Former Framingham and Milford, Massachusetts racket chief Tommy Hillary was vanquished from the east coast in 1991 by the New England mob administration for stealing $4,000 from a mafia-controlled nightclub in Boston. The 73-year old Hillary took the witness stand this week in a federal murder trial and colorfully recounted his life in the underworld, including the tale of his banishment.

Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme, the one-time Godfather of New England’s Patriarca crime family, is standing trial for the 1993 murder of his business partner, Stevie DiSarro. Salemme and DiSarro co-owned The Channel nightclub in South Boston. According to his indictment, Salemme ordered DiSarro killed for cooperating with the government and skimming profits from their business arrangement. Hillary recounted to the jury how two years earlier, he was admonished for pocketing money from the club without permission, attacked by Salemme’s son and subsequently fled south until he was arrested in 1992 and joined the Witness Protection Program.

DiSarro, 43, was baptized as an infant by legendary New England don Raymond Patriarca, one of Salemme’s mentors and Hillary’s surrogate father. Patriarca, Hillary and DiSarro grew up in Providence, while Salemme was born and raised in Boston. Attending law school in Massachusetts, DiSarro would move to Boston and start his career in the real estate and nightclub business.

Cadillac Frank went to prison in the 1970s for blowing up a mob attorney in a car bomb at Patriarca’s behest. Upon being released a decade and a half later, Salemme was inducted into the Boston-Providence crime syndicate by Patriarca’s son and successor Raymond Patriarca, Jr., who introduced him to Hillary to help him get back on his feet after 15 years behind bars. In turn, Hillary put DiSarro, who he looked at like a “kid brother,” in touch with the ambitious and savvy Salemme to find video-poker machine distribution routes in bars and restaurants across the northeast to profit from. Soon, Cadillac Frank was boss of the crime family, surviving an assassination attempt and benefiting from the federal prosecutions of allies and rivals alike.

Receiving financing from Salemme, in 1990, DiSarro purchased The Channel, the premier rock music venue on the Beantown club scene. Hillary had a “no show” job at the establishment and Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr., Cadillac Frank’s son and protégé, was the assistant manager. Salemme tasked Hillary with overseeing bookmaking and loan sharking operations in the west Boston suburbs of Framingham and Milford, located in Middlesex County.

*This story’s cover image is a Massachusetts State Police surveillance photo of Stevie DiSarro, Frankie Boy Salemme, Jr., Tommy Hillary and Cadillac Frank Salemme exiting a lunch at a Boston diner in the 1990

Per his testimony at Salemme’s trial, Hillary took $4,000 in cash from The Channel to give to a girlfriend of his for her to open a business. When Salemme discovered the missing money in September 1991, he sent Frankie Boy to administer justice and pull his stripes — because he wasn’t Italian, Hillary could never be “made,” or formally initiated into the mob. Flanked by Cadillac Frank’s right-hand man, Providence capo Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca and Dennis (Champagne Denny) Lepore, a top lieutenant of the Salemmes in Boston’s North End, Frankie Boy met Hillary at a Chinatown restaurant where Hillary was supposed to be sitting down with a local Asian gangster to negotiate buying a stolen cargo haul of silk shirts and immediately went after him.

“The second I got in the booth, Frankie grabbed me by the throat,” Hillary testified. “Bada boom, bada bing, (he told me), ‘Get out of this town. If I see you again, I’m going to kill you myself’…..I ruined my life for 4Gs.”

Multiple media outlets misreported the testimony in their accounts Thursday, claiming it was Cadillac Frank himself that attacked Hillary, not Salemme, Jr., confusing what Hillary had testified to. Hillary told jurors he was refused travel cash by DiSarro or fear of reprisal in a chat on the telephone about what had just happened and quickly moved to Florida to avoid physical harm. DeLuca was Hillary’s best man at his wedding. Lepore acted as the Salemmes’ buffer with an East Boston crew long opposed to his rapid ascension to the throne.

Tommy Hillary (left) & Bobby DeLuca (right) in 1976

The fall 1991 phone conversation with DiSarro was the last time Hillary would ever speak to him. Less than a year later, Hillary was busted for drug pushing and, alongside Salemme, Jr. and Lepore, he was indicted in a Hollywood film extortion scheme involving the bribing of labor union officials. Taken into custody in August of 1992 at a traffic stop in Florida, he became an informant. Serving just one year in prison, Hillary has spent the better half of the last three decades living under an assumed identity in an undisclosed part of the country.

Pleading guilty, Lepore, 71 years old and nicknamed for his expensive tastes, did eight years in prison. Champagne Denny returned to the streets in 2002. Salemme, Jr. died of AIDS in 1994 at 38, never reaching trial in the extortion case.

The suspect in more than one gangland murder, including DiSarro’s, the younger Salemme had contracted the then-deadly virus from sex with a female prostitute. Prosecutors believe on the afternoon of May 10, 1993, Salemme, Jr. picked up DiSarro at his house in a red-colored Jeep Grand Cherokee, drove him to the Salemme family home in Sharon, Massachusetts, where him and his best friend, mob associate Paul (Paulie the Plumber) Weadick, strangled him to death in the kitchen as Cadillac Frank observed nearby.

Bobby DeLuca admits to organizing the burying of DiSarro’s body in Rhode Island that same night. When a member of DeLuca’s former crew got pinched in a wholesale marijuana conspiracy in March 2016, he flipped and led the FBI to DiSarro’s remains under a converted textile mill in Providence he owned. DeLuca, 72, and Salemme 84, were both in the Witness Protection Program at the time and charged in the homicide conspiracy in August of that year. The 62-year old Weadick, closely aligned with current Patriarca bosses the DiNunzio brothers (Carmen and Anthony), was charged too and is Salemme’s co-defendant. Salemme joined Team America from inside prison walls in 1999. DeLuca jumped ship in 2011 and will be the star witness against Salemme and Weadick at trial this spring.

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The long-brewing gangland feud between Providence mob captains Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca and Anthony (The Saint) St. Laurent can be traced back to an August 1996 discovery by an incarcerated DeLuca while reviewing evidence against him in a pending racketeering case he was eventually convicted in. DeLuca unearthed a gaffe in federal surveillance that alerted him that St. Laurent was most likely a confidential informant, news he would begin spreading around New England mafia circles drawing St. Laurent’s ire.

Bobby the Cigar, 72 years old today and slated to be a star witness at a well-publicized mob murder trial in Boston this month, survived a number of attempted murder contracts placed on his head by St. Laurent before joining the Witness Protection Program in 2011. An increasingly-ailing 75-year old St. Laurent died of natural causes in November 2016 only two weeks after getting out of prison for trying to have DeLuca killed at least three times.

Months prior to St. Laurent’s passing, the body of missing Boston nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro was unearthed at a converted textile mill in Providence. He vanished in May 1993, prosecutors contend, slain following a falling out with DeLuca’s one-time best friend, former New England mob boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme, who had been in the Witness Protection Program himself until his arrest in the summer of 2016. DeLuca pled guilty in the DiSarro murder conspiracy that fall, admitting he was tasked with burying DiSarro’s body, and will testify against Salemme in the coming weeks.

Salemme took over the Patriarca crime family in 1990. Based out of Boston, DeLuca acted as Cadillac Frank’s eyes and ears in Providence. They were nailed together in a 1995 racketeering indictment and were housed in neighboring cells at the Plymouth County Jail awaiting the case to find its way in front of a jury. Their pre-trial research triggered shocking revelations: By reviewing federal documents, Salemme realized his allies and childhood friends in the Irish mob, James (Whitey) Bulger and Stevie (The Rifleman) Flemmi, had been feeding the government information on him for years, and DeLuca noticed a suspicious line of dialogue in an FBI surveillance transcript of a meeting him and Cadillac Frank had with a New York mob capo, which appeared to out St. Laurent as a snitch.

Bulger and Flemmi ran the South Boston Winter Hill Gang and were controversial confidential informants for the FBI for two decades. The equally iconic and ruthless Bulger went on the lam for 16 years, finally caught living in California seven years ago and soon convicted in 11 murders, all as he was being immortalized as a gangland legend on the silver screen in the films, The Departed and Black Mass.

Flemmi was housed at the same correctional facility Salemme was at when he uncovered the truth. During their time in a holding cell together awaiting the start of a 1997 court hearing, Salemme physically attacked Flemmi in a fight that was broken up by DeLuca. Salemme was so dejected by the news of the betrayal, he flipped and agreed to testify against the corrupt FBI agent that operated Bulger and Flemmi as informants.

Flemmi furthered his cooperation with the government in 2003 and told the FBI that he walked in on Stevie DiSarro getting choked to death by Salemme’s son as Cadillac Frank oversaw the hit inside his own kitchen at the family’s Sharon, Massachusetts home. He’ll testify to what he saw this month at Salemme’s trial.

