The fallout from last year’s Hankton family drug gang trial in New Orleans has been fierce: two witnesses dead, one more Hankton family lieutenant convicted…..twice.

That lieutenant, Julius Hankton, a 28-year old cousin of imprisoned Big Easy drug lord “Wild Telly” Hankton, the No. 1 defendant in a frenzied 2016 federal racketeering and murder trial, pled guilty to manslaughter last month, less than a year after pleading guilty to his role in a narcotics conspiracy – he’s expected to receive a 40-year prison sentence. According to his homicide indictment, Julius Hankton and his step brother Quentin Hankton shot and killed Maurice (Mo Red) Sparkman on December 3, 2014 for Sparkman’s brazen robbery of a Hankton gang gambling den. Quentin Hankton is currently awaiting trial on the charges.

Wild Telly Hankton, his criminal empire’s top enforcer, Walter (Moonie) Porter and two other family members were found guilty of racketeering and murder charges in July 2016. The Hankton family has ruled the New Orleans drug trade for the last two decades.

In the months following the convictions of Hankton and Porter, a pair of witnesses against them popped up dead eight weeks apart. First, Gerard (G-Rock) Howard was gunned down on August 3, 2016. Then, on December 4, Bobby Basquine was slain in a drive-by shooting. They had both given testimony damaging to Moonie Porter, an accomplished and feared assassin in the Crescent City drug world doing life behind bars for four murders, while being a suspect in several more. The 41-year old Wild Telly Hankton is also serving a life prison sentence.

Howard worked for Porter and was the initial domino to fall in the government’s assault on the Hankton organization, getting busted on weapons violations in 2012 and becoming an informant. It was Howard that alerted authorities to Porter’s penchant for “double-fisting” – using two automatic guns simultaneously – on his hits and leaving dozens of shell casings in his wake. Big Easy rapper B.G. once name-checked Porter in a song, proclaiming “niggas get hit 50 if my nigga Moonie around.”

During his time on the stand in the summer of 2016, Basquine, 22, testified that he purchased a gun from Porter linked to three gangland hits as a means of knowingly helping Porter distance himself from the murder weapon. Shortly after his testimony, Basquine, who was serving a prison term for drug and gun charges and had testified against Porter, 40, at two separate trials, was released from custody and set free.

The post Aftermath Of Hankton Trial In New Orleans Isn’t Pretty, More Murders & Convictions Abound In Big Easy Drug Scene appeared first on The Gangster Report.

There was no romancing the man with the gavel. Detroit drug dealer Stephen (Don Juan) Barry-Gibbons was sentenced this week by a state judge in Erie, Pennsylvania to 55 years in prison for narcotics trafficking in territory he took by force in the 2000s. The 31-year old Don Juan didn’t keep his feelings of outrage and disappointment a secret.

“I didn’t have a key to the (front door), I never sold drugs to nobody during this whole investigation,” he hollered at Erie County Superior Judge Michael E. Dunleavy as he was being ushered out of the courtroom by Erie County Sheriff’s Department Deputies.

A spring 2016 raid of Barry-Gibbons’ Pennsylvania residence yielded close to $100,000 worth of heroin and cocaine, $15,000 in cash and four unregistered firearms. He was found guilty at trial last month of drug and gun charges. In 2007, Barry-Gibbons got convicted in a drug conspiracy case and three years later in August of 2010, he pled guilty to third-degree murder in the gangland style slaying of underworld rival Arthur (A.J.) Cheeks.

Barry-Gibbons and his crew of Detroiters arrived in Erie in the mid-2000s and promptly went to war with an organization Cheeks belonged to in a battle for drug turf located in nearby New Castle. Cheeks was gunned down as he tried to take cover from an ambush behind the wheel of his SUV parked in his driveway on the morning of December 23, 2006.

Per court records, Cheeks had shot up a house occupied by Don Juan lieutenant and native Detroiter, Artis (Little B) Chapman in the weeks before he was killed. Just hours after Cheeks got bumped off, his brother Sammy was arrested on weapons charges when he was intercepted by area police heading over to a Detroit gang hangout to retaliate.

Stephen “Don Juan” Barry-Gibbons

The post ‘Don Juan’ Of Detroit-To-Pennsylvania Drug Network Down For The Count, Hit Hard By Judge In Narcotics Case Out Of Erie appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Martin Scorsese has brought aboard Canadian actor Gary Basaraba to play deceased Teamsters union boss and reputed mob puppet Frank (Big Fitzy) Fitzsimmons in The Irishman, the much-anticipated gangster “supergroup” film currently in production on the east coast about the relationship between hit man Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran and iconic slain labor union boss Jimmy Hoffa, Fitzsimmons’ mentor in organized labor politics. Bararaba is best known for television roles in a variety of cop dramas and appeared in the Ben Affleck movie The Accountant last year.

Hoffa, the fiery, notoriously stubborn and hard-nosed former president of the Teamsters, vanished from a suburban Detroit restaurant parking lot on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 on his way to a lunch with mob capos from Italian crime families representing Michigan and New York. With Fitzsimmons by his side and the mafia in their home base of Detroit and beyond supporting them with their immense muscle and contacts, Hoffa rose to the Teamsters’ international presidency in 1958.

Fitzsimmons, a native Detroiter considerably larger in physical stature, but much less charismatic and iron-willed than Hoffa, became his vice president in 1961. Big Fitzy succeeded him as president of the union upon negotiating an imprisoned Hoffa a commutation from U.S. President Richard Nixon on his conviction for jury tampering, bribery and fraud in which Hoffa had to step down.

In the years preceding his kidnapping and murder, Hoffa was in a growing beef with both the oafish and fleshy Fitzsimmons, who he felt personally betrayed him, and his one-time allies in the mob he had ridden to power. Fitzsimmons was reportedly much easier to control and manipulate from behind the scenes for the organized crime figures he was beholden to than Hoffa had been and Hoffa became intent on challenging his former right-hand man and VP for the presidency of the Teamsters in the 1976 election — Hoffa, 62, was told the meeting he was to attend the day he disappeared was going to help his re-election bid.

Nobody has ever been arrested or charged in the Hoffa homicide probe. Fitzsimmons died in office as the top dog in the Teamsters in May 1981, succumbing to a bout with lung cancer at age 72.

Authorities and researchers believe it was an attempt to blow up Fitzsimmons and his son and fellow labor leader Richard (Little Fitz) Fitzsimmons in a car bomb in the summer of 1975 that fast-tracked the Hoffa slaying. Whether the unsuccessful attack, which occurred in the parking lot of Nemo’s Bar, a Teamsters hangout in southwest Detroit just a stone’s throw from Local 299, was set in motion by Hoffa or people trying to make it look that way remains unknown to this very day. Less than three weeks later, Hoffa went missing.

Scorsese has collected a star-studded ensemble for his adaption of Charles Brandt’s 2004 best-selling book, I Heard You Paint Houses, in which Sheeran, on his deathbed, claims to have been the man who shot and killed Hoffa. Robert De Niro will play Sheeran and the equally-legendary Al Pacino is slated to play Hoffa in his first-ever collaboration with Scorsese. Fresh out of retirement, Joe Pesci plays rural Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino and Harvey Keitel is playing Philadelphia mafia don Angelo Bruno. Cameras began rolling on the 100-million dollar Netflix production in New York City earlier this month and the movie is expected to have a limited theatre run in late 2018 or early 2019.

Gary Basaraba

Jimmy Hoffa and Frank Fitzsimmons

The post Teamsters’ ‘Big Fitzy’ To Be Part Of Scorsese’s ‘Irishman’ Movie, Director Gives Role Of Hoffa’s No. 2 To Basaraba appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Danny Greene lived explosively. He died the same way. The brash and fearless Cleveland Irish mob boss was killed in a car bombing 40 years ago this week on the afternoon of October 6, 1977. His murder ceased tensions between the city’s Irish and Italian crime factions which had raged for the previous 18 months and tallied a string of vicious bombings and mob hits that rocked the region and attracted nationwide press attention. The 43-year old Green was blown up by a bomb that detonated in a car parked next to his in the parking lot of a Lyndhurst, Ohio dentist’s office and the ripple effects of his high-profile slaying pretty much spelled the end of the once-powerful Cleveland mafia in the years to come.

