More than one internal U.S. Department of Justice memo quotes FBI and DEA informants as saying that hip-hop mogul Sean (Puffy) Combs’ iconic Bad Boys record label was started in the early 1990s with seed money provided by the infamous Black Mafia Family. This year is the 10-year anniversary of the landmark Black Mafia Family case, a colossal indictment that first landed in the fall of 2005 (a deluge of superseding and branch-off indictments would soon follow ) and broke up the biggest urban narcotics conspiracy in American history.

The so-called BMF organization was a bi-coastal drug cartel founded in Detroit around 1990 by the ambitious and savvy Flenory brothers – Demetrius (Big Meech) Flenory and Terry (Southwest T) Flenory -, soon growing to epic heights of power, respect and opulent wealth, with outposts and loyal lieutenants spread across the entire country. Including New York City, where Puffy was based out of and which was also the home of Fleming (ILL) Daniels, one of the Flenory’s most-trusted soldiers and a top-level BMF administrator.

Puffy Combs (aka Puff Daddy, aka P-Diddy) created Bad Boy Records, the No. 1 rap and R&B music label of the late 1990s, in 1993, fresh on the heels of being ousted from his job as Uptown Records CEO Andre Harrell’s second-in-charge, securing a distribution deal through Arista Entertainment and allegedly, according to several informants, a load of start-up cash provided by Big Meech and Southwest T Flenory. The money was delivered to Combs in New York via Fleming and other east coast BMF associates acting as intermediaries, by way of multiple shipments, per DEA informant files. Rumors of these transactions were originally reported in 1998 in a feature piece in Vanity Fair Magazine exploring where Combs received his financing for his ever-growing portfolio of high-profile business endeavors.

Fleming “ILL” Daniels

From a review of court records and a series of first-hand interviews, it’s clear that Puffy’s connections to the BMF empire were far from limited. Combs’ first cousin is convicted BMF soldier, Darryl (Poppa) Taylor, more than one of Puffy’s bodyguards in the past two decades have had significant ties to the BMF gang and Combs’ name was bandied about frequently in court filings related to the BMF case.

Paul (P.J.) Buford, Combs’ head of security in the early-to-mid 2000s, was busted in the BMF indictment and became a fugitive for over three years until his capture in Nebraska in 2009. Poppa Taylor, one of BMF’s primary drug couriers, shuttling bricks of cocaine from Detroit to Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, New York and Georgia, wound up cooperating with the government and was handed a seven-year prison sentence.

Big Meech aspired to eventually transition out of the drug game and into the music game, turning his BMF brand into a legitimate rap label and himself into a southern hip-hop impresario version of P-Diddy from his base of operations in Atlanta. Puffy threw BMF a label-launch party at his upscale Justin’s eatery in June 2003 (Combs has two locations, one in NYC and the other in the ATL, where the party was held), a soiree attended by Big Meech, Southwest T and a cadre of high-ranking BMF brass along with hip-hop industry luminaries, actors, high-end groupies and the media .

Things soured between Big Meech and Puffy Combs in the months after the party when, per DEA documents, Big Meech is alleged to have began trying to extort him and then in November 2003 killed his childhood friend and bodyguard Anthony (Wolf) Jones and Jones’ buddy, Lamont (Riz) Girdy, in a gun fight that occurred in the parking lot of the Atlanta nightclub Chaos. Moments earlier inside the club, Jones and Girdy scuffled with Big Meech and Big Meech’s bodyguard, Ameen (Baby Bull) Hight, in front of hundreds of onlookers. Big Meech and Hight were both shot themselves in the incident and arrested on murder charges but the case would be dropped before it ever went to trial.

Big Meech circa 2003

From his early days growing up with Combs in Mount Vernon, New York, Wolf Jones sported a reputation for ferocity and fearlessness. Puffy had him by his side as his head of security through the peak of his fame in the late 90s and early 2000s as the face of hip hop music, a self-crafted pop-culture pioneer that ushered in the still-ongoing era of hip-hop and rap topping the mainstream charts. Back in 1999, Jones was arrested with Combs, Jennifer Lopez, his actress-singer girlfriend at the time, and Shyne (aka Jamal Barrow), his protégé at the time, in the famous Club New York shooting.

In 1995, police believe Jones shot and killed Jamaal (Jake the Violator) Robles, a bodyguard and close friend of Marion (Suge) Knight, Combs’ rival music mogul and the chief of Death Row Records in Los Angeles, outside Atlanta’s Platinum House lounge after a verbal altercation. It’s a homicide most experts point to as a watershed event in the much-hyped, however oh-so-real East Coast-West Coast rap war that lasted the rest of the decade: the moment when the first of more than a dozen of bodies hit the ground and tensions began escalating to the point of no return – rap legends Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. were each slain in the years to come.

The entire conflict can be traced to the armed robbery and attempted murder of Shakur at New York’s Quad Studio in 1994, an attack Shakur came to believe Combs and Notorious B.I.G., (Combs’ discovery and the lynchpin to his Bad Boy kingdom), either ordered, helped set up or knew about before hand and failed to warn him of. One of the prime suspects in both the recording-studio ambush – Shakur was in an elevator on his way to see Notorious B.I.G. at a recording session when he was robbed and shot – and Shakur’s slayings in Las Vegas in 1996 was Walter (King Tut) Johnson, Combs’ then-bodyguard, head of security and a former New York stick-up kid tied to ILL Daniels and the early-era BMF east coast faction.

Johnson came from a gangster element prevalent in the east coast hip hop scene in the 1990s headed by Jacques (Haitian Jack) Agnant and James (Jimmy Henchman) Rosemond. He’s currently serving a life prison term on an unrelated conviction. Agnant and Rosemond were suspected of arranging the 1994 robbery and shooting of Shakur at Quad Studio. At the time of the Quad Studio attack on Shakur, he and Agnant were involved in a rape case together, charged with sexually assaulting a girl in a hotel room. Both accused the other of informing for the government.

The vocal, intelligent and charismatic Shakur was found guilty the day following being jumped at Quad Studio and almost killed. He’d go on to serve close to two years behind bars. Upon his release, Shakur, a native east coaster who spent the end of his teenage years in California, signed with Suge Knight’s L.A.-based Death Row Records, immediately becoming the face of west coast rap and stoking the flames of discontent whenever he could. With Knight and his Death Row label backed by the Bloods street gang, Combs aligned with the Crips (the Bloods & Crips are the two biggest street gangs on the west coast).

Puffy & Jimmy Henchman

Agnant was deported back to Haiti. Rosemond went on to start hip-hop label Czar Entertainment in the 2000s (managing acts like The Game, Gucci Mane and Sean Kingston) before being imprisoned for life for racketeering, drug dealing and murder – Rosemond feuded with 50 Cent’s G-Unit crew, paying a pair of his enforcers to kill G-Unit affiliate Lowell (Lodi Mack) Fletcher in retaliation for G-Unit rap group member Tony Yayo assaulting Rosemond’s 14-year old son. Jimmy Henchman, Haitian Jack and King Tut all get name-checked in Shakur’s song “Against All Odds,” the opening track of his final album, Makaveli – Don Killuminati: The Seven-Day Theory.

The Flenory brothers pled guilty to racketeering, narcotics trafficking, tax evasion and money laundering in 2007 and got hit with 30-year prison terms. The feds convicted 150 BMF members or associates in a series of cases dotting different regions of the country. The Flenorys were indicted in Michigan.

While at the height of its’ nearly unheard of 15-year run, BMF was moving up to 3,000 kilos per month, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits (the government seized 270,000,000). Neither Big Meech, 47, or Southwest T, 45, will be eligible for release until 2032.

ILL Daniels, the Flenorys’ hot-tempered No. 3 man in their organization, was smacked with a 20-year sentence for his BMF activities and his killing of Rashannibal (Prince) Drummond in a parking-lot dispute that broke out outside the Velvet Room nightclub in Atlanta in 2004 when Drummond struck Daniels’ car with his fist after Daniels almost backed into him. Daniels was sometimes called “Pesci” by his fellow BMF rank-and-file due to his similar erratic behavior to that of characters portrayed by Oscar-winning actor Joe Pesci’s in his two immortal gangster movie roles in Goodfellas and Casino. Reports during ILL’s 2008 trial alleged NFL cornerback Adam (Pac-Man) Jones was footing the bill for his legal fees.

Combs is worth approximately 750 million dollars and today still oversees his less-hip Bad Boy label as well as a number of other business ventures, most notably his Sean John clothing brand, a widely-successful fashion line focusing on urban couture and a 50-percent stake in the popular Ciroc Vodka. During the investigation into Shakur’s death, Combs’ name surfaced, as did that of Notorious B.I.G. (real name Christopher Wallace). As of 2015, Combs’ former nemesis, Suge Knight, a suspect in ordering both Shakur’s and Notorious B.I.G’s murders in 1996 and 1997 respectively, is in jail facing murder charges.

The post Did Sean Combs Take Money From BMF To Fund Bad Boy’s Start-Up? appeared first on The Gangster Report.

According to testimony at a federal narcotics trial, rap music superstar Young Jeezy (real name Jay Jenkins) bought four kilos of cocaine from the high-powered Black Mafia Family in a 2004 purchase that took place in Atlanta and presumably was for subsequent sale himself, not personal use. The Black Mafia Family, known simply as “BMF,” was the most prolific urban drug-dealing organization of all-time and reined atop the American underworld in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The crime syndicate which boasted franchises in multiple cities around the country was started in Detroit by New Millennium kingpin Demetrius (Big Meech) Flenory and his younger brother Terry (Southwest T) Flenory. Besides Michigan, BMF’s main hubs were in California and Georgia.

Big Meech Flenory specifically has gone on to attain legendary status in the annals of criminal masterminds and is a pop-culture icon in the African-American community despite being locked up in a prison cell the last decade. This fall is the 10-year anniversary of the downfall of Flenory and his lofty BMF empire. A massive October 2005 federal indictment, the first in a long slate of cases brought to BMF’s doorstep and resulting in the conviction of over 150 gang members and associates, spelled the end for Big Meech and his lesser-known baby bro. They both pled guilty two years later on the eve of trial and were given 30-year prison sentences.

Young Jeezy, 37, is from Atlanta and since the mid-2000s has been one of the world’s top hip-hop acts, the embodiment of modern-day southern rap culture. He’s never hid his close relationship to BMF, long affiliating himself with the Flenory brothers socially and in business, making cameo appearances in a series of promotional videos for BMF in its late attempt to sustain a veil of legitimacy by masquerading as a music label. In the end though, the BMF music label proved nothing more than a front for their industrial-scale narcotics trafficking: the label only produced a single artist Bleu DaVinci (real name Barima McKnight), who never found success, however did find himself in prison for four years related to drug-pushing activity under the BMF banner.

As it became more and more evident that Bleu DaVinci wasn’t going to break through to the mainstream as a rapper, the Flenorys refocused their attention towards Young Jeezy, already inked to Sean (Puffy) Combs’ Bad Boy label, but someone they had known well before he was signed by Combs and were alleged to possibly have a “hidden interest” in. Per federal informants, Combs received aid in getting his Bad Boy Records off the ground in the early 1990s with seed capital from BMF. When Young Jeezy put out his first solo album in July 2005, Big Meech and Southwest T threw him a lavish release party at a glitzy Atlanta nightclub.

Young Jeezy (left)  & Big Meech (center)

Dropping a bombshell from the witness stand to a stunned courtroom in 2008, former BMF foot soldier Ralphie Simms testified that he sold four bricks of cocaine to Young Jeezy in a transaction that he was instructed to make by BMF’s second-in-charge Chad (J-Bo) Brown and Brown’s lieutenant, Marlon (Tito) Byrth. The purchase took place at an infamous syndicate stash house known as “Space Mountain” located in a posh suburban Atlanta neighborhood in the summer of 2004. Simms, a lower-level organization employee who worked for Terry Flenory in the Los Angeles area and functioned as a brick loader and unloader at BMF product storage facilities, was testifying at the drug, racketeering and murder trial of Fleming (ILL) Daniels, the Flenorys’ third-in-command, when he made the revelation.

A native New Yorker, ILL Daniels, reputed to be BMF’s original “in” with the Puffy Combs camp back in the 1990s, was convicted and slapped with a 20-year prison sentence. He shot and killed Rashannibal (Prince) Drummond outside an Atlanta hot spot following Drummond striking Daniels’ Porsche in anger for Daniels almost backing the vehicle into him. The jury found him guilty of drug peddling, racketeering and manslaughter. J-Bo Brown and Tito Byrth went on to be convicted (in a separate case) too.

Despite his rap lyrics being filled with first-hand references to the drug game, Young Jeezy’s criminal past is tame. He’s got a minor narcotics conviction as a teen and has been charged with assault and gun possession (twice.) Both times he was charged with illegal firearm offenses, the charges were tossed prior to ever reaching a courtroom. His arrest for assault came last year after a verbal spat between him and his teenage son turned physical.

Young Jeezy is reportedly worth an estimated 17 million dollars. He’s been nominated for four Grammy Awards and is credited with pioneering the Southern Rap subgenre “Trap Music.” In the aftermath of Big Meech and Southwest T heading behind bars – they won’t be eligible for release for another 17 years – there was a falling out between them and Young Jeezy and as of today they are no longer in communication with him. Big Meech and Southwest T stopped speaking in the years leading up to their indictment.

The post Young Jeezy Bought Bricks Of Blow From BMF, Said Witness At Trial appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s the old adage, right? Well, it appears to be ringing true when it comes to the Black Mafia Family in recent times. Original Black Mafia Family members Christopher (Pig) Triplett and Chauncey (C-Bear) Johnson have had their names bandied about over the last year in regards to their place in the syndicate‘s attempted resurgence. Pig is back in the can, C-Bear is on the verge of getting out and taking over, per sources.

“C-Bear has the juice,” said one Black Mafia Family insider. “Everybody likes him, if anybody can put it all back together, he can.”

The first incarnation of the Black Mafia Family was toppled 10 years ago. Triplett and Johnson were a part of that bust. In the years following roughly 150 gang members and associates around the country being imprisoned for various roles in an epic nationwide drug conspiracy distributing up to 3,000 kilos of cocaine a month, a second generation of syndicate leadership began to emerge, consisting of younger lieutenants untouched by the titanic Operation Motor City Mafia indictment in 2005 (and the several more forthcoming) and original gang rank-and-file given shorter terms behind bars.

“We’re aware of the continued existence of the Black Mafia Family,” said one DEA source. “Although their existence is marginal compared to where they once were, they’re functioning with a reassembled pecking order and in multiple states.”

The goliath Black Mafia Family (known on the streets as simply, “BMF”) was the biggest urban dope-dealing conglomerate in United States history, reining as the nation’s premiere African-American criminal organization of the last portion of the Twentieth Century and the first five years of the New Millennium. Founded on the southwestern side of Detroit in 1990 by the Flenory brothers, Demetrius (Big Meech) Flenory and Terry (Southwest T) Flenory, but was fast to expand to outposts around the country, soon establishing additional BMF base of operations in geographically strategic locales like Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas and St. Louis.

Native Detroiters, Pig Triplett and C-Bear Johnson have both been there at the Flenory boys’ sides since the start. Operating out of the region’s West Downriver area – a cluster of factory towns inhabited by a significant African-American population –, they were each indicted and subsequently convicted in the 2005 case responsible for bringing down the entire BMF leadership. They are also said to be integral cogs in the “new era” BMF along with the others. Pig Triplett, 43, came out from behind bars in 2012 and reemerged eager to dive back into the world of narcotics trafficking.

Triplett was arrested for possession with intent to distribute over $125,000 worth of drugs last summer in Ohio. His car was pulled over driving southbound on I-75 in the early morning hours of August 18, 2014 and uncovered two pounds of heroin in the vehicle’s air filter. He was sentenced to four years in prison in May and id scheduled for a 2018 out date.

If the past has showed us anything in relation to Pig Triplett, it’s that he’s a standup guy, someone willing to do time instead of turnover on his co-conspirators in court. He was one of the first to fall in the initial 2005 BMF case. Triplett and his then-partner in crime on the street, fellow Detroit BMF lieutenant Calvin (Playboy) Sparks were pulled over in St. Louis in April 2004 with nine bricks of cocaine concealed in the SUV they were driving in.

“Pig” Triplett

In conversations intercepted by court-authorized wiretaps, Southwest T was heard trying ease concerns from members of Sparks’ family that Triplett was about to turn witness and give up Playboy and the Flenorys to the government in exchange for his freedom. Southwest T, responsible for looking after BMF activity in Michigan even though he resided in L.A., proved accurate in his assessment of the situation and Pig Triplett stood strong, refusing to fold.

Running point in Detroit for the Southern California headquartered Terry Flenory were Benjamin (Blank) Johnson and Johnson’s right-hand man, Eric (Slim) Bivens. Both Johnson and Bivens flipped after being indicted in Operation Motor City Mafia. Blank Johnson is C-Bear Johnson’s half-brother. Convicted BMF member Derrick (Chipped-Tooth D) Peguese is his other half-brother and in the syndicate’s heyday was Southwest T’s representative in the Atlanta area, where his older brother Big Meech set up shop.

Big Meech is suspected of carrying out at least two murders in his tenure living large in the Dirty South. Federal informants tag Meech as the shooter in the October 1997 slaying of turncoat Dennis Walker, a Detroit drug dealer who had testified against BMF associate Tony Valentine, and Flenory was charged but never put on trial for the November 2003 double-homicide of Anthony (Wolf) Jones and Lamont (Riz) Girdy which took place outside an Atlanta nightclub.

Walker was gunned down with automatic weapon fire from a passing vehicle while he was in his own car driving onto an Atlanta expressway off-ramp after leaving a party at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel celebrating his release from a three-year prison stint earlier in the day. Jones and Girdy, close friends of hip-hop and pop culture impresario Sean (Puffy) Combs, tussled with Big Meech and his bodyguard inside Chaos nightclub and minutes later were shot dead in the parking lot.

The Flenory brothers both pled guilty in the Motor City Mafia bust in 2007 and each got 30-year sentences. Per a BMF insider, Big Meech still keeps in frequent communication with members of the organization on the street.

Southwest T (far left) & Big Meech (bottom right) in ’03

While Triplett is just getting comfortable in his new jailhouse digs, C-Bear is days away from trading his prison blues for some fresh new gear on the “outside.” And maybe a new job to boot. Johnson is slated for release from his decade stint in federal lock-up on August 2 and according to sources will immediately assume the role of boss over the existing BMF power structure, a job he was personally appointed by Big Meech and one he’s been eagerly preparing for on the “inside” for years. Currently, the 44-year old C-Bear is in a Texas halfway house waiting for his walking papers in just two and a half weeks. When the 2005 indictment struck in October 2005. Big Meech was spending the week at his mansion in Texas and taken into custody near Dallas. Exactly where Johnson will headquarter his affairs out of is unknown.

Another reputed new era BMF kingpin, Darnell (Cuckoo) Cooley, was released from prison last summer on a manslaughter conviction and according to exclusive Gangster Report sources, is one of those in charge of BMF activity in Michigan today. Cooley and his two bodyguards beat a man to death in a fight at a suburban Detroit jazz club in the summer of 2009. At the outset of the case, Cooley was charged with murder, however the only available witness to the vicious assault (a very public stomping & strangling) was killed himself in the hours before he was scheduled to testify at a grand jury proceeding – possibly on orders from Cooley, per DEA informants – and state prosecutors agreed to a plea deal with him resulting in only five years of prison time.

The post State Of The Syndicate: Where The Black Mafia Family Stands In 2015 appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Lil Wayne has had a hit put out on his life. Birdman and Young Thug are accused of conspiring to kill the Free Weezy Album creator, according to an indictment filed in Cobb County, Ga. last month.

Apparently when Weezy’s tour bus was shot up in April, the man behind the shooting plotted with Birdman and Young Thug to kill him, reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Twenty-five-year-old Jimmy Carlton Winfrey was arrested on June 2 in connection with the shooting, an act he carried out to gain street cred with the Bloods Gang, a police warrant states. All three rappers are also listed as being members of the gang.

Winfrey, who also goes by the names “Pee Wee” and “Roscoe,” is charged with aggravated assault, terroristic threats and acts, criminal damage, possession of a firearm by a felon, criminal gang activity, reckless conduct and discharging a weapon near the street as a result of the tour bus shooting, in which he caused $20,000 worth of damage. No one on the bus was injured.