Back in their early days rising through the east coast underworld, Salemme had covered for Flemmi in a 1968 car bombing they did in tandem and he was forced to serve 15 years in prison for. Salemme and Flemmi were both mentored in the mob by deceased Boston capo Larry Zannino. Salemme’s son, Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr., died of AIDS-related cancer two years after DiSarro’s slaying.

The same time Salemme was finding out about his buddies Bulger and Flemmi, Bobby DeLuca seized on a clerical error by the government in transcribing a wire installed to record a meeting between him, Salemme and Gambino crime family capo Natale (Big Chris) Richichi inside a Boston hotel suite. Richichi, back then the Gambino’s crew boss in Florida and Las Vegas, had flown into Massachusetts in December 1991 to negotiate a partnership for peep shows in a Boston red light district known as the Combat Zone that was controlled by the Patriarcas. Providence porn king Kenny Guarino brokered the sit down. Guarino would go on to be outed as an FBI informant in later years.

As DeLuca poured over the surveillance transcript, he noticed a conversation between what appeared to be two FBI agents accidentally added into the hotel room dialogue, where one agent told the other that they should have had “The Saint make up a list of questions to give to Kenny to ask.” DeLuca took this to mean both Guarino and Anthony St. Laurent were secretly working with the FBI and began circulating the belief inside and outside prison walls.

St. Laurent was a hardened career criminal and acted as the Patriarca’s primary narcotics lieutenant in Rhode Island. Years earlier, he and DeLuca had been indicted for running a sports gambling operation out of a Providence strip club. The fact that Bobby the Cigar was besmirching his reputation incensed St. Laurent and in turn, he started spreading rumors that DeLuca was in fact the snitch, not him.

As soon as DeLuca got released from prison in the mid-2000s, St. Laurent began plotting to murder his former bookmaking partner. Throughout 2006, the Saint tried hiring at least two people to kill Bobby the Cigar, explaining to his prospective hit men that the contract was blessed by Patriarca syndicate administrators and even driving one of them by the restaurant DeLuca was working at as part of his parole restrictions. After getting locked up for extortion the following year, a wheelchair-bound St. Laurent continued to plan DeLuca’s demise trying to hire another hit man from behind bars. The 2007 hire happened to be a undercover cop, who taped St. Laurent telling him to go up to Bobby the Cigar with a gun, tell him “This is from the Saint,” and blow his head off.

DeLuca was busted for extorting strip clubs in 2011 and began cooperating. Up until DiSarro’s remains were found two years ago, he had been living under an assumed identity in Florida.

The post Providence Wiseguys’ Rivalry Stemmed From Mistake In FBI Bug Transcript, Led To Unfulfilled Murder Contracts appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The New England mafia broke out into war in the summer of 1989, as factions representing the crime family’s Providence and Boston wings locked horns for the keys to the kingdom. Within hours of each other in June of that year, then fast-rising captain Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme survived an assassination attempt and underboss William (The Wild Man) Grasso was killed. Soon, Salemme rose to the boss’ seat and sought vengeance on those who had sided against him.

Cadillac Frank Salemme, 84, is standing trial this month for the 1993 murder of nightclub mogul Stevie DiSarro, a business partner of his aiding the government in building a case against him that would drop two years later. DiSarro’s remains were exhumed in Rhode Island in March 2016.

Salemme came up in the turbulent New England underworld of the 1960s, groomed as a killer by Boston capo Larry Zannino. He went to prison in 1972 for car bombing an attorney on orders from legendary Godfather Raymond Patriarca, the storied mob chief from Providence. Patriarca had taken a liking to Salemme and used him as muscle for syndicate affairs in Beantown.

When Cadillac Frank was released from prison in 1987, Patriarca had been dead for three years and his absence had sent the crime family named after him into chaos, splitting the organization down the middle between its two hubs, Providence and Boston. Although Salemme was a Boston native, he sided with the Providence faction and lined up behind Patriarca’s son and successor Raymond Patriarca, Jr., the man responsible for inducting him into the mafia shortly after walking free.

Unlike his father, Patriarca, Jr. was a weak leader and garnered little respect from his men. His power came from those he surrounded himself with, including Salemme and Grasso, a heavily-feared Connecticut Goodfella and former prison cellmate of his dad’s. Besides taking part in numerous gangland slayings in his younger days, the half-Irish Salemme maintained deep ties to Boston’s Irish mob, known as the Winter Hill Gang, making him even more valuable to Patriarca, Jr., fast losing his grip on the crime family’s rank-and-file.

Raymond Patriarca, Jr.

Opposing Patriarca, Jr.’s reign were crews from East Boston and the North End (Boston’s Little Italy) headed by veteran hit man Joe (J.R.) Russo and his young, capable, college-educated protégé, Vinnie (The Animal) Ferrara, respectively. They would often hold meetings in the storage room of a downtown Boston restaurant called Vanessa’s, owned by North End soldier Angelo (Sonny) Mercurio, the group’s liaison to the Winter Hill Gang.

Around the time Salemme got sprung from the can, the FBI bugged Vanessa’s storage room and collected a series of incriminating conversations, highlighted by the shake down of a major Jewish bookmaker for $200,000. Upon word of the bug leaking out to the street in the summer of 1988, Sonny Mercurio flipped and began cooperating with the government and the Providence faction began making plans to take over Boston once the Russo and Ferrara contingent was indicted.

However, by the early summer of 1989, the indictment still hadn’t been filed and both sides of the conflict started circling each other, planning to launch attacks. The tipping point pushing things towards violence, according to federal records, was Salemme ripping off an East Boston cocaine dealer for $100,000. During the first week of June, FBI informants told their handlers that murder contracts were being arranged on both ends and that Salemme was testing fate by continuing to take meetings with Boston wiseguys unaffiliated with Russo and Ferrara around town in an attempt to consolidate his interests in Massachusetts.

On June 16, 1989, the Boston faction tried taking out Salemme and Grasso in coordinated murder plots. Grasso was picked up in New Haven, Connecticut for what he thought was a meeting with Patriarca, Jr. in Providence and shot to the death in route, his body dumped in a nearby body of water. Summoned by Mercurio to a lunch at a suburban Boston International House of Pancakes, Salemme was ambushed by gunmen in the parking lot, getting hit six times before taking refuge in a pizza parlor down the street.

Spending six days in the hospital, Salemme checked himself out and flew to California to recover and wait out the storm. Russo met with Patriarca, Jr. at a sit down later that month and threatened to kill him if he didn’t step down, per informants present.

At some point in August, New York’s Gambino crime family intervened.The Gambinos had backed Patriarca, Jr. for the position of boss following his father’s passing. The Genovese crime family, also out of New York, backed Russo’s faction during the insurgency. Then-Gambino boss John Gotti hosted Russo at a meeting in a luxury hotel in the weeks prior to Labor Day weekend, according to federal documents, and demanded that he halt the violence, offering to negotiate a peace treaty. In a sit down a week later, Patriarca, Jr. ceded control of the family to Providence capo Nicky Bianco and Russo accepted a promotion to consigliere and was promised the chance to “make” a dozen of his men. A party was thrown by Russo at Lombardo’s Italian Restaurant in East Boston over Labor Day weekend for the two sides of the feud to break bread and officially make amends.

Joe Russo

There would be epic consequences related to the pending induction ceremony: Sonny Mercurio tipped the feds off to its time and place of location (on October 29 in a small house in Medford, Massachusetts belonging to a wiseguy’s sister and brother-in-law). As three Russo loyalists (Vinnie Federico, Carmen Tortora and Richie Floramo) and one Providence mob figure (Bobby DeLuca) took the oath of Omerta that day, tapes were rolling. Less than a month later, Russo and his crew and Patriarca, Jr. and Bianco and their crew were indicted, setting the stage for Cadillac Frank to return from the west coast and assume command of the New England mafia, which he promptly did.

DeLuca, who helped mediate the dispute, became Salemme’s man on the ground in Providence and his only real Italian allies in Boston, Charles (Q-Ball) Quintina and the Rosseti brothers (Stevie & Mark), formed his primary support base in what had been hostile territory for the eager don and would soon be again. The Rosettis looked after East Boston and Quintina became his consigliere. He recruited a pair of tough Irish hoodlums from Winter Hill’s South Boston turf, Richard (Richie the Hatchet) Devlin and Richard (Richie Nine Lives) Gillis, to be his main collectors and made the muscle-bound, square-jawed Darin (Nino) Bufalino, his driver and bodyguard.

Refusing to honor old agreements, Salemme began systematically trying to eliminate anybody he perceived involved in trying to take him out of the picture the previous summer. Vinnie Ferarra’s best friend and driver Robert (Bobby D) Donati, was the first to go — found dead, stuffed in the trunk of his car in 1991. More murders of his rivals would follow in the coming years. Devlin was killed by remnants of Russo’s East Boston regime, headquartering out of the Breed Hill Social Club on Bennington Street and taking marching orders from Russo’s half-brother, Bobby Carrozza, behind bars.