A former U.S. Marine fascinated by world history and his Irish heritage, Greene first came on the scene as a force to be reckoned with in the longshoremen’s union on the docks of Lake Erie, eventually getting elected president of the city’s International Longshoremen’s Association. Venturing into local gangland affairs under the tutelage of Cleveland mafia underboss Frank (Little Frankie) Brancato and legendary area Jewish mobster Alex (Shondor) Birns, working as an enforcer, collector and bodyguard for both, he hedged his bets and also began cooperating with the FBI as a confidential informant. It wasn’t long before he had his own set of street rackets and a band of loyal, mainly-Irish lieutenants he called the Celtic Club surrounding him and doing his bidding.

Pushed out of power in the longshoremen’s union in the late 1960s, Greene gravitated towards infiltrating the sanitation and vending machine industries while cultivating connections in the mammoth Teamsters union and dabbling in the fire restoration business. By the early 1970s, Greene was partnered with his underworld mentors, Little Frankie Brancato and Shondor Birns in a series of gambling, extortion and narcotics operations. Through his ties to Brancato and Birns, he forged a relationship with the Gambino crime family out of New York City. Far from camera or quote shy, he often did interviews with the media in an attempt to curry favor with the press and shape a public image for himself as more benevolent community leader than Irish crime lord.

Brancato died of natural causes in 1973 and in the years that followed Greene and Birns fell out over a drug deal gone wrong. Birns placed a murder contract on his former protégé’s head and Greene retaliated by having Birns blown to bits in a March 1975 car bombing. This put the tough-as-nails Irishman at odds with Brancato and Birns’ pals in the mafia and set the stage for war.

When longtime Cleveland mafia don John Scalish, the consummate gentleman gangster, passed away on the operating table during open heart surgery in the spring of 1976, Greene squared off with Scalish’s more rough-around-the-edges successor, James (Jack White) Licavoli, for the city’s racket empire, the crown jewel of which was the syndicate’s lucrative share in the famous Las Vegas casino skim. Firming up further backing, Greene joined forces with a Teamsters bigwig and Italian mobster named John Nardi in his fight with the Licavoli camp, further strengthening his position courtesy of Nardi’s contacts and influence in the labor union. Nardi’s uncle, Tony Milano, had served as Scalish’s consigliere and top advisor.

Licavoli’s underboss, best friend and first cousin Calogero (Leo Lips) Moceri, disappeared in August 1976 after a loud verbal altercation with Nardi at the Feast of the Assumption in Cleveland’s Little Italy – only his blood-soaked Mercedes was ever recovered. Nardi, 61, was killed in a car bombing outside his Cleveland Teamsters office on May 17, 1977, five months prior to Greene meeting the same fate. In the wake of Greene’s death, most of his loyalists fell in line behind Licavoli.

Pennsylvania mobster Ray Ferritto, the man ultimately responsible for planning and carrying out Greene’s murder – recruited from out-of-state to perform the hit after a number of unsuccessful tries by several Mafiosi in Ohio proved an embarrassment for Licavoli’s regime –, went on to be arrested shortly after completing the job and testify for the government in court against his bosses. Ferritto was tipped off to Greene’s dentist appointment on October 6, 1977 by Licavoli, who had placed a tap on Greene’s phone.

Jack Licavoli died of a heart attack behind bars in 1985. He was 81 years old. His incarceration three years before marked the beginning of the end for a crime family already on its last legs due to general attrition and fallout from the war with Greene and his Irish mob.

Today, the Cleveland mafia has no formal structure and is considered virtually dormant. The story of Danny Greene was turned into a movie in 2011 called Kill The Irishman and starring Ray Stevenson as Greene and Christopher Walken, Val Kilmer and Paul Sorvino in supporting roles.

The post Conclusion Of 1970s Cleveland Mob War Marks Anniversary: Irish Crime Lord Danny Greene Met Grisly Death In Fall Of ’77 appeared first on The Gangster Report.

In the 1970s, Danny Greene and his Irish mob, known as the “Celtic Club,” locked horns with the Cleveland mafia for control of the city’s underworld. Throughout most of the decade, bombings, beatings and murders ravished the streets and drew headlines around the country. Greene was killed in a car bombing 40 years ago this week on October 6, 1977.

THE CLEVELAND MOB WAR TIMELINE: 1970-1978

October 31, 1971 – Art Snepeger, Danny Greene’s gopher and overall right-hand man, is blown up in a car bomb he was attaching to the Cadillac of Greene’s friend-turned-rival in the trash-hauling industry Michael (Big Mike) Fratto.

November 26, 1971 – Michael (Big Mike) Fratto is killed in a shootout with Danny Greene which broke out when a car carrying Fratto approached a jogging Greene at Cleveland’s White City Beach Park. Greene is let off on self-defense grounds.

March 29, 1975 – Notorious Cleveland Jewish mobster and numbers boss Alex (Shondor) Birns is blown up in a car bomb attached to his Cadillac parked behind Christy’s Lounge on Detroit Street after a falling out with Greene, a former protégé of his.

September 19, 1975 — Cleveland mob figure John Conte disappears on his way to a meeting with Greene to discuss business in the local vending machine racket. He is later discovered beaten to death in suburban Austintown. Conte was a close friend and lieutenant of Buckeye State mafia capo Joe Gallo.

May 26, 1976 – Longtime Cleveland mafia Godfather John Scalish dies on the operating table in a risky medical procedure on his ailing heart. The heavily-respected 64-year old Scalish had led the Ohio crime family since the 1940s and reportedly tapped capo James (Jack White) Licavoli before he died. Scalish’s passing sends the city’s underworld into a freefall it would never recover from, starting with Greene and his buddy John Nardi, the nephew of Scalish’s consigliere, Anthony Milano, making a play for the crown themselves.

July 19, 1976 – Innocent civilian Frank Pircio, the 50-year old neighbor of Cleveland mob soldier Alfred (Allie Con) Calabrese, is killed in a car bomb attached to Calabrese’s brand-new Lincoln Continental when going to move the vehicle obstructing his own on his way to work one early summer morning.

July 21, 1976 – Infamous Cleveland mob enforcer Eugene (The Animal) Ciasullo is nearly murdered in a porch bomb planted under his house. Ciasullo survives the blast, but the explosion blew apart his stomach and he was in the hospital recovering for weeks before voluntarily bowing from the hostilities.

August 22, 1976 — Cleveland mob associate and labor union strong arm Joe Kovach is shot to death in front of his home.

August 23, 1976 – Cleveland mafia underboss Calogero (Leo Lips) Moceri disappears, his blood-soaked Mercedes the only evidence of his slaying. Moceri was don Jack Licavoli’s cousin and best friend. Earlier that month, Moceri had gotten into a public verbal spat with John Nardi at the annual Feast of the Assumption.

April 5, 1977 – Hells Angel biker Enis (Eagle) Crnic is killed while attempting to attach a car bomb to a vehicle belonging to eastside Italian mob associate John (Johnny Del) Delzoppo. Despite the Hells Angels working relationship with the mafia, Crnic was hired by Greene for the job, greatly angering Licavoli and his administration.

May 17, 1977 – Aspiring Buckeye State mafia overlord and labor union boss John Nardi is killed in a car bomb outside his labor union hall.

June, 23 1977 – Cleveland mob associate and explosive expert Henry (Boom Boom) Grecco, a member of the hit team that planned and carried out the Nardi bombing, vanishes, presumably in “clean-up” from the Nardi job.

October 6, 1977 – Cagey Cleveland Irish mob boss Danny (The Irishman) Greene is killed in a car bomb in the parking lot of a suburban Lyndhurst, Ohio dentist’s office.

November 17, 1977 — Irish mob lieutenant Elmer Brittain is shot to death inside his office located on Cleveland’s Westside. Brittain was closely aligned with Greene

Summer of 1978 – The year after Greene’s murder, his former Westside Irish mob, known amongst themselves as the “Celtic Club,” was merged into Licavoli’s Eastside Italian mafia. A peace meeting in late June 1978 between both factions was brokered by rising Cleveland mafia lieutenant Tommy (The Chinaman) Sinito.

July 6, 1978 – Cleveland mobster Joey Bonarrigo is murdered in a beef with the Hells Angels.

November 16, 1978 – Irish mob strong arm Keith (The Enforcer) Ritson, who acted as Danny Greene’s main muscle and top hit man, is shot to death by Hans (The Surgeon) Graewe, a German-born Cleveland mafia associate and deranged assassin, on orders of the Licavoli group after word of Ritson’s intent on settling old scores with the Italians began surfacing in the weeks following the successful peace conference.