The Cash Money Records head honcho and Thugger were named in the indictment as being involved in a RICO conspiracy along with Winfrey. However, neither Rich Gang members have been charged with any wrongdoing in this incident. But Thug is currently in jail as a result of another matter. He was arrested Wednesday (July 15) for making terroristic threats after allegedly threatening to shoot a mall security guard in the face.

Mike Petchenik of WSB-TV Atlanta offered details on the indictment via Twitter that include the video for Thug’s “Halftime” being used as evidence. “Prosectors cite #YoungThug music video for #HalfTime showing Winfrey with assault rifle, lyrics about #LilWayne as evidence. #wsbtv,” he wrote.

The news of a plot to kill Lil Wayne comes just days after he was performing at Club LIV in Miami and Birdman and his entourage were reportedly throwing water bottles at him while he was onstage.

Read More: Birdman and Young Thug Conspired to Kill Lil Wayne According to Indictment | http://theboombox.com/birdman-young-thug-conspired-to-kill-lil-wayne/?trackback=tsmclip

The post Rappers soon to be indicted for attempted murder of Lil Wayne appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Longtime Detroit mafia street boss Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone always publically denied any connection to or knowledge of the disappearance and gangland murder of spirited labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa, without question America’s most notorious unsolved crime which is marking its 40^th anniversary this month. In private, it was a completely different story. Tony Jack enjoyed using his reputation as the villainous mastermind of the infamous kidnapping and assassination as currency in the underworld, per a number of reported incidents and first-hand accounts, most gallingly in his attempt to extort Hoffa’s protégé-turned-rival and successor as Teamsters president Frank Fitzsimmons in the years after Hoffa vanished in the summer of 1975.

According to FBI documents, Giacalone (pictured as a young goodfella in the feature photo & dead since 2001), tried shaking down Fitzsimmons for $250,000 dollars in the winter of 1978 in relation to Hoffa’s execution and was partially successful. Tony Jack bluntly informed Fitzsimmons at a meeting in Florida that he did him a favor by getting rid of Hoffa, in essence paving the way for his reelection to office in 1976, and if he didn’t deliver a lump sum pavement of 250 large in return for an effort that brought Giacalone even more squarely into the federal government’s crosshairs than he already was, he’d kill him. Fitzsimmons paid Giacalone a portion of the extortion money however was able to buy time and stave off further attempts to collect the cash until Tony Jack was shipped away for a seven-year stint in the can months later.

During the days that they were allies, the diminutive, broad-shouldered and high-energy Hoffa and the tall, chubby and more low-key Fitzsimmons made an odd, yet incredibly prolific pair. With “Big Fitzy” by his side watching his back, Hoffa climbed the ranks of the Teamsters, first locally in Detroit in the 1930s and 40s and then nationally and worldwide in the 1950s and 60s, as the fiery labor leader built the trucker and cartage workers union into a massive political power. Fitzsimmons was Hoffa’s vice president at his Michigan Local (Southwest Detroit’s Local 299) and eventually his international VP following his ascent to the Teamsters Presidency.

At least a share of Hoffa’s rise in the organized labor movement, if not more, is directly attributed to his mob ties, specifically his deep links with Italian mafia factions in Detroit, Ohio, Chicago, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and New Orleans. One of the key entry points into his mutually-beneficial arrangement with the mob from early on in his career was his relationship to Tony Giacalone and Giacalone’s mentor, legendary Motor City Godfather Joseph (Joe Uno) Zerilli. Giacalone, Zerilli and their associates (men like underboss Angelo Meli and capos Pete Licavoli and Santo Perrone) provided Hoffa muscle and an introduction to other mafia luminaries across the country for him to build inroads with and grow his powerbase.The mob in return got free run of the union itself, jobs, contracts and access to the Teamsters overall coffers and pension funds to loot.

Zerilli, widely beloved, respected and revered in underworld circles on multiple continents, sat on the American mafia’s National Commission until he died of natural causes in 1977. Giacalone, a suspect in literally dozens of gangland slayings and a man that reveled in his role as a terrifying hoodlum, was the face of the Detroit mob in the last half of the 20^th Century.

Upon Hoffa’s imprisonment in 1967 (convicted for bribery, fraud and jury tampering), he named Fitzsimmons his temporary replacement, maintaining the official title even though he was behind bars. As Fitzsimmons negotiated a Presidential pardon with Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, Hoffa was convinced to officially resign his post as boss of the Teamsters as a gesture of good will, presumably under the promise that he would be allowed to get his job back once free. Big Fitzy either didn’t get the memo or got too comfortable in the boss’ chair to care. The Teamsters’ backers in the mob had a different idea as well. The consensus in the mafia was it wanted Fitzsimmons to remain in the president’s seat – being he was much easier to control – and Hoffa to voluntarily retire.

Hoffa and Big Fitz circa 1966

Realizing that was probably wishful thinking, they sought insurance. In the proverbial 11th hour of talks, Fitzsimmons quietly got Nixon to add a clause in the pardon barring Hoffa for running for re-election for 10 years. Unaware of the last-minute added language, Hoffa agreed to accept Nixon’s pardon and walked out of his Pennsylvania federal prison cell in December 1971.

Learning of his restrictions in reclaiming the union in the days after his release, he was livid and vowed to fight it and the mob for that matter if he had to in order to take back the Teamsters presidency he lusted for badly. He blamed Big Fitzy, who he viewed as a traitor, for the pardon double-cross and openly cursed him. Per several FBI informant logs, Hoffa sought on more than once occasion to place a murder contract on Fitzsimmons’ life for his betrayal.

Once his parole was lifted in early 1974, Hoffa embarked on a media tour denouncing his former friends in the mafia and telling anyone who would listen that if he was allowed to return to power he intended of ridding the Teamsters of any and all organized crime influence. Word began spreading that Hoffa had a good chance of getting the pardon clause ruled unconstitutional by the courts and the pulse of the union rank-and-file showed he’d easily unseat Fitzsimmons in the 1976 election if cleared to throw his hat into the ring. The mafia eliminated the problem by eliminating Hoffa.

Most experts concur, Tony Giacalone, Hoffa’s contact in the Detroit mob dating back as early as the 1940s, was tasked with coordinating his murder. Hoffa disappeared on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 en route to a sit down at a Bloomfield (Tony Jack’s cousin via marriage). Neither Tony Pro nor Tony Jack showed up for the sit-down and Hoffa got into a car believed to have belonged to Giacalone’s son in the restaurant’s parking lot and drove away with three unidentified men never to be seen or heard from again.

Hoffa was desperate to quell tensions with Provenzano, needing Tony Pro’s east coast mob-puppeted Teamsters voting block to win a potential election. Tony Jack’s younger brother and fellow feared Michigan mafia capo Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone is believed to have been Tony Jack’s representative on the Hoffa hit. A number of lieutenants working under both Tony Giacalone and Tony Provenzano are suspected of carrying out the slaying and the disposal of the body on their behalf. The “Two Tonys” themselves were at their respective headquarters – Tony Jack at the nearby Southfield Athletic Club and Tony Pro at his union hall in Jersey – at the exact time Hoffa was done away with. No arrests were ever made and charges have never been filed in the case.

Detroit mob chieftain Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone circa 1975

In the weeks leading up to Hoffa’s kidnapping and homicide, Fitzsimmons’ son, Richard (Little Fitz) Fitzsimmons, had his car blown to pieces while it was parked outside a popular Local 299 hangout, Nemo’s Bar & Grille, and he and his dad dined inside. Nemo’s is located in between Local 299 and the now torn-down Tigers Stadium. Little Fitz was opposing Hoffa loyalist Dave Johnson in the race for the presidency of 299 at the time of the car bombing, an incident investigators peg as the exact point when Hoffa’s death warrant was signed. The FBI theorizes Hoffa either ordered the bombing himself as an intimidation tactic and possible attempt on the lives of both Big and Little Fitz as retribution for their disloyalty or rival forces in the Teamsters perpetrated it trying to make it appear that Hoffa had gone too far.

Big Fitzy coasted to victory in the ’76 Teamsters presidential election with Hoffa out of the way. Tony Giacalone felt that he was responsible for laying the necessary groundwork that allowed Fitzsimmons to waltz back into office and wanted financial compensation, according to FBI records regarding labor-union corruption. Summoning Fitzsimmons to a dinner at Miami’s Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Restaurant & Lounge in January 1978, Giacalone demanded $250,000 for rubbing out Hoffa two and a half years prior and in turn getting him elected. He threatened to kill Big Fitzy if he didn’t cough up the cash immediately.

Sonken’s restaurant was a well-known mob hangout in South Florida, a congregating spot for gangsters spawning from a variety of mafia crime families around the U.S for almost 50 years. It closed its’ doors in 1994. A Jewish Chicago Outfit associate, Sonken opened his Gold Coast haunt in 1948. Sonken was alleged to have been a pimp and bookie back in the Windy City before migrating south after WWII.

The summer after Fitzsimmons met Giacalone at the Gold Coast Restaurant, Big Fitzy got a visit at his palatial Washington D.C. office from one of Tony Jack’s labor-union lackeys, Chuckie O’Brien, a Detroit mob associate and Jimmy Hoffa’s surrogate son. Per court motions filed years later, O’Brien wanted to know why Fitzsimmons hadn’t paid Giacalone the 250K Giacalone had “requested.” O’Brien’s visit worked and elicited a payment. Shortly thereafter, Fitzsimmons’ son, Little Fitz, shuttled a $25,000 installment to Tony Jack in Michigan.

Chuckie O’Brien circa 1975

Big Fitzy didn’t pony up any more money though. Probably because Giacalone went to prison – on January 2, 1979, Tony Jack reported to a federal correctional facility in Atlanta to serve a 10-year sentence for tax evasion and extortion related to a Detroit mafia satellite crew in Saginaw, Michigan ran by his nephew. Giacalone was paroled after seven years and returned to his gangland throne in early 1986. He died 15 years later of kidney failure under another federal racketeering indictment.

Fitzsimmons died of cancer in 1981. Little Fitz would go on to be jailed for taking kickbacks. O’Brien, someone investigators think may have lured Hoffa into Giacalone’s son’s car that fateful July day 40 years ago, was booted out of the Teamsters union in 1988 due to his mob ties. He admits to having possession of the vehicle in the hours leading up to Hoffa going missing. Currently 80, O’Brien resides in Florida.

The post Detroit’s Tony Jack Leveraged Engineering Of Hoffa Hit To Extort Teamsters Boss Big Fitzy appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Deceased New Jersey-based Mafioso and Genovese crime family captain Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano was in Detroit the night before labor leader and mob associate Jimmy Hoffa disappeared and was slain 40 years ago this month, according to an imprisoned FBI informant who came forward in the mid-2000s. The informant, former Teamster insider Don Wells, claims Provenzano dined at a favorite mafia haunt with Motor City underworld figures on July 29, 1975. Some experts further speculate Tony Pro could have also been in Michigan the next afternoon when Hoffa vanished from a suburban Detroit restaurant parking lot on July 30, 1975, not where his alibi placed him, at his New Jersey Teamsters union hall playing cards. Then-Jersey Teamsters boss Provenzano was feuding with Hoffa at the time he went missing. Hoffa was in the midst of trying to regain his post as Teamsters International President and Tony Pro, an ally-turned-enemy of his, is still considered one of the top suspects in the notorious kidnapping and murder which hasn’t been solved to this very day.

The bitter dispute between Tony Pro and Hoffa dated back to their days in prison together in the late 1960s, specifically a heated verbal altercation in the chow hall that turned physical. Hoffa was executed for ignoring the mafia’s repeated requests for him to give up his desire to take back the Teamsters Presidency he gave up in 1971 in order to get a pardon and released from prison early. Labor-union powers in the mob preferred Hoffa’s successor Frank Fitzsimmons and worried Hoffa was willing to sell them out to the government in order to get his one-time position atop the Teamsters back in his grasp. Hoffa’s rise in the notoriously-corrupt truckers union paralleled the infiltration of the Teamsters by organized crime. The words Hoffa, Teamsters and mafia would become virtually synonymous.

The afternoon Hoffa disappeared he was on his way to a purported sit-down with Provenzano and steely-eyed Detroit mafia street boss Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone. Tony Jack was Tony Pro’s cousin via marriage, Hoffa’s longtime contact in his hometown’s Italian mob and the man that was supposedly trying to broker a peace accord, something Hoffa needed to do if he wanted to win a future union presidential election. Giacalone was the person allegedly assigned to arrange all the particulars in the high-profile slaying. He told Hoffa to meet him, Tony Pro and a well-liked labor consultant and mutual business associate of theirs named Leonard (Little Lenny) Schultz, at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan at 2:00 on July 30, 1975.

It was a setup. Giacalone, Provenzano and Schultz never showed and Hoffa was nabbed in the parking lot, probably in Tony Jack’s son’s car and murdered minutes later. His body or remains were never found. Not a single arrest has ever been made.

Per Don Wells, he had dinner with Giacalone and Provenzano, as well as a number of additional suspects in the Hoffa investigation, on the evening of July 29, 1975 at Carl’s Chop House, a popular Detroit steakhouse and underworld gathering spot, and references were made to the forthcoming assassination (news first broken by No. 1 “Hoffaologist” and award-winning author Dan Moldea). Wells was close to Teamsters enforcer and mob associate Rolland (Big Mac) McMaster – another suspect in the Hoffa case – and divulged details of what he knew about the Hoffa hit in 2005 debriefing with the FBI while he was incarcerated on drug charges. After passing a lie-detector exam, the feds acted on intelligence gleaned from Wells and dug up the Hidden Dreams Ranch in Wixom, Michigan, property owned by McMaster when Hoffa was killed, in search of Hoffa’s remains to no avail in the spring of 2006.

Also of interest to the feds was the breaking of bread Wells told them he attended the night before Hoffa was clipped at Carl’s Chop House (information that was vetted by a polygraph, too). McMaster, a legendary leg-breaker and the Teamsters’ ace enforcer for decades, brought Wells, who was staying with him at his ranch in July 1975, to the meal with the rogue’s gallery of mobsters and misfits that made up a significant handful of suspects in the Hoffa drama. Carl’s (christened in honor of original owner Carl Rosenfeld) was a dining staple in the Motor City from the moment it opened for business in 1942 right up until it closed it’s doors in 2008

While Tony Jack and Tony Pro sat at one table, Wells, McMaster and two of McMaster’s most trusted strong arms Jim Shaw and Larry McHenry sat nearby at another. Wells recounted for authorities an exchange towards the end of the dinner where Provenzano came over to where they were all sitting and pounded the table with his fist in excitement, exclaiming “Tomorrow’s going to be a great day, gentlemen!” Tony Pro turned to Shaw and McHenry and asked, “We’re all good, right?” before requesting to speak to McMaster alone outside.

At that point, McMaster, Shaw and McHenry were at the forefront of a strategic intimidation plot funded by the Teamsters brass and geared solely to disrupt Hoffa’s relentless campaign to recapture the union presidency. The trio was behind multiple acts of violence against Hoffa and Hoffa loyalists in the months leading up to his slaying. The FBI views them as suspects in the execution’s clean-up and the disposal of Hoffa’s body. All three are currently deceased. McMaster died at 94 in 2007.

The day after the meal at Carl’s, while they were supposed to be having lunch with Hoffa at the Red Fox, Tony Giacalone and Lenny Schultz were firmly planted at Tony Jack’s Southfield Athletic Club headquarters (owned by Schultz) five miles away and Tony Provenzano is said to have been at his own headquarters in New Jersey playing cards with members of his crew. Giacalone’s alibi is airtight. Provenzano’s isn’t.

Tony Giacalone

More than a dozen people, many of them who didn’t know him personally, confirmed Tony Jack’s alibi. Tony Pro’s story of being at his union hall engaging in an afternoon of gin rummy could only be verified by close associates and lieutenants of his in the mob – in other words people with a reason to lie for him.

One retired FBI agent thinks Provenzano easily might have been in the Metro Detroit area the day Jimmy Hoffa was wacked.

“We had some informants tell us it was possible that Tony Pro was in Detroit the whole time, stashed in some house waiting to hear from his guys he had doing his dirty work,” the former mob buster said. “Wells passed a lie detector placing him in Michigan within 24 hours of Hoffa getting snuffed. Others told us he didn’t leave until late the next day, until after he met with Tony Jack and got the rundown from his lieutenants at ground zero so to speak.”

Whether Tony Pro was in Michigan the day Hoffa was banged out or not, members of his and Tony Jack’s crew became the prime suspects in the case. When it came to Provenzano, the Briguglio brothers (Sal & Gabe) and the Andretta brothers (Stevie & Tommy) were lofty on the government’s list of targets. When it came to Giacalone, it was his younger brother Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone and old-time wiseguys, Raffeale (Jimmy Q) Quasarano and Peter (Bozzi) Vitale – all capos at the time in the Detroit crime family), along with McMaster and his two thug henchmen (McHenry & Shaw) who got mentioned the most in internal investigation memos as Tony Jack’s “on-the-ground” representatives in the perfectly-orchestrated assassination. All of the aforementioned men were called in front of a grand jury, a majority of them invoking their fifth-amendment right against self-incrimination and refusing to say a word.

Tony Jack avoided being busted in the Hoffa case, however, he wouldn’t be so lucky a few years later in an extortion case involving Tony Pro’s relatives in Saginaw, Michigan, a working-class city 60 miles north of Detroit and a town the mob had infiltrated back in the Prohibition Era. From the late 1920s until his death of natural causes in 1970, Giacomo (Big Jack) Provenzano, Tony Pro’s first cousin and Tony Jack’s father-in-law, ran the rackets in Saginaw for the Detroit mafia as a satellite franchise, kicking up to the bosses in the Motor City, but pretty much allowed to do his own thing.

After Big Jack died, the reins of the crew fell to Big Jack’s young grandson, William (Billy Lee) Loiacano, who was also Tony Jack’s nephew. If Billy Lee ran into trouble in his neck of the woods, he’d frequently turn to his uncle in Detroit for help. As was the case in 1976 when Loiacano and a contractor he hired to build a restaurant he would headquarter out of (The Pasta House) got into a beef over $10,000 and reached out to Tony Jack for aid in collecting. Giacalone made a trip to the contractor’s apartment and demanded $250,000 to remove the murder contract he had put on his head.

Tony Jack, Loiacano and his whole crew went down in a 1978 CCE (continuing criminal enterprise) indictment. In addition to a tax evasion conviction he took two years prior, Tony Jack was sent to prison on a 10-year bid of which he did seven. Released in the winter of 1986, Giacalone remained in his role as day-to-day overseer of affairs in the Detroit mob until the day he died of kidney failure in 2001. Little Lenny Schultz, a Jewish hoodlum tracing his underworld roots to the last remnants of the iconic Purple Gang, was nailed in a drug case in the 1980s and did to close to five years in prison prior to retiring to Florida and dying at the ripe old age of 93 in the fall of 2013.

Tony Pro circa 1975

Tony Provenzano had his own legal problems to deal with in the aftermath of the Hoffa hit. The same year Giacalone and his little cousin Billy Lee Loiacano took the racketeering pinch in Saginaw, Tony Pro was going on trial for murder and racketeering charges stemming from his running of his New Jersey Teamsters Local 560 (actually two trials, the case was split between jurisdictions in New York and Jersey and twin state and federal assaults). Tony Pro was convicted on the RICO (the first-time ever law was applied to a federal OC defendant, an obvious sign of things to come) and of ordering the execution of a union rival years before.

Provenzano had two of his enforcers, “Sally Bugs” Briguglio and Harry (K.O.) Koenigsberg head a hit team in killing aspiring labor leader and Jersey Docks mobster Anthony (Tony Three Fingers) Castellito. Sally Bugs, K.O., and two other men beat and strangled Castellito to death at a fishing cottage in rural New York state in 1961. Briguglio, Tony Pro’s longtime right-hand man, was slain gangland style himself in 1978 in the weeks before his trial was scheduled to begin. Many believe Sally Bugs was the shooter in the Hoffa murder.