The bloodshed didn’t cease until Salemme was finally locked up in 1995. He’d enter the Witness Protection Program without admitting to any murders on his watch as boss, causing him trouble with the government when they came to belief he was the one responsible for the Stevie DiSarro slaying from 1993. Four months after DiSarro’s skeletal remains were unearthed in the Spring of 2016, buried at the site of a converted textile mill in Providence owned by a soldier belonging to DeLuca’s former crew, Cadillac Frank was arrested and charged in the hit. DeLuca, 72, joined the Witness Protection Program in 2011 and will be the star witness against Cadillac Frank at trial.

Joe Russo and Nicky Bianco died in prison of natural causes. Patriarca, Jr. walked free in 1999 and retired from mob affairs. Vinnie Ferrara allegedly did the same in 2005, however, him and Bobby Carrozza are said to act in a strictly advisory role for modern day syndicate leaders when they seek counsel.

The post Cruel Summer: Flames Of Discontent Raged In New England Mob Circles In Summer Of ’89 appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Oh, the irony. Per sources with intimate knowledge of the situation, former New England mob boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme didn’t admit to his role in the Stevie DiSarro murder during his multiple FBI debriefings because he was trying to protect his one-time gangland best friend Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca. In return, DeLuca did the same thing. Until he didn’t.

The 84-year old Salemme is currently on trial in federal court in Boston for DiSarro’s 1993 homicide – he’s pled not guilty. Bobby DeLuca will be the star witness at the trial and has implicated Salemme in the crime, admitting Cadillac Frank put him in charge of burying DiSarro’s body.

“Frank wanted to look out for Bobby, he liked Bobby a lot,” one source said. “Bobby only had a few years left on his bid when Frank flipped and would be going back to his family, going back to the streets before long. Frank didn’t want to trip him up with a murder beef or a bunch of murder beefs. Plus, Frank knew admitting to his and Bobby’s participation in that murder opened up a whole other can of worms. They had a lot of blood on their hands in the 1990s. Admitting to one, would inevitably lead to admitting to the rest.”

One of those additional murders would be the 1992 hit on rogue mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan, six months prior to the DiSarro hit. DeLuca has fingered Salemme in the Hanrahan slaying, too, and possibly more.

DiSarro and Salemme co-owned The Channel nightclub in South Boston, a popular rock-and-roll, soul and new wave music venue. In March 1993, the FBI approached DiSarro about cooperating, explaining to him he was about to be indicted for bank and real estate fraud. Prosecutors believe on the morning of May 10 of that year, Salemme called DiSarro over to his home in Sharon, Massachusetts and had his son, the late Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr., strangle him to death. The next day, DeLuca had his older brother Joey, meet Salemme in Rhode Island, where the elder DeLuca took possession of DiSarro’s body and subsequently buried it at an associate’s mill in Providence. That associate traded the knowledge of the burial site for a get-out-of-jail free card in 2016 after getting busted in a drug case.

Frank Salemme (L) & Bobby DeLuca (R) at a 1991 meeting

Financed by Salemme, DiSarro purchased The Channel with the intent of letting Salemme use it as a place to launder money. DiSarro had previously owned successful nightclubs in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and South Florida.

One mob associate involved in the South Boston club was quoted as saying, “If the place takes in $100k in a month, we skim 80 Gs off the top.”

Salemme himself was caught on an FBI wire discussing his interest in The Channel.

“It’s a famous place, a real rock-and-roll joint,” he’s heard bragging on a bug. “I’m talking like heavy rock. You know its garbage music, sickening stuff, but I mean it’s a real money maker. We’ve already paid the money for it. We own 66 percent of the place…….I’m the one who gets all the cash.”

Becoming boss of the Patriarca crime family in 1990, Cadillac Frank took power amidst rising tensions in the syndicate, first quelled in the summer of 1989 following Salemme surviving an assassination attempt and then ramped back up upon his grabbing the reins less than a year later. With Salemme stationed in his hometown of Boston, DeLuca acted as his aide-de-camp in Providence. DeLuca was named a “kingsman’s captain,” a capo who reports directly to the boss.

Fresh to the throne, Salemme used his new role as boss to take aim at those he viewed as rivals, specifically those connected to the East Boston crew who had tried to have him killed. Between 1991 and his incarceration in 1995, Salemme is suspected of ordering over a half-dozen gangland slayings.

However, when he cut a deal with the government in 1999, he denied his role in all of them, including the DiSarro hit. While admitting to participating in nine murders during the 1960s, Cadillac Frank didn’t cop to a single homicide throughout his firestorm of a five-year tenure at the helm of the New England mafia.

DeLuca, 72, jumped ship from the Patriarca clan and onto Team America in the late 2000s, entering the Witness Protection Program in 2011 and relocating to Florida. Just like in Salemme’s purge sessions with the government, Bobby the Cigar left out any mention of involvement in the Stevie DiSarro murder or any others from the 1990s in his initial FBI debriefing.

He wanted to keep a trump card in his back pocket. He played it in 2016 when DiSarro’s remains were dug up.

New England mob soldier Joey DeLuca, Bobby the Cigar’s big brother, took the stand this week at Salemme’s trial and testified to being assigned by his sibling to retrieve DiSarro’s body in a rendezvous with Cadillac Frank in North Providence and then being told to deliver it to a local converted textile mill for burial. The elder DeLuca, 78, was “made” by Salemme in the following months as a reward for a job well done, and told jurors his motivation for testifying was to get his brother a more lenient sentence (Joey DeLuca wasn’t facing charges due to the statute limitations having run out). Bobby the Cigar will be sentenced after the DiSarro trial.

The post “Cadillac Frank” Kept Mouth Shut About DiSarro To Protect “Bobby The Cigar” In N.E. Mafia Saga appeared first on The Gangster Report.

New England mobster Luigi (Baby Shacks) Manocchio was officially bumped up to underboss of the Patriarca crime family in late 1991, according to an FBI recording played at a federal murder trial in Boston this week. The now-retired Manocchio, 90, was boss of the crime family from 1996 until he retired in 2009.

A tape of Manocchio’s predecessor, Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme talking to New York gangster Natale (Big Chris) Richichi of the Gambino crime family, was heard by jurors Friday at Salemme’s trial for the 1993 slaying of nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro, whose remains were unearthed two years ago at a Providence mill. The recording was made in December 1991 at the Hilton Hotel near Boston’s Logan Airport where Salemme met Richichi to discuss join pornography rackets and the general state of mob affairs in New England. Cadillac Frank had taken over the Patriarca clan the previous year after a power struggle.

“Until I can name some captains, see what I can do, I want to make Louie underboss,” Salemme told Richichi. “When I’m out of town he takes over…..he’s acting right now. Sometimes I get called down there or whatever. If a problem comes up, he handles it.”

Salemme can also be heard bad mouthing his alleged victim, DiSarro, on the tape, questioning his son Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr’s decision to get involved with him.

“I told Frankie Boy, DiSarro is going to turn on you,” recalled Salemme to Richichi. “He’s a snake, he’s a sneak, he’s no fucking good.”

DiSarro fronted a Boston rock-and-roll club for the Salemmes called The Channel in the early 1990s. Prosecutors allege that the late Frankie Boy Salemme strangled DiSarro to death at the Salemme family home in Sharon, Massachusetts on the morning of May 10, 1993 following the Salemmes suspecting the 43-year old Providence native of cooperating with the government and skimming the till at The Channel. Salemme is said to have lured DiSarro to the residence and, per his indictment, was present while he was slain.

Cadillac Frank was locked up for racketeering in 1995. Baby Shacks Manocchio succeeded him as don the next year. By the end of the decade, however, Salemme had entered the Witness Protection Program. Failing to admit to his participation in the DiSarro hit, he left himself exposed if and when DiSarro’s body was ever found. Salemme was pulled out of the “Program” in 2016 and charged in DiSarro’s murder just months after DiSarro’s bones were dug up.

Manocchio left his Rhode Island headquarters in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood in the past few years and currently resides in Florida. He served four years in prison for extortion, getting released in 2015.

Holding the reputation as a suave and sophisticated wiseguy, Manocchio speaks several different languages, is a rare wine connoisseur and once romanced prominent Providence heart surgeon Barbara Roberts, the first-ever female cardiologist in the state of Rhode Island. A former capo of his, Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca recently implicated him in the 1992 murder of rogue mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan. DeLuca used to be Salemme’s right-hand man and will be the star witness at the DiSarro trial this month.

Baby Shacks and Cadillac Frank go way back. When they were both on the run from the law as fugitives in the 1970s, Manocchio helped hide Salemme in New York – Salemme fled attempted murder charges stemming from a car bomb attack in 1969 and Manocchio averted authorities for a full decade on a murder conspiracy case where he provided the weapon used in a 1968 double homicide.

The post FBI Wire: “Baby Shacks” Manocchio Promoted To Underboss Of New England Mafia In December 1991 appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Although reputed New England mafia associate Charles (Harpo) Garabedian vigorously denies playing any role in the burial of slain mobbed-up nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro two and a half decades ago, he’s expected to testify at the trial trying to bring DiSarro’s murderers to justice. The United States Attorneys’ Office in Boston has given Garabedian, 83, immunity and will call him as a witness against former Patriarca crime family boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme, who is currently on trial for DiSarro’s homicide.