The post The Cleveland Mob Wars Timeline: Danny Greene Dueled With Italians In 1970s, Lost Life & Limbs In Battle appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The man probably responsible for arranging the details of labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa’s kidnapping and murder, snarling, steely-eyed Detroit mafia captain Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone, will be played by little-known actor Patrick Gallo in The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s much-anticipated gangster “supergroup” film currently in production on the east coast about the relationship between Hoffa and union enforcer and hit man Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran. Right before he died in 2003, Sheeran claimed to have been the triggerman in Hoffa’s iconic, still-unsolved slaying, an assertion the FBI rejected after a DNA scrub of the house in Northwest Detroit that Sheeran said he clipped Hoffa in came up empty.

Robert De Niro is playing Sheeran, while Al Pacino is cast as Hoffa. Like many of those already involved in supporting roles in the film, Patrick Gallo has done recent on-screen work at HBO. He’s appeared in an episode of The Deuce, the cable television network’s dive into the 1970s Times Square sex trade in New York and the Emmy Award-winning Boardwalk Empire about the Prohibition Era underworld in Atlantic City.

Hoffa, the fiery, notoriously stubborn and hard-nosed former president of the Teamsters, vanished from a suburban Detroit restaurant parking lot on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 on his way to a lunch meeting with Tony Giacalone, his longtime contact in mob circles dating back to his early days in union politics. Giacalone was one of the mobsters Hoffa used his close relationship with to maneuver up the ranks of the union, eventually grabbing the Teamsters presidency in 1958. Hoffa became a fixture in the press for his blustery and strong-willed and was viewed by many as the voice of the American working man.

In the years preceding his murder, Hoffa butted heads with those very same mob figures he was once allied with over his desire to return to the union’s top spot after a prison stint for bribery and fraud that saw him relinquish his post. Observed visiting Hoffa at his lakeside home in the days before he was killed, Hoffa had hoped Giacalone could play peacemaker with his bosses in organized crime who opposed his re-election bid. In reality, authorities theorize he was tasked to coordinate the specifics for Hoffa’s murder, selling him on the setup and assigning a team of assassins to handle the wet work.

Nobody has ever been arrested or charged in the Hoffa homicide probe. Always considered the No. 1 suspect in the murder investigation, Giacalone, the face of the Detroit mob on the street for the second half of the 20th Century and believed to have ordered or personally carried out dozens of gangland slayings, died in 2001 at 82 of kidney failure under federal indictment for racketeering. He did seven years behind bars (1979-1986) for tax evasion and extortion in the wake of the Hoffa hit.

On the day Hoffa disappeared in the summer of 1975, Giacalone was down the road from where Hoffa was last seen at his headquarters, the Southfield Athletic Club. His brother and fellow powerful Motown Mafioso Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone is thought by investigators to have represented him on the actual job itself — he went unaccounted for by his FBI surveillance unit that particular afternoon. Tony Jack’s son had his car (a 1975 maroon-colored Mercury Marquis) confiscated in the days following Hoffa turning up missing under the belief that it was used in the kidnapping, murder and body disposal. DNA from Hoffa has been linked to the backseat and trunk of the younger Giacalone’s vehicle.

Scorsese has collected a star-studded ensemble for his adaption of Charles Brandt’s 2004 best-selling book, I Heard You Paint Houses. Besides De Niro and Pacino, he recruited Joe Pesci out of retirement to play rural Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino and cast Harvey Keitel as Philadelphia mafia don Angelo Bruno, a pair of one-time Hoffa mob confidants that sanctioned his assassination.

Sheeran was Bufalino’s right hand man and main strong arm for his affairs in the Teamsters, often doing muscle work directly for Hoffa, too . Cameras began rolling on the 100-million dollar Netflix production in New York City earlier this month and the movie is expected to have a limited theatre run in late 2018 or early 2019.

The post ‘The Irishman’ Hoffa Movie Fills Tony Giacalone Role, Scorsese Selects Patrick Gallo To Play Notorious Detroit Street Boss appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Back in the early 1990s, Danny DeVito and Jack Nicholson told Jimmy Hoffa’s life story on the silver screen to a lukewarm response. The 1992 Christmas Day release of Hoffa by 20^th Century Fox Studio was directed by DeVito – who also co-starred – and got Nicholson a Golden Globe Award nomination for his portrayal of the historic slain labor union leader. However, the film itself failed to make a dent at the box office, raking in just $30,000,000 against a $35,000,000 budget and underwhelmed critics.

Jimmy Hoffa was the face of the working man in America in the second half of the 20th Century. Supported by the mafia, he ascended to the presidency of the Teamsters union in the 1950s before a falling out with the very same mobsters he relied on to climb the ranks of the union resulted in his murder – Hoffa was last seen on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 en route to a lunch date with a pair of mob capos at a suburban Detroit restaurant. His remains have never been found and nobody has ever been arrested in the kidnapping and homicide case that remains a part of the modern-day pop culture zeitgeist over four decades later.

Next up in the Hoffa to Hollywood department is Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Hoffa-centered film, The Irishman, featuring a $100,000,000 Netflix budget, a powerhouse cast spearheaded by Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel and currently shooting in parts of New York and New Jersey. While DeVito’s Hoffa movie took significant creative liberties with its script and storytelling format, The Irishman will be considered straight fiction by most experts.

The Scorsese-helmed flick tackles the relationship between Hoffa and a Delaware-based Teamsters goon and hit man named Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran and Sheeran’s highly-questionable boast that he was the triggerman in Hoffa’s still-unsolved slaying, first reported in author and attorney Charlie Brandt’s 2004 NY Times Best-Selling book about Sheeran called I Heard You Paint Houses. The FBI and the majority of historians surrounding the case cast heavy doubt on the claim. Sheeran passed away prior to the book’s publication. De Niro is playing Sheeran in the movie and Pacino is playing Hoffa.

Let’s look back at 1992’s Hoffa and how the tale that it spun stacked up to reality:

Hoffa movie characters – FACT OR FICTION?

Jimmy Hoffa – Legendary leading man Jack Nicholson captured Hoffa’s passion, fire-and-brimstone personality and combative nature with an over-the-top performance that fit the role and the man himself through-and-through.

Bobby Ciaro – Actor-director Danny DeVito played a composite character, based partially on Hoffa’s adopted son Chuckie O’Brien and partially on Detroit Teamsters official and longtime Hoffa loyalists Bobby Holmes. O’Brien and Hoffa had been feuding in the months preceding Hoffa’s disappearance. Authorities believe O’Brien had possession of the car used to kidnap his surrogate dad the day he went missing in July 1975, but aren’t certain of his actual role, or if he played any at all, in the murder conspiracy itself. Holmes met briefly with O’Brien the afternoon Hoffa was killed to take possession of a fresh-water salmon. DeVito’s Bobby Ciaro was Hoffa’s right-hand man in the film.

Frank Fitzsimmons – Well-known character actor J.T. Walsh accurately portrayed “Big Fitzy,” Hoffa’s less-combustible, easier-to-puppet vice president and successor, who betrayed him and sided with the mob in Hoffa’s battle to reclaim the Teamsters presidency. Fitzsimmons ran the union from 1971 when Hoffa stepped down from behind bars until he died of cancer in 1981. An unsuccessful car bombing in the parking lot of a Southwest Detroit tavern aimed at killing Big Fitzy and his son in the summer of 1975 — as shown in the movie — is alleged to have set in motion the final phase of the Hoffa murder conspiracy.

Carol D’Allesandro – Mob movie staple Armand Assante played a character based directly on Detroit mafia street boss Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone, Hoffa’s primary conduit to the organized crime figures that at first provided the backing for his political reign in the labor union and then killed him for refusing to retire following a prison term. In the movie, like in real life with Tony Jack, Assante’s “Dally” character set Hoffa up to be murdered, luring him to a meeting where he was kidnapped and slain.

Pete Connolly – Oscar-nominated supporting actor John C. Reilly played a composite character based partially on Richard (Little Fitz) Fitzsimmons, Big Fitzy’s son and fellow Teamsters leader, and Edward Grady Partin, the Louisiana Teamsters agent and star witness against Hoffa at his trial for fraud related to the handling of the union pension fund. The “Petey” Connolly character in the movie was Big Fitzy’s nephew, who turned against Hoffa and the Teamsters in court.

