy No. 1 starring Lionel Barrymore. In 1959, Robert Blake played Joe “Honeyboy” Willard in a movie called The Purple Gang – the character was based on the only non-Jewish member of the Purple Gang, Joseph (Joe Honey) Miller, sometimes called “Honeyboy.” Eddie Fletcher appeared as a character on the popular TV show The Untouchables.

The post The Color Purple: New York & Detroit Purple Gangs Shared Common Ground In Viciousness & Vice appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The classic Blaxploitation flick, The Mack, was loosely based on the life of the original Black Godfather of Oakland, California, Frank Ward, slain in the weeks after principal photography on the movie wrapped in 1973. The Mack’s lead character, John “Goldie” Mickens, portrayed by Max Julien, rises to become the biggest pimp in the Bay Area. Ward ran drugs, prostitution and policy in Oakland and San Francisco in the 1960s and early 1970s and put up a large chunk of the movie’s budget himself, as well as appeared in it besides his little brother and right-hand man Teddy and consulted for it practically scene-for-scene until his untimely demise towards the end of production.

The Mack was the most financially successful film of the Blaxploitation era and possibly its’ most influential pop-culture wise. Dedicated to Ward and produced for $120,000, the movie went on to gross more than $3,000,000. Besides Julien, The Mack starred comedy legend Richard Pryor as Goldie’s best friend “Slim,” Blaxploitation queen Carol Speed as Goldie’s No. 1 girl, “LuLu,” Tony-award winning Dick Anthony Williams as Goldie’s rival “Pretty Tony,” Roger E. Mosley of Magnum P.I. television fame in the 1980s as his Black militant brother and Oscar-nominee Juanita Moore as his mother.

Born in Alabama, Frank and Teddy Ward migrated west to Northern California from New Orleans in the late 1950s. People would sometimes call Frank Ward “Goldie” due to his light skin color and his signature mode of transportation, a custom-built gold-plated Cadillac he allowed Julien to drive on screen. He also began dating Speed during filming.

Max Julien with the Ward brothers (far right. Teddy & Frank, respectively)

The Ward organization occasionally butted heads with the Black Panthers, the famous Black militant group formed in Oakland in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. According to police informants, Frank Ward was “protecting” The Mack movie set from extortion efforts on the behalf of the Black Panthers as cameras rolled in the inner city of Oakland and it was a reputed dispute with Black Panthers leadership that led to his slaying.

On February 10, 1973, Frank Ward, 33, was killed sitting behind the wheel of his silver-colored Rolls Royce with another girlfriend of his named Blanche Brown idling on a street corner in an affluent Berkeley, California neighborhood. Ward and Brown were each done-in with shots to the head at point-blank range. In the immediate aftermath of Ward’s murder, the cast and crew of The Mack departed the Bay Area for reshoots and editing in Los Angeles.

The movie hit theatres in April 1973 and quickly achieved cult status. Teddy Ward relocated back to the Big Easy in the wake of his brother’s murder. The film’s director, Michael Campus, a California native, died two years ago in the spring of 2015.

Huey Newton was slain in the summer of 1989 in the Lower Bottoms section of Oakland’s Westside. Seale remains alive and well at 80 years old and is active on the lecture circuit.

Frank Ward (L) & his brother Teddy

The post Real-To-Reel: The Mack Was Modeled After West Coast Black Godfather Frank Ward, Who Didn’t Survive To See Iconic Film Hit Screen appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Detroit Drug Wars of the 1980s rocked and ravished the Motor City streets, as African-American crime lords on both the city’s eastside and westside battled for control of the local cocaine and heroin trade throughout the decade, birthing a seemingly-endless parade of eye-catching press clippings and rampant, reckless bloodshed. While the westside Young Boys, Incorporated (YBI) garnered the majority of the dubious headlines in the early 1980s, Demetrius Holloway, Richard (Maserati Rick) Carter and their allies-turned-enemies, the murderous Best Friends Gang on the eastside moved to the forefront of discussion in the late 1980s – the craziness even bleeding over into the first part of the 1990s.

DETROIT DRUG WARS –The Dark Era (1979-1993)

July 18, 1979: The Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club Massacre: The Motor City’s Murder Row Gang was torn apart by an internal feud, resulting in the gang’s No. 1 enforcer Adolph (Doc Holiday) Powell declaring war on Murder Row boss Francis (Big Frank Nitti) Usher and staging an attack on him and two of his most trusted lieutenants, William (Dirty Dirt) McJoy and William (Straw Hat Perry) Jackson at Usher’s Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club headquarters. When the dust settled that day, McJoy, Jackson and Jackson’s girlfriend, Joanne Clark were killed and decapitated, foreshadowing the treachery and wanton violence that lied ahead in the coming decade.

*Powell was acquitted at trial for the triple murder, but shockingly Usher was found guilty instead, almost a decade prior to having the conviction thrown out of court and beating the charges at his subsequent retrial.

March 28, 1982 – Detroit Police Department undercover narcotics detective William Green is shot to death by Young Boys, Inc. lieutenant Cary Goins as Green was in the process of arresting a group of barely-adolescent street corner pushers he was responsible for. YBI was notorious for using elementary-school aged kids to push their products on area playgrounds.

September 28, 1982 – YBI co-founder Dwayne (Wonderful Wayne) Davis is gunned down on a Northwest Detroit street corner, shot in the back of the head at point-blank range after a falling out with fellow YBI co-founders Milton (Butch) Jones and Raymond (Baby Ray) Peoples. The flashy, fashionable and fiercely entrepreneurial, “W.W.” had recently returned to Motown following trips to Boston and Seattle, respectively, were he had planted flags for his new “H2O” crew and recruited muscle to bring back with him to Michigan.