Prior to the unrest between them arising, Tony Pro and Hoffa had actually been extremely close friends (see this story’s feature image). Upon Hoffa assuming the International Teamsters Presidency in 1957, Provenzano’s star began to rise. The following year, with Hoffa’s muscle behind him, Tony Pro grabbed control of Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey. He soon became the most powerful labor union boss on the east coast. His and Hoffa’s relationship began to deteriorate while both served prison sentences at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in the late 1960s, housed together in a branch of the facility dubbed “Mafia Manor,” and portrayed in the movie Goodfellas.

Hoffa was behind bars for bribery, jury tampering and fraud, Tony Pro for extortion. Things started out like it was on the outside and Hoffa and Provenzano were buddy-buddy, eating, socializing and exercising together on the yard. That was until Tony Pro was made aware of union insurance benefits Hoffa and his family were receiving that he and his family were not. This revelation caused significant tension and Hoffa refused to remedy the situation, angering Provenzano to no end.

The bad blood boiled over in 1969, in the months before Tony Pro was to be released. Sitting around with other mob luminaries at the Lewisburg chow hall, Provenzano made a dig to Hoffa about his unwillingness to fix his insurance benefits issue, resulting in Hoffa remarking loudly in response that it was “people like you,” that put him in prison in the first place. The barky retort sent Provenzano over the edge. He lunged at Hoffa and the two went at it, exchanging blows and hurling threats at one another that they were going to kill the other’s family.

Tensions only ramped up when the equally ferocious pair hit the streets again in the 1970s: a peace conference at a Miami hotel arranged by Frank Fitzsimmons and a chance run-in at a lounge inside JFK Airport both turned physical and resulted in more threats, this time involving massacring each other’s grandkids. Hoffa soon realized though that he needed to mend fences with Provenzano if he wanted back into the Teamsters presidency, for Provenzano’s support brought with it the entire east coast voting block and the requisite delegates he needed to be able to recapture office in a future election.

Tony Giacalone, a man quite adept at the murder trade being a suspect in sanctioning, ordering or personally carrying out upwards of 25 gangland homicides, came to the conclusion that the best way to lure the always-cautious Hoffa out into the open to be killed was to use Tony Pro as bait. It worked and Hoffa came running, only to be cut down by Giacalone-and Provenzano-assembled assassin squad. Hoffa was finally declared dead in 1982. Tony Pro was felled by a heart attack in a California prison hospital in 1988 at 71 years old.

The post NJ Mob Capo Tony Pro Was In Detroit Hours Before Hoffa Was killed, Says FBI Informant appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Nestled away in the basement of FBI headquarters in Detroit, up on blocks in a storage locker, gathering dust going on its fifth decade, sits the lone piece of physical evidence recovered in the still-unsolved Jimmy Hoffa murder case – a 1975 burgundy Mercury Marquis Brougham once belonging to reputed Motor City mobster, Joseph (Joey Jack) Giacalone, the son of the No. 1 suspect in the long-running investigation into the iconic labor leader’s disappearance and execution, deceased Midwest mafia don Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone. Hoffa, the relentless former Teamsters president, was killed 40 years ago this month after butting heads with the mafia regarding his plans to reclaim his post atop labor-union politics following a four-year prison term.

Per federal records, Tony Jack, the menacing and always immaculately-manicured street boss of the Detroit mob from the early 1960s until he died of kidney failure in 2001, was the person tasked with organizing the logistics of the world-famous gangland assassination. He had been Hoffa’s main contact in the Michigan underworld during Hoffa’s 20-year reign at the forefront of international Teamster affairs. Joey Jack, 23 at the time, isn’t believed to have taken part in the hit, just to have lent his brand-new Mercury, possibly even unknowingly, to be used as the “kill car.”

On the afternoon Hoffa vanished, July 30, 1975, Tony Giacalone was scheduled to broker a sitdown for Hoffa and a rival union power at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Twp, Michigan, less than 10 miles north of the Detroit city limits. He never showed. Neither did Hoffa’s Teamsters rival, New Jersey mafia figure Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, The Giacalones’ cousin through Tony Jack’s wife.

Experts contend a mix of Tony Jack’s and Tony Pro’s lieutenants made up the hit team that ultimately ended Hoffa’s life. Eye-witnesses saw Hoffa get into what the government insists was the younger Giacalone’s car and drive away with three unidentified men from the Red Fox parking lot, never to be seen again. No charges have ever been filed and no arrests have ever been made in the case to this day.

The FBI confiscated Joey Jack’s Mercury in the weeks after Hoffa’s slaying, seizing it as evidence under the belief that Hoffa was transported to his killing in the vehicle and once he was rubbed out his body was placed in the trunk and shuttled to an unspecified disposal location. Soon it was confirmed that Joey Giacalone’s Mercury was in the possession of Hoffa’s surrogate son, Giacalone family friend and Teamsters heavy Chuckie O’Brien the afternoon Hoffa went missing. During his childhood, O’Brien’s mother was romantically linked to both Tony Jack and Hoffa.

Forthcoming forensics tests confirmed Hoffa’s DNA in Joey Jack’s car through a hair sample. Trained police dogs detected his scent in the trunk as well. Investigators speculate that either O’Brien was the driver responsible for scooping Hoffa and bringing him to where he was slain or for the sole purpose of “middling” a vehicle drop-off to the elder Giacalone intended for use by the assassin squad assigned to carry out the hit itself.

The trunk of Joey Jack’s Mercury

O’Brien, who was barely on speaking terms with his foster father in the summer of 1975, admittedly took possession of the Mercury around lunch and used it to deliver a giant freshwater salmon to Teamsters executive and Hoffa loyalist Bobby Holmes’ house in Novi, then stopped at a car wash before heading on over to Tony Jack’s headquarters, the Southfield Athletic Club located on the first floor of the Traveler’s Towers office building. The fish was a gift from a fellow union member in Seattle. O’Brien arrived at the Southfield Athletic Club at 2:15, the same time Tony Jack was supposed to be meeting with Hoffa at the Red Fox five miles away.

Depending on which theory you adhere to, O’Brien either left the car with Tony Jack at his base of operations to do with what he pleased, immediately went and dropped the car back with Joey Jack at his office or took off with two hit men in tow to pick Hoffa up and drive him to his pending slaughter. In his own statement to investigators, O’Brien denied that he or the vehicle had anything to do with the Hoffa killing and told authorities he never surrendered possession of Joey Jack’s car until late that afternoon when he returned it to Joey Jack at his office around 4:00 p.m.

Regardless of how it went down, Joey Giacalone hasn’t seen his Mercury since August 1975. As of today, it still remains at Detroit FBI headquarters in the basement of the Patrick McNamara Federal Building off Michigan Avenue, walking distance from Hoffa’s old stomping grounds at Local 299 near the former location of historic Tigers Stadium (torn down). Chuckie O’Brien, 80, lives in retirement down in Florida and is reportedly trying to shop a book about his life.

Although the feds never prosecuted Tony Giacalone for his central role in the Hoffa homicide, he didn’t escape the government’s wrath in the aftermath of the seminal event in the annals of U.S. crime. In 1976 and 1978, he was convicted on tax evasion and extortion charges respectively and imprisoned for the better half of the next decade.

While he was incarcerated in an Atlanta federal correctional facility, per state police documents, the responsibility for Tony Jack’s crew fell to his family: Joey Jack, his other son, Anthony (Fat Tony) Giacalone, Jr., his nephew, modern-day Godfather Jack (Jackie the Kid) Giacalone, and his baby brother and equally-fearsome capo and future underboss Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone – another prime suspect in the Hoffa murder. These same documents allege Joey Jack and Fat Tony Giacalone, along with their first cousin Jackie the Kid and current reputed No. 2 man in the syndicate Anthony (Chicago Tony) La Piana, were inducted into the Detroit mafia in a February 1986 ceremony, weeks following Tony Jack’s release from the pen. Informants told the FBI that the “making ceremony” was intentionally delayed a number of years so Tony Jack himself could attend and conduct the festivities.

Tony Jack is escorted into court by Joey Jack (back left) & his baby bro Billy Jack (far right)

Joey Giacalone’s star continued to rise the very next year when he became a multi-millionaire via supposedly legitimate means in a lucrative eminent domain deal. The city of Detroit paid Giacalone and several of his business partners over 42 million dollars for 15 acres of semi-vacant, undeveloped property they owned on Jefferson Avenue that the city then gave to the Chrysler Corporation to build a billion-dollar automotive assembly plant. The transaction elicited dual state and federal investigations, which failed to result in any criminal charges, but did reveal that in 1984, less than three years prior to the city’s payout, Chrysler had sold a majority of the acreage to Giacalone for only $300,000.

Both the city of Detroit and Motown’s bread-and-butter auto industry were known to have ties to organized crime in the past, dating as far back as Henry Ford, the undisputed Godfather of the American car business. Ford and his de-facto sergeant-at-arms Harry Bennett employed Michigan mobsters and their associates as strike breakers and on-call muscle in the 1930s and 40s. The Detroit mafia’s Downriver capo Anthony (Tony Cars) D’Anna was the syndicate’s liaison to the local auto industry until he passed away in 1984.

Per FBI documents, as Tony Giacalone prepared to slow down in the 1990s in his duties as day-to-day caretaker of the Motor City Italian crime family, he tapped his nephew Jackie Giacalone to be his replacement as street boss and his son Joey Jack to assume command of his crew, a regime he’d overseen starting in the late 1950s. Sometime between the government indicting Tony and Billy Jack in 1996 for a variety of racketeering offenses and Tony Jack falling ill and dying in early 2001, Tony Jack, according to these documents, demoted Joey from being the successor to his mob empire (allegedly for his erratic, indulgent behavior – he had the reputation as a “partier” since his teen years) and gave the job to his other son, Fat Tony.

Tony Jack’s namesake’s reign as crew boss was short lived. Jackie Giacalone became dissatisfied with Fat Tony’s performance and leadership ability, per an internal FBI-IRS memo, and decided to reinsert Joey Jack into the slot. It’s a capo post the 63-year old is alleged to still hold today.

Recent photo of Joey Giacalone (right)

Last year, Jackie Giacalone, 65, was anointed new overall boss of the Detroit mob. He was given the position in the final months of his predecessor Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco’s life, after being street boss for 15 years, say Motown mafia insiders.

Jack Tocco, who headed the notoriously prosperous and stable vice syndicate for 35 years (39 if you include “acting” basis) died of heart failure in July 2014, like Jackie the Kid’s uncle Tony and dad Billy, a top suspect in the Hoffa homicide investigation. He was acting boss of the Family then and seen meeting with Tony Giacalone at the Southfield Athletic Club the afternoon Hoffa was done in. Tony Jack and Tocco were not close and rarely met face-to-face, despite running the mafia in Detroit in tandem for more than two decades. “They co-existed, yet were far from friends or frequent social companions,” remarked one FBI informant in the 2000s.

Fat Tony Giacalone succumbed to cancer in 2013 at the age of 63. At the time of his death, Fat Tony and Jackie the Kid were fighting and not speaking to each other – a fallout allegedly rooted in the demotion years earlier. Jackie the Kid is rumored to have skipped Fat Tony’s wake and funeral. Joey Giacalone is sometimes referred to as “Joe Vine” on the streets for his hobby of making his own wine (with grapes straight off the vine).

The post Detroit Wiseguy Joey Jack’s Car Is Only Piece Of Evidence In Hoffa Investigation appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Ferocious and dangerously-stubborn Teamsters union chieftain Jimmy Hoffa was killed at deceased Detroit mafia soldier Carlo Licata’s house, not where famous mob turncoats Frank (the Irishman) Sheeran or Anthony (Tony Z) Zerilli – both dead– assert the notorious gangland assassination went down 40 years ago this week in their respective confessions, according to exclusive Gangster Report sources. Licata’s house was at 680 W. Long Lake Road in Bloomfield Township, less than a five minute drive from where Hoffa disappeared from, as opposed to Sheeran’s and Zerilli’s claims that place his murder occurring at locations at least 20 minutes away. Licata, mob royalty in Detroit and California, died there as well.

“The Outfit (slang for the Detroit mafia) banged Hoffa out at Carlo Licata’s place in Bloomfield and did Licata there a few years later,” said one key mafia insider in Motown. “People called that place the “house on the hill.” It holds a lot of secrets. Those walls could tell stories that would make a fucking movie screenwriter jealous.”

Sheeran, a Teamsters enforcer from Delaware and Hoffa confidant, declared in a 2004 book that he was the man that shot Hoffa in the back of the head in a house in Northwest Detroit – the Irishman died prior to his book making it onto shelves. Zerilli, the deposed underboss of the Detroit mob and one of the men that helped put the popular and magnetic Hoffa into power in the truckers union the 1950s, went to the FBI in 2012 and told them Hoffa was bludgeoned to death with a shovel and buried on a piece of farm property in Northern Oakland County (the cluster of suburbs directly north of Detroit’s city limits) owned by his first cousin, then Michigan crime lord Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco. The FBI investigated both allegations but came up empty on each occasion.

An understated, immensely-respected and immensely rich Godfather, Black Jack Tocco ruled over his Midwest mob kingdom for almost four decades and was Carlo Licata’s brother-in-law. Licata’s residence was two miles away from the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan where Hoffa was last spotted and was supposed to meet high-ranking Mafiosi Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone of Detroit and Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano of New Jersey on the afternoon of July 30, 1975. Giacalone and Provenzano were  no-shows and Hoffa was witnessed getting into a car with three unidentified men and driving off.

Hoffa was never been seen again and his infamous kidnapping and execution remains an open case. He was killed for his refusal to relinquish his quest to retain his Teamsters presidency at the mob’s behest. Part of his campaign to get his office back included an all-out media assault against his former allies in the mafia. After Hoffa went to prison in 1967, he voluntarily forfeited his post as Teamsters boss. The mafia didn’t want him to get it back. Despite repeated warnings to “give it up, or else,” the strong-minded Hoffa, a spitfire with a relentless spirit and passion for his cause, continued to tempt fate and forced the mob’s hand – they, in turn, decided to wack him.

None of Hoffa’s remains were ever recovered, no arrests were ever made and no charges have ever been brought in his slaying. It’s without question the American underworld’s most iconic unsolved murder of all-time and this week is its’ 40^th anniversary.

Eerily and probably not by mere coincidence, it’s also the anniversary of Licata’s suspicious death, which happened 34 years ago this week on July 30, 1981. When he died, Licata was on shaky terms with his brother-in-law Jack Tocco. The two of them had tumultuous relationship dating back years, from practically the moment Carlo was assigned to Black Jack’s crew when they were both still young men.

Carlo Licata circa 1977

“Carlo could never make Jack happy, he’d bring Jack an envelope with 1,000 bucks in it and Jack would ask why ain’t there 2,000 in here?, he was always busting balls and a lot of people think Carlo finally snapped and tried sticking it to him,” said once elite street source.

How did he stick it to him? At least one way, says another source, was leveraging the details he knew regarding the Hoffa assassination against his brother-in-law.

“As soon as Jack got the power in the Family, Carlo thought he had something coming to him, felt passed over for a captain’s post and would start vaguely referencing the Hoffa thing to Jack in conversations out in public,” the source remembered. “You could tell Jack didn’t like it.”

Tocco was anointed don in 1979, leapfrogging Tony Zerilli, the previous heir apparent who had just served four and a half years in the joint for skimming and hidden ownership in the Frontier Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas  Licata never rose above the rank of solider in his 35-year underworld career. Tony Jack was street boss in Motown for almost a half-century and Tony Pro a capo in New York’s Genovese crime family based out of his Teamsters local in New Jersey.

Jack Tocco, Tony Giacalone and Tony Provenzano are considered the top suspects in the Hoffa homicide even though they are all dead. Also no longer with us are the other two prime suspects in the investigation, Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone, Tony Jack’s younger brother and fellow Michigan mob titan and Salvatore (Sally Bugs) Briguglio, Tony Pro’s right-hand man and No. 1 “hitter.” All died of natural causes, except Sally Bugs, who was murdered in New York in 1978 while facing unrelated murder and racketeering charges alongside Provenzano.

One-time close friends, Hoffa was fighting with Tony Pro towards the end of his life – a heated feud that sprouted while they were locked up together over union insurance benefits Hoffa was still receiving in prison and Tony Pro wasn’t. More than once, they had threatened to kill each other’s families and twice in the years after they got out of jail clothes they physically scuffled in face-to-face meetings in Miami and New York, respectively. Regardless of the bitterness, Hoffa understood it was necessary to make amends with Provenzano if he wanted to win the upcoming Teamsters election, being that Provenzano controlled large chunks of votes from his east coast union stronghold spanning over a half-dozen states on the Atlantic seaboard.

Tony Jack, who was related to Provenzano through marriage and Hoffa’s contact in the mafia since the 1950s, offered to broker a “sit-down.” He arranged a setup instead.

Licata would often host mafia sit-downs at his home, a two-story brick estate perched on a leafy hill across from an elementary school. Hoffa and Giacalone had met there in the past in the years leading up to Hoffa vanishing, meaning Hoffa wouldn’t have been suspicious if he was informed the sit-down at the Red Fox was diverted to the Licata residence up the road .

A longtime button man and mob prince, Licata was discovered dead there on July 30, 1981, the six-year anniversary of the Hoffa hit, shot twice in the chest, the gun resting 10 feet away on a dresser minus his fingerprints. His death at 57 was officially ruled a suicide, however some people (law enforcement, mobsters and others) view it more likely as a homicide.

Carlo Licata’s dad was Los Angeles mob boss Nick Licata, a Detroiter during Prohibition who fled Michigan in the early 1930s and relocated to Southern California after having a murder contract placed on his head as a result of feuding with Motor City mob “founding fathers,” Joseph (Joe Uno) Zerilli  – Tony’s dad – and his brother-in-law William (Black Bill) Tocco – Black Jack’s dad.Taking refuge in the California crime family led by L.A. don Jack Dragna, Nick Licata climbed the latter in the west coast rackets fast and proved a valuable enough of an earner that Dragna reached out to Zerilli and Tocco and got the contract lifted. Licata operated out of the Five O’Clock Tavern in Burbank and forged close relationships with Dragna’s brother and consigliere Tom and fellow up-and-comer and future Godfather, Frank (Frankie One Eye) DeSimone.

L.A. mafia boss Nick Licata

By the time Licata reached captain status in the 1950s and it became clear that he was destined for a spot in the L.A. mob’s hierarchy, any lingering animosity from his quarrel with Zerilli and Tocco had to be quelled for the sake of good business – the California and Detroit crime families did quite of bit of business together and it couldn’t be jeopardized by past ill will cutting into either syndicates’ bottom line. So, a truce was arranged: via the marriage of Nick Licata’s only son Carlo, already a “made” man in the L.A. Borgata to Black Bill Tocco’s youngest daughter, “Babe,” in 1953.

The Tocco-Licata wedding was a giant, lavish affair held at downtown Detroit’s beautiful Book Cadillac Hotel and attended by American mob luminaries from around the entire country. Babe Tocco’s brothers, Jack, a future boss of the Detroit vice syndicate and Tony, a future consigliere, were groomsmen for Carlo Licata. Following the nuptials and honeymoon, Carlo officially transferred from the California mafia to the Detroit mafia. State police documents reveal Licata’s involvement in an array of business endeavors, legal and illegal, over the years. He was partnered with his brother-in-laws and other local organized crime figures in gambling, loansharking and shakedown rackets, per these documents.

Black Bill Tocco and Joe Zerilli ran the mob in Michigan side-by-side for 41 years. Zerilli, the front boss for most of that time, earned a seat on the National Commission, the U.S. Mafia’s board of directors and overall ruling body and was widely beloved, often acting as the Commission’s unofficial consigliere, called on to mediate disputes between different “LCN” factions.

With his son keeping busy in Detroit, Nick Licata climbed the ranks of the SoCal mob out west, going from consigliere to underboss to finally boss in 1967 upon the death of Frank DeSimone (Jack Dragna’s successor as don) from a heart attack. He died in 1974, two years after Black Bill passed away because of a bad ticker, too. Joe Uno Zerilli followed in 1977. However, Zerilli was alive in the summer of 1975 when it was decided Jimmy Hoffa had become more headache than he was worth. In other words: expendable.