Red Bennett – Character actor John P. Ryan played a character based loosely on former labor union powerbroker, trusted mob associate and early Hoffa ally, Paul (Red) Dorfman. While Ryan’s character in the movie was Irish, in reality, Red Dorfman was Jewish.

The post Real-To-Reel: DeVito & Nicholson’s ‘Hoffa’ Film – What’s Fact, What’s Fiction In 1992 Biopic appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Jimmy Hoffa’s love life will be addressed in Martin Scorsese’s heavily-anticipated mob “supergroup” movie The Irishman, currently filming and chronicling the relationship between the iconic slain labor union boss and east coast mafia hit man Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran. Hoffa’s been missing since the summer of 1975, a victim of a beef with his one-time benefactors in the underworld.

According to recent reports from the set announcing the casting of Academy Award winning supporting actress Anna Paquin as Sheeran’s rebellious daughter Peggy, a subplot of the story will revolve around the Peggy character’s growing attraction to Hoffa. Whether Hoffa, a frequent adulterer despite his public image at the time as a staunch family man, and Sheeran’s young daughter ever carried on a romantic relationship in real life is unknown.

Paquin, 35, is best known for her starring role as Sookie Stackhouse in the HBO vampire drama True Blood and for her work in films like The X-Men franchise, The Piano, She’s All That and Almost Famous. She won the Oscar for The Piano in 1993 at just 11 years old and the 2009 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama for True Blood.

Robert De Niro is playing Sheeran and Al Pacino is cast as Hoffa in the $100,000,000 megawatt Netflix production gunning for a late 2018 or early 2019 release. Based on the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charlie Brandt in which Sheeran claims to have been the man responsible for shooting Hoffa to death 42 years ago, the movie will also include Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel as the pair of Pennsylvania mob dons – Russell Bufalino and Angelo Bruno, respectively – Sheeran worked for out of his Delaware Teamsters branch. The FBI and most experts and historians don’t give Sheeran’s admission much weight.

The 62-year old Hoffa, president of the mammoth Teamsters union from 1958 until he stepped down while in prison in 1971, disappeared from a Bloomfield Township, Michigan restaurant parking lot on the afternoon of July 30, 1975. His body has never been found. At the time of his kidnapping and murder, Hoffa was feuding with his former allies in the mafia. The day he vanished he was on his way to a lunch meeting with mob powers Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone of Detroit and Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, representing the Genovese crime family in New York.

Anna Paquin

Hoffa married his wife Josephine in 1936 and the pair had two children – their daughter Barbara is a retired judge and their son James P. Hoffa has been the president of the Teamsters for the past two decades. The role of Josephine Hoffa in The Irishman will be played by Welker White, best remembered as Lois the superstitious babysitter in Scorsese’s classic Goodfellas.

Those once close to Hoffa describe him as a loving husband and father, but a rampant womanizer as well. Around the time he wed Josephine, Hoffa was having a love affair with infamous Midwest gun moll Sylvia Paris, an aspiring actress and model known to have dated multiple gangsters in Detroit, Kansas City and Chicago. Tony Giacalone had an affair with Paris too. Both Hoffa and Giacalone served as surrogate father figures to Paris’ son Chuckie O’Brien, who followed Hoffa into the Teamsters and may have been involved in the conspiracy to murder him, however has never faced any charges.

According to a Michigan State Police report from the 1960s, one of Hoffa’s girlfriends in Florida was instructed by Giacalone to rob Hoffa’s safe located in a luxury high-rise Miami apartment building and bring the items retrieved from the theft back to him in Detroit. Giacalone is considered the No. 1 suspect in the still-ongoing Hoffa homicide investigation despite having died himself of cancer in February 2001 while under indictment for racketeering.

It wasn’t only Hoffa himself partaking in extramarital activity. Per FBI records, in 1966 Hoffa sought permission from then Detroit mob don Joe Zerilli to have local mafia figure Anthony (Tony Long) Cimini killed for having an affair with his wife Josephine. Cimini was a button man with deep ties in the Teamsters. Zerilli denied Hoffa’s request to bump him off and Cimini died of natural causes in 2005.

The post Hoffa’s Affairs Of The Heart Examined In Scorsese’s ‘Irishman’ Movie, Oscar Winner Anna Paquin On Board As Sheeran’s Daughter appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Former acting boss of the New England mafia, Anthony (Spucky) Spagnolo was released from federal prison late last week after serving two years for extortion. The 75-year old Spagnolo collected thousands of dollars in protection money from Boston’s Constitution Vending and the Revere Moose Lodge, a local social club in the mob hotbed of suburban Revere, Massachusetts. He pled guilty to the charges in 2015, admitting to accepting $50,000 in tribute cash over an eight-year time span, and did his term behind bars in a New Jersey correctional facility. He’ll be on house arrest until December.

The extortion case carried threats of bodily harm to those trying to cross him. When one of the men who ran the Revere Moose Lodge decided to try to remove vending machines provided by Constitution Vending and replace them with machines from another vending company, he was called to a meeting with Spagnolo and threatened with violence. After a rival vending company contacted the lodge and attempted to persuade them to use their machines, instead of Constitution Vending’s, the owner of the company was approached by Spagnolo and threatened as well.

Spagnolo’s co-defendant in the case, fellow Patriarca crime family figure Pryce (Stretch) Quintina, 77, came out of lock up back in the spring. His predecessor as the Patriarca’s acting boss, Anthony (The Little Cheese) DiNunzio, was released from prison on his own extortion conviction last month. DiNunzio’s older brother, Carmen (The Big Cheese) DiNunzio, is alleged to be the syndicate’s current don and bases his affairs out of the Gemini Social Club in Boston’s North End Little Italy neighborhood.

A multiple-time convicted felon, racketeer and drug dealer, Spucky Spagnolo got his start in the East Boson wing of the New England mafia. Despite his genuine tough guy reputation, he’s known for his sense of humor. Once after a car he was driving in was pulled over by police and an officer found a pair of guns wrapped in a towel under the passenger’s seat, per the arrest report, he responded by saying “Wow, how did those get there?”

Spagnolo’s arrest record dates back to the late 1950s, with charges ranging from public drunkenness and disturbing the peace to narcotics trafficking, bookmaking and armed robbery. According to FBI informants, he traveled to California in the winter of 1976 with East Boston capo Joe (J.R.) Russo to murder notorious New England mob turncoat Joe (The Animal) Barboza, living in hiding under an assumed name in San Francisco. Russo was allegedly the triggerman and Spagnolo drove the getaway car.

Throughout the 1980s, Spagnolo frequented, The Roma, an East Boston Italian restaurant owned by Biagio DiGiacomo, a Sicilian-born New England mobster and got stung by an FBI undercover operation there when he befriended an FBI agent named Vince DelaMontaigne, who started hanging out at the eatery posing as an aspiring wiseguy. DelaMontaigne and Spagnolo ran illegal card games and sold drugs together. On one occasion in 1986, Spagnolo got into a verbal altercation with a patron at The Roma and DelaMontaigne had to stop him from stabbing the man with a 12-inch hunting knife he was brandishing.

While buddying around town with DelaMontaigne, Spagnolo’s name surfaced in another homicide investigation — the October 28, 1985 slaying of North End Goodella Jimmy Limoli. The word on the street was Limoli had stolen $100,000 of cocaine from Spagnolo the previous month. In January 1987, with the Beantown crime syndicate on the verge of erupting into violence and splitting into an all-out civil war, Spagnolo was tape-recorded telling DelaMontaigne, “Things are tough these days in the mafia…..I might have to go back to making money the old-fashioned way, pulling kids out of their sneakers and emptying their fucking pockets.”

Due to DelaMontaigne’s undercover work, Spagnolo was indicted in a giant racketeering case in 1990 and convicted a year later. He did nine years in prison and upon his release in 2000, he received a promotion to captain, per FBI documents. Authorities believe Spagnolo served as acting boss of the Patriarca crime family from 2012 until he was jailed in 2015.