January 22, 1983 – Former Murder Row Gang leader Adolph (Doc Holiday) Powell is slain with a shotgun blast to the head as he took a shot of cognac at La Player’s Lounge on the eastside. Powell, a transplant from New Orleans, was under suspicion for being a federal informant and wasn’t able to keep the Murder Row organization together once Usher was out of the picture behind bars.

May 12, 1983 – YBI member Joseph (Wamp) Brown is shot dead on the westside Detroit street corner he manned for an imprisoned Baby Ray Peoples, the first salvo in a nasty two-year blood feud that raged between YBI co-founders Peoples and Butch Jones. On his deathbed, Brown named two of Jones’ favorite hit men, Curtis (Kurt McGurk) Napier and Maurice (Mo Heart) Gibbs, as the triggermen in his attack.

*Gregory (Special K) Kendricks, another Peoples lieutenant, survives a separate shooting that same day

June 17, 1983 – YBI affiliate drug dealer William (Chilly Willie) Hunter is killed on the city’s westside as tensions between an indictment-crippled YBI and rival upstart the Pony Down Gang headed by the Buttrom brothers rise to a boiling point through late 1982 and into 1983, resulting in a string of shootings and murders.

February 7, 1984 – YBI enforcer and Baby Ray Peoples’ bodyguard Norman (Big Snead) Johnson is machine-gunned to death on Detroit’s westside.

April 30, 1984 – Independent westside Detroit drug peddler Jerry Kenny is killed in a territorial dispute with YBI after Kenny refused to stop dealing on an YBI-claimed street corner.

May 30, 1984 – YBI member and Baby Ray Peoples loyalist Ricky (G-Funk) Gracey is tortured and murdered execution style in an attempted robbery of Butch Jones’ suburban Detroit home with Jones just shipped off to prison and his wife and 10-year old son occupying the domicile when the break-in occurred.

June 22, 1984 – YBI member and Baby Ray Peoples loyalist Dennis (D-Boogie) Bankston is found machine gunned to death, slumped over the wheel of his Cadillac in a Northwest Detroit parking lot. Bankston allegedly planned the ill-fated robbery of the Jones residence in Troy, Michigan less than a month before and was an early mentor of Peoples on the street.

July 17, 1984 – YBI member and Baby Ray Peoples’ driver and bodyguard Carl (GQ) Garrett is slain in a drive-by shooting as he sat on his moped at a traffic light in Northwest Detroit. Garrett was Bankston’s stepson and helped him plan the botched heist of Jones’ house.

July 23, 1984 – YBI member and Baby Ray Peoples loyalist Reggie Stringer is slain for his role in the attempt robbery of the Jones residence.

September 1984 – Independent westside drug dealers Shona Terrell Bryce & James Harriel are killed in the same two-week period after failing to bow to YBI demands. Harriel, who was bumped off on September 29, was with Bryce when he was gunned down on September 16 leaving his home.

August 10, 1985 – YBI co-founder Raymond (Baby Ray) Peoples is murdered behind the wheel of his car idling at a westside Detroit street corner less than four months after his release from prison. The Peoples hit brings the curtain down on the transformational YBI era in the Motor City and ushered in the true start of the crack wars.

December 20, 1986 – Best Friends Gang co-founder Ezra (Wizard) Brown is killed on the eastside of Detroit sitting in his car chatting with his brother “Ghost” in a drive-by shooting

December 27, 1986 – Best Friends Gang co-founder Gregory (Ghost) Brown is shot to death leaving an eastside Detroit bar the night of his brother Wizard Brown’s funeral

June 13, 1987 – Best Friends Gang enforcer Patrick (Lunchmeat) Jackson is killed for allegedly stealing from the remaining two Brown brothers, Reggie (Rocking Reggie) Brown and Terrance (Boogaloo) Brown. Jackson died a suspect in several murders.

August 7, 1987 – Flint, Michigan Best Friend Gang affiliate Mark Murray is found shot to death in a Genesee County ditch after allegedly stealing from the Brown brothers. The Best Friends, like YBI before them, expanded into Flint, a smoggy factory town about an hour’s drive north of Detroit

September 20, 1987 – Eastside Detroit drug dealer Stephen (Freaky Steve) Roussell is shot to death as he slept on his couch by Rocking Reggie Brown after the two had engaged in a longstanding beef over a girl.

September 12, 1988 – Detroit drug chief, Richard (Maserati Rick) Carter, is brazenly executed in his hospital-room bed recovering from a bullet wound to the stomach suffered two days earlier in a shootout with eastside drug game rival Edward (Big Ed) Hanserd. Carter was shot in the head at point-blank range by an assassin dressed in a doctor’s coat.

October 14, 1988 – Monster Squad lieutenant Steve (Little Stevie) Washington, best friend and driver for Monster Squad boss Cliff Jones is slain, shot to death behind the wheel of his gold-colored Mercedes-Benz on an eastside Detroit street corner. The Monster Squad replaced the Best Friends as Demetrius Holloway and Maserati Rick Carter’s main enforcement crew.

February 20, 1989 – Detroit Iraqi mob street boss and drug kingpin Harry Kalasho is murdered on the near Northwest side of Detroit, gunned down in a drive-by shooting in the middle of a turf war within the clannish crime family allegedly founded by his uncle Lou Akrawi

March 16, 1989 – Eastside Detroit drug kingpin James (Mr. Big) Lamar is slain as he sat at a traffic light in front of the St. Regis Hotel in the heart of Midtown on W. Grand Boulevard, shot to death by the Best Friends in a territory dispute.