Joe Zerilli (second from left) & Black Bill Tocco (far right)

Zerilli was the person who signed off on both Hoffa’s ascent to the presidency of the colossal-sized Teamsters union and ultimately his execution. Per federal informants, Joe Uno assigned Jack Tocco and Tony Giacalone to coordinate the assassination. According to numerous Gangster Rerport sources, they decided to use Black Jack’s brother-in-law Carlo Licata’s house as the kill spot. These sources say Sally Bugs Briguglio, Billy Giacalone and a fast-rising Detroit mobster named Anthony (Tony Pal) Palazzolo picked up Hoffa in the Red Fox parking lot in Tony Giacalone’s son’s car – a 1975 Mercury Marquis –, informed him that the sitdown he had with Tony Jack and Tony Pro was being moved to Licata’s house a couple minutes away and then drove him there and killed him in the garage.

The fateful head-shot was fired by either Sally Bugs or Billy Jack as Hoffa got out of the car being driven by Tony Pal, per two of these sources. Early that morning, Billy Jack intentionally lost the FBI and state police surveillance squads trailing his customized Cadillac, outfitted with secret weapon compartments and they didn’t’ pick him back up until after dinner.

Neither Licata, nor Black Jack’s baby sis Babe Tocco were at home when the hit went down, per these sources, but a pair of Tony Pro’s guys from Jersey, the Andretta brothers (Stevie and Tommy) were and, along with Tony Pal, they placed Hoffa’s body in the trunk of the Mercury Marquis and took it to Central Sanitation, a trash company owned by Detroit mafia capos Peter (Bozzi) Vitale and Rafealle (Jimmy Q) Quasarano, where it was incinerated. Vitale and Quasarano were best friends, well-known wholesale narcotics traffickers and labor-union racketeers connected to Hoffa from his earliest days organizing truck drivers in the 1930s and 40s.

“We’d hear from informants that Hoffa could have got taken out at Carlo Licata’s house,” said retired FBI agent Mike Carone. “Like every legitimate tip, you had to look into it. That lead proved more promising than others. We never had the ammo to bring charges, though. It seems logical, knowing all the factors that played into Hoffa’s disappearance and death. Things just didn’t pan. Nothing panned the whole case. That’s why we’re still here today 40 years later talking about it.”

FBI surveillance logs note Vitale and Quasarano presence at a dinner held at Larco’s two nights before Hoffa’s slaying with Giacalone and Joe Zerilli and then another dinner two nights after he was murdered in New York with high-ranking members of the Genovese crime family, the Borgata Tony Pro belonged to. Tony Giacalone and Jack Tocco, far from friends or social companions, were observed by FBI agents meeting behind closed doors at Tony Jack’s headquarters, the Southfield Athletic Club, late the afternoon Hoffa went missing. The Mercury Marquis used in the hit was confirmed to be at the Southfield Athletic Club at 2:15 p.m. on July 30, 1975, only a half hour before Hoffa was nabbed at the Red Fox restaurant five miles away by the hit team.

The Burgundy-colored car is the lone piece of physical evidence recovered in the Hoffa case. Hoffa’s DNA was placed in the vehicle via a hair extracted from the backseat and his scent was found in the trunk by police-trained canines in the weeks after he disappeared.

Tony Giacalone went to prison in 1979 for tax evasion and extortion, leaving Tocco in charge all by himself until he was slated to return to town in the mid-1980s. Black Jack Tocco was voted into the boss’ chair of the Detroit mafia in June 1979 at an inauguration ceremony hosted at a mob-owned hunting lodge near Ann Arbor drawing all the crime families administrators and capos (or their representatives) as well as camera-toting FBI agents tipped off by Tocco’s driver, bodyguard and cousin, Anthony (Fat Tony) Zito, a confidential federal informant for decades without any knowledge of the local underworld.

Jimmy Quasarano, sometimes referred to by the more ominous nickname, “Jimmy the Goon,” and tied to Sicilian mafia sects from his marriage to Vittorio (Don Vito) Vitale’s daughter, was appointed Jack Tocco’s consigliere. He died in 2002 at 92 years old. Pete Vitale, the Motor City’s overlord of Greektown (Detroit’s main downtown entertainment district) until he passed in 1997. Palazzolo, per FBI records and inside sources, stepped into Vitale’s capo slot.

Black Jack Tocco circa 1998

It wasn’t a secret in area gangland circles that Jack Tocco and his little brother and aid-de-camp Anthony (Tony T) Tocco, didn’t always get along with their brother-in-law. They were frequently at odds over family and business matters. At some point in the early 1980s, tensions were boiling and Carlo Licata wound up dead in his own house, the house many speculate was used to kill Jimmy Hoffa at and six years to the very date it happened. Sources tell the Gangster Report, that Licata might have tried to use his knowledge of the Hoffa hit and where it took place to blackmail his brother-in-laws in some form or used the information to hold over their heads in the years after Hoffa was wiped off the face of the earth.

In the end, these sources say, it got him wiped out.

“Within some circles, Carlo Licata showing up dead wasn’t a surprise,” one source said. “The last thing Jack Tocco wanted was loose ends, any way to link him to Hoffa he would do anything to remove if he felt it becoming a threat. I think he saw Carlo as a threat starting at a certain point. Once he became boss and his dad, Carlo’s dad and uncle Joe Z were gone and he had nobody to answer to but himself, he did something about it.”

On the afternoon of July 30, 1981, the six-year anniversary of the Hoffa hit, Licata and his wife were at home and Jack and Tony Tocco were at a college graduation party. Licata’s son came over his parents’ house around dinner time and discovered his dad dead in his bedroom (two bullet wounds in the chest) and his mom, asleep in the study. Babe Tocco’s statement to responding police was that she heard two loud bangs while in the midst of napping, but assumed it was her husband opening and slamming the front door. There were no reports of Licata behaving depressed or suicidal in the days and weeks leading up to his being found dead.

The Detroit mob is historically known for often veiling its’ murders as suicides and/or drug overdoses in attempts to thwart off investigators. Fat Tony Zito allegedly committed suicide in the years following Licata’s death. The day Zito is alleged to have shot himself his family unearthed FBI pay slips hidden in his attic.

“This particular group of Goodfellas in Detroit for a variety of reasons are in the Hall of Fame for their ability to manipulate their murders in ways that not only distance themselves from the hits, but creates all this other confusion and misdirection that can and does prove bothersome to those of us that are or who have been responsible for building cases against them,” retired undercover FBI agent Bill Randall recalled. “To some it might sound like a cliché, these individuals (the Detroit mob) are operating at a higher plane than most organized crime groups of their ilk. Over the years, there were countless mob hits or suspected mob hits in Michigan the FBI could never crack. There would just be too many dead ends, too many questions, never enough answers. The consensus amongst us in the Bureau would be this guy did this, or these people were involved in this, we never stacked up enough to feel confident in taking it in front of a jury, or at least the DOJ (Dept of Justice) didn’t. You just did your work, even when it was frustrating and you knew in some cases, these guys were getting away with murder.”

Tony Giacalone died of kidney failure in 2001, facing a 1996 racketeering case that concluded in convictions for his brother Billy and Jack Tocco. Billy Giacalone and Tocco both did prison time in the case and when they came out, Billy Jack was promoted to syndicate underboss, replacing Jack Tocco’s deposed No. 2 and first cousin, Tony Zerilli, Joe Uno’s only son.

Jack Tocco died of heart failure last summer. His brother Tony T and Billy Jack both passed away from natural causes in 2012. His cousin, Tony Zerilli, died back in the spring. Experts contend that Zerilli’s motive for alerting the government of where he believed Jimmy Hoffa was buried in his final years was undermined by the bad blood he had with Jack Tocco: simmering animosity lied just under the surface for years with the pair and they fell out for good following the ’96 bust, a pinch Black Jack saddled Tony Z with responsibility for.

Tony Palazzolo, 75, is reputed to be the Detroit mafia’s consigliere today. He once bragged to an undercover cop in his office at his Detroit Sausage Company headquarters that he personally put Jimmy Hoffa through his sausage auger.

Tony Zerilli (center) circa 1979

In his debriefing with the FBI and U.S. Attorneys Office,Tony Zerilli, imprisoned in a federal correctional institute in Minnesota at the time Hoffa was killed but still the Detroit mob’s acting underboss and day-to-day No. 2 in charge, told agents and lawyers present that Tony Pal was the man wielding the shovel that beat Hoffa to death at Jack Tocco’s farm property in Oakland Township and that Palazollo and Pete Vitale picked Hoffa up at the Red Fox the afternoon of his assassination and drove him there to be slain. Zerilli was let in on the specifics by Tony Giacalone after Tony Z was released from prison in 1978.

Tony Provenzano dropped dead of a heart attack in prison in December 1988. Provenzano was jailed for racketeering and ordering Briguglio to anchor a hit squad he dispatched in 1961 to murder a gangster and union rival of his named Anthony (Tony Three Fingers) Castellito. Retired from the mob, 75-year old Tommy Andretta resides in Las Vegas. His older brother Stevie died years ago of cancer. The Andretta brothers were groomed in the ways of the mafia by Tony Pro and Sally Bugs and were indicted and convicted in the same landmark late-1970s RICO case, the first ever prosecuted against an Italian mob regime.

The post Sheeran, Zerilli Off The Mark, Jimmy Hoffa Clipped At Detroit Mobster Carlo Licata’s Home, Per Sources appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Many American crime experts and former and current members of federal law enforcement believe slain Teamsters titan Jimmy Hoffa had his corpse incinerated at Central Sanitation in Hamtramck, Michigan, a Detroit mob-owned trash company. Central Sanitation was a business that belonged to deceased Motor City mafia lieutenants Peter (Bozzi) Vitale and Raffaele (Jimmy Q) Quasarano, the closest of friends and both longtime Hoffa associates and high-ranking organized crime figures connected to homicides in the past.

Hoffa was kidnapped and killed 40 years ago this week. He vanished from a Metro Detroit restaurant parking lot the afternoon of July 30, 1975 en route to a gangland sit down with Detroit mob street boss Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone and Genovese crime family capo Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano. His body has never been found and no charges were ever filed in the case, though it’s still an open investigation. Some sociologists have dubbed the Hoffa mystery the most iconic unsolved crime in U.S. history. Four decades later, never-ending debates related to the whereabouts of Hoffa’s remains have turned the ongoing search and surrounding hysteria whenever a new tip arises every couple years or so into modern mythology.

But what if there’s nothing to find? What if any and all remnants of his body cease to exist and have since the very hour he breathed his last breath? That’s where Vitale and Quasarano allegedly come in.

“Within a half hour of taking two in the head, Jimmy Hoffa was ashes,” says a Detroit mob insider and respected wiseguy. “All this running around looking for a body is laughable, there ain’t nothing to find. And he wasn’t the first either. Bozzi Vitale and Jimmy Q got rid of a bunch of bodies the exact same way. Abracadabra, you’re corpse is suddenly gone, no evidence, no nothing. It’s not that complicated.”

Hardly ever seen apart, Bozzi and Jimmy Q were both raised in Sicily and known to be partners in narcotics, gambling and loansharking operations. They were each a prime suspect in the Hoffa investigation from the jump and dominated the area’s trash-hauling trade with their co-ownership of Central Sanitation at that time.

The FBI was tracking their movements in the days leading up to and after Hoffa went missing and saw them have dinner with Tony Giacalone and Detroit mob Godfather Joseph (Joe Uno) Zerilli at Larco’s, a favorite mafia haunt in Motown on July 28 and then break bread with Genovese crime family street boss Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno on August 1 in New York’s Little Italy.

Zerilli’s son, Anthony (Tony Z) Zerilli, the syndicate’s imprisoned “acting” underboss the summer Hoffa got clipped, came forth to the FBI in the final years of his life in 2012 and fingered Bozzi Vitale and Jimmy Quasarano in the actual hit, along with current reputed Detroit mafia heavyweight Anthony (Tony Pal) Palazzolo. Zerilli told investigators that Tony Giacalone informed him Hoffa was driven to property owned by his cousin and the Family’s then “acting” boss Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco in Oakland Township, Michigan by the trio of wiseguys and once they arrived in a farmhouse at the property, smacked in the head by Palazzolo with a shovel and buried there, possibly alive.

The FBI looked into the Zerilli tip and searched the property to no avail. Tony Z died in the spring, no longer part of the mob’s hierarchy in Detroit. He was No. 2 in charge from 1974 until he was jailed in 2002. His dad passed in 1977, turning over the reins of the crime family to Tocco despite Tony Z being the original heir apparent to the throne. Tocco preceded him to the grave though, succumbing to heart failure last July, the city’s sitting don for the previous three and a half decades. Tony Jack and Tony Pro died of natural causes in 2001 and 1988, respectively.

Pete Vitale (left) and Jimmy Quasarano (right) in an FBI surveillance photo snapped in 1978

Bozzi Vitale and his older brother Paul (the Pope) Vitale – another Central Sanitation co-owner – were captains in the Michigan mafia responsible for overseeing the city’s Greektown neighborhood, downtown Detroit’s central entertainment district, for years.The Vitales were stationed out of the Grecian Gardens restaurant, a mob hangout in the heart of Greektown at the east end of Monroe Street, the neighborhood’s main drag. Coming up in the rough-and-rugged rustbelt underworld of the 1930s and 40s, they were groomed by fearsome Detroit mafia capo Pietro (Machine Gun Pete) Corrado, the original gangland “Pope” of Greektown.

As a young hood, Bozzi Vitale was Machine Gun Pete’s driver and bodyguard. When Machine Gun Pete and his top crew boss Salvatore (Tootie) Buffa both died of sudden heart attacks a few years a part in the 1950s, the Vitales inherited Buffa’s rackets and were appointed capo of his crew, while Corrado’s two sons Dominic and Anthony took over their dad’s regime. Binding the families even tighter, Dominic (Fats) Corrado and Anthony (Tony the Bull) Corrado married Paul Vitale’s two daughters.

Jimmy Quasarano was a suave, savvy and reputedly lethal Motown drug czar who would rise to the crime family’s consigliere slot or No. 3 in charge in the late 1970s. Besides being thought to have taken part in Hoffa’s slaying, Quasarano is suspected to have participated in the planning or carrying out of at least a dozen other mob murders. Married to the daughter of a Sicilian mafia don, Jimmy Q (sometimes referred to by his men as “Jimmy the Goon”) cut his teeth as the driver, bodyguard and all-around right-hand man of beloved longtime Detroit mob consigliere Giovanni (Papa John) Priziola. He replaced Priziola as consigliere following Priziola’s death due to natural causes in April 1979 – he’d been serving in the post on an “acting” basis for several years before that. Although he kept an office at Central Sanitation, Quasarano could be found most days at his Motor City Barber Supply, the Motor City Boxing Gym (where he staked fighters) or cavorting with his buddy Bozzi at the Grecian Gardens.

Jimmy Q and the Vitales had been linked to Hoffa by federal authorities in various (mostly) illegal capacities dating back to the days right after Prohibition when Hoffa was establishing himself as a presence in the local Detroit labor community with fire-and-brimstone speeches, a charismatic swagger and savvy, bulldog-tough leadership backed with fierce knuckle-dragging firepower supplied by his friends in the mob. Men like the Vitale brothers and Quasarano.

The fiery one-time Teamsters President locked horns with his former allies in the mafia over his desire to take back his presidency after serving a prison sentence in the early 1970s. Throughout the mid-to-late 20^th Century, organized crime dominated the ranks of the Teamsters labor union underlying Hoffa’s meteoric ascent to being one of the country’s the most recognized and powerful men in both industrial and political terms. He was incarcerated in 1967 for bribery, fraud and jury tampering and in 1971 relinquished his role as president of the union to his VP and protégé, the more controllable and oafish Frank Fitzsimmons, in hopes of getting an early release, which was granted by a pardon that came straight from the White House and sitting Commander and Chief Richard M. Nixon, by the end of that same calendar year .

Upon hitting the streets, Hoffa made it clear publically he intended on seeking reelection to the great dismay of the very same mafia bosses he used as muscle to take office in the first place and who were ordering him to retire because they preferred Fitzsimmons’ more easy going and persuadable style as
Teamsters boss than his fearless, harder to control, bull-in-a-china shop-approach. Hoffa neglected the demand to forgo his bid to reclaim the presidency and threatened to expose the ties between the union and organized crime if the mob didn’t stop blocking his path. The mob decided to nip the problem in the bud – they solved it by murdering him.

Tony Giacalone lured Hoffa out in the open to be killed with the promise of a critical “burying of the hatchet” meeting with Tony Provenzano, Tony Jack’s cousin via marriage and an east coast Teamsters powerbroker with whom Hoffa was feuding with but needed on his side for the sake of his reelection bid. The supposed sit down was scheduled for 2:00 p.m. on July 30, 1975 at the Machus Red Fox in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, a ritzy suburb less than 10 miles north of Detroit city limits and home to auto executives, judges, lawyers, doctors and professional athletes. Tony Jack and Tony Pro intentionally didn’t show. Giacalone, the man put in charge of arranging Hoffa’s assassination, sent a hit squad in their place, to pick him up under the guise of taking him to another location where he’d be meeting with the “Two Tonys,” and executed him at a nearby residence instead.

Many FBI and Gangster Report sources say within 45 minutes of Hoffa being murdered, his body was driven in the trunk of Tony Jack’s son’s car to Jimmy Q and the Vitales’ Central Sanitation in Hamtramck and promptly torched in the trash company’s incinerator. Suspiciously, Central Sanitation itself burned to the ground in a suspected, but never indicted arson fire that occurred in the months after Hoffa disappeared.

Hamtramck is a city within a city, resting on Detroit’s near northwest side and holding a rich gangland history as well as a reputation for being home to the most culturally diverse set of neighborhoods in the whole state of Michigan. The municipality was so corrupt during Prohibition that the city was put under Martial Law and taken over by the state to rid it of the dirty politicians that existed from top-to-bottom in Hamtramck city hall at that time. In other words, it was a perfect city for wiseguys like Jimmy Q and the Vitale brothers to set up shop.

Central Sanitation was an offspring of Tri-County Sanitation, another FBI search destination in the Hoffa investigation and equally notorious in the annals of the Detroit underworld. Tri County was formed in 1962 by the Vitale brothers and Bozzi Vitale’s soon-to-be son-in-law, mob prince, Joe Barbara, Jr., who was young (30), ambitious and according to numerous federal informants, extremely deadly, having already been named a suspect in more than one gangland homicide. Barbara, Jr., known on the streets then as “Joe the Clipper,” was the son of rural Pennsylvania mob don Joseph (Joe the Barber) Barbara, Sr., the famous host of the ill-fated 1957 Apalachin, New York mafia summit.

About three years after the Apalachin summit was raided by the police, making huge headlines around the world, Barbara, Jr. moved to Detroit and began dating Bozzi Vitale’s daughter, finally marrying her in 1963 in an extravagant ceremony attended by a who’s who of mob dignitaries from across the country. With Barbara, Jr. at the helm and the Vitales providing the capital, connections and back-up artillery (not that he needed much), Tri-County quickly became the biggest sanitation company in Southeastern Michigan. It also might have doubled as a gangland graveyard. An FBI memo from 1978 cites confidential informants claiming “at least 10 bodies were disposed of on Tri-County Sanitation property.”

Joe Barbara, Jr. (center) following his racketeering conviction

Before he was indicted in 1968 for racketeering and extortion revolving around activities related to Tri-County, Barbara, Jr. had expanded his and the Vitales’ interests in the trash biz into Ohio, teaming with the legendary Toledo underworld character Leonard (Chalky Red) Yaranowsky to open the King Road Dump Truck Company. But his 1968 bust eventually got him booted from the sanitation industry all together and forced Barbara, Jr. to sell his stakes in both Tri-County and King Road. In 1972, Barbara, Jr. sold his interests in the two businesses to Nick Micelli, Bozzi Vitale’s other son-in-law and attorney. Then Micelli and the Vitales’ made a five million-dollar stock deal (1.5 million cash) orchestrated by Barbara, Jr. to sell Tri-County to a Boston-based trash-hauling company while keeping their workers employed and hidden points on the backend of the sale.

The Vitales partnered with Jimmy Q, went to a bank and got a loan to start Central Sanitation. Barbara, Jr.’s racketeering case stemmed from his alleged rape of Delores Lazaros, the wife of an imprisoned Greek Detroit mafia associate, Peter (Birmingham Pete) Lazaros, the syndicate’s payoff king and primary bagman in the 1950s and a majority of the 1960s. After Pete Lazaros failed killing Barbara, Jr. in an unsuccessful hit attempt that took place in the parking lot of a suburban hotel (The Kingsley Inn in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan), he joined Team USA and testified against Joe the Clipper at trial, helping convict him and send him to the pen for six years. During a recces at the highly-publicized trial, Lazaros and Barbara, Jr. got into a shouting match in the court hallway and Lazaros accused Joe the Clipper of stuffing the wife of another mobster down a drain pipe.