The post Boston Mobster ‘Spucky’ Spagnolo Sprung From Prison, Back On The Scene In Beantown appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The fabled Kronk Boxing Gym, once home to dozens of world champion prize fighters and the “King of Kronk” himself, legendary trainer Emanuel Steward, burned to the ground on Detroit’s westside over the weekend, ending almost a century standing at the corner of McGraw and Junction. Located inside the basement of what was the Kronk Recreational Center, the gym and its inhabitants shot to world prominence in the last vestiges of boxing’s golden era in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing adulation and iconic prestige to the tiny, cramped sweat box responsible for 41 championship belts under Steward’s guidance.

The fanfare surrounding activity at the gym and those training there back in the day also attracted the interest of federal law enforcement. The feds thought the drug dealers were plying their trade in conjunction with some of the fighters as well as possibly using them and Steward himself to help launder their illegal proceeds, per sources and FBI files. While Steward came away from the investigation unscathed, three of his boxers didn’t fare as well. One remains behinds bars to this very day, a non-violent drug offender who could wind up spending the rest of his life in prison.

Steward died in 2012 and the recreation center and gym haven’t been operational in over a decade. Authorities speculate arson was involved in the fire that torched the building back on Saturday. The Kronk was the city of Detroit’s first publically-funded rec center, opened in 1920 in the wake of World War I ending.

Following a multi-year probe in conjunction between the FBI, DEA and IRS, Kronk fighters Darrell Chambers, Donald (The Lone Star Cobra) Curry and William (Stanley the Steamer) Longstreet were each indicted for narcotics trafficking in May 1994. Longstreet turned witness for the government and testified at the 1995 trial. Curry, a welterweight world champion, was found not guilty. Chambers, the alleged mastermind of the conspiracy and childhood friends with Kronk’s favorite son Tommy (The Hitman) Hearns, wound up being convicted and hasn’t seen the light of day since.

Currently retired, Hearns, like Steward, an unsuccessful target of the federal inquiry, according to FBI records, won five different world titles in five different weight classes and was known to consort with local Detroit underworld figures. Steward and Hearns were in attendance at Chambers and Curry’s trial.

In late 1992, the DEA had a notorious and controversial paid informant named Andrew Chambers (no relation to Darrell) infiltrate the Kronk Gym drug organization. Chambers was paid a whopping $4,000,000 and testified in more than 300 cases for the government. The DEA suspended his use as an informant in 2000 when it was discovered he perjured himself in court testimony on 16 separate occasions. As of 2013, Andrew Chambers was back working the DEA per published reports.

A pair of DEA agents testified at Darrell Chambers’ January 1995 trial that they followed the two Chambers, Donald Curry and James Longstreet to the Bahamas in September 1992 and watched the boxers negotiate a half-million dollar cocaine deal. Only $225,000 of the deal was completed, but the government felt it had enough evidence to bring a case.

After Curry’s acquittal, he fought for another two years, retiring from the ring in 1997 with a 34-6 record. Longstreeet pled guilty to the charges as a requirement of his plea deal and did three years in prison. His final record in the ring was 22-3.

Turning pro in 1981, Chambers, a born-and-bred eastside Detroiter, burst out of the gate to a 12-0 start and got a shot at well-regarded Ohioan Bobby Joe Young in a nationally-televised middleweight bout in Las Vegas during the summer of 1983. Chambers, today 56, lost on a technical knockout in the ninth round. He finished his pro career with a 22-2 overall mark.

There are those of the belief that Darrell Chambers was scapegoated (at the very least in regards to his sentence) for the frustration the government felt for the inability to catch bigger fish in its investigation into the Kronk Gym.

At least one exclusive Gangster Report source confirms this allegation.

“I was in meetings with the FBI regarding the Chambers case, all they wanted to know about was Manny and Tommy and other people they thought were doing dirt around him in that Kronk orbit. They didn’t care about Darrell, they wanted to use him to collect bigger fish for their mantelpieces. When they couldn’t, when Darrell wouldn’t give them what they wanted, they nailed him as hard as they could.”

The post Detroit’s Famous Kronk Gym Destroyed By Fire, ’94 Drug Case Part Of Storied Training Ground’s Legacy appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Recently-slain Detroit rapper Rodney (Doughboy Roc) Yeargin was convicted of narcotics trafficking last summer and per sources his murder earlier this week is being investigated by authorities for links to the local drug world. The 29-year old Yeargin, signed to rap superstar Young Jeezy’s Def Jam-backed CTE label since 2013, was found shot to death behind the wheel of his car Monday afternoon on Detroit’s westside. He had done two short prison stints in the past decade for firearm offenses, the last one in 2015 ending when the weapons charges against him were dropped.

Yeargin was part of the rap group Doughboyz Cashout, one of the most prominent underground hip hop acts in the Midwest today, beloved by droves of fans for their gritty, “ghetto fabulous” lyrics and vivid storytelling about street life. The group’s music attracts millions of listens on SoundCloud and YouTube.

Arrested on April 8 in Detroit for possession with intent to manufacture and distribute a controlled substance, Yeargin pled guilty back in June and received probation. He had already been on probation with the state of Michigan for a 2010 weapons conviction. In February 2010, Yeargin and associates were caught in a raid of a Huntington, West Virginia drug house by the FBI with OxyContin pills and several unregistered firearms.

Detroit drug pushers have been doing business in southern states like West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee for decades. West Virginia and the Huntington region has been of particular interest to hustlers and dealers from Detroit since the late 2000s.

The post Motor City Rapper’s Murder Possible Drug Hit, Doughboy Roc Took Narcotics Arrest As Recently As Six Months Ago appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Federal investigators had recently-slain Detroit rapper Rodney (Doughboy Roc) Yeargin in their sights, at least partially due to a tip received following a drug raid carried out in a Southeast Michigan suburb earlier this year, according to sources. Yeargin, 29, was killed this week on Detroit’s westside, shot to death behind the wheel of his car. His murder is being probed for links to the local drug trade.

On February 28, 2017, Yeargin was intercepted by DEA agents boarding a plane from Detroit to Arizona where agents confiscated over $50,000 in cash the popular hip-hopper was holding on his person and in his luggage. The Detroit News was the first to report the seizure. The government believes the money was either the proceeds or the payment in a drug transaction. Less than two months later, Yeargin was arrested by police in Detroit and charged in a pair of cocaine cases, which he pled out in and got probation.

Yeargin was part of the Doughboyz Cashout rap group. Doughboyz Cashout, the most well known of today’s underground hip hop acts in Michigan beloved by droves of fan for their gritty, “ghetto fabulous” lyrics and vivid storytelling about street life, has been signed to Young Jeezy’s CTE label under the Def Jam banner since 2013. His arrest record included two firearm offenses and a drug and weapons arrest in West Virginia six years ago.

The interaction Yeargin had with the DEA at Detroit Metropolitan Airport back in the winter was a result of a raid on a suspected drug house in Waterford, Michigan weeks earlier, according to sources familiar with the inquiry into Yeargin’s affairs. Both an attorney representing Yeargin and the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office have filed lawsuits in federal court to retrieve the cash. Yeargin’s lawyer, Ivan Land claims the money came from his client’s music career.

The post GR SOURCES: Tip Out Of Suburbs Put Slain Detroit Rapper Doughboy Roc On DEA’s Radar appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The 1989 gangland revenge slaying of Sherman Christian was tangentially tied to the so-called Kronk boxing drug case of the 1990s. Christian was gunned down in a highway drive-by on the orders of Olee Robinson, who was loosely connected to the Kronk narcotics conspiracy indictment which landed in May 1994. Robinson was part of a network of drug pushers working with one-time Kronk boxers, Darrell Chambers and William (Stanley the Steamer) Longstreet, two of three Kronk-trained fighters convicted in a cocaine conspiracy almost 23 years ago.

Chambers, a 56-year old one-time middleweight contender trained by the legendary Emanuel Steward at his iconic westside Detroit gym, has been behind bars since the winter of 1995 after being found guilty in a drug conspiracy case. He’s serving a life prison sentence as a result of the conviction, despite it being a non-violent offense.The building that served as the former site of the Kronk Gym and Kronk Recreational Center burned to the ground last week in a suspicious fire.

Home to 41 world champion prize fighters, the Kronk closed its doors in 2006. Steward passed away in 2012. The most well-known boxer to come out of the Kronk is Detroit’s favorite son, five-time world champion Tommy (The Hitman) Hearns, who was a childhood friend of Chambers on the city’s rugged eastside. Per sources, both Hearns and Steward were investigated for possible connections to laundering drug proceeds for Kronk fighters and former Kronk fighters, but never charged with any crimes.