August 24, 1990 – Eastside Detroit drug dealer Dexter (Def Jam Dex) Washington is murdered in the aftermath of a proposed consolidation effort of all eastside narcotics operations failed and erupted in more bloodshed instead. Washington’s slaying is one of five over the next two months tied to the unrest the proposition caused.

August 31, 1990 – Best Friends Gang enforcer Mark Patrick is killed when the Brown brothers believe he has too much weight on them in regards to his  knowledge and participation in dozens of gangland slayings at their direct orders.

September 17, 1990 – Eastside Detroit drug chief, Clyde Carter and his fiancé Patty Scott are slain in mid-conversation in front of Scott’s residence. Carter was Maserati Rick’s brother and right-hand man and apparently was the loudest in rebuking the consolidation attempt weeks prior.

October 8, 1990 – Legendary Motown drug kingpin Demetrius Holloway is murdered inside The Broadway, a popular men’s clothier in Downtown Detroit, shot in the back of the head as he was purchasing a pair of designer socks at the front counter. Who gave the order to hit Holloway, known as the first and original “Big Meech,” has remained a mystery to this day.

May 12, 1992 – Best Friends Gang lieutenant Alfred (Rudy) Austin and three innocent bystanders, including a 3-year old baby girl, were killed as Rocking Reggie Brown, out on bond while under indictment for the Freaky Steve Roussell murder, sprayed Austin’s porch with automatic weapon fire to prevent him from testifying at an upcoming court proceeding.

August 9, 1993 – Best Friends Gang co-founder and boss Terrance (Boogaloo) Brown is shot to death as he slept in his Atlanta hotel room on the run from the law in Detroit. Just months earlier, Brown murdered his top Best Friends Gang lieutenant James (Jimmy the Bruiser) Denard, who was on the run with him. Brown’s decision to clip Denard allegedly led to his two other top henchmen Stacy (The Machine) Culbert and Charles (Chuckie Do) Wilkes deciding they were next on their boss’ hit list and combining for a preemptive strike.

The post Detroit Drug World Murder Timeline: YBI, Best Friends, Maserati & Original Big Meech Brought Chaos To Motown Streets In 1980s appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Fugitive biker Miquel (Toe Jam) Torres was arrested Tuesday near his home in Rockledge, Florida for the April 2017 murder of rival biker David (Gutter) Donovan after nearly six weeks on the run from the law. Prior to being taken into custody without incident, the muscle-bound, heavily-tatted Torres, 37, was one of two fugitives from the Donovan homicide case that has a total of four defendants. Torres’ co-defendant, 32-year old Greg (Stinky) Umphress, remains at large. The indictment came down in mid-May.

Torres and Umphress are members of the notorious Outlaws Motorcycle Club’s Ocala, Florida chapter. At the time of his slaying, Donovan was the vice president of the lesser-known Kingsmen Motorcycle Club’s Lake County, Florida chapter. The two biker gangs clashed at the annual Leesburg Bikerfest in Leesburg, Florida, with Torres, Umphress and several other Outlaws staging a coordinated attack on Donovan at a local Circle K gas station. The brutal attack ended with Donovan dead and the architect of the military-style siege, Outlaws president Marc (Not Quite) Knotts laid out on the concrete with three bullet-wounds to his back and shoulder resulting from a Kingsmen’s retaliatory strike.

Knotts, 48 and Jesus (Ace) Marrero, 35, have also been charged in the case. Knotts – wearing a bullet-proof vest during the incident and released from the hospital within days – and Marrero were both arrested at the Outlaws clubhouse in Ocala the afternoon the indictment dropped last month.

According to the indictment, on the evening of Sunday, April 29, 2017, Knotts had Umphress, Marrerro and Torres abduct Donovan from the gas station’s convenient store where he was purchasing cigarettes and bring him to the side of building. Torrres put a knife to Donovan’s throat, per the indictment, and flanked by Umphress and Marrero, forced him to his knees on the ground facing Knotts. When the 41-year old Donovan reportedly refused Knotts’ demand that he remove his Kingsmen colors and cut (rocker vest), Knotts allegedly ordered him murdered.

“Shoot that motherfucker,” he instructed his Outlaw underlings, per the charges pending against him.

Donovan was shot in the head and the back, dying after a two-week fight for his life in the hospital. Which Outlaw lieutenant of Knotts’ he had actually pull the trigger in the execution is unclear. Knotts himself was then shot three times in the back from the gas station entranceway by a Kingsmen brother of Donovan’s as he went to get on his bike and flee the scene. Knotts and Marrero have each entered not guilty pleas.

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 as well, have started to demand that all other biker groups in the state 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 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 Florida Outlaws MC Member ‘Toe Jam’ Torres Nabbed By Authorities, Only One Fugitive Left In Donovan Murder Indictment appeared first on The Gangster Report.

As iconic as they were violence-prone, the Purple Gang, an all-Jewish mob and Detroit’s premier Prohibition Era bootlegging brigade, ruled the Midwest illegal-booze market for less than a decade (from roughly 1925 through 1933), but their legacy still endures to this very day. Universally respected and feared throughout American underworld circles in its’ heyday and well beyond, the Purple Gang was allegedly responsible for hundreds of gangland slayings and made tens of millions of dollars in liquor smuggling and sales, gambling, extortion, hijacking, kidnapping, prostitution, labor racketeering and narcotics trafficking.