Garabedian’s name was bandied about on the stand this past week when Patriarca soldier Joey DeLuca testified about burying DiSarro’s body back in the spring of 1993. DeLuca, the older brother of Salemme’s one-time right-hand man, mob captain Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca, told jurors Garabedian helped him transport DiSarro’s body the day after he was killed to a Providence mill where it was thrown into a six-foot pit with hazardous waste and covered with dirt via construction equipment. Bobby DeLuca, 72, will be the star witness at Salemme’s trial.

Joey DeLuca, 78, claims Garabedian provided him a rental car, drove the vehicle with DiSarro’s corpse stashed in the trunk from DeLuca’s home to the mill and fell down when he and DeLuca placed the body on a rusty rolling hand cart to move it from the mill to the burial site. The mill was owned by DeLuca crew member Billy Ricci. After getting busted in a drug case in 2016, Ricci made a deal with the government and led the FBI to DiSarro’s remains.

The elder DeLuca recounted a run in with Garabedian at the Twin River Casino in the months following DiSarro’s remains being dug up, where Garabedian disparaged Ricci for cooperating.

“Can you believe that motherfucker couldn’t do three years?” Garabedian allegedly said to DeLuca, referencing the amount of prison time Ricci was staring at had he not cut a deal.

Charles Garabedian, Jr., Harpo Garabedian’s son and attorney, sent email correspondence to a number of east coast media outlets in the wake of DeLuca’s testimony last week, strenuously disputing DeLuca’s version of events and reiterating that his father played no role whatsoever in the DiSarro homicide conspiracy. He noted in his messages the discrepancies between DeLuca’s testimony at trial and his testimony in front of a May 2016 grand jury.

“Joe DeLuca’s testimony (in regards to the elder Garabedian) is completely false. Amid his patently self-serving recounting of events, Mr. DeLuca could recall word-for-word what my father said and did in 1993, but couldn’t remember the key points of his testimony in 2016. The prosecution failed to introduce any audio recordings to substantiate any of these claims of what my father said or did.”

Harpo Garabedian was banned from Lincoln Downs Racetrack in the 1970s for being an “undesirable” and did two years in prison for racketeering offenses linked to currently incarcerated New England mob capo Edward (Little Eddie) Lato. He was released in 2001. Lato has recently been looked at for his role in an unsolved 1992 gangland homicide.

During Cadillac Frank’s reign atop the Patriarca syndicate in the first half of the 1990s, Garabedian was observed in his company on numerous occasions by FBI and Massachusetts State Police surveillance units. Salemme was imprisoned in 1995 and entered the Witness Protection Program in 1999, testifying for the government in a second-degree murder case filed against a corrupt FBI agent.

During his November 1999 debriefing with federal agents, Salemme, 84, denied any knowledge or involvement in DiSarro’s murder. Five years later, Cadillac Frank pled guilty to perjury and obstruction of justice related to the DiSarro homicide probe. DiSarro and Salemme were partners in a South Boston music venue called The Channel. DiSarro is alleged to have fallen out of favor with Salemme after he got jammed up in a bank and real estate fraud case and was suspected of cooperating with the FBI and stealing proceeds from the club.

According to his indictment, Salemme summoned DiSarro to a meeting at his Sharon, Massachusetts home on the morning of May 10, 1993 and watched as his late son and mob associate Paul (Paulie the Plumber) Weadick strangled him to death — they’ve both pled not guilty. For aiding in DiSarro’s burial, Joey DeLuca was “made” by Salemme into the Patriarca crime family. Garabedian could never be initiated into the mafia due to his Armenian heritage.

The post “Harpo” Garabedian Calls Fellow Providence Mob Figure A Liar, Will Testify In Murder Trial To It appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Young Boys, Incorporated (YBI) drug organization redefined the dope game in Detroit in the late 1970s and early 1980’s, becoming street legends and underworld icons for its trendsetting business practices and flashy demeanor. Founded on the Motor City’s Westside, the group revolutionized the heroin trade in terms of distribution and marketing techniques and at its peak was clearing $500,000 a day in sales. Kids as young as eight and nine years old pushed YBI’s products on local playgrounds across the city.

The beginning of the end came in 1982 with the federal indictment of 41 YBI members on narcotics conspiracy charges, including the bulk of its leadership hierarchy. Of the over 40 people busted, 31 were convicted. Short sentences brought many back on the street within a few years however a nasty spat of internal warfare combined with another indictment hitting in 1987 brought down the curtain on YBI for good.

YBI ROLL CALL – The Man For Man Index Of Major Players:

Milton (Butch) Jones – YBI co-founder and front boss, the self-proclaimed “Henry Ford of Heroin”

Raymond (Baby Ray) Peoples – YBI co-founder and crew boss, the “Stringer Bell” of the organization, a thinking-man’s gangster

*Killed in power struggle

Dwayne (Wonderful Wayne) Davis aka “W.W.” – YBI co-founder and crew boss, the consummate street hustler who started the offshoot H2o Gang and opened up satellites in Boston and Seattle

*Killed in power struggle

Charles (Choicey Chuck) Lindsey – YBI co-founder and Wonderful Wayne’s business partner

Mark (Block) Marshall – YBI co-founder and the group’s original main enforcer who gets into a beef with Baby Ray Peoples over a girl and leaves town for Atlanta in 1980

Sylvester (Seal) Murray – YBI supply chief and Butch Jones’ top advisor

Darryl (Dynamite D) Young – Seal Murray’s right-hand man

Darryl (Stoney Roney) Terrell – YBI’s Eastside crew boss

Curtis (Kurt McGurk) Napier – Butch Jones’ teenage protégé, bodyguard and the leader of the A-Team enforcement crew

Maurice (Mo Heart) Gibbs – Butch Jones’ first cousin and the leader of an enforcement wing of the group known as The Wrecking Crew

Keithon (Terrible T) Green – Wrecking Crew’s first lieutenant

Richard (Richie Rich) Daniels – Wrecking Crew’s second lieutenant

Timothy (Timmy Slim) Peoples – Butch Jones’ right-hand man and Baby Ray Peoples’ little brother

Steve (Big 50) Brown – Wonderful Wayne’s top lieutenant in Detroit

James (Pep) Cooper – Wonderful Wayne’s top lieutenant in Boston

Norman (Sneaky Snead) Johnson — Baby Ray Peoples’ right-hand man

*Killed in power struggle

Melvin (Sammy D) Davenport – A Seal Murray lieutenant who gets the Murray crew infiltrated by an undercover federal agent

Kevin (Lughead) Wilson – One of Butch Jones’ Wrecking Crew enforcer who becomes the star witness against the group in court

The post Young, Rich & Ruthless: Breaking Down The Structure & Legacy Of Detroit’s YBI Gang appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Out of the pig pen and back to the real world. Black Mafia Family member Chris (Pig) Triplett was recently released from a four-year state prison stint in Ohio for narcotics trafficking. A Detroit native, the 47-year old Triplett was arrested in August 2014 for possession of two pounds of heroin stashed in the air filter of a car he was driving from the Buckeye State back to Michigan.

Triplett got out of federal prison in 2012 for his role in the enormous Operation Motor City Mafia bust of 2005 where the entire “BMF” drug gang was dismantled. BMF was founded in Detroit in the early 1990s by Demetrius (Big Meech) Flennory and his younger brother Terry (Southwest T) Flenoory. The highly-structured crew soon spread around the country to become the most prolific urban organized crime conglomerate of all-time, establishing a strangle hold on huge swaths of territory in strategically-placed locales set up in Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Memphis and Dallas.

*This article’s cover image is a photo of Pig Triplett (with hat on, holding bottles of liquor) and the Flennory brothers on an airplane in 2003.

The Flennorys left Detroit in the mid-1990s, with Big Meech settling in Georgia and Southwest T planting his flag in California. Both men kept key intermediaries though stationed in Motown, which remained the nerve center for BMF distribution routes. Triplett served as one of the Flennorys’ primary courier lieutenants, responsible for transporting vast sums of cocaine throughout the United States in a fleet of secret-compartment adorned automobiles.

On the eve of trial in 2007, the Flennorys copped pleas and are in the process of doing 30-year bids behind bars. Big Meech, 49, has grown into a full-blown cultural icon in the hip-hop community, constantly being name-checked on rap records. Rapper and actor Curtis (50 Cent) Jackson is currently developing a television series on the rise and fall of BMF for the Starz network.

The post Black Mafia Family Soldier “Pig” Triplett Gets Out Of Prison In Time To Watch Spring Bloom In The D appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Springfield (MA) mobster Talal (Big T) Soffan was in U.S. District Court this week to plead not guilty in a credit card fraud case. According to his indictment, the 46-year old Soffan lied when filling out forms to acquire a small business loan for $35,000 and then, using a series of fronts, established lines of credit to rack up $140,000 in billing on cards without sufficient funding. Prosecutors also believe he made $30,000 in fraudulent charges using a fake identity. The business loan was to open a trash dumpster business.