Chambers and Longstreet were busted in 1994 after their drug operation was infiltrated by a soon-to-revealed tainted DEA informant. Also indicted in the case was high-profile Kronk boxer Donald (The Lone Star Cobra) Curry, winner of two world championship belts in the welterweight and super welterweight divisions. He was acquitted at their 1995 trial. Longstreet testified against Curry and Chambers in court and only did three years in prison. Olee Robinson wasn’t a part of the Kronk case – he was indicted separately on drug and murder charges in 1993 and found guilty at a trial in December of that year.

Robinson fronted his wholesale cocaine business through a luxury car-leasing company in suburban Southfield, Michigan. In April 1989, Robinson and his girlfriend Michelle West were robbed of $25,000 cash at gunpoint leaving Robinson’s car-leasing office. They soon found out that the culprit was the boyfriend of West’s best friend, Cynthia Horry, another area drug world figure named Sherman Christian.

On June 23, 1989, Christian was killed in drive-by shooting on the Southfield Freeway. The month previous, West helped Horry take out a million-dollar life insurance policy on Christian through Sun Life of Canada bank. Although Horry was the original beneficiary on the policy, West and Robinson forged a transfer of duty to West as trustee for Christian’s children and eventually recovered a portion of the money (splitting the payout with Christian’s ex-wife).

According to trial testimony and police records, Robinson, today 65 and serving life in prison, farmed out the murder contract on Christian’s head to his right hand man Edward (Tricky) Osborne, who in turn hired triggermen Michael (Little Mike) Abernathy and Lopez (Big Pez) Moore for the job. Osborne became a government witness. Another Robinson lieutenant testified that when Robinson saw Christian’s slaying being reported on the television news, he immediately turned to others and said “What did I tell you I was going to do to that motherfucker.”

The post Murder Of Detroit Stick-Up Kid Loosely Linked To 1990s Kronk Gym Narcotics Probe appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The string of violence preceding the kidnapping and murder of historic labor union chief Jimmy Hoffa in 1975 will be depicted in The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s much-anticipated mob “supergroup” film about the relationship between Hoffa and east coast mafia hit man Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran currently in production in New York. This week, Scorsese and company will shoot a scene in Long Island’s Hempstead Harbor where Michigan Teamsters’ boss Dave Johnson has his boat blown to pieces in a marina bombing, part of a series of intimidation tactics launched by Hoffa’s former backers in the mob and aimed at him and his inner circle. Hempstead Harbor is standing in for the Detroit River where the explosion actually took place 42 years ago.

Jimmy Hoffa was president of the goliath Teamsters Union from 1958 through 1971. He was killed for attempting to reclaim power against the wishes of the mafia. Johnson served as president of Local 299, Hoffa’s home base in Detroit and was a longtime staunch Hoffa ally.

Right before he died in 2003, Frank Sheeran said he was the triggerman in Hoffa’s iconic, still-unsolved slaying, an assertion the FBI rejected after a DNA scrub of the house in Northwest Detroit that Sheeran said he clipped Hoffa in came up empty. Robert De Niro is playing Sheeran in the upcoming Scorsese flick based on Charlie Brandt’s 2004 best-selling book entitled I Heard You Paint Houses, while Al Pacino is cast as Hoffa.

Hoffa vanished from a suburban Detroit restaurant parking lot on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 on his way to a lunch meeting with two mobsters. He had used his close relationship with the mob in the Midwest to maneuver up the ranks of the union in the 1940s and 50s, but butted heads with his gangster benefactors in the years before he was slain due to his dogged desire to return to the Teamsters’ top spot after a prison stint for bribery. Those in the mob once loyal to Hoffa had shifted their allegiances to his successor and one-time vice president, Frank Fitzsimmons.

Actor Gary Basaraba is playing Fitzsimmons, but it is unknown who will be in the role of Johnson. The 1978 movie Blue Collar, starring Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel and taking place in a Detroit auto factory, featured a character loosely based on Dave Johnson (called Eddie Johnson) played by Harry Bellaver.

As a means of thwarting Hoffa’s effort to recapture the union’s presidency, the mob constructed a Teamsters “goon squad” to ignite a strong-arm campaign against him. That campaign was in high gear in the summer of 1975.

Besides his boat being bombed, Johnson had the windows in his office shot out by gunfire one night. Six weeks prior to Hoffa’s murder, another Teamsters loyalist of his named Ralph Proctor was jumped and severely beaten outside Nemo’s bar and grill down the street from Local 299. Frank Fitzsimmons and his son, Richard (Little Fitz) Fitzsimmons, survived a car bombing in Nemo’s parking lot less than three weeks before Hoffa went missing unscathed.

Hoffa himself was blamed for the attack on the two Fitzsimmons. Johnson and Richard Fitzsimmons had been battling for control of Local 299 in the months surrounding Hoffa’s murder.

Nobody has ever been arrested or charged in the world-famous Hoffa homicide probe. Proctor and fellow Hoffa friend and Teamsters official Otto Wendel were both killed gangland style in the Detroit area in the years following Hoffa’s disappearance. Wendel was shot to death in 1978. Proctor was shot to death in 1984.

Scorsese has collected a star-studded ensemble for his Irishman movie. Besides De Niro and Pacino, he recruited Joe Pesci out of retirement to play Northeast Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino and cast Harvey Keitel as Philadelphia mafia don Angelo Bruno. Bufalino and Bruno were a pair of one-time Hoffa mob confidants that sanctioned his assassination. Sheeran was Bufalino’s right hand man and a Teamsters boss out of Delaware. Cameras began rolling on the 100-million dollar Netflix production last month and the movie is expected to have a limited theatre run in late 2018 or early 2019.

The post Exploding Onto The Big Screen: Detroit Teamsters Leader Dave Johnson’s Boat Bombing Will Be Shown In New Scorsese Hoffa Film appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The brutal labor-union related murder of Anthony (Three Finger Tony) Castellitto over a half-century ago will be shown on the big screen in acclaimed director Martin Scorsese’s highly-anticipated gangster “supergroup” movie The Irishman about the relationship between historic slain Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa and east coast hit man Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran. The film is currently shooting in New York and New Jersey and will star Robert De Niro as Sheeran and Al Pacino as Hoffa. Stunt man and bit-player actor John Cenatiempo (The Departed, American Gangster, The Sopranos) has been cast in the Three Finger Tony Castellitto role.

Castellitto was bludgeoned and strangled to death at his fishing cottage in Kerhonkson, New York in June 1961 on the orders of mob captain Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano of the Genovese crime family after Provenzano and Castellitto began fighting for control of Teamsters Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey. Provenzano died in prison in 1988 of a sudden heart attack while serving a life sentence for the Castellitto hit.

At the time of the his death, Tony Pro was one of the top suspects in Hoffa’s summer 1975 gangland slaying. Hoffa was on his way to meet Provenzano, an ally-turned-enemy, for lunch at a restaurant in suburban Detroit on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 to discuss his own feud with the mafia related to labor-union politics when he disappeared. His remains have never been found. Neither have Castellitto’s. Three Finger Tony was the No. 3 in charge of Local 560 and was gunning to unseat Provenzano’s as the Local’s puppet master.

From 1958 through 1971, Hoffa was the president of the goliath Teamsters union and a household name around the world. Unlike in the murder of Three Finger Tony, nobody has ever been arrested in the considerably more notorious Hoffa homicide.

Authorities believe Provenzano lieutenants Salvatore (Sally Bugs) Briguglio, Salvatore (Big Sal) Sinno and Harold (K.O.) Konigsberg were responsible for killing Castellitto. Briguglio, Tony Pro’s longtime right-hand man and thought by some to be the triggerman in the Hoffa hit, was killed himself in the weeks preceding his trial for Castellitto’s murder in December 1978. Konigsberg was convicted for the Castellitto slaying and died in a Florida nursing home in 2014, two years after being released from prison for health reasons. Sinno testified against both Provenzano and Konigsberg in court and entered the Witness Protection Program.

Stephen Graham (Boardwalk Empire) will play Provenzano in The Irishman. Louis Cancelmi is cast as Sally Bugs. Martin Scorsese has collected a star-studded ensemble for his adaption of Charles Brandt’s 2004 best-selling book, I Heard You Paint Houses, in which Sheeran, on his deathbed, dubiously claims to have been the man who shot and killed Hoffa — the FBI and most historians and expert dispute Sheeran’s confession.