Founded and led by the four Burnstein brothers (Abe, Joe, Ray & Izzy), the gang included roughly 50-to-100 men and attained worldwide infamy and pop culture prestige rivaled in mob lore only by Chicago’s Al Capone and Murder Inc. of New York – the Purples did frequent business with both groups over the years. Once Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Abe Burnstein, the eldest of the Burnstein brothers and the Great Lakes region’s legendary Jewish Godfather, opted for early retirement and voluntarily let his criminal empire be taken under the banner of his allies in the Detroit Italian mafia. Abe Burnstein died of a heart attack in 1968 in his longtime home in a penthouse suite at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, the old Purple Gang headquarters.

The Purple Gang’s Greatest Hits (The Highlights:1927-1945)

March 28, 1927 – The Milaflores Apartment Massacre: Independent racketeers Frankie Wright, Joe Bloom and George Cohen were lured to the Milaflores Apartments under the pretense of retrieving a kidnapped associate of theirs and instead were machine-gunned to death by a Purple Hit team consisting of “Siamese Twins” assassins Eddie Fletcher and Abe Axler, Fred (The Killer) Burke and Joseph (Joe Honey) Miller. Wright was from Chicago and Bloom and Cohe came to Michigan from New York – together they started doing muscle work and running a kidnapping-for-ransom scam, murdering a pair of Purple Gang affiliates and nabbing Purple-connected hoodlums in their ransom routine. The Milaflores Massacre was the first machine-gun slaying in state history and set the tone for the gang’s epic level of ruthlessness regarding friend and foe alike going forward.

*Fletcher & Axler are pictured with their attorneys in this article’s featured image.

January 31, 1928 – Detroit police officer and extortionist Vivian Welch is shot dead in the street by Purple enforcers after trying to shakedown Purple Gang speakeasies. Purple boss Abe Burnstein is arrested but never charged with ordering the high-profile hit of a cop that generated significant area press coverage.

February 14, 1929 – The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: The Purples gave a helping hand to Southside Chicago Italian mafia boss Al Capone in delivering a deathblow to his opponents in his war with the Windy City’s Northside Irish mob, providing Capone a set-up plan, a triggerman (St. Louis “Egan Rat’s” transplant Fred Burke) for his hit squad and a cadre of lookout men (Eddie Fletcher, Abe Axler and Harry & Phil Keywell) for the famous mass murder that drew headlines around the globe. The massacre occurred at a Northside auto garage hangout and claimed the lives of seven Northside mob lieutenants, including the gang’s top two enforcers, Frank & Pete Gusenberg, the gang’s second-in-command Albert (Jimmy Clark) Kaschellek, the gang’s top blind pig extortionist Albert (Gorilla Al) Weinshank, a gang bookmaker Reinhardt (Doc) Schwimmer, the gang’s accountant Adam Hayes and Johnny May, a mechanic in the gang. With a single call from Detroit, the Burnstein brothers had drawn the Northsiders garage the morning of Valentine’s Day with the promise of a discounted batch of boosted liquor fresh from Motown and a squad of assassins showed up instead dressed as police, lined everyone up against the wall and killed them all in a hail of machine-gun fire.

July 27, 1929 – Purple Gang lieutenant Irving (Little Irv) Shapiro, known for his loud, lethal and garish behavior, is found dead in a ditch, shot in the back of the head and tossed from a moving automobile. Shapiro was one of the gang’s most feared strong arms and hitmen. He was suspected of stealing from his Purple bosses and angering them with his reckless antics.

October 28, 1929 – Purple Gang lieutenant Zigmund (Ziggie Fingers) Selbin, a young, crazy street hood and protégé of the unstable Little Irv Shapiro, is shot to death on the city’s Westside. Selbin, only 22, earned his nickname for cutting off a rival’s finger so he could take ownership of a diamond ring over a debt.

July 22, 1930 – Detroit teenager Arthur Mixon (15) is killed by the Purple Gang for entering a syndicate bootlegging plant without permission and mouthing off to the Purple strong arms who tracked him down to confront him about the indiscretion. Phil Keywell, one of the lookouts in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was convicted for shooting the African-American Mixon to death on a eastside Detroit street corner.

July 22, 1931 – Purple Gang member Earl Passman is shot to death by fellow Purple Ganger Hyman (Two-Gun Harry) Altman in a prank gone very wrong: Passman locked Altman in a closet as a joke and Altman shot his way out, killing Passman in the process.

September 16, 1931 – The Collingwood Manor Massacre: When the Purple Gang’s booze-smuggling subunit known as the Little Jewish Navy began making plans to break off into the bootlegging industry on its own, the Purples’ purged the subunit’s treasonous leadership of Isadore (Izzy the Rat) Sutzker, Joseph (Black Joe) Leibowitz & Harold (Hymie) Paul in a triple slaying carried out by a three-man Purple hit team in the Collingwood Manor Apartments and spelled the beginning of the end of the syndicate’s memorable reign. Ray Burnstein was quickly arrested and convicted for masterminding the massacre. Harry Keywell, one of the lookouts at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, went on to be convicted of being one of the shooters in the triple homicide.

November 26, 1933 – The Siamese Twins Slayings: Purple Gang enforcers Eddie Fletcher and Abe Axler, referred to as the “Siamese Twins” for their constant companionship in the Motor City rackets, were slain side-by-side in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, shot to death at close range in a car on the side of the road after a night of carousing at a nearby beer garden and left in the back of the vehicle with their hands intertwined. Fletcher and Axler were New Yorkers who came to Detroit in the mid-1920s to work as muscle for the Burnsteins in the “Cleaners & Dyers War,” the gang’s street taxing of the area’s dry-cleaning industry. They were marked for death after allegedly double-crossing the Burnsteins and their close friend and favored enforcer Harry (H.F.) Fleisher in a business deal. Fleisher was one of the main suspects in the double homicide as well as a triggerman in the Collingwood Manor Massacre.