Central Sanitation was only in operation for less than five years and shut down after a March 1976 fire that gutted the place, possibly erasing any evidence of Hoffa’s remains.

“Probably the best intelligence we received regarding how Hoffa’s body was done away with was the Central Sanitation angle,” retired U.S. Prosecutor Keith Corbett recalled. “We were being told a lot of bodies were disposed of, incinerated there in the 1970s. Vitale and Quasarano were running out of there at that point in time and both those two fellas were pegged pretty early on as being involved in this murder in some capacity or another, so it wasn’t a leap on our part to put two and two together, plus the information we were getting fed was leading us to that conclusion. Betting odds would dictate, the fact that the place mysteriously burnt to the ground shortly thereafter wasn’t a coincidence.”

Corbett was at the helm of the federal government’s courtroom assault on Jimmy Q and Bozzi Vitale when they were convicted of racketeering offenses in 1981 spawning from the “bustout” and extortion of a Wisconsin-based Italian cheese company with outlets in Michigan, Illinois, California and Connecticut and financed by a Teamster-backed pension-fund loan. The racketeering case was rolled into a tax fraud indictment tied to the sale of Tri-County Sanitation that the pair incurred the same month in 1979.

Former U.S. Atty and famous Michigan mob buster Keith Corbett

The government was aided tremendously in both cases by Nick Micelli, who heavily in debt to Jimmy Q and others from his gambling habit and threatened with prison time, gave up his father-in-law and Quasarano to the feds and testified against them in court. On the stand he recalled Jimmy Q informing the cheese company’s owner, “The big fish is swallowing the little fish and frankly you’re lucky we didn’t break your legs.”

Micelli, his wife and kids moved to the west coast in the wake of the trial. He continued practicing law in Beverly Hills, dodging a retaliatory hit only because he was married to Bozzi’s daughter. A heated conversation about whether or not Micelli should live or die between Vitale and Quasarano was intercepted by FBI audio surveillance. “I don’t care how mad we are at him (Micelli), we’re not going to make my little girl a widow and let my grandkids grow up without a dad, that’s not happening on my watch,” Bozzi pointedly told Jimmy Q.

Later on in the same snippet of the wiretap feed, Quasarano was heard telling another associate immediately after Vitale left his office at Motor City Barber Supply, a different story. “That rat bastard owes me 150 large and five years,” Jimmy Q hissed, referencing Micelli’s gambling debt and the ensuing five-year prison term he had in front of him. “He’s going to get it (get killed), it’s just a matter of when.”

Micelli would be felled by a heart attack at the age of 50 in 1994, not on Quasarano’s order as he had predicted. Paul Vitale died in 1990, Bozzi Vitale in 1998. Jimmy Q held on to 2002, passing away at the ripe old age of 92. Joe Barbara, Jr. is 84 today and did another 5-piece in the can because of a racketeering pinch in the 1980s.

The post Jimmy Hoffa’s Corpse Most Likely Cremated At Detroit Mob’s Central Sanitation appeared first on The Gangster Report.

This week is the 40-year anniversary of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance and murder. Hoffa’s high-profile kidnapping and slaying has never been solved, firmly embedding itself as the most notorious unsolved crime in American history. He was a lifelong mafia associate and those underworld connections are undoubtedly what got him killed at 62 years old in the midst of his golden-years resurgence in the then-monolithic labor union on July 30, 1975.

Pre-Assassination Days

February 14, 1913 – James Riddle Hoffa is born in Brazil, Indiana

1924 – Hoffa and his family move to Detroit, Michigan

1927 – Weeks short of his 15th birthday, Hoffa goes to work on the loading docks at Kroger’s, a leading grocery-store chain in the Detroit area to this very day, eventually making his reputation as a young force to be reckoned with in the burgeoning organized labor community by spearheading the now-famous “Strawberry Strike,” where he led his fellow “unloaders” on the dock in a work-stoppage to force a wage increase.

1932 – Hoffa is recruited by the Teamsters to become a organizer at Local 299, the truckers and cartage-workers union’s main Detroit hub, located down by the old Tigers Stadium

1935 – Hoffa cements relationship with Detroit mafia, using an introduction by international gangster extraordinaire Frank (Frankie Three Fingers) Coppola to syndicate labor racketeering experts like Angelo (The Chairman) Meli, Santo (Cockeyed Sam) Perrone and Peter (Horseface Pete) Licavoli, who he uses his ties to as a means of building a staggering powerbase in the decades to come

September 1936 – Hoffa marries his wife, Josephine, buys a house in Northwest Detroit and starts a family, a son Jimmy, Jr. and a daughter Barbara

1952 – Hoffa becomes International Vice President of the Teamsters

1958 – Hoffa becomes International President of the Teamsters, well on its way to being the most powerful single labor union in the world, and catapulting himself into the spotlight, where he’d go on to also become one of the most recognized people in the nation.

1964 – Hoffa is convicted in federal court twice in the same year, first for bribery and jury tampering and second for fraud, sentences to eight years in prison

March 1967 –  Hoffa is incarcerated at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary following appeals on his criminal convictions being rejected, housed in the prison’s infamous “Mafia Manor” wing, holding many of the country’s most fearsome Italian organized crime figures

1969 – Hoffa and New Jersey Teamster Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, a convicted murderer and Genovese crime family capo, get into a heated verbal altercation that turned physical at the Lewisburg chow hall, regarding union benefits Hoffa and his family were still receiving while he was behind bars, but Tony Pro and his family were not – originally, Hoffa and Tony Pro were close friends dating back years, however the falling out in the can would cause serious issues for Hoffa going forward

February 1971 – Hoffa officially surrenders duties as Teamsters President, handing over the reins to the union empire to his VP and one-time protégé Frank Fitzsimmons

December 1971 – Hoffa is granted a Presidential Pardon by Richard Nixon (looking to secure the Teamsters backing in his ’72 election)

1972 – Hoffa announces his intention of unseating Fitzsimmons as president in the 1976 Teamsters election, news unsettling to his former allies in the mob, who had in no uncertain terms instructed him to retire and not seek reelection, quite content with “Big Fitzy” in the union boss’ chair

Winter of 1974 – Hoffa has his parole restrictions removed and embarks on a media blitz, campaigning to take back the Teamsters while blasting the mafia and promising to rid the entire union rank-and-file of mob influence if and when he gets back in office

Summer of 1974 –  At the mob’s behest, the Teamsters tap legendary labor-union goon Rolland (Big Mac) McMaster, once a Hoffa confidant and his No. 1 enforcer in the union, to form an “Anti-Hoffa squad” intended to disrupt Hoffa’s campaign to reclaim the president’s post by any means necessary, specifically by employing intimidation tactics.

Spring 1975 – Hoffa puts out word that he was amiable to a squashing-of-the-beef with Tony Provenzano, who Hoffa realizes he needs on his side for a successful Teamsters presidential bid the following year, being that Tony Pro controlled all the east coast votes

July 10, 1975 – The car of Detroit Teamsters executive Richard (Little Fitz) Fitzsimmons is bombed in the parking lot of Nemo’s, a popular Local 299 watering hole, restaurant and after-work gathering spot, as he and his dad, Big Fitzy Frank Fitzsimmons, ate inside – rumors abounded, some saying that Hoffa put out murder contracts on both Fitzsimmons, others speculating that it was the work of McMaster’s Anti-Hoffa squad to make it appear that he had gone over the edge

July 12 & 26, 1975 – Hoffa takes meetings with Detroit mob street bosses Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone and Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone, brother mafia capos linked to literally dozens of gangland homicides and Hoffa’s longtime “contacts” in the Motor City underworld, at Hoffa’s lakeside suburban residence – the first was to discuss the Fitzsimmons car bombing incident at Nemo’s, the second to confirm a purported “sitdown” on the afternoon of July 30 at the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Twp, Michigan with Tony Jack,Tony Provenzano and labor consultant Leonard (Little Lenny) Schultz, the Giacalone brothers’ liaison to union affairs.

July 29,1975

12:30 – Hoffa has a lunch meeting with Mayor of Detroit, Coleman A. Young at the historic Book Cadillac Hotel, then in need of refurbishing and the possibility of Teamsters help in that endeavor being the main topic of discussion at the meal

8:30 – A fully-vetted FBI informant places Tony Giacalone, Tony Provenzano and Rolland McMaster all having dinner in a group at Carl’s Chop House, a late-night Tony Jack hangout for years and Provenzano proclaiming loudly, “Tomorrow’s going to be a great day, gentlemen.”

The Day of The Hit – July 30, 1975

6:00 a.m. – Lenny Schultz opens Southfield Athletic Club, the Giacalone brothers headquarters and Schultz’s family-owned business, located in the first floor of the Traveler’s Tower office building at the corner of Evergreen and 11 Mile Road, less than 5 miles outside of Detroit’s city limits

6:30 a.m. – Hoffa awakes at his Orion Township home, which rested on Square Lake, goes into his kitchen and reads the newspaper, before eating breakfast with his wife Jo on the deck outside

7:45 a.m. – Hoffa speaks on the telephone with New York Teamsters Local President for a half hour about strategy for his forthcoming sit down with Tony Pro

8:45 a.m. – Hoffa’s surrogate son Chuckie O’Brien, a Teamsters executive who he was feuding with, is dropped off at Local 299 on Trumbull Ave in Southwest Detroit.

9:00 a.m. – Hoffa chats with his 10-year old male neighbor as he is watering his grass

10:30 a.m.- Billy Giacalone leaves his eastside residence and quickly loses a pair of surveillance units (one federal, one state) assigned to keep tabs on his whereabouts – he’s not “picked up” again by either unit until dinner time

11:00 a.m. – Tony Giacalone arrives at the Southfield Athletic Club

12:00 p.m. – Chuckie O’Brien takes possession of Tony Jack’s son, Joseph (Joey Jack) Giacalone’s brand new 1975 maroon-colored Mercury Marquis in order to deliver a 40-pound freshwater salmon sent from a Seattle Teamsters president as a present to Local 299 VP and staunch Hoffa loyalist Bobby Holmes

12:30 p.m. – Tony Jack goes for massage at Southfield Athletic Club

12:45 p.m. –  Hoffa, who has spent the late morning and early afternoon watching television and doung crossword puzzles with his wife at home, talks to a friend in a local painters union in Hazel Park on the phone hoping to arrange yardwork to be done at his residence that upcoming weekend

12:50 p.m. – O’Brien arrives at Holmes’ house in the Metro Detroit westside suburb of Novi and gives the giant fish to Holmes’ wife, helping her chop it up into individual salmon steaks before departing .

1:00 p.m. – Hoffa leaves his home for the Red Fox sitdown, tells his wife he’ll return by 4:00 p.m. and will cook her a steak dinner on the grill

1:15 p.m. –  O’Brien takes Joey Jack’s Mercury Marquis to a car wash in Farmington, Michigan, to clean it of the fish blood that had dripped on the backseat interior of the vehicle in the process of delivering it

1:30 p.m. – Hoffa stops at a limousine-rental business Airport Service Lines in Pontiac on his way to the Red Fox to see ASI’s owner Louis (Louie the Pope) Linteau, a longtime Hoffa ally and former Teamsters Local chief in Pontiac, a hardscrabble, working-class community directly north of glitzy Bloomfield Hills and Bloomfield Twp – Linteau is away at lunch and Hoffa leaves a message with his secretary telling him he’s going to meet Tony Jack, Tony Pro and Lenny Schultz at Red Fox in Bloomfield Twp at 2:00

1:45 p.m. – Tony Provenzano is seen playing cards at his Teamsters union hall in New Jersey

2:00 p.m. – Hoffa arrives at the Machus Red Fox, located at the forefront of a shopping mall bordering Telegraph Rd, one of the area’s busiest thoroughfares – he speaks to numerous people, a hostess, a waitress and several patrons and well-wishers.

2:15 p.m. – O’Brien arrives at the Southfield Athletic Club with a freshly-cleaned Mercury Marqus, deliveringTony Jack a present for his grandkid’s communion

2:25 p.m. – Tony Jack goes to the barber shop at the Southfield Athletic Club for a haircut and manicure

2:30 p.m. – A visibly-frustrated Hoffa leaves the Red Fox, realizing he’s been stood up and heads towards a nearby hardware store, right behind the Red Fox in the shopping plaza, to use the  pay phone, where he calls Linteau first and then his wife to inform them that Tony Jack, Tony Pro and Schultz were no-shows and that he was going home

2:45 p.m. – En route to his green-colored Pontiac sedan from the hardware store pay phone – roughly a 30 yard walk, Hoffa is witnessed speaking to three unidentified males in a car matching the description of Joey Jack’s Mercury Marquis and then getting into the car with them and driving off onto Telegraph Rd.

2:50 p.m. – Tony Jack leaves the Southfield Athletic club for a meeting with his attorney Bernie Humphrey on the 4^th floor of the Traveler’s Tower, meaning he just had to go out the athletic club’s frontdoor and up four floors in the elevator

2:55 p.m. – Hoffa is killed, the common theory being with two bullets to the back of the head, at a secured private residence nearby the Red Fox (most likely at Detroit mobster Carlo Licata’s house at 680 W. Long Lake Rd., a spot two miles away and somewhere Hoffa had met at with Tony Jack to talk business)

3:30 p.m. – Hoffa’s body is probably incinerated at Central Sanitation, a trash company owned by Detroit mafia lieutenants and Hoffa pals Peter (Bozzi) Vitale and Raffaele (Jimmy Q) Quasarano

3:50 p.m. – Tony Jack returns to the Southfield Athletic Club and sets up shop at his favorite table at the club’s grille.

4:30 p.m. –  An FBI surveillance unit follows Detroit mob “acting” boss, Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco from his Melrose Linen Co. office to Southfield Athletic Club where meets behind closed doors with Tony Jack and Little Lenny Schultz – Tocco, who would be upped to official don in 1979, and Tony Jack, the day-to-day overseer of syndicate activities from the early 1960s into the start of the New Millennium, are thought by the FBI to have been the two men assigned to plan and coordinate Hoffa’s murder

5:30 p.m. – Billy Jack is “back on the grid,” seen scooping his brother Tony at the Southfield Athletic Club and going to dinner

7:00 p.m. – Hoffa’s wife Joe calls Louie Linteau worried because Hoffa hadn’t returned from his meeting at the Red Fox

9:30 – Linteau phones Tony Jack at his home and asks what happened at the meeting, to which Tony Jack responded by saying he had no such meeting and had been at the Southfield Athletic Club all day, per usual

The Post-Assassination Days

July 31, 1975

6:45 a.m. – Louie Linteau calls Tony Jack to tell him Hoffa never came home, Tony Jack comments “Maybe he took a little trip.”

7:45 a.m. – Linteau goes to Red Fox to find Hoffa’s abandoned car, his registered firearm left inside.

10:00 a.m.- Linteau and Jo Hoffa go to Bloomfield Twp. Police Department and file a missing persons report

12:00 p.m. – Linteau gets into fight with O’Brien on the phone when he informs him of Hoffa’s disappearance

9:00 p.m. – Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. kicks O’Brien out of the Hoffa family home, accusing him of being somehow involved in his dad’s kidnapping

August 5, 1975 -The FBI assumes command of the Hoffa investigation from the Bloomfield Twp. authorities

Aug 19, 1975 – Feds seize Joey Jack’s Mercury Marquis, successfully fights state appellate court’s ruling that the seizure is unconstitutional at the state supreme court level in the coming months

Aug 21, 1975 – Police dogs find Hoffa’s scent in the trunk of Joey Jack’s car

Sep 2, 1975 – A federal grand jury is convened in Detroit, calling 16 people to testify, but not resulting in any charges or indictments being filed

June 1976 – Tony Giacalone is convicted of federal tax evasion at trial – along with a soon-to-be-levied extortion indictment he’d plead guilty to in 1978, he was sent away to prison in Atlanta for seven years

1978 – East coast Mafioso Salvatore (Sally Bugs) Briguglio, Tony Provenzano’s right-hand man and a suspected trigger man in the Hoffa hit, is killed gangland style in New York about to go on trial with Tony Pro on murder and racketeering charges (Tony Pro was convicted)

July 30, 1982 – Jimmy Hoffa legally declared dead by the U.S. government

December 1988 – Tony Provenzano dies of a heart attack in prison

January 2001 – Tony Giacalone dies of kidney failure, under indictment in a racketeering case

March 2001 – U.S. Department of Justice announces it has made a DNA match between Hoffa and a hair found in Joey Jack’s Mercury Marquis back in 1975

May 2004 – The FBI examines a claim by dying east coast Teamsters goon, former Hoffa enforcer and well-known mob associate Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran that he personally killed Hoffa at a house in Northwest Detroit on Beaverland near the 7 Mile Road and Evergreen intersection – investigators never found any evidence to validate Sheeran’s assertions

May 2006 – The FBI  examines a claim by a one-time Rolland McMaster associate named Don Wells, incarcerated on drug dealing charges, that Hoffa’s remains were buried at McMaster’s formerly-owned Hidden Dreams Ranch search in suburban Detroit – a multi-million dollar dig and excavation is fruitless

2012 – Billy Giacalone dies of natural causes at 89, still suspected of possibly being the trigger man in the Hoffa hit and having risen to underboss of the Detroit mob in his latter years

June 2013 – The FBI examines a claim by deposed Detroit mafia underboss Anthony (Tony Z) Zerilli that Hoffa was killed and buried at a farm once owned by his cousin and longtime Michigan don, Black Jack Tocco – a short search and dig at the property at the corner of Buell and Adams Roads in Oakland Twp., about 25 miles north of Detroit proved another dead end and experts chalk up, at least part of, his motivation for coming forward was his bitterness towards Tocco, with whom he was haggling over money, power and respect for years.

July 2014 – Jack Tocco dies of heart failure

March 2015 – Tony Zerilli dies of natural causes

The post The Hoffa Hit Timeline: What Exactly Happened The Day The Teamsters Boss Died appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Philadelphia mob infused its’ ranks with some new blood recently, per exclusive Gangster Report sources on the ground in Pennsylvania, as 53-year old Florida-based Godfather Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino is alleged to have conducted a making ceremony on one of his several trips back to the City of Brotherly Love following his being let off parole restrictions in the spring. According to these sources, at least three wiseguys, possibly more, received their buttons, at least one of those inductees coming from a non-Merlino faction of the crime family, specifically, reputed capo Phil Narducci’s camp, as a “conciliatory gesture.”

Narducci, also 53, and Skinny Joey don’t like each other, however, per one source, are “quietly co-existing” using Merlino’s acting boss and second- in-command Steven (Handsome Stevie) Mazzone, who Narducci gets along with and respects, as a “buffer.” Even though the are the exact same age, Narducci and Merlino represent different eras in the city’s mob history, as well as two of at least four emerging subgroups currently operating in the fractured-yet-still-churning-and-burning Philly mafia.

The source, intimately familiar with a number of the fragile Family’s cliques, claims the making ceremony took place in late August or early September at a residence in South Philly and was the first Skinny Joey has held since his release from prison almost five years ago. Word on the street is that one of the new Men of Honor is somehow related by blood or by marriage to Narducci, said the source. It’s unclear if Narducci attended the ceremony.

The forever-suave and magnetic Merlino spent the summer and early fall traveling back and forth between Boca Raton, South Philly and the Jersey Shore, with a portion of his trips to Pennsylvania being used, per sources, attempting to mediate a festering beef between his former underboss Marty Angelina and his former consigliere George (Georgie Boy) Borgesi, both childhood friends of his, and ease tensions amongst certain syndicate members related to his own lead-from-afar ways. Borgesi and Angelina are said to be feuding over Angelina’s alleged siege on Borgesi’s rackets while Georgie Boy served time in prison and Borgesi reportedly requested permission to kill him as punishment. Per multiple sources close to the situation, Skinny Joey is being pressured by some “key” subordinates to spend more time in Philadelphia overseeing his mob family and less time living the highlife in Florida as a restauranteur eagerly glad-handing with the public.