Oscar-winner Joe Pesci has come out of retirement to play Northeast Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino in the film and Harvey Keitel is playing Philadelphia mafia don Angelo Bruno. Sheeran was based out of a Teamsters post in Delaware and reported directly to Bufalino and Bruno in his days as a mob thug. Cameras began rolling on the 100-million dollar Netflix production in New York City last month and the movie is expected to have a limited theatre run in 2018.

The post The Three Finger Salute: N.J. Teamster ‘Three Finger Tony’ Castellitto’s Murder To Be Seen In Scorsese’s ‘Irishman’ Movie appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Former North Carolina biker chief William (Chains) Flamont died in a motorcycle crash this fall. The 70-year old Flamont headed the Charlotte chapter of The Outlaws Motorcycle Club in the 1970s and first part of the 1980s, but had hung up his renegade biker spurs following a federal prison sentence. He was killed instantly when his Harley Davidson motorcycle collided with a Jeep Grand Cherokee on September 26 driving on Highway 70 in Hickory, North Carolina.

For most of the 1970s, the Charlotte area Outlaws were at war with the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club for control of drugs and prostitution in the Queen City, a southeast biker hub invaded by the Midwest-based Outlaws and west coast-based Hells Angels at the beginning of the decade. Authorities chalked up at least a dozen gangland homicides to the unrest. For The Outlaws, the city of Charlotte served as a key way station for the club’s narcotics trafficking ventures, which spanned from up north in Detroit and Chicago all the way down to the vice hotbed of South Florida.

Tagged by the government as the most powerful biker boss in North Carolina, Flamont was busted in an FBI sting in November 1982 for his role at the center of a cocaine and marijuana distribution ring. A group of undercover FBI agents had infiltrated Charlotte’s biker underworld months earlier as part of a high-priority investigation into the club dubbed Operation Countervail. Flamont only ended up doing two years behind bars and retired from being president of the Charlotte Outlaws upon walking free, going to work for a local Harley Davidson dealership instead.

On an early morning in the summer of 1979, Flamont was the first person to discover the gory bloodshed in the Queen City’s notorious July 4th Massacre, the mass murder of three Outlaws, a teenage girl and a 28-year old man inside the Outlaws clubhouse in Charlotte — victims of an internal club squabble gone wrong. Traveling back to the Outlaws headquarters after a late-night of partying, Flamont found club members William (Mouse) Dronenberg, Leonard (Terrible Terry) Henderson and William (Waterhead) Allen, along with Bridgette (The Midget) Benfield and Randy Feazell, all shot to death. They had been slain in their sleep.

Benfield, days shy of her 18th birthday, was Henderson’s girlfriend. Feazell had recently met and befriended Mouse Dronenberg, the club’s designated tattoo artist, and was staying overnight at the clubhouse. Terrible Terry Henderson was the Charlotte Outlaws’ top enforcer. Waterhead Allen had fallen asleep standing guard at the clubhouse doorway when he was shot dead.

Police in Charlotte only just closed the infamous quintuple slaying in 2011, placing responsibility for the heinous crime at the feet of former Outlaws probationary member Greg (Angel) Lindaman and his best friend Randy Pigg, another biker world figure from the region. Lindaman had been cut loose as a “probie” and was feuding with Henderson in the weeks preceding the massacre. He passed away in a car crash in Texas in 1990. Pigg died of cancer in 2007.

The post One-Time Charlotte Biker Boss ‘Chains’ Flamont Dies In Car Wreck, Was At Center Of Outlaws-Hells Angels Wars Of 1970s appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Jimmy Hoffa’s surrogate son, Chuckie O’ Brien, one of the suspects in Hoffa’s still-unsolved kidnapping and murder conspiracy, will be played by actor Jesse Plemons in the upcoming gangster “supergroup” movie, The Irishman about the relationship between the slain labor-union leader and east coast hit man Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran. Being helmed by acclaimed director Martin Scorsese, the film is currently shooting in New York and New Jersey and will star Robert De Niro as Sheeran and Al Pacino as Hoffa.

Plemons is best known for supporting roles in hit television shows Friday Night Lights, Fargo and Breaking Bad and films like Black Mass and The Master. On the day Hoffa went missing in the summer of 1975, O’Brien had been beefing with his adopted dad over labor-union politics and was in possession of the vehicle authorities believe Hoffa was kidnapped in and his dead body transported to its final resting place. Nobody has ever been arrested in the case.

Hoffa, the fiery former Teamsters boss who was fighting to retain his post atop the mammoth union, disappeared on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 en route to a lunch meeting in suburban Detroit with mob captains Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone of the Zerilli-Tocco crime family in Michigan and Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano of the Genovese crime family out of New York. He was last witnessed getting into what the FBI thinks was Giacalone’s son’s maroon-colored Mercury Marquis in a Bloomfield Township, Michigan restaurant parking lot and driving away with three unidentified individuals.

O’Brien admits to driving Joseph (Joey Jack) Giacalone’s brand new Mercury Marquis in the hours preceding Hoffa vanishing that afternoon, but denies any involvement in the crime. The FBI has tied Hoffa’s DNA to inside the car itself and its trunk. Today, the Mercury Marquis sits in an FBI storage unit, 81-year old O’Brien lives in retirement in Florida and the younger Giacalone, 64, is alleged to have followed in his dad’s footsteps and serves as a reputed capo in the Detroit mob, looking after his father’s former crew.

From 1958 through 1971, Hoffa served as president of the Teamsters until he relinquished the job in 1971 as a means of getting an early release from prison for bribery, fraud and jury tampering. Leveraging his connections to the underworld to climb the ranks of the union, he butted heads with his one-time mob benefactors after his time behind bars as he maneuvered to become boss of the Teamsters again against their wishes

Chuckie O’Brien

.

A delegate and registered business agent for the Teamsters through Hoffa’s powerbase at Local 299 in Southwest Detroit, O’Brien reportedly sided with the mafia over his surrogate father in the heated dispute. According to federal records, Hoffa had angered O’Brien by refusing to support O’Brien’s bid to get elected as vice president of Local 299 and in retaliation O’Brien, scribe Mario Puzo’s inspiration for the Tom Hagen character in The Godfather movies and book, began spreading rumors that Hoffa was an FBI informant. In the months before his murder, Hoffa had been trying to get O’Brien shipped off to a Teamsters job in Alaska as punishment.

Born to a Kansas City mobster named Sam (The Binger) Scaradino, who used the alias “Frank O’Brien,” Chuckie O’Brien moved to Detroit with his mom Sylvia Pagano and lived with Hoffa, a boyfriend of Pagano’s, for most of his childhood and formative young adult years. Pagano also dated Tony Giacalone. Puzo wrote the Tom Hagen character, a half-German, half-Irish adopted son of fictional mob don Vito Corleone based on stories he had heard about Hoffa and O’Brien’s relationship. Giacalone died of cancer in 2001.

The Irishman boasts a $100,000,000 budget and will be released on Netflix in 2019, with a limited theatre release in late 2018. Martin Scorsese has collected a star-studded ensemble for his adaption of Charles Brandt’s 2004 best-selling book, I Heard You Paint Houses, in which Sheeran, on his deathbed, dubiously claims to have been the man who shot and killed Hoffa — the FBI and most historians and experts dispute Sheeran’s confession.

Oscar-winner Joe Pesci has come out of retirement to play Northeast Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino in the film and Harvey Keitel is playing Philadelphia mafia don Angelo Bruno. Sheeran was based out of a Teamsters post in Delaware and reported directly to Bufalino and Bruno in his days as a mob thug. .

The post Jesse Plemons Cast As Chuckie O’Brien In New Hoffa Flick, Will Play Role Of Murdered Teamsters’ Surrogate Son-Turned-Rival appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Detroit rapper Rodney (Doughboy Roc) Yeargin was laid to rest earlier this week in a funeral fit for royalty. Considering the 29-year old Yeargin was one of the young princes of the Midwest hip-hop scene, it was appropriate. Nearly 1,000 mourners turned out to see the rapper buried, his casket carried on a horse-drawn carriage in a procession which made its way from his childhood home on Detroit’s westside to the cemetery. As the casket was lowered into the grave, a fleet of white doves were released to fly to the angels beside him.