December 3, 1934 – Oakland Sugar Gang boss Henry Shorr, the Purple Gang’s mob mentor, disappears, and is allegedly bumped off by his one-time “students” in a business dispute over a brewery with his former pupils and partner in the Oakland Sugar House Gang, Charles Leiter. H.F. Fleisher was considered the No. 1 suspect in the hit. Shorr’s son, Mickey, was a popular disc jockey and radio personality in Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s prior to starting a successful stereo equipment franchise.

August 29, 1937 – Nightclub valet Willie Holmes is accidentally killed in a car bomb, blown up in renegade Purple Ganger Harry Millman’s brand new Cadillac LaSalle’s Coup in an attempt on Millman’s life in the parking lot of Club 1040 staged by the Detroit’s Italian mafia in their heated feud with the Burnstein brothers’ former bodyguard and driver following the Purples disbanding in the wake of Prohibition.

November 24, 1937 – The Thanksgiving Night Massacre: Boss of the so-called “Junior Purple Gang,” Harry Millman and his two bodyguards Harold (Big Harry) Gross and Harold (Hymie) Cooper were gunned down in a crowded Boesky’s Deli’s while having a post Turkey Day feast drink by Murder Inc. assassins Harry (Pittsburgh Phil) Strauss and Harry (Happy) Maione dispatched from New York City for the job. Millman couldn’t get along with his new bosses in the Italian mafia, specifically beefing with Detroit mob street boss Joseph (Scarface Joe) Bommarito. At the time of Millman’s murder, he was one of the prime suspects in the Eddie Fletcher and Abe Axler slayings almost three years later to the day, a double homicide authorities speculate Millman did with H.F. Fleisher.

May 16, 1938 – The Doherty Hotel Murder: Purple Gang lawyer and business associate Isaiah Leebove is shot to death by oil-field expert Carl (Texas Jack) Livingston, his distant cousin and partner in the Mammoth Oil Co., as he dined with his showgirl wife and Purple Ganger Sam (Fatty) Burnstein, the Burnstein brothers first cousin, at the Doherty Hotel in downtown Clare, Michigan. Livingston was acquitted on first degree murder charges via an insanity defense and would die of a drug overdose less than a decade later – the two were fighting over business affairs. The Burnsteins and Leebove and Livingston, both connected to east coast Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky, founded Mammoth Oil together in the early 20^th Century mid-Michigan oil rush. Original Purple Gang lieutenant Sam (Uncle Sammy) Garfield, another Lansky confidant, fronted the Burnsteins’ interests in the oil trade and had relocated to Clare, a two-and-half hour’s drive from Detroit, since the late 1920s.

January 11, 1945 – Michigan State Senator Warren Hooper is shot to death driving home from the state capital in Lansing to his home near Albion for his decision to cooperate with investigators in a political corruption probe looking into mob payoffs in what is known as the “final” Purple Gang murder. H.F. Fleisher, his baby brother Sammy and his Purple protégé Myron (Young Mikey) Selik were convicted of conspiracy in the Hooper hit and all time prison time for the crime. Some federal informants pointed to an incarcerated Ray Burnstein as the triggerman in Hooper’s murder, theorizing he was let out of lockup in state prison for the day with a payoff and subsequently stalked and assassinated the turncoat senator.

The post The Purple Gang Murder Timeline: Detroit’s Jewish Mob Was Merciless During Prohibition, Left Lasting Imprint In Underworld appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Big Cheese can roam free now. As of this weekend, acting New England mob boss Carmen (The Big Cheese) DiNunzio is off parole and minus any government restrictions of his movements and personal dealings. In the winter of 2015, he was released from almost six years in federal prison for bribery and racketeering and is considered the top candidate to assume Godfather duties in the wake of the death of Patriarca crime family don Peter (The Crazy Horse) Limone last month.

Headquartered out of the Gemini Social Club in Boston’s North End, the 59-year old DiNunzio served as the New England mob’s underboss for a majority of the 2000s. Limone, 83, and also from Boston, became boss of the Patriarcas in 2009, after several years as the Family’s consigliere. Due to his hands-off leadership style, Limone always employed an acting boss. Anthony (The Little Cheese) DiNunzio, Carmen’s baby brother, was Limone’s acting boss between 2009 to when he was locked up for extortion in 2012. The younger DiNunzio is scheduled to come home early next year.

The Providence wing of the Patriarca clan is said to be run these days by the crime family’s current reputed underboss Matthew (Good Looking Matty) Guglielmetti and alleged consigliere Joseph (Joe the Bishop) Achille. Since the spring and word of an impanelled grand jury hit the streets in Rhode Island, rumors of a looming murder indictment charging imprisoned Providence mob captain Edward (Little Eddie) Lato and former New England don Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme with the 1992 gangland slaying of Patriarca enforcer Kevin Hanrahan have rampantly circulated.

Salemme, 84, was yanked out of the Witness Protection Program last summer and charged with ordering the 1993 murder of mob associate Stevie DiSarro, his partner in a South Boston nightclub, go-go bar and music venue. He’s pled not guilty and is awaiting trial. Lato, 70, is finishing off the tail end of a prison stint for racketeering. The recent developments are the result of Salemme’s one-time underboss Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca renewing cooperation with the government after he was arrested from within the Witness Protection Program last year too.