Soffan was released on bail. He faces up to eight-to-ten years in prison if convicted.

Back in 2005, Soffan was busted alongside then local mafia captain Anthony (Bingy) Arillotta for acting as a collector for Arillotta’s bookmaking and loansharking operations. Convicted in that case, he was sentenced to three years of probation and 100 hours of community services. Soffan hails from Lebanese descent and once resided in Arillotta’s inner circle.

Arillotta, 49, became a government witness and testified against New York mob boss Arthur (Little Artie) Nigro in 2011, working his way out of a potential life prison sentence for two murders. The Springfield mob crew has long been a satellite faction of the Genovese crime family in New York.

Recently released from prison, Arillotta has returned to the Springfield area in the last year. Albert (The Animal) Calavese is alleged to have succeeded Arillotta as the Genovese clan’s Western Massachusetts crew boss. Calvanese used to be Arillotta’s top loan shark. Several members of the current Springfield mob crew, including power players Ralphie Santaniello and Frank (Frankie the Shark) Depergola, were nailed in a 2016 racketeering indictment. Santaniello received a five-year prison term and Depergola got hit with a three-year bid.

*MassLive crime writer and resident expert mobologist Stephanie Barry first reported on Soffan’s newest run-in with the law on Wednesday

The post Teeing It Up Again: Western Massachusetts Wiseguy Popped For Credit Card, Identity Fraud appeared first on The Gangster Report.

By the beginning of 1994, New England mafia boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme’s reign atop the Patriarca crime family was running on fumes. His enemies, both in law enforcement and on the street – remnants of the Boston mob crew opposed to his ascent to power five years earlier – were gaining traction in their collective efforts to unseat him as Godfather. The fact that he allegedly ordered the murders of at least a half-dozen foes tied to the crime family’s Boston faction during his time at the helm only served to strengthen the desire of cop and crook alike to take him down.

Salemme, 84 today, is currently on trial for the 1993 gangland slaying of nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro, his former business partner. DiSarro’s remains were found in Providence two years ago and subsequently Cadillac Frank, who had flipped and turned witness for the government while behind bars in 1999, was ripped out of the Witness Protection Program and charged with DiSarro’s homicide.

With Salemme fighting for his freedom in a Boston federal courthouse, let’s take a look back at his last dance as don of New England.

Cadillac Frank Final Days Timeline:

February 1994 – Fall River, Massachusetts racketeers Joe (The Animal) Savitch and Louis (Miami Beach Louie) Alexander vanish. Savitch and Alexander’s bones are discovered in Maine three years later. Authorities believe the pair either ran afoul of Salemme and his shakedown efforts or butted heads with their former protégé, Timmy (The Bat) Mello, Fall River crew boss and Cadillac Frank’s former cellmate in prison in the 1980s.

March 1994 – East Boston mob figures Anthony (Bennington Street Tony) Ciampi & Michael (Big Mike) Romano, one-time members of the renegade crew that had tried to block Cadillac Frank’s ascension to boss, seek and receive permission from imprisoned Patriarca soldier Bobby Carrozza, the step brother of the renegade crew’s captain, Joe (J.R.) Russo, to lead a rebellion against the Salemme regime.

*In October 1993, Salemme’s top enforcer Richard (Richie the Hatchet) Devlin began attempting to extort tribute from Ciampi and Romano.

*The East Boston mob rebellion headquartered out of Ciampi’s Breed’s Hill Social Club.

March 4, 1994 – Former renegade crew member Vinnie (Gigi) Marino is released from prison and takes a leadership position in the rebellion. According to the FBI, Marino was part of an execution squad sent to kill Salemme at a Saugus, Massachusetts pancake house in the summer of 1989 (Salemme was shot five times, but survived the attack).

March 31, 1994 – Salemme’s two top enforcers Richard (Richie the Hatchet) Devlin and Richard (Richie Nine Lives) Gillis come under a barrage of gunfire by Ciampi as they stalk members of the rebellion outside the Breed’s Hill Social Club. The bulletproof vest-adorned Devlin is killed. Gillis is shot three times but lives.

April 1, 1994 – Salemme regime Providence soldiers Ronnie Coppola & Pete Scarpellini are shot to death inside Coppola’s Hockey Fans Social Club in Cranston, Rhode Island by “made” mobster Antonino (Nino) Cucinotta in a fight over a card game Coppola was running. Cucinotta was originally in the Salemme camp, however, had begun souring on his leadership methods and the behavior of his loyalists.

June 1994 – The Patriarca’s two warring mob factions hold a peace conference at Kelly’s Pub in East Boston’s Central Square, with Big Mike Romano representing the rebellion and Stevie Rossetti and Bobby Luisi, Jr. representing Salemme.

September 1, 1994 – East Boston crew member Michael (Little Mikey) Romano, Jr., Big Mike’s son, is killed by the Salemme group – some say as the unfortunate victim of mistaken identity – as he changes a flat tire outside the Stadium Café.

September 2, 1994 – Massachusetts State Trooper Mark Charbonnier is shot to death by Salemme enforcer Dave Clark during a routine traffic stop when Clark, allegedly involved in the conspiracy to murder Little Mikey Romano, Jr., worries that Charbonnier will discover evidence of the conspiracy in his vehicle.

September 10, 1994 – Salemme loyalist Joe Cirame averts an ambush attempt by the East Boston crew.

September 16, 1994 – Joe Cirame is wounded in an ambush outside his home.

September 21, 1994 – Salemme drug dealer Mike Prochilo averts being struck in a drive-by shooting coordinated by the East Boston crew.

September 25, 1994 – East Boston crew enforcer and drug dealer Sean Cote stabs Salemme loyalist Timmy O’Toole in a bar fight.

October 13, 1994 – High-ranking Salemme lieutenant Stevie Rossetti survives an ambush outside his home.

October 20, 1994 – Salemme lieutenant, Joe Souza is shot in an East Boston phone booth by Big Mike Romano.

October 31, 1994 – Joe Souza dies in the hospital on Halloween.

December 11, 1994 – Salemme drug dealer Paul Strazzula is killed in Revere, found stuffed in the truck of his car, which has been set ablaze.

Jan 5, 1995 – Cadillac Frank Salemme is indicted on racketeering charges out of federal court in Boston.

June 24, 1995 – Francis (Frankie Boy) Cadillac, Jr. dies of AIDS-related cancer under indictment in two different federal racketeering cases and the suspect in multiple mob-related murders.

Aug 11, 1995 – Cadillac Frank is apprehended by U.S. Marshals hiding in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The Aftermath:

November 6, 1995 – The 99 Restaurant & Pub Massacre: Salemme loyalists Bobby Luisi, Sr., Roman Luisi, Antonio Sarro and Anthony Pelosi are gunned down while eating at a Charlestown tavern

April 3, 1995 – Old-school Boston mobster Richard (Vinnie the Pig) DeVincent is killed in Medford, Massachusetts after rebuffing shakedown efforts from the remaining Salemme regime.

October 14, 1996 — East Boston loyalist Frank Imbrescia is ambushed in his office, but survives the shooting.

November 24, 1996 – Gigi Marino is shot entering his Caravan Social Club and fellow East Boston crew enforcer Robert (Bobby the Beast) Nogueira, Gigi Marino’s bodyguard, is killed in the parking lot of a Comfort Inn in Revere, Massachusetts fifteen minutes later down the street.

The post The Last Dance: New England Mafia Leader “Cadillac Frank’s” Final Days Timeline appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Distinguished Chicago mafia don John (Johnny No Nose) DiFronzo died of natural causes over the weekend ending a more than two decade reign and bringing the curtain down on a storied career in the Midwest underworld. The beloved 89-year old Outfit boss went into retirement due to health concerns in recent years, but kept his Godfather title. Per Windy City mob tradition, DiFronzo used a series of street bosses throughout his tenure, insulating himself from the lower regions of his crime family and only sending orders via a select few highly-trusted middlemen.

Referred to as “Johnny Bananas” by many close to him — “No Nose” was more media creation than street handle –, DiFronzo had been suffering from dementia and fighting a bout with Alzheimer’s Disease. Rising through the ranks of the Outfit as a professional thief, he acquired the “No Nose” moniker in 1949 after cutting off the front of his nose while breaking through the glass window of a Michigan Avenue department store he was burglarizing as he fled from police. Surgery corrected the damage in subsequent years.

Quick on his feet, savvy on the street and known for having a head for legitimate business, DiFronzo was rich and powerful but lived a humble, understated life in the boss’ chair, shunning the extravagance and showiness of some contemporaries in favor of keeping a low profile. He did prison time in the 1950s for burglary and again in the 1990s, a short stay on a 1993 federal racketeering conviction that was overturned 14 months later.