All three of them – Borgesi, Angelina and Merlino – were convicted together in a wide-reaching RICO case in 2001, which brought down the entire sitting Philly mob administration. Angelina was busted in another racketeering case in the years that followed. Skinny Joey walked out of prison in 2011 and relocated to sunny Florida, where, according to the FBI, he’s been heading the powder keg of the Philadelphia mafia via a series of intermediaries. Borgesi, who was arrested in the same subsequent RICO that ensnared his buddy-turned-rival Angelina, but had a pair of trials end in hung juries, finally got out of the can in early 2014 and just recently got “off paper,” allowing him to meet freely with his gangster pals.

Entering the 2015 holiday season, the Philly mob is broken off into several distinct wings, per sources, splitting into four separate factions representing two different eras in the syndicate’s history: The Merlino Era of the 1990s, with one faction backing Skinny Joey himself and the other standing behind Borgesi and the “Little Nicky” Scarfo Era of the 1980s, with Narducci heading one side of the Reagan White House button men and Joseph (Joey Pung) Pungitore leading the other.

In the FBI’s opinion, Merlino, made into the mob in 1992 and the son of Scarfo’s underboss Salvatore (Chuckie) Merlino, remains the official boss of the Philadelphia mafia today (a job he’s maintained in one capacity or another for the last 20 years or so). Handsome Stevie Mazzone serves as Merlino’s “boss on the ground and day-to-day caretaker,” sources within Philly law enforcement say, with John (Johnny Chang) Ciancaglini filling Merlino’s underboss role and Johnny Chang’s dad, Joseph (Chickie) Ciancaglini, Sr. and Borgesi’s uncle, Joseph (Uncle Joe) Ligambi, – Merlino’s street boss when he was away at college from 2000-2011 -, acting as twin advisors and dual consiglieres.

Chickie Ciancaglini came out of prison after three decades last year and is officially the Family’s No. 2, but it’s a designation more ceremonial in nature, per this source. Ligambi was caught on federal audio surveillance in 2010 telling mobsters from New York that there were three guys he didn’t want to make because he didn’t know them well enough and was going to let Merlino do it when he came home from the big house – speculation is that the 2015 ceremony was for that purpose.

Narducci and Pungitore, both of whom got sprung from two-decade bids behind bars in the past few years and are second-generation Goodfellas, are considered capos loosely affiliated with the traditional Philly mob led by Merlino and his crew of staunch loyalists, which used to include Borgesi, but apparently doesn’t any longer. Sources say Narducci and Pungitore each pass “an envelope” to Mazzone or Mazzone’s people on a monthly basis and Narducci has “a lot of young guys” lining up in his corner. Borgesi, according to these sources, is getting support from a stable of “hardened, street-corner toughs,” non-made guys tied to labor unions, establishing his own powerbase outside of South Philly and apparently not kicking up any tribute to Merlino or Mazzone.

*FoxPhilly’s award-winning investigative reporter Dave Schratwieser, a go-to Philly mob pundit for years, was consulted for portions of this article

The post GR SOURCES: Philly Mafia Ups Its’ Ranks In Recent Months, Where 4 Factions Now Reign appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Major League Baseball Hall of Famer and Detroit Tigers’ legendary slugger Hank Greenberg, America’s first Jewish sports celebrity, traveled to Jackson State Prison in Jackson, Michigan on request of the former leaders of the notorious Purple Gang to play in a charity game on the penitentiary diamond in the early 1940s, according to FBI records and Greenberg’s own autobiography. A native New Yorker, Greenberg was a five-time MLB All-Star, four-time home-run champ and two-time American League MVP awardee.

The Purple Gang was the Motor City’s Jewish mob at the height of Prohibition, sprouting up on Motown’s rough-and-rugged eastside and centering around bootlegging, extortion, kidnapping and gambling rackets overseen by the organization’s “founding fathers,” the four Burnstein brothers, Abe, Joe, Ray and Izzy. Abe, the eldest sibling, was the gang’s architect and boss, Joe, its’ handsome, well-dressed political fix-it man and Abe’s main go-between to affairs on the street, Ray, the head of the gang’s enforcement unit and Izzy, the family’s youngest sibling, was in charge of syndicate bookmaking activities and Joe’s right-hand man.

Known to take family trips to watch the Tigers play, all the Burnstein boys were friendly with Greenberg. So much so, they got him to be a ringer in a prison baseball game that took place in the summer of 1941 in the months after Greenberg left the big leagues and joined the army to serve in WWII.

In 1930, at the peak of the Purple Gang’s power, Greenberg (19) was the youngest player in Major League Baseball. At the time of Greenberg’ enlistment in the military at the beginning of the following decade , the Purple Gang – responsible for more than 500 murders, was no longer in existence, having quietly disbanded in prior years, absorbed by Detroit’s Italian mafia.

While Joe and Izzy Burnstein fled Michigan in the days after the Prohibition Act was repealed in 1933, settling in California, Abe Burnstein remained in Detroit at the Purples’ old headquarters, the Book Cadillac Hotel, occupying the penthouse suite and acting as an on-call counselor for the city’s Italian mob dons, Joseph (Joe Uno) Zerilli and William (Black Bill) Tocco. The Book Cadillac was down the street from the Leland Hotel, where Greenberg lived. FBI documents from the 1930s note Greenberg’s dining and carousing with the Burnsteins and other Purples at Detroit hotspots.

Ray Burnstein was jailed for organizing the infamous 1931 Collingwood Massacre, the triple homicide of three Chicago transplants operating as the Purple Gang’s booze-smuggling wing at Detroit’s Collingwood Apartments. He was first locked up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula at Marquette State Prison and then by the 1940s he was transferred to Jackson State Prison, closer to Detroit (roughly 90 miles west).

With a prison system open to payoffs, Burnstein and his Purple cronies ruled the roost behind bars. Burnstein literally kicked the warden of Jackson State Prison out of his office and took it over himself. State Police documents describe Burnstein and other Purples frequently leaving prison grounds in Michigan Department of Corrections vehicles, driving to Detroit for meetings, romantic rendezvous and occasional ball games – a number of imprisoned Purples attended the 1935 and 1945 World Series, both won by Greenberg and the Tigers.

Per Abe Burnstein’s FBI file, the Jewish Godfather personally called Greenberg to a lunch meeting at the Cream of Michigan Café (a popular Purple Gang hangout) in July 1941 and asked that he take his army regiment, training in Battle Creek at Fort Custer at the time, to Jackson State Prison to play a charity exhibition game against the correctional institute’s own team that his brother Ray played on and managed. There was a kicker, though. Abe Burnstein wanted Greenberg to play on the prison team, not the Fort Custer, which he would wind up doing. Further encouragement came from a long, hand-written letter by Ray to Greenberg, personally asking him to join his club for the game and describing what a hero and idol he was for him and the Jewish people in general, according to the file.

Anchored by Greenberg’s two home runs, the prison squad bested a Fort Custer team featuring almost entirely made up of semi-pros, 9-6. Greenberg recalls the charity game on prison grounds and his relationship with the Burnstein brothers in his autobiography, published three years following his death from cancer in 1986 at age 75.

Greenberg left baseball for four years to fight in WWII, seeing duty in the South Pacific. He retired in 1947, spending his final season in uniform with the Pittsburgh Pirates and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1956.

Ray Burnstein was finally released from prison in 1964 and died shortly thereafter. Abe Burnstein died of a heart attack in his room at the Book Cadillac in 1968. Greenberg attended both funerals.

The post Detroit’s Historic Purple Gang Made MLB Star Hank Greenberg An Offer He Couldn’t Refuse appeared first on The Gangster Report.

By Paul Kavieff w/ contributions from Scott M. Burnstein:

THERE was little evidence in Harry Millman’s childhood that he would one day become one of the most feared gangsters to ever walk the streets of Detroit. Millman was born in the Motor City in 1911. His death was a watershed moment in Michigan underworld history – a brazen and public execution in a crowded Boesky’s Deli on Thanksgiving night 1937 carried out by the notorious New York assassin squad, Murder, Incorporated and immediately creating a monopoly on the streets for Detroit’s Italian mafia. The strapping and cocksure Millman was the final holdout from the city’s Jewish mob, the infamous Purple Gang, known worldwide for its’ ruthlessness and brilliance in the bootlegging trade during Prohibition.

Millman’s parents were recently immigrated Russian Jews. Harry was the oldest of five children and attended Detroit public schools, but finished high school in a Kentucky military academy. As a youngster, Millman acquired a reputation as a star athlete and a champion swimmer.

When Harry returned to Detroit in 1928 he began hanging around the Oakland Avenue pool halls and blind pig hangouts of the Purple Gang. By 1928 the Purples were near the height of their power in the Detroit underworld. According to one early acquaintance, “The older hoods liked Harry and let him hang around because he was good looking and attracted the ladies.”

Millman was also good with his fists and liked to drink. He soon developed a reputation as a barroom brawler and a mean drunk. Because of his fighting skills, Harry was noticed by the Purple Gang leadership and employed as a hijacker, gunman and bodyguard for the Jewish mob elite of the era. The strapping and muscle-bound Millman was personable and gregarious when sober but dangerous and totally unpredictable when drinking.

Once he was hired on as a Purple Gang enforcer, he pursued his underworld career with determination and was quickly identified by police as one of the leaders of the “Junior Purples”, the gang’s eager and able youth brigade. First arrested in 1928 at the age of 17 on suspicion of armed robbery, he was later released for lack of evidence. In approximately nine years of activity in the Detroit underworld, Harry Millman was arrested 28 times on charges including assault, armed robbery, kidnapping, carrying a concealed weapon, extortion, murder, and operating a gambling place, however never spent a night in jail. The charges that ever stuck to the fledgling gangster were convictions for a couple of minor traffic offenses and for carrying a concealed weapon – for which he paid a small fine.

On January 14, 1931, Millman and four other Purple gangsters broke into the home of Frank Kaier, a freelance hijacker who had stolen a truckload of whiskey from Purple Gangster Harry Keywell. A Detroit police officer on his way home from work saw Millman pistol whipping Kaier through a window in Kaier’s home. The officer ran in and quickly arrested the five Purples, who tried to hide their pistols under the cushions of a sofa in Kaier’s living room. On January 16, 1931, all five thugs were indicted by a Wayne County grand jury. The men were well defended during their trial by Purple Gang attorneys Edward Kennedy Jr. and Sidney Sherman. They were all found not guilty of assault with intent to kill and released.

In October of 1931, Millman was arrested with Morris Raider, a well-known Purple Ganger sitting in a car at Warren and Twelfth Street in Detroit. Both men were held as disorderly persons under the new Public Enemy Act. Raider at that time was out on bail pending the outcome of an appeal on a manslaughter conviction. Both cases were thrown out once again on insufficient evidence. The Public Enemy law was later struck down as unconstitutional because under its statutes a suspect could be convicted on notorious reputation alone.

Not more than two months later In December of 1931 Millman found himself in trouble with the law once again, when him and four other Purples were arrested on kidnapping charges. This time they snatched a known Oakland Avenue bootlegger and attempted to extort several hundred dollars from the terrified man at gunpoint. The victim later failed to positively identify any of the gunmen at the trial, and once more Millman and the other Purples walked out of the courtroom free men.

Harry Millman

By 1932 Harry Millman was suspected by Detroit police of being involved in a wide variety of rackets. As Millman grew more successful, he became the real life version of a Hollywood gangster, sporting expensive tailor-made suits and flashing a large bankroll. By the early 1930s, Millman had a well-known reputation for violence, especially when he was drinking. According to one account, he once physically beat a girlfriend in front of a dining room full of shocked people at the Cream of Michigan restaurant in Detroit. An observer to the incident reflected, “You could have heard a pin drop in the restaurant.”

One of Millman’s favorite pastimes was shaking down Mafia protected brothels and busting up blind pigs and nightclubs owned by members of the Detroit Mafia. Millman carried a violent grudge against the Italian mob and took every opportunity to display his vengeance. He would walk into a nightclub either alone or with several of his men, knock customers off their barstools, slap around the owner of the place, break up furniture, smash bottles, and generally create havoc. Anyone foolish enough to protest received a beating or a pistol whipping.

Being called to answer for his erratic behavior many times by the Burnstein brothers and other leaders of the Purple Gang did little to deter Millman’s antagonistic antics. If it wasn’t for the Burnstein brothers, specifically Abe, who seemed to have a soft spot in his heart for the young thug, Millman would have been targeted for death by the Italians a lot sooner. The mob had too much respect for the Jewish Godfather to move on his favorite protégé without his blessing. However as the 1930s went on, Millman’s behavior towards the city’s ruling underworld authority became increasingly insolent and even Abe Burnstein himself would no longer be able to help save him from the wolves.

The Purple Gang and the Detroit Mafia always had a cordial relationship. Millman was a loose -cannon in this respect and on numerous occasions, usually after one of Millman’s latest outrages, bosses of the Detroit Mafia met with the Burnstein brothers and demanded that Harry Millman be eliminated. At these meetings Abe Burnstein would always use his charm and considerable diplomatic ability and promise to “straighten him out.” It was of little use. Like many other gangsters before and after, Millman began believing his own press clippings. He came to think that the reason no one tried to kill him was because they were thoroughly terrorized by him. In reality it was only Abe Burnstein and his protection from the Detroit Mafia bosses that kept Millman alive and on the street for so long.

Millman was a prime suspect in the sensational murders of Purple Gang lieutenants Abe Axler and Eddie Fletcher, Detroit’s Public Enemies 1 and 2 in the early-1930s. Axler and Fletcher, a pair of New York imports to the Motor City’s underworld, were found shot to death in the back seat of Axler’s brand new Chrysler sedan the morning of November 26, 1933. An Oakland County constable found the bodies on a lonely country road approximately fifteen miles north of Detroit in Bloomfield Hills by the intersection of Telegraph and Quarton Roads.

The two Purple assassins had been shot at point-blank range by .45 and .38 caliber pistols. One of the shooters sat next to Axler in the front seat and another sat next to Fletcher in the back seat. The faces of both men were unrecognizable as the result of the heavy caliber bullets fired at close range into their faces. As a sign of contempt, the bodies were placed together in the back seat of the car holding hands. It was rumored in the underworld that Axler and Fletcher had double-crossed Millman, the Burnstein brothers and their top lieutenant, Harry “H.F.”Fleisher, in a business deal.

Police would later reveal that they had specific information that Harry Millman had phoned Axler and set up a meeting with Axler and Fletcher at a Pontiac, Michigan beer garden the night before they were found murdered. The murders were never solved, but made papers across the nation with headlines claiming the death of the Purple Gang.

On June 13, 1934, George “Eddie” Dorn, the owner of a Detroit speakeasy known as “Eddie’s Hideaway,” was found shot to death. The bar was a Purple Gang hangout. Harry Sutton, Dorn’s bartender, was also wounded in the incident. Sutton was a former Purple who had served time in Federal prison with other members of the gang for a 1929 conviction for bootlegging. Detectives found Dorn’s body in the rear of the blind pig about 4:30 a.m. and surmised that Dorn had evidently been running from someone who shot him in the back.

Police believed that Eddie Dorn’s murder was the result of a drunken argument between him and Harry Millman that occurred a few weeks before his slaying. Millman and another Purple named George Harris had been seen in the club shortly before Dorn was killed.

Later that morning Harry Sutton staggered into Detroit’s Providence Hospital. He refused to give police any information about the shootings. Sutton had been shot in the groin and was in critical condition. Investigators came to the conclusion that Sutton had been fighting with someone before he was shot as his shirt was torn. When questioned by detectives later that morning, Sutton told the police, “Santa Claus shot me.”

There were reported to be more than twenty witnesses to the shooting incident. Detroit police questioned a number of people who had been in the blind pig, but nobody had seen anything. Homicide detectives began a fruitless search for a piano player who worked at Dorn’s bar and supposedly saw Dorn’s killer take a cloth and wipe a .32 automatic pistol clean of fingerprints and place it on a table. Police later found the gun but nothing ever came of this lead in the case. Harry Millman left for Chicago immediately after the Dorn murder and did not return to Detroit until early-1935. On January 7, 1935, Millman was arrested by Detroit police and held for questioning in the Dorn murder case. Witnesses, however, could not or would not positively identify Millman, and he was released.

When Harry Millman returned to Detroit he immediately went back into the protection racket, shaking down disorderly houses (brothels) in Ecorse, Hamtramck, Mt. Clemens, Detroit, and other southeastern Michigan cities. Millman and his men would make the rounds of these locations on a weekly basis and pick up various amounts of protection money from the madams.

The imposing enforcer had a very effective technique for convincing disorderly houses to pay protection. He would walk into a brothel, beat up or pistol whip the johns, and generally disrupt business. Sometimes Millman or his men would rob the customers of a brothel on a daily basis until the business would drop off to nothing.

Whether or not a disorderly house was under the protection of another mob meant little difference to Millman. In fact, he would sometimes target a particular underworld operation solely because it was protected or owned by the Detroit Mafia, which by that time had become the dominant power in the local underworld with the unheralded disbandment of the Purples.

The year 1935 also saw Millman get involved in the area labor union rackets. With the growing trend of unionization in the Detroit manufacturing industry, the relationship between the mob and organized labor was a natural fit. Labor bosses used gangsters for strike breaking purples, leverage at the negotiation table and general employee -intimidation after the repeal of Prohibition in December of 1933 with mafia syndicates around the county looking to cultivate new and fresh sources of Illicit income . Due to his growing financial prosperity, he opened several handbooks (horse race betting parlors) on Twelfth Street in Detroit. By 1936 Millman’s underworld operations were bringing in a considerable amount of money.

Millman and his crew, which included his brother Sam, Harry Cooper, Harry Gross, and several former Purple Gang members, soon began muscling into the local illegal lottery racket. At that time, the illegal lottery, known on the street as the numbers business, was controlled by the Detroit Mafia working in conjunction with several African-American gangsters. Police feared that tensions created by Millman’s bold and subversive move could wind up exploding into a major gang war across the city. This racket was also sometimes referred to as, “policy”, stemming from the Italian word polizza, meaning lottery ticket and took bets from players on three-digit number codes that would be compared to any agreed upon tabulation, like all the money bet at a given race track which would always be reported in the next morning’s paper.   Usually the odds were about 10000 to 1 to guess correctly, but the vice served as a lot of poor black families only chance of hitting it big in an otherwise bleak financial existence.

Detroit police believed that Harry Millman’s move to take over the Detroit policy rackets created a serious rift between him and Joe “Joe Scarface” Bommarito, the man in charge of all of the Detroit Mafia’s vast street operations as well as the brother-in-law of local Mafia boss Pete Licavoli.

When the Detroit Mafia took over the former racket operations of the Purple Gang in 1935 it was a peaceful transition. By the mid-thirties the Purple’s power had been seriously weakened by inter-gang sniping and long prison sentences. Abe Burnstein had quietly turned over former Purple Gang operations to the Detroit Mafia. Individual Purples and associates often worked as partners with various Detroit Mafia members in the rackets, but not Millman. He was the only Purple gangster of any significance who continued to challenge the Italian mob authority after the Purple Gang lost its dominance in the Detroit underworld – the final holdout from the city’s first and last all-Jewish crime conglomerate. Growing more insubordinate by the day, Millman was totally fearless and had no intention whatsoever of ever bowing to or cooperating with the Detroit mob.

Late one winter evening in December of 1936, Harry Millman strutted into Salvatore “Little Sammy” Finazzo’s cafe at Eighth and Fort Streets in Detroit and stoked the flames of discontent even further. Finazzo was a soldier in the Detroit Mafia and the brother-in-law to recently-inducted mob Don Joe Zerilli who controlled the prize fighting industry in Detroit for well over 50 years. His cafe was a hangout for Italian gangsters and a frequent socializing point for Scarface Joe Bommarito. Barging into the establishment after a night on the town boozing it up, Millman confronted Bommarito and the pair broke into a heated fistfight.

Like their fierce Jewish adversary, Bommarito, Pete Licavoli, and a downriver gangster named Joseph “Beach Bum Joe” Massei, who was the crime family’s representative in Florida for close to 40 years, had been steadily muscling into the Detroit labor rackets. All three Italian mobsters effectively worked their way into Local 299 of the Teamsters Union, the same local a young Kroger warehouse worker of the era named Jimmy Hoffa would soon use as his powerbase to climb to epic heights in the country’s labor movement. To put it mildly, the Italians, especially Scarface Joe, resented the fact that Millman was trying to exert his influence in certain unions that they already sunk their hooks into.