The DiNunzio brothers were born and raised in East Boston, before gravitating to the city’s North End Little Italy neighborhood, getting schooled in mob activity by then Patriarca underboss Jerry Angiulo and his crew of cronies and siblings. Angiulo went to prison in the fall of 1983, around the same time he had a falling out with the Big Cheese and stuck a murder contract on his head for shaking down another young Mafiosi and Angiulo protégé named Vincent (Dee Dee) Gioacchini for $100,000 (Gioacchini is a reputed made guy today).

Fleeing to the west coast, the DiNunzios’ took refuge with the Chicago’s mob’s California and Nevada crews. They worked as bookies and collectors, eventually getting busted for extortion, doing four years of fed prison time apiece and returned to the North End in the late 1990s.

The case that Carmen DiNunzio is getting off parole from this weekend came down in 2006 and charged the Big Cheese with extortion, running an illegal sports gambling enterprise and trying to bribe an undercover FBI agent that he believed was a state highway department inspector. Pleading guilty to bribery in exchange for the dropping of the extortion and gambling charges, he was hit with a six-year term that he got out six months early from due to good behavior and his teaching of educational courses to other prisoners while incarcerated.

The post Boston’s ‘Big Cheese’ Finally Off Parole With Feds, Expected To Take Top Spot In New England Mafia appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Serving as the official hit squad for the early-era Italian mafia in New York City during the 1930s, Murder, Incorporated was made up of mainly Jewish gangsters and could morbidly boast a body count reaching well into the triple figures in a little over a decade of gangland prominence. With affairs in the mob enforcement wing overseen by the diminutive, but historically-lethal Louis (Lepke) Buchalter and reporting directly to “The Commission” of the notorious Five Families and legendary Jewish crime lord Meyer Lansky, the trigger-happy unit of eager thugs and sociopathic sycophants wreaked havoc on the east coast and eventually each other, cementing a legacy of viciousness and volatility unrivaled in American underworld circles.

The Murder Inc. Murder Timeline (1930-1951): Greatest Hits Version

June 12, 1930 – David (Frisco) Gordon

August 6, 1930 – New York State Supreme Court Judge Joe Crater

April 15, 1931 – Joseph (Joe the Boss) Masseria

July 11, 1931 – Irv Shapiro

July 31, 1931 – Guido Ferrari

September 16, 1931 – Joey Silvers

September 17, 1931 – Meyer Shapiro

December 31, 1931 – Louis (Crooked Neck Louie) Levine

*The first significant Murder, Inc. lieutenant to be slain by his fellow Murder, Inc. members

May 22, 1932 – Leon Goldstein

May 26, 1932 – Walter Schwall

September 13, 1932 – Jack Painter

October 27, 1932 – Sam Medell

November 20, 1932 – Frank Fabrizzio

*Killed in a brewing beef between Murder, Inc. and Jewish gangster Irving (Waxey Gordon) Wexler

March 19, 1933 – Joe Calligari and Frank Russo

March 25, 1933 – Elmer Johnson

April 10, 1933 – Max Hassel & Max Greenberg

*Waxey Gordon’s bodyguards are both killed in an attempt on Gordon’s life.

June 2, 1933 – Abe Durst

*Waxey Gordon’s driver is found in the trunk of his car in the Bronx

June 4, 1933 – William (Big Bill) Oppenheim

*Waxey Gordon’s bodyguard is killed entering his apartment building in Patterson, NJ

June 25, 1933 – Joey Kennedy

July 2, 1933 – Murray Marks

*Another casaulty of the Gordon-Murder, Inc. feud

November 20, 1933 – Alan (Al Silver) Silverman

November 25, 1933 – Alex (Red) Alpert

December 5, 1933 – Frank (Skinny Frankie) Partuese & Frank (Frankie Black) Stillo

July 20, 1934 – Willie Shapiro

October 18, 1934 – Joe (Fatty) Cooperman

March 3, 1935 – John (Spider) Murtha

September 15, 1935 – Abe Meers & Irv Amron

May 7, 1935 – Orlando (Duke) Minichelli

August 21, 1935 –Ben Holinsky & Frank Holak

*Pair of independent gangsters killed for running a kidnapping racket targeting associates of Meyer Lansky and his partners, Italian mob don Charles (Lucky) Luciano and fellow fabled Jewish racketeer Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel

September 30, 1935 – Joe Amberg and his driver Morris (Manny) Kessler

*Murder, Inc. hit men

October 11, 1935 – Frank (Little Frankie) Teitlebaum

*Murder, Inc. hit man

October 23, 1935 – Louis (Pretty Louie) Amberg

*Murder, Inc. hit man

October 24, 1935 – Dutch Schultz, Otto (Abbadabba) Berman, Bernard (Lulu) Rosencrantz & Abe (Abie the Accountant) Landau

*Iconic Jewish crime lord Schultz, his top advisors Berman and Landau and his bodyguard are gunned down at The Palace Chop House in New Jersey

August 5, 1936 – Irving (Charlie the Chink) Sherman

September 13, 1936 – Joseph (Joe Candy) Rosen

*Murder, Inc. hit man

October 18, 1936 – August Justriano

September 26, 1936 – Irv Askenaz

*Askenaz was Murder Inc’s No. 1 getaway driver

May 25, 1937 – George (Whitey) Rudnick

July 16, 1937 – Sam Silverman

July 31, 1937 – Walter Sage

November 24, 1937 – Harry Millman

*Detroit wiseguy and Purple Gang leader murdered for butting heads with his counterparts in the Motor City’s Italian mafia