In the 1970s and 1980s, DiFronzo ran an Elmwood Park crew with a reputation for earning big money. According to Chicago Crime Commission files, DiFronzo maintained a prodigious business portfolio, including ownership in car dealerships, construction companies, trucking and sanitation firms, recycling plants and large portions of real estate. DiFronzo took his first arrest as a teenager in 1946 for petty larceny during his days as a member of the “3 Minute Gang” and a gopher for his gangland mentor, John (Jackie the Lackey) Cerone, the future syndicate underboss.

Legendary Outfit Godfather Tony (The Big Tuna) Accardo allegedly blessed DiFronzo’s ascension to the Windy City mob throne in his final weeks. Accardo died of heart failure in May 1992.

“Accardo loved Johnny DiFronzo,” one Chicago mafia insider said. “He would always ask about him. He knew Johnny was the future of the Outfit and made sure he was on his way to becoming boss before he left this earth. Everybody understood that was Accardo’s wish.”

Some of the top dogs in Illinois law enforcement tasked with targeting him in mob probes displayed a grudging respect for DiFronzo as well.

“Johnny had a routine, he wasn’t hard to find, but he was very smart about how he did Outfit business,” recalled retired FBI agent Jim Wagner of tracking DiFronzo’s movements. “When I was on the job, most mornings you’d find him having breakfast at the same place and then reading the paper behind the desk at his office at one of his automobile dealerships. He was always pleasant with us. He was hard to get on a wire though. He knew to avoid phones and talking shop in places where we’d know to try to bug. His inner circle was tight knit and knew how to have other people do his bidding and taking all the risk. The guy was a world-class earner too. He made a lot of money for a lot of people, especially himself.”

Testimony at the historic 2007 Operation Family Secrets trial implicated DiFronzo in planning and taking part in the 1986 double homicide of the Outfit’s explosive Las Vegas crew leader Tony (The Ant) Spilotro and his baby brother Michael, however he was never charged in the landmark case. Gene’s Deli in Elmwood Park, Agostino’s on Harlem Avenue, The Loon Café in River Grove and the Rosebud chain of Italian eateries were his top hangout spots.

Sources peg DiFronzo the man who sanctioned the two most recent confirmed Outfit hits: the 2001 murder of loan shark and enforcer Anthony (Tony the Hatchet) Chiaramonti and the 2006 disappearance of underboss Anthony (Little Tony) Zizzo. Chiaramonti was gunned down on Thanksgiving inside a fast food fried chicken place. Zizzo vanished on his way to a mob sit down on Rush Street, Chicago’s main nightlife district.

The post Godfather Of Windy City Mafia “No Nose” DiFronzo Dead At 89, Succumbs To Battle With Dementia appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Raymond (Ray Rubber Lips) Patriarca, Jr. saw his New England mob kingdom crumble in the late 1980s as his troops grew restless and frustrated with his feeble leadership. The details of Patriarca, Jr.’s downfall have come to light in federal court these last few weeks as a successor of his, Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme, stands trial for the 1993 murder of Boston nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro. Salemme and Patriarca, Jr. were allies during a war that broke out in 1989, but Patriarca, Jr. would eventually turn on Cadillac Frank and seek to have him assassinated from behind bars.

Patriarca, Jr. took power after the death of his dad, fabled crime family namesake Raymond Patriarca, who passed away from a sudden heart attack in 1984 following heading the organization for more than two decades from his headquarters in Providence. The 84-year old Salemme was one of the elder Patriarca’s top enforcers in Boston during the 1960s. He got out of prison in the spring of 1987 for a car bomb attack he perpetrated at Patriarca’s behest and the younger Patriarca immediately inducted him into the crime family, making him his main representative in Beantown where he replaced his mentor and syndicate consigliere Larry Zannino who was locked up around the same time.

Zannino’s incarceration and Salemme’s unconventional fast rise through the ranks presented problems for Patriarca, Jr. Zannino was well liked and heavily-respected while Salemme was perceived as aloof and power hungry. Without Zannino on the street to back Patriarca, Jr.’s regime, the crown was left exposed due to Patriarca, Jr.’s inability to instill faith, nor fear in his followers. Mob crews out of East Boston and the North End, led by old-timer Joe (J.R.) Russo and his protégé Vinnie (The Animal) Ferrara, respectively, resented Salemme’s rapid ascent and with Patriarca, Jr. “closing the books,” refusing to induct new members into the crime family after Salemme got his button, they began quietly discussing staging a mutiny.

By 1989, those whispers ballooned to a full-blown roar.

According to FBI documents, North End mobster Angelo (Sonny) Mercurio told Patriarca, Jr. in May of 1989 that if he didn’t open the books soon to placate Russo and Ferrara, he was going to have a war on his hands. In early June, Patriarca had a meeting with the ambitious, college-educated Ferrara in New York at the Saratoga Race Track. The face-to-face didn’t solve anything though and on June 16, Salemme was wounded in an ambush outside a Saugus, Massachusetts International House of Pancakes, set up by Mercurio, and Patriarca, Jr.’s underboss, notoriously-unhinged Connecticut Goodfella William (The Wild Man) Grasso, was killed in separate attacks.

Salemme retreated to California and Patriarca, Jr. hoped to stave off the insurgence by making peace. Per testimony this week at Salemme’s murder trial, former Rhode Island wiseguy Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca, was summoned to then-Providence mob captain Anthony (The Saint) St. Laurent’s house by Patriarca, Jr. and asked to broker talks with the Boston faction in order to quell tensions – once partners in a bookmaking business, DeLuca and St. Laurent had a bitter falling out in the 2000s with St. Laurent taking out multiple murder contracts on his head.

DeLuca attended a pair of meetings with Ferrara, one at a North End elementary school playground and another at a North End coffee shop, and was told Salemme was shot because of a drug deal gone bad, which he knew wasn’t true. When DeLuca requested that Ferrara and Russo come to Providence for a sit down with Patriarca, Jr., they refused. Eventually, Patriarca Jr. agreed to come into Boston for the sit down and bringing DeLuca and St. Laurent as back-up, the don met with the leaders of the rebellion in the cafeteria of Massachusetts General Hospital. Days later, Rhode Island mob powerhouse Matthew (Good Looking Matty) Guglielmetti met with Ferrara at a Providence pizza parlor to tell him he was taking over the Connecticut territory previously overseen by Grasso and would be providing Russo a bigger piece of the action from that state’s rackets.

Shortly thereafter, New York’s Gambino crime family got involved in negotiations. The Gambinos had supported Patriarca, Jr. promotion to boss years earlier. The Teflon Don himself John Gotti, at that point, the most prominent Godfather on the east coast, called both sides of the conflict to separate sit downs in Manhattan. Russo was instructed to stop the violence and DeLuca, sent on behalf of Patriarca, Jr., was told there should be no retaliation for the attacks on Salemme and Grasso, according to FBI informant files. Gotti in turn arranged for Russo to get a bump up to consigliere, Patriarca, Jr. to “make” a dozen of his men and DeLuca to be inducted as reward for his role as peacekeeper.

During a subsequent sit down in the back office of DeLuca’s Lorenzo’s Jewelry in North Providence, Russo and Ferrara demanded that Patriarca, Jr. step down.

“You’re not running this thing like a boss….this is not how a boss should act,” Russo hollered at Patriarca, Jr., per DeLuca’s testimony.

DeLuca told jurors that Patriarca, Jr. agreed to resign his post, but in order to save face and not be publicly embarrassed, made a deal with Russo where he would be allowed to conduct the upcoming making ceremony and then tell the organization’s rank and file that he was leaving the mob on his own volition and handing the reins to longtime Rhode Island capo Nicky Bianco.

The next month, Russo invited the Providence and Connecticut factions of the crime family to a party at Lombardo’s Italian Restaurant in East Boston to kickoff Labor Day weekend and bury the hatchet on the war. Ostensibly, the party was held in honor of Russo’s dad’s birthday. The making ceremony, staged that October, was famously bugged by the FBI courtesy of help from Sonny Mercurio. Within weeks, Patriarca, Jr., Bianco, Russo and Ferrara, among others, were indicted on racketeering charges.

Upon Bianco being convicted at trial in 1991, Cadillac Frank assumed command and proceeded to continue to fight it out with the East Boston crew for almost the entirety of his reign. Salemme also dodged a murder contract taken out on him by an imprisoned Patriarca, Jr.

The deposed Patriarca, Jr. did eight years in the joint. Today, at 73, he sells real estate. Russo and Bianco both died in prison. Ferrara got out more than a decade ago and is semi-retired and running a series of successful legitimate businesses in his old North End stomping grounds.

Busted by the feds in 1995, Salemme turned witness for the government in 1999, aiding in the building of a case against a corrupt FBI agent. However, he lied to his handlers about the Stevie DiSarro hit and when DiSarro’s remains were unearthed behind a converted textile mill in Providence in late March 2016, he was yanked out of the Witness Protection Program and arrested for DiSarro’s homicide. Prosecutors allege Salemme had the 43-year old DiSarro killed for stealing from a joint business venture and cooperating with the FBI and IRS. DeLuca, 72, flipped in 2011 and admits to being tasked with burying DiSarro’s body.