The fight in Sam Finazzo’s beer garden was only the beginning. Sometime in the early spring of 1937, Millman got word that Joe Bommarito was getting a shave and a manicure at an Oakland Avenue barbershop.   Walking up on Bommarito, who was stretched out in a barber’s chair with a hot towel on his face, Millman lifted the towel off the Scarface Joe’s head and spat in his face.

This final display of complete and utter contempt and disrespect towards Joe Bommarito, and in turn, the entire Detroit mafia in general, was the beginning of the end for Harry Millman. Totally disgusted with his inexplicable, outright insane behavior, his mentor, Abe Burnstein turned his back on him. The period of “sit downs” and diplomacy to protect Millman was over. He was on his own.

On the evening of August 28, 1937, Millman arrived in Detroit from a short trip out of town. At about 10:00 p.m., he phoned Harriet (Hattie) Fleisher. Hattie was an old friend of Millman’s and the wife of Purple Gang lieutenant Harry Fleisher, who was then serving time in Alcatraz for a 1936 tax evasion conviction. Millman invited Hattie out for an evening of dinner and dancing at a favorite Purple Gang hangout known at the 1040 Club. The cabaret derived its name from the fact that it was located at 1040 Wayne Street in downtown Detroit.

Picking her up in his new 1937 LaSalle coupe – the new automobile reflecting Millman’s recent success in the handboook and policy rackets -, Millman escorted Mrs. Fleisher to the club and treated her to hours of dancing, drinks and food. Sending Hattie home around 1:00 a.m., he stayed on at the club, continuing to drink and cavort with his friends at the bar.

A man who kept late hours and sometimes would go days without sleep from excessive partying, Millman planned to go to a Hamtramck-based blind pig after the club closed. Shortly after 3:00 a.m., Millman handed the keys to his LaSalle coupe to Willie Holmes, the 1040 Club valet and doorman. Holmes hurried off to get Millman’s car, which was parked in a remote unlighted section of the Service Parking Lot Company across the street from Detroit’s Federal Courthouse building. At approximately 3:10 a.m., Holmes climbed into Millman’s coupe and turned the ignition key. A tremendous explosion immediately followed and the resulting shock wave blew out windows of nearby buildings and sent the hood of Millman’s LaSalle coupe onto the roof of a five-story building. A silent alarm set off by the shock wave created by the explosion sent three police cruisers to the F.G. Clayton Company opposite the parking lot where the explosion occurred.

Instantly torn to pieces in the explosion, Holmes was killed immediately and Millman’s car was completely demolished. Detroit police investigators later estimated that at least ten sticks of dynamite had been packed into the center of the engine block and wired to a spark plug. The bomb had obviously been meant for Harry Millman, but the assassins had not done their homework. Millman almost always gave the keys to Holmes or to his bodyguard Harry Cooper when he arrived or left the 1040 Club. Fortunately for Cooper, he had been home that night. The death of Willie Holmes was the first bomb slaying in the history of Detroit.

Seemingly unfazed by the near-death experience, Millman never even went back to look at his car. Instead, he hailed a cab and went on to the Hamtramck blind pig just as he had planned. When later questioned by police he pleaded ignorance to why anyone would want to kill him. By the fall of 1937, it was so widely known throughout the city that Millman was going to be killed that many hotels would not rent him a room for fear he might be murdered on the premises.

Despite the swirling rumors of his pending demise, Harry Millman continued to openly walk the streets of Detroit. He was known to frequent such establishments such as a near Westside eatery and cocktail lounge known as Boesky’s Delicatessen on the corner of 12^th Street and Hazelwood and the very popular Cream of Michigan Cafe, which was located a few blocks away from Boesky’s. Both restaurants were in walking distances from the series of handbooks and gambling dens he owned and essentially neighborhood restaurants with a primarily family clientele. Surprisingly, Millman fit in rather well. Keeping to himself, he was often seen drinking alone in the Boesky’s, frequently either starting or coming off a several-day long binge. It was rumored that he had also begun using heroin at this time. Things were spiraling out of control in his business and personal life and Millman was looking to escape reality in any way possible.

His dispute with the mob escalated even further in September when in his continued attempts to antagonize his adversaries in the mafia he shot up a mob-backed Hamtramck brothel in retaliation for the car bombing while in a drunken rage. The Detroit mafia was officially at its wits end with Millman and made his murder its absolute top priority. He wouldn’t make it another two months.

Millman at the end

On the night of November 24, 1937, Millman, Cooper, and Gross stopped at Boesky’s for a drink. It was Thanksgiving eve that night and the restaurant and its accompanying bar were crowded with people home for the holiday. After a few pops, Gross and Cooper left the crowded restaurant to attend a movie playing nearby, while Millman stayed and continued drinking. Around midnight Cooper and Gross returned to Boesky’s and re-joined their boss, who was now sitting at a table with two ladies whom he had invited to have a drink. It would be the last few moments of Harry Millman’s short, but headline-filled life.

At about 1:00 a.m. on the 25th, Millman got up to talk to a friend. As he leaned against the edge of the bar, two well-dressed men wearing overcoats and snap brim hats walked into the restaurant side of Boesky’s. No one paid much attention to the men as they walked quickly through the throngs of people and disappeared under the archway that led to the cocktail lounge. Walked directly up to Millman, one of the men pulled out two .45 automatic pistols, while the other a .38 revolver out of his coat and they both opened fire from point blank range. The roar of the assassins’ pistols was deafening. Terrified customers ran to the exits, others dove under tables or fell on the floor in a desperate attempt to find cover. Ten slugs tore into Millman’s body. Harry Shulak, the man standing next to Millman, was hit in the chest and left hand and slumped to the floor.

The killers then turned their guns on Cooper and Gross, who had dove under their table when the shooting began. Cooper, Millman’s bodyguard and chauffer received a flesh wound in the left shoulder. Gross was shot in the right shoulder and chest, the bullet traveling through his lung. As the gunmen hurried out of the restaurant, Abe Betensky made the mistake of suddenly walking out of the men’s room, cutting across the path of the gunmen’s retreat. Both men fired at the man, hitting him in the right shoulder, right hand, and twice in the back.

The gunmen ran out of the restaurant and jumped into a 1937 maroon Ford sedan. Racing eastbound on Hazelwood Avenue, the car and the assailants disappeared. Shulak, Betensky, and Harry Gross were rushed to Detroit Receiving Hospital. Harry Cooper was given first aid and taken to police headquarters as a material witness.

Cooper’s statement was the first of more than 40 taken by homicide detectives. Four police cars were dispatched to the scene of the shooting at 1:25 a.m. Officers searched the cocktail lounge for several hours looking for evidence. Thirteen empty .45 shells, six .45 full metal jacket bullets, and two .38 revolver bullets were found at the scene. A green felt hat with a local label was picked up by a witness who had seen it fall off the head of one of the escaping gunmen. Authorities later estimated that there were more than 60 people in Boesky’s when Millman was brazenly murdered.

Millman’s body was taken to the Wayne County Morgue where the coroner and county medical examiner performed an autopsy; He had been shot ten times. The first bullet had severed his spine. Death was caused by gunshot wounds through the head, chest, and abdomen. The first shot had been fired at such a close range that Millman’s flesh was badly powder burned.

The two gunmen were described by witnesses as being between 25-35 years old. One of the men was said to be 5-foot 6 in height, with a yellowish complexion, black hair, a small black mustache, dressed in a polo coat and dark fedora. The other gunman was approximately six-foot tall, with a yellowish complexion and black hair, dressed in a dark overcoat and dark hat.

Witnesses to the shootings were able to get the license number of the 1937 model Ford sedan used as the getaway car. Michigan State motor vehicle records showed the car had been purchased from a Detroit Ford dealer approximately a month earlier. The owner gave his name as Joseph Cohen with a New York City address. Both the name and address were later found to be fictitious. The 1937 Ford was found a month after the Millman murder parked on a Detroit street, but no further clues were unearthed. Harry Gross languished in Detroit Receiving Hospital until December 16, 1937, when he died from complications resulting from the attack.

Detroit police detectives received many tips from underworld informants regarding the reasons why Millman had been murdered. One rumor claimed that some members of the New York mob had paid Millman $25,000 to run slot machines in the Detroit area after he promised he good guarantee them large profits, but instead, following a government crackdown on the racket, he simply pocketed the money rather than send it back east.

It was also reported that Millman had been trying to bully his way into the rackets in Toledo, Ohio, a vice-filled city that sits on the south Michigan border. Toledo had been under the control of the Detroit mafia for over a decade, first overseen by Pete Licavoli’s brother, Yonnie and then Frank “Frankie C” Cammerata another one of Licavoli’s brother-in-laws. At the time of his death, Millman’s list of enemies was seemingly endless.

Detectives were most interested, however, in reports of Millman’s ongoing feud with Scarface Joe Bommarito, a man who held the title of Street Boss of the Detroit mafia. He was the syndicate’s most-trusted enforcer, earning his stripes on the frontlines of the Crosstown Mob War earlier in the decade and crossing him like Harry Millman did meant certain death.

Although the murders of Millman and Harry Gross have never been officially solved, more clues were forthcoming in future years. In 1940 the Brooklyn, New York district attorney’s office launched an investigation into the Brooklyn rackets and uncovered Murder Inc. The intimidating moniker was a journalistic pseudonym for a group of Jewish and Italian mobsters who controlled the Brooklyn underworld. The thugs that made up Murder Inc. had developed a national reputation as killers and were kept on a retainer by the New York mob for contracts all over the United States.

These well-trained and highly-skilled professional hit men would fly into a city, assassinate their victim, and be back on a plane to New York before local police could make any connection between the crime and the perpetrators. This group of gangsters was estimated to have carried out as many as 1,000 execution contracts during their ten years of operation.

Due to the oppressive assault on the gang by the D.A.’s office, one of the leaders of Murder Inc , Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, turned rat and became a star witness against his fellow professional assassins and the entire New York mob. Reles proved to be one of the most important organized crime figures to ever come forward. The information that poured from his mouth in an unending stream painted the first accurate picture of a national mob organization years before law enforcement would have the knowledge to understand the ramifications.

While be debriefed by federal authorities, Reles claimed that Murder Inc. hit men, Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss and Harry “Happy” Maione were sent to Detroit in 1937 to carry out Millman’s execution. He told the assistant prosecuting attorney that the “local boys had failed to get Millman with a car bomb” and as a result the Detroit mob contacted New York for help “eliminating the problem.” Strauss and Maione were two of Murder Inc.’s most accomplished killers. The pair of bloodthirsty triggermen might not have gone down for the Millman and Gross hits, but Strauss and Maione were later convicted of first degree murder in an unrelated killing and died in the Sing Sing electric chair.

******************************

The very public, cowboy-style execution of Harry Millman served as the official end to the Purple Gang as an individual entity in the Motor City underworld. It was appropriate in a lot of ways, considering the ruthless and murderous ways in which the gang had done business in their heyday.

Following Millman’s headline-grabbing homicide, the Purples names stayed out of the press for close to a decade until the 1945 murder of Michigan State Senator Warren G. Hooper, whose charred body was found on the side of a road in the town of Albion. Former top Purple lieutenants, Harry Fleisher, his brother Sam Fleisher, and “Young Mikey” Selik, a leader of the Junior Purples, were each eventually charged and convicted of conspiracy to kill Hooper, who had been on a quest to take down a dirty politician named Frank McKay, a longtime Detroit gangland ally. Selik would emerge from prison and along with his top proxies David “Davey Boy” Feldman and Sam “Sammy the Mustache” Norber, both former Purple associates themselves, would become a powerful cog in the city’s Italian mob’s operations for the latter half of the 20^th Century. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Norber was frequently cited by law enforcement as being one of the state’s largest wholesale heroin distributors.

In the years following the Purple Gang’s demise, American pop culture and even those in the nation’s vast landscape of organized criminals itself would do their best to keep the unique Jewish mob’s name alive. The famous Elvin Pressley tune, “Jailhouse Rock” references the Purples in one of the song’s most recited verses (‘the whole rhythm section was the Purple Gang’) and in 1959 Hollywood released a move titled “The Purple Gang”, starring actor Robert Blake in the lead role playing a character loosely based on former Purple enforcer Joe “Honeyboy” Miller. A New York-based Italian drug syndicate of the 1970s, led by future Five Family mafia bosses, Michael “Mikey Nose” Mancuso and Daniel “Danny the Lion” Leo, used the Purple Gang name as a moniker for most of their time flooding the East Coast streets with high-grade heroin. As recent as the fall of 2010, “Detroit 1.8.7”, an ABC television drama set in the Motor City, paid homage to the Purples with an episode’s storyline surrounding a former Purple Gang member who comes out of retirement to help his wannabe-gangster grandson runs drugs and commit murder.

The post Purple Gang Expert Paul Kavieff: Millman’s Thanksgiving Night Murder Marked End Of An Era For Detroit’s Jewish Mob appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Chicago mobster Robert (Bobby the Gabeet) Bellavia celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday with his family this week for the first time in two and a half decades. In the process, reputed acting Chicago mafia don Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis got another member of his inner circle back from prison, the second running buddy of his to get his walking papers in the past year.

Bellavia was released to an Illinois halfway house last week. He had been in a federal correctional facility since 1990 when he was indicted and eventually convicted in the Good Ship Lollipop case, a large-scale RICO and murder indictment which brought down a large chunk of the Outfit’s Cicero crew. Deceased Cicero capo Ernest (Rocky) Infelise, the lead defendant in the case, jokingly called his crew the Good Ship Lollipop, a reference to an old Shirley Temple song.

A part of the indictment dealt with Outfit activity in north-suburban Lake County, a region that falls under the Cicero crew banner and has been DeLaurentis’ primary stomping grounds since the 1970s. The 76-year old Bellavia will be out of his downtown Chicago halfway house this spring (May to be exact). Per Chicago Police Department records, he holds multiple legitimate investments in real estate and the restaurant business in the so-called Second City, investments dating back decades.

“Bobby’s rock solid, the guy just did two dimes and a nickel (25 years in prison) and didn’t flinch for a second,” said one Gangster Report source who grew up with Bellavia. “They don’t make ’em like him anymore. He was dead to rights, wouldn’t even consider turning on his friends. That’s the kind of man he is, a man’s man, a soldier, a man of honor. How many people left can say that? A lot people want to pretend, want to talk the talk. Bobby walks the walk, day in-day out, his whole life.”

DeLaurentis, also 76 and the front boss for the Chicago mob for the last few years, was convicted in the Good Ship Lollipop case, too and has been free since 2006. Solly D’s best friend and fellow co-defendant, Louis (Louie Tomatoes) Marino was sprung from the clink last fall. Bellavia and Infelise were found guilty of conspiracy in the case’s headlining murder, the heinous 1985 gangland-style homicide of brash Lake County bookie Hal Smith, one of the most successful sports-handicappers in the country at the time he was clipped.

Outfit enforcer and retied pugilist and prize-fighter trainer Robert (Bobby the Boxer) Salerno was convicted of Smith’s actual murder at a second trial in 1995, represented in the courtroom by his son, defense attorney Alexander Salerno. Marino and DeLaurentis were convicted of racketeering, but acquitted of any wrongdoing in the Smith slaying. The 1982 Chicago mob murder of Bobby Plummer, an Outfit associate who helped oversee operations at a backdoor casino ran out of his suburban mansion, was charged in the case as well, yet yielded no convictions when the dust cleared.

Smith, 47, was killed on February 7, 1985 at the Long Grove, Illinois home of Outfit associate William (B.J.) Jahoda, DeLaurentis’ former driver. Jahoda turned informant in 1989 and implicated Infelise and his brigade of underworld protégés in the hit, where Smith was beaten, tortured, stabbed and strangled to death, his body left in the trunk of his Cadillac in an Arlington Heights bar’s parking lot.

According to Jahoda’s testimony, Smith continually resisted shakedown attempts by the Outfit’s Cicero crew and got into a public shouting match with DeLaurentis and Marino resulting in racial epithets being flung back and forth in the months preceding his murder. Although Smith initially agreed to fork over a $3,000 per month extortion fee – after more than three years of dodging paying any tribute – , it wasn’t long before negotiations completely broke down and tensions reached a boiling point when DeLaurentis demanded $6,000, instead, per court filings. Witnesses at an Arlington Heights restaurant in the spring of 1984 recounted Smith and DeLaurentis throwing money at each other, Smith calling Solly D and Louie Tomatoes, “no-good guineas that should take their olive-oil smelling asses back to Italy”, and DeLaurentis threatening to kill Smith and stuff him in the trunk of his car, making him “trunk music.”

Marino’s glasses and a cigar of his were discovered by police inside the vehicle Smith actually did become trunk music in. Louie Tomatoes was named as a participant, but never charged in the infamous Spilotro brothers double murder in June 1986, depicted in the movie Casino (w/ Oscar-winning actor Joe Pesce portraying rogue Outfit lieutenant Anthony (Tony the Ant) Spilotro).

Jahoda told the jury at the Good Ship Lollipop trial – lasting from late 1991 into 1992 – that after a half-year of Infelise and company stalking Smith and planning his demise, in the winter of 1985, he was instructed by Infleise to deliver Smith to his slaughter, scheduled to take place in his own kitchen. The government’s star witness testified watching Smith’s murder carried out by Infelise, Bellavia, Marino and Salerno through a window from his front lawn.

In a conversation with a wired-for-sound Jahoda in 1989, Bellavia was asked if Smith had any chance that day four years prior of ever making it out of his house alive.

“Nope. That was it, right there (in his kitchen). Bang. Out,” he replied.

Infelise, a former paratrooper in the U.S. Army, died while incarcerated in 2005 at a medical hospital at age 82. Salerno, 81, isn’t eligible for parole until the 2020s.

Exclusive Gangster Report sources say DeLaurentis was tapped as the Outfit’s street boss and acting boss in around late 2010 upon his predecessor Michael (Fat Mike) Sarno being convicted and jailed for mob-related extortion. Marino (83 years old), per these sources, assumed command of Cicero’s Lake County wing immediately following his release from behind bars in 2014 – Solly D originally staked claim to the lucrative racket territory in the early 1980s. The Chicago mob’s overall boss, long-tenured John (Johnny No Nose) DiFronzo, remains the city’s Godfather, although according to most reports, the octogenarian is semi-retired and relatively inactive.

The post Windy City Wiseguy, Outfit Boss Confidant, ‘The Gabeet’, Back For The Holidays, Enjoying Partial Freedom appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The beginning of 1985 was quite bloody in the Chicago mafia. Bodies were falling like dominos. The gruesome Hal Smith slaying was just one of three Outfit murders to take place at the start of the 1985, all three occurring in the same month’s timespan. Smith, an independent bookmaker, Leonard (Little Lenny) Yaras, a high-level Jewish Outfit associate and Charles (Chuckie English) Inglese, an aging Windy City mob heavyweight tied by some, at least tangentially, to the John F. Kennedy assassination, were all killed between mid-January and mid-February 1985.

Chicago goodfella Robert (Bobby the Gabeet) Bellavia, a soldier in the Outfit’s Cicero crew, was released to a halfway house last week after 25 years behind bars related to his conviction for conspiracy to murder Smith, among other racketeering offenses. Bellavia, 76, was allegedly one of four hitmen that beat, strangled and stabbed the stubborn Smith to death on February 7, 1985 in a private residence located in Long Grove, Illinois. Cicero regime strong-arm Robert (Bobby the Boxer) Salerno was the only person convicted of the physical act of homicide itself in the case. The 48-year old Smith ran a massive sports-gambling ring and repeatedly refused to pay a repeated street tax to the Cicero crew.

Three weeks preceding Smith’s grisly slaying, Little Lenny Yaras, the son of deceased Outfit lieutenant and labor-union power Davey Yaras, was wacked. The younger Yaras, a 44-year old fast-rising hoodlum in Chicago, was ambushed by a pair of masked gunmen as he pulled out of his parking space at his A-I Industrial Uniforms Rogers Park headquarters on the morning of January 10, 1985. Almost exactly a month later, on February 13, less than a week following Smith’s murder, Chuckie English, slain Outfit boss Sam (Momo) Giancana former right-hand man who had just recently came out of retirement, was shotgunned to death by two masked assailants in the parking lot of the popular Chicago mafia hangout Horwath’s in Elmwood Park (this article’s feature image is a photo of Inglese on the slab in the morgue).