August 21, 1938 – Herman (Little Greenie) Yuran & Solomon Goldstein

*Murder, Inc. hit men

November 10, 1938 – Married couple Leon & Rachel Scharf

March 21, 1938 – Maurice (Frenchy) Carillet

January 19, 1939 – Albert (Al the Plug) Shuman

*Murder, Inc. hit man

January 28, 1939 – Louie Cohen & his brother-in-law Isadore (Whitey) Friedman

February 6, 1939 – Cesare Lattaro & Antonio Siciliano

February 9, 1939 – Felice Esposito

May 10, 1939 – Sam (Tootsie) Feinstein

May 19, 1939 – Morris (Mershie) Diamond

July 14, 1939 – Pete Panto

July 28, 1939 – Irv Penn

August 10, 1939 – Yoeli Miller

August 23, 1939 – Hyman (Little Curly) Holtz

*Murder, Inc. hit man

September 4, 1939 – Irving (Puggy) Feinstein

*Murder, Inc. hit man

October 16, 1939 – Harry Schober

October 17, 1939 – Rube Smith

November 22, 1939 – Harry (Big Greenie) Greenberg

*Murder, Inc. hit man and Bugsy Siegel’s close childhood friend

December 14, 1939 – Mike Spataro

May 14, 1940 – James (Dizzy) Ferracco

*Murder, Inc. hit man

February 6, 1941 – Benjamin (Bennie the Boss) Tannenbaum

*Murder, Inc. numbers whiz

June 12, 1941 – Murder, Inc. hit men Harry (Pittsburgh Phil) Strauss & Martin (Bugsy) Goldstein die in the electric chair

July 30, 1941 – Walter (Whitey) Krakow

Bugsy Siegel’s brother-in-law

November 12, 1941 – Famous Murder, Inc. turncoat Abe (Kid Twist) Reles dies suspiciously when he either falls or is thrown out of a window in his police-guarded hotel room

February 19, 1942 – Murder, Inc. hit men Harry (Happy) Maione & Frank (Dasher) Abbadando die in the electric chair

April 11, 1942 – Anthony (Tony Romero) Romanello

*Murder, Inc. hit man

August 3, 1942 – Morris (Morrie Dimples) Wolinsky & Bobby Greene

March 4, 1944 – Murder, Inc. leaders Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, Emmanuel (Mendy) Weiss & Louis (Brownsville Lou) Capone die in the electric chair

June 20, 1944 – Jack (The Ox) Finkel

November 4, 1944 – Enrique Diarte

*Bugsy Siegel’s partner in a drug racket is killed in Tijuana, Mexico

June 20, 1946 – Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel

*The historic Jewish mob figure is murdered in Beverly Hills, California after angering his partners in the mob with dealings in getting the Las Vegas hotel and casino industry off the ground and his girlfriend’s sticky fingers

September 15, 1949 – Philip (Little Farvel) Cohen

*One of Murder, Inc.’s most accomplished assassins and top narcotics peddlers

March 7, 1951 – Anthony (Dukie) Maffetore

*Murder, Inc. hit man and the last body to drop of the group’s core members

The post The Murder, Incorporated Murder List: NYC’s Mostly-Jewish Mob Killed Its Way To Top Of The Underworld In 1930s appeared first on The Gangster Report.

R&B music luminary and hip-hop pioneer Bobby Brown barely escaped with his life as he watched the 1995 gangland-style execution of his best friend, bodyguard and soon-to-be brother-in-law, Boston drug lord Steven (Stevie Shots) Sealey carried out in the early-morning hours of September 28, 1995 in front of a bar and night club a stone’s throw away from Brown’s childhood home. Beantown drug-world figure John (Johnny Black) Tibbs was convicted of being the triggerman in Sealey’s murder which drew national media exposure due to its connection to Brown and Brown’s then wife, legendary pop singer Whitney Houston.

Brown and Sealey were parked in front of the Biarritz Lounge engaged in a conversation in Houston’s $400,000 cream-colored Bentley sedan when Tibbs swooped in, unloaded his pistol into the 31-year old Sealey’s head, face and torso, snatched a large gold medallion chain from around his neck and fled into the nearby Orchard Park Projects in rough-and-tumble Roxbury, Massachusetts. Brown survived the attack by ducking for cover on the floor of the car.

As Sealey’s lifeless body slumped onto the concrete from the car’s passenger side, Brown was heard screaming, “they got my boy, they got my boy,” to a group of horrified onlookers, while members of his entourage simultaneously exchanged gunfire with Tibbs as he ran from the scene and eventually got into a getaway vehicle driven by Cedric (Cookie) Phillips. Tibbs was sentenced to 27 years in prison, Phillips got 15.

During his career on the street, Sealey was linked to historic drug syndicates, Young Boys, Incorporated out of Detroit and Boston’s Bomb Boys and Columbia Point Dawgs. He had recently relocated to Atlanta to work security for Brown when he was slain in the shadows of the Orchard Park projects, where Brown was raised and back visiting family and friends that week.

The two were childhood buddies, even though Sealey was a little older and Brown came from Orchard Park in Roxbury and Sealey came from the Columbia Point Projects in nearby Dorchester. They soon went their separate ways – Brown escaped poverty and the projects via a record contract and music superstardom (first with the group New Edition and then as a solo artist) and Sealey drifted heavily into the drug game — only to be brought together later in life. At the time of his murder, Sealey and Brown’s sister Carol were engaged to be married and Sealey was acting as Brown’s main bodyguard.