The post The Downfall Of A Don: Fresh Intel On How Patriarca, Jr. Lost Grip Of New England Mafia In ’89 appeared first on The Gangster Report.

New England mob turncoat Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca will return to the witness stand later this year at the perjury trial of Patriarca crime family associate Gaythorne (Poochie) Angell. The 72-year old DeLuca just finished up a week of contentious testimony at the murder trial of his former best friend and one-time New England mafia don Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme, charged with killing his business partner, Stevie DiSarro, in 1993. DeLuca admits to coordinating DiSarro’s burial.

Salemme and DeLuca were both pulled out of the Witness Protection Program in 2016 after DiSarro’s remains were dug up behind a Providence mill building owned by a drug-dealing DeLuca associate. That same year, Poochie Angell, 83, was indicted for perjury connected to testimony before a 2011 grand jury convened on the mob’s strip-club extortion racket. While Salemme joined the Witness Protection Program in 1999, DeLuca signed on to Team USA in 2011 following his bust for shaking down a pair of Rhode Island strip clubs, the Satin Doll, the Cadillac Lounge and the Foxy Lady, for more than $2,000,000 over a 25-year period.

A longtime mob-backed bookmaker, Poochie Angell owned the Foxy Lady, the most well-known nude dance establishment in the state since opening in the late 1970s. He was pinched alongside DeLuca in 1993 for running a large-scale sports book out of the Foxy Lady in Providence.

According to his current indictment, Angell lied to the grand jury regarding protection payments he made to Providence mafia captain Edward (Little Eddie) Lato. DeLuca, Lato and retired Patriarca crime family boss Luigi (Baby Shacks) Manocchio were nailed in the extortion scheme in the fall of 2011. Manocchio, 90, did four years behind bars.

Lato, 71, is slated for release from prison next year. That is if he’s not indicted for his role in the 1992 gangland slaying of rogue Patriarca clan enforcer Kevin Hanrahan. Upon his 2016 arrest, DeLuca implicated both Lato and Manocchio in Hanrahan’s murder. Hanrahan, 39, was shot to death in Providence’s Federal Hill section on September 18, 1992 allegedly for planning on killing Cadillac Frank Salemme and Baby Shacks Manocchio with plastic explosives on orders from deposed New England mob Raymond Patriarca, Jr., who was incarcerated at the time. 

The post In The Doghouse: Fmr. Mafia Capo Bobby DeLuca Not Done Yet, Will Testify Against R.I. Strip Club Owner Next appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Words from the grave — the voice of slain New England mob associate Stevie DiSarro was heard in federal court this week talking on a FBI wiretap about his pending purchase of the iconic Channel nightclub. DiSarro’s purchase of the storied South Boston rock music venue which he eventually turned into a strip club was financed by former Patriarca crime family boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme, currently on trial for DiSarro’s murder. The 43-year old DiSarro disappeared in May 1993 after a falling out with Salemme over skimmed profits from their business partnership and his potential cooperation with the FBI and IRS following him getting jammed up in a bank and real estate fraud case.

Salemme, 84, was ripped out of the Witness Protection Program two years ago in the wake of authorities unearthing DiSarro’s remains behind a Providence, Rhode Island mill in March 2016. The one-time don turned witness for the government in 1999, but neglected to inform the FBI of his alleged involvement in ordering DiSarro’s slaying.

Below is a transcript from an FBI wire in 1992 intercepting a conversation between DiSarro and Boston Irish mobster George Kauffman discussing among other things, DiSarro’s purchasing The Channel. Kauffman acted as an intermediary for the city’s Irish mob and Salemme’s Italian organized crime outfit. Salemme would often visit Kauffman at Kauffman’s Brookline, Massachusetts auto repair shop and Kauffman helped Salemme extort a series of Jewish bookmakers in the early 1990s.

The Wire:

DiSarro – Hi George

Kauffman – What’s up my man?

DiSarro – How are ya?

Kauffman – What’s going on?

DiSarro – Did you get that agreement?

Kauffman – Yeah

DiSarro – Is it Ok?

Kauffman – I hope so

DiSarro – Alright, so they signed it and everything?

Kauffman – Yeah

DiSarro – Ok

Kauffman – What’s new with you?

DiSarro – Not much, we’re putting some deals together, we’re working hard

Kauffman – They closed down the Channel, huh?

DiSarro – Yep

Kauffman – So what’s going to happen now?

DiSarro – What’s going to happen now is we’re going to get it for nothing

Kauffman – You’re going to get it?

DiSarro – Yup

Kauffman – Yeah, beautiful

DiSarro – But instead of it costing $600,000, it’s gonna cost 10

Kauffman – Beautiful

DiSarro – Little different, right?

Kauffman – That’ s saving a couple yards for ya for sure

DiSarro – Is Jimmy around?

Kauffman – He’s around somewhere

DiSarro – Is he around the garage?

Kauffman – No, he was here, but he took off, he should be back anytime now

DiSarro – Ok, I want to see him, should I come down to the garage?

Kauffman – I don’t know if he’s gonna come back down here or if he’s going over to Cambridge, you want his number?

DiSarro – Just have him call me, he has the number

Kauffman – Alright, see ya later buddy

DiSarro – Bye, Georgie, take care

The post FBI Transcript: Boston Nightclub Owner Chats Numbers With Irish Mob Figure In Years Before He’s Killed appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Once-highly feared South Boston mobster Stevie (The Rifleman) Flemmi saved Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme Jr.’s life after the aspiring wiseguy ripped off a mafia-backed drug ring. This week, he’s trying to help the government make it so his dad, former New England mob don Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme spends the rest of his life in prison.

Flemmi, known for practicing a particularly heinous brand of violence and for being a longtime FBI confidential informant, during his time on the street brand took the stand Wednesday at the elder Salemme’s murder trial and recounted his early days in the Boston underworld when he was running buddies with Cadillac Frank in the 1960s and the city’s underworld was ablaze in war. At the very end of his first day of testimony, Flemmi recounted a story about intervening on behalf of the younger Salemme when his dad was behind bars for a car bomb attack and Frankie Boy sold a marijuana dealer connected to deceased Patriarca crime family soldier Joseph (Joe Black) Lamattina a bunch of peat moss he tried parading as pot.

Cadillac Frank Salemme, 84, is charged with the 1993 gangland slaying of nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro, a business partner of his he suspected of stealing and ratting. The 83-year old Flemmi is set tell jurors that he accidentally walked in on Frankie Boy Salemme strangling DiSarro to death inside the Salemme family home in Sharon, Massachusetts. DiSarro’s remains were dug up in Providence in 2016. Frankie Boy Salemme died of AIDS-related cancer in 1995 at 38.

In the first half of the 1990s, Cadillac Frank ruled New England’s Italian mafia with an iron fist. Despite being of Italian descent, Flemmi was a leader of Boston’s Irish mob, referred to by locals as the Winter Hill Gang. They both went down in a 1995 racketeering bust. Flemmi has been in prison ever since and started testifying for the government in the early 2000s. Salemme entered the Witness Protection Program but didn’t admit to his alleged role in the DiSarro homicide and was arrested in the months following DiSarro’s bones being unearthed.

The hot-headed Frankie Boy Salemme Drug has been portrayed as a loose-cannon of a wiseguy in testimony at his father’s trial, with frequent fist fights at the drop of a dime and drug rip offs aplenty filling the narrative painted by several witnesses. Per testimony this week, he threw a narcotics trafficker he was stealing from out of a moving car and at a dinner meeting to discuss auction bids for a nightclub he was trying to buy with his father and DiSarro, Frankie Boy broke a plate over the head of a competing bidder as a means of persuading the bidder to drop out of the auction. The final piece of Flemmi’s testimony Wednesday saw the former Korean War paratrooper recall an incident in the mid-1980s where Frankie Boy swindled one of Joe Black Lamattina’s drug-peddling underlings out of a couple thousand bucks in bunk weed.

“They were looking for him……He was a nice kid. I liked him. I told Joe Black, that’s Cadillac Frank’s kid, nothing’s going to happen to him. If something does, there’s going to be a problem”

Dying of natural causes at 85 years old in 2015, Lamattina used to be soldier in Boston’s North End mob crew run by Larry Zannino. His older brother, Ralph (Ralphie Chong) Lamattina, also belonged to Zannino’s crew. Ralphie Chong, 94, died last year. Joe Black did five years in prison for loansharking (1988-1993) and was in charge of the Patriarca crime family’s interests in the casino-gaming industry, looking after investments in the Caribbean, Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Zannino dropped dead in prison in the 1990s.

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Reputed Patriarca crime family captain Joe Ruggiero was with former New England mafia boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme in December 1994 when then-South Boston mobster Stevie (The Rifleman) Flemmi informed Salemme of a looming federal racketeering indictment. Salemme already knew of the legal peril headed in his direction though, per Flemmi’s testimony at Salemme murder trial this week.