Like Inglese, the elder Yaras was implicated in a mob plot to murder the U.S. President in 1963 (they both maintained close relationships with Jack Ruby). Davey Yaras, the Illinois mob’s emissary in Miami in the 1960s and early 1970s, died of a heart attack while playing a round of golf at a Florida country club in 1974. He was partners on the street with Lenny Patrick, the Jewish Godfather of the Chicago Northside’s Rogers Park neighborhood, his son’s direct superior in the Outfit at the time he was killed, unable to prevent it because of his non-Italian heritage.

The door was officially open to rubout Little Lenny Yaras, when his Italian benefactor, Joseph (Little Caesar) DiVarco, was incarcerated on a racketeering conviction the day prior to his execution. DiVarco oversaw the city’s Rush Street entertainment district for the Chicago mob’s Northside crew. According to Cook County Sheriff’s Department documents, Little Lenny worked in the Northside crew as a bookie, collector and drug dealer.

In the final years of his life, his skill at thuggery made him a valuable commodity in Outfit circles and syndicate administration began farming out his services to other crews, most notably the Cicero regime’s giant sports-gambling unit ran by Dominic (Large Dom) Cortina and Donald (The Wizard) Angelini. Yaras was looked at by federal authorities as a possible getaway driver in the 1983 slaying of mob associate and insurance mogul Allen Dorfman, a hit carried out by the Westside Grand Avenue crew.

Informants told the FBI following his death that the Cicero crew suspected Yaras of skimming from his collections for Cortina and Angelini and when he was called out for his behavior he got into an intense verbal spat with Cicero lieutenant Lawrence (Hungry Larry) Pettit. Chicago Crime Commission files name Pettit and his brother Joe, as the people that took control of Yaras’ rackets after he was killed.

Outfit associate and Cicero crew member David (Red) O’Malley, a former police officer and convicted racketeer, was put on trial for the Yaras hit, but acquitted of the charges. O’Malley did 10 years behind bars for helping Cicero wiseguy Bobby Salerno oversee bookmaking and loansharking operations.

Chuckie English, 70, sealed his fate to an early grave by returning to the Outfit after a brief retirement. He quickly started stepping on people’s toes. Inglese angered mob powers, Joseph (Joey Doves) Aiuppa, John (Jackie the Lackey) Cerone and Joe Ferriola, when he came back from Florida in the early 1980s. He had retreated south following Sam Giancana’s assassination in 1975, only to return to the Chicago underworld with longtime don Tony (The Big Tuna) Accardo’s permission.

Ironically, Accardo was the one who eventually sanctioned his murder, per FBI records, at the request of Ferriola and Aiuppa, both Cicero guys. Ferriola was feuding with Inglese in the years leading up to his murder. Aiuppa, the Outfit’s acting boss from the early 1970s until the mid-1980s, was on the verge of turning over day-to-day leadership duties to Ferriola because he and Cerone, his Elmwood Park-based second-in-command, were heading off to prison for stealing from the Las Vegas casinos they controlled.

Current reputed Chicago mob don, John (Johnny No Nose) Di Fronzo and alleged modern-day Elmwood Park capo, Rudy (The Chin) Fratto, had their names surface as suspects in the Chuckie English hit, however, neither were ever charged. One informant told the FBI that Fratto “made his bones” on the Inglese job, setting the stage for his “making” three years later. Inglese was dining with a group of judges and politicians at Horwath’s, a Chicago gangland haunt dating back to Prohibition, the night he was done in.

The post Winter Of 1985 Was A Murderous One In Chicago Outfit: Smith, Yaras & Inglese Hits Set Tone For Things To Come appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Legendary Chicago mafia boss Al (Scarface) Capone reached out to his underworld allies in Detroit, the infamous Purple Gang, for help in pulling off the notoriously-brutal St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in the winter of 1929, per police informant intelligence records and numerous federal documents. These filings reveal that Capone had the Purples set up a group of rivals of his from the Northside Irish mob to be slain that fateful cold, snowy morning in the Windy City almost 87 years ago, as well as provide a lookout squad for the hit and at least one of the shooters dispatched from Capone’s Southside mob stomping grounds to gun down the over half-dozen Northsiders in cold blood.

The Italian Capone and the Jewish Purple Gang, led by the four Burnstein brothers (Abe, Joe, Ray, & Izzy), worked harmoniously while dually overseeing all bootlegging activity in the Great Lakes region of the United States throughout the second half of Prohibition, each becoming an American icon of the era. “Dapper” Joe Burnstein, the second oldest Burnstein brother, married a showgirl from Illinois who worked at a Capone-mob nightclub. For a majority of Capone’s reign atop the rackets in Chicago, he sold the Purples’ “Old Log Cabin” brand of bootlegged booze. In reality, Capone had no choice but to work with instead of against the Purple Gang, for the Purples’ territory sat directly on the Canadian and Capone’s didn’t.

According to one FBI file from 1945, Capone and the Purple Gang, with eldest Burnstein brother and syndicate chief Abe, acting as the Purples’ spokesperson, first met face-to-face at a dinner arranged to discuss territory distribution that occurred at the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, the Purples’ headquarters, in February 1927 – also said to be on the agenda was the Purples beef with east coast Irish bootlegger Joe Kennedy, father of future U.S. President John F. Kennedy, over Kennedy encroaching on Burnstein brothers’ turf in Canada, which per FBI informants, Capone stepped in and settled, stopping an Abe Burnstein-issued contract on Kennedy’s life.

No more than a month later, the Purple Gang foreshadowed things to come in Chicago by orchestrating the Milflores Apartment Massacre, the killing of three local hoodlums responsible for a string of kidnappings in Detroit targeting Purple-affiliated mobsters on March 28 1927. The trio of Milflores Massacre murders, carried out by Purple Gang assassins Eddie Fletcher, Abe Axler, Joe (Honey Boy) Miller and Fred (The Killer) Burke, were the first documented machine-gun slayings in the history of the state of Michigan.

Fletcher and Axler were native New Yorkers and the Purple Gang’s ace strong-arm tandem and hit team known in the underworld as “The Siamese Twins.” Joe Miller (real name Sal Mirigolotta) was the lone high-ranking Purple that wasn’t Jewish – actor Robert Blake played Honey Boy Miller in the 1960 movie, the Purple Gang. Burke, whose nickname told you his trade without having to ask, was a transplant from St. Louis and the Egan’ Rats Gang and became a frequently-utilized Purple gun-for-hire. He was the man alleged to be wielding the machine gun itself in the Milflores Massacre.

Both Capone and the Purples rose to power at the exact same time: specifically in 1925, when Capone took over from his mentor, John (Johnny the Fox) Torrio, who retired to New York and the Burnsteins and several of their boyhood associates branched off from their gangland mentors, Charles Leiter and Henry Schorr of the Oakland Sugar House Gang, to open shop on their own operation, which quickly began being referred to in the Detroit press as the Purple Gang, for a robbery victim of theirs calling them “Purple… rotten, like tainted meat,” to a newspaper reporter early on in their careers in the street.

Throughout much of Capone’s reign atop the rackets in Chicago, he was at war with the Irish mob, stationed on the Northside. In 1929, the Northside Irish mob was led by George (Bugs) Moran. Flouting Capone’s authority, Moran ordered his men to begin hijacking the Old Log Cabin booze Capone’s Southside gang were buying from the Purples in Detroit and smuggling into to Illinois. Then, Moran tried killing Capone’s No. 1 enforcer, Vincent (Machine Gun Jack) McGurn, dispatching his top two lieutenants and hitmen the Gussenberg brothers, who caught McGurn in a phone booth and shot him, but failed to finish him off.

Capone swore vengeance. He looked for his pals in the Purples to give him a hand. Per Detroit Police Department intelligence files, the Purples were eager to chip in with the effort. And more than able. Not only did Abe Burnstein himself place a phone call to Bugs Moran in Chicago, offering to sell him a load of Old Log Cabin at a cut rate to act as the set-up for the attack, he sent five of his top men to help plan and carry out the job with Scarface Capone and Machine Gun Jack McGurn.

The Siamese Twins, Eddie Fletcher and Axler, the Keywell brothers (Harry and Phil) and “Killer” Burke were all dispatched by Burnstein to the Windy City in the first week of February 1929. Fletcher, Axler and the Keywell checked into a boarding house on the Northside across from SMC Cartage, a Moran hangout on Clark Street near the Webster intersection, Burke joined McGurn at a Southside safe house. Abe Burnstein told Moran he would have the batch of Old Log Cabin delivered to him at SMC Cartage early on Valentine’s Day.

On the morning of February 14, with the Keywells, Fletcher and Axler, acting as lookouts and signal men in the boarding house, a number of Capone gunmen, two dressed as cops, one of them Burke, stormed SMC Cartage on the go-ahead from the Purples across the street, who thought they recognized Bugs Moran – in reality, it was Moran muscle, Albert (Gorilla Al) Weinshank. Nonetheless, Burke and the Southsiders lined up seven of Moran’s men against the wall, including both Gussenberg brothers and Moran’s second-in-charge, Albert (Jimmy Clark) Kachellek, and machine-gunned them to death.

Nobody was ever charged in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Chicago Police Department detectives traveled to Detroit to interview Fletcher and the Keywells, each identified by boarding-house staff as the occupants of the room directly facing SMC Cartage on the day of and the week leading up to the massacre. The FBI eventually discovered one of the machine guns used in the mass slaying in the possession of Fred Burke at his rural Michigan hideout. Burke died in prison on unrelated charges. So did Moran.

Harry and Phil Keywell would both be convicted of separate, unrelated murders in the years to come and served multiple decades in prison apiece as punishment. Capone was eventually nailed on tax evasion and did eight years behind bars – succumbing to syphilis in 1947. McGurn was killed on Valentine’s Day 1936 inside a Chicago bowling alley, a Valentine’s Day greeting card left next to his body. Fletcher and Axler were killed in a high-profile Detroit double homicide in November of 1933.

Abe Burnstein went into semi-retirement following Prohibition, voluntarily bequeathing his rackets and territory to the Michigan’s Italian mafia. He died of a heart attack in 1968, still residing in his penthouse suite at the Book Cadillac Hotel. Joe Burnstein, the Purples’ main go-between with Capone and the Chicago gangland scene, left the Midwest in the 1940s, settling in Los Angeles, where he would die peacefully in 1984.

The post The Purple Gang & The St. Valentines’ Day Massacre: Detroiters Give Chicago’s Capone A Helping Hand appeared first on The Gangster Report.

College football superstar Joey Bosa of defending NCAA National Champion Ohio State University has a little mob in his blood. Bosa, a 6-foot-6, 275-pound junior defensive end and a projected early first-round NFL Draft pick, is the great grandson of legendary Chicago mafia don, Tony (the Big Tuna) Accardo, the most powerful Midwestern mob boss in American history. Accardo was to organized crime in the rustbelt as Bosa is to college pigskin right now – aka an undisputed force to be reckoned with.

Bosa had 13.5 sacks as a sophomore and led the Big Ten in tackles for losses (21) while earning first-team All-American honors. He grew up in Florida, prepping at storied St. Thomas Aquinas. His great granddad, the savvy and understated Accardo, a protégé of iconic crime lord Al (Scarface) Capone himself, would be proud. Accardo died peacefully in May 1992 at 86 years old, having ruled the Windy City underworld in one capacity or another from the 1940s until his last dying days having never spent a night in prison.

Ohio State (11-1) is currently hoping to sneak into the NCAA college football playoffs. So far through the 2015 season, Bosa, facing constant double-teams, has 45 tackles, (16 for lost yardage), five sacks and 15 quarterback hurries.

Bosa’s dad is John Bosa, a former All-American defensive end at Boston College, who played in the NFL with the Miami Dolphins. His uncle is Eric Kumerow, a retired NFL linebacker who also played for the Dolphins. Both dad and uncle were first-round selections in the NFL Draft. The elder Bosa married Kumerow’s sister, Tony Accardo’s granddaughter, making Joey the Big Tuna’s great grandchild.

Kumerow is the son of one-time NFL center Mike Pyle and Accardo’s daughter Marie as well as the adopted son of mobbed-up former labor union boss Ernie Kumerow, his mom’s second husband. Ernie Kumerow, a star pitcher on the baseball diamond at the University of Illinois, was booted from office representing street and sanitation workers (LIUNA 1001) in the early 2000s for his connections to the Chicago mob’s Southside-Chinatown crew. According to FBI records related to organized crime in the Great Lakes region of the United States, Accardo “appointed” his son-in-law Kumerow to his throne atop the LIUNA.

Tony Accardo circa 1960

Accardo rose in the ranks of the Chicago mafia during Prohibition under the tutelage of Scarface Capone and Capone’s No. 1 enforcer Vincent (Machine Gun Jack) McGurn. He became a capo and leader of the syndicate’s enforcement unit in the 1930s before ascending to the boss’ chair the following decade. His reign was long and was marked by his soldiers’ extreme loyalty.

Insulating himself from legal damage by employing a series of front bosses, acting bosses and street bosses, Accardo was quiet, however, alleged to be incredibly ruthless. After a rouge burglary crew robbed and vandalized his River Forest mansion in January 1978, the nationally-respected and revered don ordered the execution of everyone involved, a bloodletting that neared double digits over the next several months. In the final years of his life, Accardo, nicknamed the Big Tuna for his love of fishing, lived with his daughter Marie and the Kumerows in the high-end Chicagoland suburb of Barrington Hills, Illinois

The post Future High NFL Draft Pick Bosa Sports Mafia Bloodline, Traces Lineage To Historic Chicago Godfather appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Gangster Report’s Scott M.Burnstein  & Al Profit discuss the new Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) film The Infiltrator about a U.S. Customs Agent who went undercover into Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Drug Cartel in the 1980s in this new episode of their brand new podcast series the Remix Lounge (click here to listen).

The post Gangster Report Movie Review (Podcast Edition): The Infiltrator Explores Dangerous Undercover Work In 1980s War On Drugs appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Connecticut-stationed Genovese crime family acting captain Eugene (Rooster) O’Nofrio might have “made his bones” in 1972 as a young aspiring mob button man with the murder of mafia associate Jimmy Cotter. O’Nofrio was convicted of manslaughter in the Cotter homicide, but had the case tossed on appeal seven years later, walking free from state custody in 1979. His co-defendants, fellow then-eager young Goodfellas, Robert (Bobby Suedes) Celentano and Donald (Skippy) Perrotti, were both acquitted at the trio’s second trial – the first trial ended in a hung jury for all three.

The 74-year old O’Nofrio was indicted this week along with 45 other East Coast wiseguys in a gigantic federal racketeering case which paints the picture of a five-crime syndicate co-op constructed amongst four of the historic Five Families in New York (Genovese, Lucchese, Gambino & Bonanno) and the Philadelphia-North New Jersey mafia faction led by Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino.

Genovese Family capo Patsy Parrello along with Merlino and O’Nofrio were the top three defendants respectively in the case dropped Thursday charging illegal gambling, loansharking, extortion, arson, fraud, cigarette smuggling and weapon sales. Merlino, 54, has been operating out of Florida since his release in 2011 from a 12-year prison stint (racketeering conviction in Pennsylvania). Parrello, 72, headquarters out of Pasquale’s Rigoletto Italian Ristorante on famously-mobbed up Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

“Rooster” O’Nofrio oversees Genovese Family affairs in Manhattan’s Little Italy and Western Massachusetts for the Family’s longtime satellite wing in Springfield, from his East Haven, Connecticut home base according to the indictment. An undercover FBI agent successfully infiltrated O’Nofrio’s crew further bolstering the multi-state investigation built on a mountain of audio and video surveillance evidence.

Jimmy Cotter was found barely clinging to life, shot multiple times, run over by a car and lying unconscious on a Milford, Connecticut road in the early morning hours of June 9, 1972. Five days later his right leg was amputated due to one of the gunshot wounds he sustained and the next day he died of an infection resulting from the surgery.

In the hours and days following his attack before he passed, Cotter informed at least three people, including his sister, lawyer and a New Haven Police Department detective, that O’Nofrio shot him. Cotter told New Haven PD detective Nick Pastore that “Rooster shot me three times, Skippy (Donald Perrotti) shot me twice and Bobby Suedes (Robert Celentano) ran me over with his car.”

Perrotti would go on to become a made member of the Gambino crime family, per New York Police Department documents. Prior to the Cotter hit, O’Nofrio was convicted for his role in a bank heist. O’Nofrio and Richard Magnotti were arrested in March 1970 for the robbery of the Second National Bank of New Haven branch in Hamden, Connecticut. More recently, he did prison time for narcotic trafficking.

The post ‘Rooster’ O’Nofrio Responsible For Genovese Interests In Little Italy & Springfield (MA), Linked To ’72 Mob Slaying appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Western Massachusetts wasn’t spared in last week’s 46-person, five-crime family east coast mafia racketeering indictment. Five members of the mob in Springfield, Ralphie Santaniello, Gerald Daniele, Frank (The Shark) Depergola, Giovanni (Johnny Cal) Calabrese and Richard (Richie the Postman) Valentini, were ensnared in the bust.

One old timer with deep connections into the Genovese crime family’s Western Mass outpost is disgusted with the area’s new-school mob regime, if you could even call it that, he’s quick to point out.

According to the “old timer”, the modern-day mafia in Springfield, Massachusetts is a ragtag group of mostly unrefined criminals, thugs, thieves and braggarts compared to the region’s mob heyday of Salvatore (Big Nose Sam) Cufari and the Scibelli brothers (Frank aka “Skyball,” Anthony aka “Turk,” and Alfred aka “Baba”). The last vestige of any respectability for the organization, per the “old timer” died with Springfield mob capo Adolfo (Big Al) Bruno, the Scibellis’ gangland protégé slain on November 23, 2003 in a power-play staged by his own protégé, Anthony (Bingy) Arillotta, who eventually became a government witness and is slated for release from federal prison before the end of the year.

“These guys today are a total joke,” he said. “The whole operation is a three-ring circus. You don’t ask who the boss is, you ask whose the next lead clown, whose gonna sit on the seltzer bottle and make everyone laugh. To say this outfit is a shadow of it’s former self is an insult to shadows. Real men used to run this town, men you were proud to work for, men who could go across the entire god damn country and find respect. What we’ve got now are a bunch of wannabes, a bunch of clowns, drug fiends, drug pushers, fake tough guys. It’s a sad state of affairs. We’re talking about the blind leading the blind here.”

Per sources with first-hand insight into last week’s indictment, the Springfield mob is currently being overseen by 49-year old Ralphie Santaniello and his 53-year old first cousin Albert Calvanese on a day-to-day basis. Amedeo Santaniello, Ralphie’s 77-year old father is alleged to be the crew’s pseudo consigliere. Calvanese, a convicted loan shark, and the elder Santaniello both avoided the recent indictment.

Frank Depergola, 60 and reputed to be second-in-charge under Ralphie Santaniello and Calvanese, wasn’t so lucky, arrested last Thursday alongside Santaniello and charged with him, Daniele, Valentini and Calabrese on six counts of illegal gambling, loan sharking and extortion. Calabrese, Santaniello and Depergola allegedly shook down a local tow-truck company owner for $20,000. Santaniello threatened to chop the extortion victim’s head off and bury him in the backyard of his own house if he didn’t resume tribute payments discontinued after Big Al Bruno’s assassination in 2003.

Depergola was with Bruno when he was shot to death in the parking lot of his Our Lady of Mount Carmel Social Club by hit man Frankie Roche dispatched by Bingy Ariollotta (today 48) via a pair of his lieutenants Freddy and Ty Geas, brothers and Arillotta’s main muscle. He was convicted of loan sharking in 2006. The younger Santaniello, Calabrese, Daniele and Valentini are all former mob running buddies of Arillotta’s. Amedeo Santaniello was once Bruno’s right-hand man until the pair had a falling out and Santaniello retreated to Florida in the late 1990s.

The post Springfield (MA) Mob In 2016 A Bunch Of ‘Clowns, Wannabes’ Says GR Source On Heels Of Recent Bust appeared first on The Gangster Report.