According to court records, Sealey’s killing was connected to a turf battle in the Orchard Park Projects in Roxbury in which Orchard Park drug rings were coming under siege by Dorchester’s Columbia Point Dawgs. Tibbs and Phillips belonged to Orchard Park gangs resisting the “CPD’s” push into the area.

Houston and Brown were married for 15 years amid a deluge of tabloid media coverage related to their high-wattage celebrity, Brown’s constant run-ins with the law and the couple’s substance abuse issues. Houston died of a drug overdose in 2012. Brown is 48 today and published his autobiography last year.

Sealey was killed exactly 13 years to the day his underworld mentor, Detroit drug kingpin Dwayne (Wonderful Wayne) Davis, was slain in similar brazen fashion as a result of a power struggle raging within his Young Boys, Incorporated narcotics empire that had expanded outside of the Motor City and into Massachusetts in the early 1980s. Davis held the reputation as the consummate hustler and businessman drug baron.

“W.W” was gunned down on a Northwest Detroit street corner on the afternoon of September 28, 1982, just months after returning from Boston with a teenage Sealey and several dozen more out-of-state henchmen ready to square off with fellow “YBI” co-founder Milton (Butch) Jones for control of Motown’s heroin industry. Jones, Davis and another pair of westside Detroit drug bosses Raymond (Baby Ray) Peoples and Mark (Block) Marshall, joined forces to form YBI in 1978 and quickly went on to dominate the area’s heroin market with their revolutionary sales and marketing strategies and brutish enforcement tactics.

Per federal informants, the start-up cash for what fast became a juggernaut multi-million dollar criminal organization derived from a six-figure life-insurance policy payout Marshall received from his parents’ murders, a double-homicide he himself was a prime suspect in. A beef between Marshall and Peoples over a girl three years later led to Peoples shooting Marshall and Marshall fleeing for the west coast and California, leaving his stake in YBI behind for Peoples, Jones and Davis to split.

Around this same time, Wonderful Wayne and his “H20” wing of YBI branched off from Michigan into untapped locales in Boston, Seattle, Indianapolis and Cincinnati. In Boston, the H20 crew set up shop in the Columbia Point Projects where Davis met Steve Sealey and Sealy became his bodyguard and driver while Davis did business in Massachusetts. Upon Davis’ return to Detroit in the spring of 1982, he had Sealey in tow. However, after Davis was killed that fall, Sealey went back to Boston and along with the old H20 crew rechristened the east coast YBI satellite the Bomb Boys and continued running the drug trade in Columbia Pointe unchallenged.

State prosecutors in Michigan indicted Butch Jones, his hit man protégé Curtis (Kurt McGurk) Napier, bodyguard Keith (Kethon the Terrible) Green and cousin Maurice (Mo Heart) Gibbs for murdering Wonderful Wayne Davis, but they had all the charges dropped before the case ever reached trial. Gibbs, Green and Napier were part of Jones’ “Wrecking Crew” wing of YBI. Napier made headlines for penning a letter to then-Mayor of Detroit Coleman A. Young threatening to assassinate him.

Wonderful Wayne & his H20 crew

The Bomb Boys gang was headed by Toby (Big Blood) Johnson, a former H20 crew member and lieutenant of Wonderful Wayne’s from Detroit. Johnson was slain in 1988 by his own men and Sealey and the other leftover Bomb Boys changed the organization’s name again, this time calling themselves the Columbia Point Dawgs or just “CPD.” The moniker stuck and for the last 30 years, the Columbia Point Dawgs rose to be the most prominent and feared urban street gang in Boston.

By the first part of the 1990s, Sealey and the CPD decided to take a page out of W.W.’s book and expand, aggressively moving into surrounding housing projects and neighborhoods and staging takeovers of their respective drug territories – the bust of Boston’s infamous crack era kingpin Darryl (God) Whiting and his New York Boys gang laid the foundation for CPD’s rapid ascent. The Orchard Park Projects, the one-time home to Whiting and his New York Boys group, fought back the hardest against CPD’s arrival in the area and Sealey’s murder set off increased tensions between the Roxbury and Dorchester drug gangs for years to come.

According to a police report regarding the homicide, Sealey became a prized target for rivals in Orchard Park following his alleged sanctioning of a series of robberies of area drug houses in the summer of 1995. Prior that year, Sealey had been released from a two-year stint in prison on weapons charges.

Just two years ago in June 2015, the entire CPD hierarchy and a majority of its rank-and-file went down in a giant federal narcotics, guns and racketeering case. The bulk of those charged in the case have since pled guilty, including the lead defendants brothers, Tony (Mazi Brawl) Berry and Willie (Sco Dough) Berry.

YBI boss Butch Jones went to prison in 1983. Baby Ray Peoples was shot to death in the summer of 1985, shortly following walking free from a three-year stay behind bars. Jones and Peoples fell out when they were both incarcerated, with Peoples alleged to have orchestrated a botched attempted robbery of Jones’ suburban Troy, Michigan residence occupied by his wife and young son.

Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston divorced in 2007. Houston died having sold nearly 200 million records and found success in Hollywood as an actress (The Bodyguard, Waiting To Exhale). Brown is credited with bringing the New Jack Swing sound to the masses, a blend of R&B, Jazz and Hip-Hop that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His influential, chart-topping Don’t Be Cruel album hit stores in June 1988 and sold a staggering 7,000,000 copies and spawned five No. 1 singles.

The post The Bobby & Whitney Nightclub Murder: Well-Traveled East Coast Drug Boss ‘Stevie Shots’ Sealey Slain Outside Boston Lounge In ’95 appeared first on The Gangster Report.