“Rodney was a righteous dude, he had mad love for everybody,” said one mourner. “This is a sad day on the westside. His memory will still be alive through his words, through his music. Those things will last ’cause they were as real as he was.”

Yeargin was killed October 9 on the westside of Detroit, shot to death behind the wheel of his car. His murder is being probed for links to the local drug trade.

A member of the popular Doughboyz Cashout rap group – signed to Def Jam Records though Young Jeezy’s CTE label for the last four years – Yeargin’s activities outside the music world were being eyed by the DEA. Back in February, he had $55,000 in cash confiscated from him as he tried to board a plane from Detroit to Arizona under the DEA’s belief it was drug money. In court filings attempting to retrieve the currency, Yeargin claimed the money was from his rap career and he was going to Arizona to purchase a new car with it. Yeargin’s arrest record included two firearm offenses, a narcotics trafficking pinch last spring and a drug and weapons arrest in West Virginia in 2011.

The post Detroit’s Westside Bids Farewell To Beloved Son, Rapper ‘Doughboy Roc,” Heads To Grave In Style appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The mob in upstate New York was based around Utica, a notoriously tough region in Oneida County nicknamed by some in the past the Empire State’s Sin City, has been gone for more than a quarter century — a 1990 federal racketeering case decimated what was left of true organized crime in the area once ran at various times by crews representing both the mafia in Buffalo and New York City’s Colombo Family. But the last gasp of mob activity in the 1970s and 1980s was a doozy with almost a dozen gangland murders touching the city’s underworld landscape throughout those two decades.

The Falcone brothers, Salvatore and Joe, ran the rackets in Utica from the Prohibition Era into the 1970s. However, when Salvatore died of natural causes in the fall of 1972 and Joe went into retirement, the local mob empire was up for grabs and eventually Colombo crime family-backed Dominic Bretti, fresh off a stint behind bars, took control of the streets until his bust for murder, attempted murder and racketeering put him back in prison in 1982. Bretti, 83, just walked free this year.

The Last Utica Mob Hit Parade (1970-1990)

February 28, 1970 – Mob associate William Conley is blown up by a grenade attached to his car door after leaving Mr. Joe’s restaurant and tavern in South Utica

July 4, 1971 – Mob associate David Sgroi is shot to death, dumped near Hidden Lake just outside Rome, New York city limits

October 3, 1976 – Rogue mob figure Albert (Crazy Al) Marrone is killed in a hail of bullets leaving Alfredo’ Ristorante in New Hartford, New York and walking towards his apartment in East Utica.  Just week removed from his release from a prison stay, he had openly boasted about taking over the area’s mafia faction with the Falcone brothers out of the picture. Marrone’s murder was toasted the next evening at a mob get – together held inside the Alpine Restaurant.

December 20, 1976 – Syracuse produce dealer and mob associate Albert Schiano is killed, shot to death and left on the side of a road near the Onondaga County line

December 3, 1979 – Mob wife Dawn Grillo is strangled and bludgeoned to death for skimming money from a the Bretti mafia crew and possibly cooperating with the authorities

February 14, 1980 – Utica tavern owner and mob associate Richie Clair’s bar is bombed in an attempt on his life, but Clair was already swooped up into police custody after word of the pending murder hit the street. Clair had testified in a trial regarding the Albert Schiano slaying.

January 4, 1983 – Young criminal attorney Joe Dacquino is shot to death inside his office, either in a case of mistaken identity – Dacquino was a protégé of and worked for well-known Utica mob mouthpiece Louie Brindisi – or as a macabre message to his mentor

January 15, 1983 – Mob associate Hector Ambrosi is shot in the back of the head in a Ramada Inn hotel room in New Hartford, New York

January 17, 1983 – Topless dancer Carla Feliciano is stabbed to death inside her Woodside, New York apartment

September 16, 1983 – Mob soldier Angelo Grillo is gunned down at the bar of the Regency Lounge in Utica’s hardscrabble Cornhill neighborhood

October 23, 1983 – Mobster Tommy Bretti — imprisoned crew boss Dominic Bretti’s brother — is severely injured in a porch bomb attack at his Utica home after he had gotten into a beef with members of the old Falcone regime

February 11, 1989 – Longtime local bookie George (Butch) Sandouk is killed inside his apartment for refusing to pay the mob tribute money to run his sports gambling operation in the area

The post The Final Days Of The Mafia In Upstate New York: Utica Mob Murder Timeline (1970-1990) appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The upscale wedding of a famous mob lawyer’s daughter held in the days following Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance will be depicted in the much-anticipated Martin Scorsese movie,The Irishman, about the relationship between the iconic labor union boss and an east coast mafia hit man.

The fiery 62-year old Hoffa was kidnapped and killed on July 30, 1975, vanishing from a suburban Detroit restaurant parking lot on his way to a meeting with a pair of mob captains to discuss his plans to retake the top spot in the Teamsters union. Just over 48 hours later, Hoffa’s longtime attorney Bill Bufalino, a one-time Teamsters power himself and a mouthpiece for numerous high-wattage American mafia figures in his day, married off his baby girl at his estate in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan in front of a cavalcade of mob royalty, including several of those suspected in Hoffa’s murder conspiracy. Hoffa’s remains have never been found and nobody has ever been arrested for his slaying.

The Bufalino wedding was intensely monitored by FBI surveillance units. Bufalino himself had been identified as a “made man” in Detroit’s Zerilli-Tocco crime family by informants to the FBI and Michigan State Police in the years before he became an attorney.

The Irishman is based on the 2003 best-selling book, I Heard You Paint Houses, penned by Charles Brandt chronicling the life of Delaware Teamsters leader and mob assassin Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran, who dubiously claimed on his deathbed he was the triggerman in the Hoffa hit – his confession is unsubstantiated and heavily doubted by historians and the FBI. Scorsese has cast Robert De Niro as Sheeran, Al Pacino as Hoffa and Ray Romano as Bufalino in the $100,000,000 project currently in production in New York and slated for a late 2018 limited-theatre run and 2019 streaming release.

While De Niro and Pacino are legends of the big screen, Romano is more known for his work on television, where he got an Emmy nod for his successful CBS sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. The show ran for nine seasons and won more than a dozen Emmy Awards. Romano has gotten recent rave reviews for his supporting role in the movie The Big Sick.

Bill Bufalino died of cancer in 1992 living in retirement in Florida. He was cousins with Northeast Pennsylvania mob don Russell Bufalino, one of the prime suspects in ordering Hoffa’s execution. Sheeran was Russell Bufalino’s right-hand man and main enforcer. Both Bufalino and Sheeran were present at the August 1 wedding of Bill Bufalino’s daughter. So was Detroit mob street boss Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone and Genovese crime family capo Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano of New Jersey, the two men Hoffa was supposed to meet for lunch the day he vanished two days prior.

Hoffa had used his connections to the underworld to rise to the Teamsters presidency, but relinquished his post in 1971 when he was serving the final months of a five-year prison term for fraud and bribery. Despite warnings from his former benefactors in the mob to stand down and retire, Hoffa insisted on gunning for the goliath labor union’s presidency again, setting his sights on the 1976 election.

In addition to being Hoffa’s attorney and the lawyer for a slew of mobsters around the country, Bill Bufalino was the president of Teamsters Local 985 in Detroit from 1947 through 1967. Local 985 oversaw much of Southeast Michigan’s jukebox delivery and maintenance business, an industry in the Detroit area allegedly controlled by longtime Detroit mafia underboss Angelo (The Chairman) Meli, the uncle of Bufalino’s wife. Reportedly the man who gave Hoffa his start up the ladder of the Teamsters, Meli died of natural causes in 1969.

Bufalino’s son, Bill Jr,, followed his dad into the practice of law and was also the subject of FBI inquiries for his reputed ties to organized crime. According to FBI records, the younger Bufalino ferried mob luminaries from St. Louis and Tampa to his sister’s wedding in the summer of 1975, picking them up from Detroit Metropolitan Airport and driving them to his father’s home in ritzy Grosse Pointe Shores for the nuptials. One federal record from 1974 alleges Bufalino and Detroit mob soldier Danny (The Trigger) Triglia beat up a local gambler indebted to a Zerilli-Tocco crime family-backed Las Vegas casino.

The post The Wedding Of The Year: Mob Lawyer’s Daughter’s Wedding Will Get Scene In Scorsese Hoffa Film ‘The Irishman’ appeared first on The Gangster Report.