A Rhode Island native, Ruggiero, 68, allegedly runs his rackets out of Fall River, Massachusetts, a tough factory town located between Boston and Providence. In the 1990s, Ruggiero was a frequent companion of Salemme, who fled the northeast and was a fugitive for seven months following learning a January 1995 indictment was on its way. Ruggiero has no criminal record to speak of.

The 84-year old Cadillac Frank is on trial for the 1993 gangland slaying of mob associate Stevie DiSarro, who, according to prosecutors, was killed for stealing from their partnership in a famous “Southie” nightclub-turned-strip joint and informing for the government. DiSarro’s remains were discovered in Providence two years ago and Salemme was dragged out of the Witness Protection Program and hit with homicide charges.

Salemme led the New England mob in the early-to-mid 1990s before joining Team America in 1999. Flemmi, 83, jumped ship in 2003 and told authorities he happened upon the 43-year old DiSarro being strangled to death inside Salemme’s Sharon, Massachusetts residence by Salemme’s late son as Cadillac Frank watched on.

Cadillac Frank and Flemmi were longtime allies in the topsy-turvy New England underworld, participating in numerous murders together. However, Flemmi, a member of the mostly Irish Winter Hill Gang, was a confidential FBI informant feeding the feds intelligence about Salemme’s criminal dealings for years without his knowledge. Because some of his FBI handlers were on the payroll for Flemmi and his storied Winter Hill Gang cohort James (Whitey) Bulger, he got valuable information about him and his gangland associates back in return.

Around the 1994 Christmas holiday season, Flemmi received word from his government moles that a giant racketeering indictment was coming down the pike, slated for filing on January 10, 1995. The indictment charging Salemme, Flemmi and Bulger, among others, actually landed earlier then that, dropping on January 5.

According to Flemmi’s testimony, almost immediately after finding this out, he swung by the Salemme family home in suburban Boston, the same one DiSarro is said to been brutally slain at 18 months earlier, and encountered Cadillac Frank, his son, Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr. and Joe Ruggiero. He thought he would be the first one to alert, the elder Salemme of the news, but Salemme had his own mole in law enforcement and had already found out. Shortly thereafter, Cadillac Frank fled, not being apprehended until the following August in West Palm Beach.

Flemmi was arrested Christmas shopping in downtown Boston. Bulger lasted 16 years on the run. Flemmi testified at Bulger’s 2013 trial, where Bulger, 88, was convicted of taking part in more than a dozen slayings.

Ruggiero is closely tied to retired Patriarca crime family Godfather Luigi (Baby Shacks) Manocchio, 90 years old and living in the sun in Florida. While Manocchio was boss in the late 1990s and most of the 2000s, Ruggiero allegedly worked business deals with him and sometimes acted as a driver and bodyguard, per Rhode Island State Police records. FBI agents followed the pair on a trip to Italy to scout potential real estate buys.

One RISP document cites informants telling them that Manocchio sent Ruggiero into Fall River in 1997 after high-level mob associate Gerard (The Frenchman) Ouimette, the Patriarca clan’s previous point man in the region, was incarcerated, to take his place. That same document contains reference to a 1999 shouting match Ruggiero engaged in with another Fall River racketeer named Tim (Timmy the Bat) Mello at a amateur boxing match — Mello had been a “Salemme guy.” Since planting roots in Fall River, Ruggiero has made headlines for his business purchases in the area and his tight personal relationships with political officials, including the former Mayor.

The post Mafia Boss “Cadillac Frank” Had Elusive N.E. Mob Figure Joe Ruggiero By His Side The Day He Went On Run appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Much like his on-screen namesake played by matinee movie idol Brad Pitt, the late Boston mobster Joseph (Joe Black) Lamattina wasn’t someone to be trifled with. Back in the 1980s, he got jammed up in a loansharking case for threatening to physically harm one of his debtors. This week in federal court it was revealed that he was looking to kill a future mob boss’ son for a brazen drug rip off.

In late 1982, used car dealer Billy DiStefano sought a street loan of $5,000 from Joe Black, a longtime member of Boston’s North End mob crew run by Larry Zannino. DiStefano received the loan at a 5% interest rate. By February 1983, DiStefano took out an additional $5,000 loan from Lamattina at 3% interest. Since he hadn’t paid back the first loan yet, DiStefano gave Lamattina a stolen car as collateral. Just weeks later, DiStefano needed another $5,000 and Joe Black provided it with the same 3% interest rate as his last loan.

Within months, DiStefano couldn’t keep up with his monthly payments to Lamattina, was under investigation by the police for insurance fraud and skipped town. An irate Joe Black showed up at his girlfriend’s clothing store and told her to tell DiStefano, “You took my blood, now I’m going to take his.” When DiStefano called Lamattina from out of town to try to calm him down, Joe Black said, “There’s no place left to hide,” in response to DiStefano trying to use his connection to imprisoned gangland figure Pete (The Crazy Horse) Limone as a means of receiving mercy for his transgressions – Limone would go on to become Godfather of the New England mafia in the 2000s.

DiSteffano contacted the FBI in February 1984 and wired up in meetings with Lamattina. The feds indicted Joe Black in early 1985 and he was convicted at trial in 1988, sentenced to eight years behind bars. He was released from prison in January 1993. Joe Black died of natural causes in 2015 at 85 years old. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, he spearheaded the Patriarca crime family’s out-of-state casino-gambling interests, working with iconic Jewish wiseguy Meyer Lansky.

Lamattina tried taking out a murder contract on Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr. in the 1980s but Winter Hill Gang leader Stevie (The Rifleman) Flemmi intervened on Salemme, Jr. behalf and had the contract removed. Flemmi testified about the incident this week at his one-time close friend Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme’s trial, Frankie Boy’s dad and the former northeastern mob don who’s fighting first-degree homicide charges in the 1993 slaying of nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro.

Federal prosecutors claim the now-deceased Frankie Boy strangled DiSarro on his father’s orders on the morning of May 10, 1993 at the Salemme family home in Sharon, Massachusetts. DiSarro, 43, had fallen out of favor with the Salemmes after their business relationship went sour and the father-son gangster tandem suspected him of stealing as well as snitching. DiSarro’s remains were dug up in 2016.

Flemmi, aligned with the Boston Irish mob in his gangland heyday, has told authorities he accidentally walked in as the DiSarro hit was in the process of being carried out that fateful spring day 25 years ago. He also told jurors this week he instructed Lamattina to back off and give Frankie Boy a free pass for scamming an associate of his in a drug deal while Cadillac Frank was away serving time in prison. Salemme, Jr. had sold a Lamattina underling $2,000 worth of fake pot.

Joe Black’s wrath might have indirectly led to the 99 Restaurant & Pub Massacre in the Charlestown section of Boston, where North End Goodfella Robert (Bobby the Blade) Luisi, Sr. and several members of his family were gunned down in a booth eating dinner on November 6, 1995. Luisi, Sr. had attacked Lamattina weeks earlier with a tire iron in a beef over real estate Luisi, Sr. was trying to buy in which Joe Black had been running gambling rackets.

The massacre was the work of the Clemente family and killed four wiseguys, Luisi, Sr., his son, his nephew and an associate. Anthony Clemente and his son Damian were butting heads with Bobby the Blade regarding drug dealing they were doing in the North End without paying Luisi, Sr. protection. Rumors circulated immediately following the slayings that Lamattina had signed off on violence towards the Luisi, Sr. camp in the aftermath of his attack, leaving him with dozens of stiches in his head. Less than 24 hours before the massacre, Damian Clemente had beat up another nephew of Luisi, Sr. at a North End eatery escalating tensions.

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Some two and a half decades ago, Rhode Island real estate mogul, mob associate and multi-millionaire Frank Zammiello provided financing for former New England mafia don Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme in his and his late son’s purchase of the wildly popular Channel nightclub in South Boston, per sources. With a little muscle displayed by Salemme’s wildcard of a son, they snagged the famous rock-and-roll music venue for cents on the dollar, eventually deciding to turn it into a strip club.

For the past month, the 84-year old, still-colorful Cadillac Frank, boss of the New England mafia in the first half of the 1990s, has been on trial for the first-degree murder of his partner in the club, Stevie DiSarro. The Salemmes and DiSarro used DiSarro’s step brother Roland Wheeler as their front on paper.

According to federal prosecutors, DiSarro was slain due to Salemme and his eager-to-please offspring “Frankie Boy” believing DiSarro was skimming profits from the club without permission and cooperating with the IRS, strangled by the younger Salemme on the morning of May 10, 1993 while his pops watched on with pride in the kitchen of their family home in posh Sharon, Massachusetts. Buried in Providence, DiSarro’s bones weren’t unearthed until 2016, the same year Cadillac Frank was yanked out of the Witness Protection Program and charged in his homicide. Salemme joined Team America in 1999 and was living under an assumed identity in Atlanta when authorities were tipped to DiSarro’s final resting place.

Zammiello, 67, rose from meager beginnings as an electrician in the Olneyville section of Providence to being the most prominent real estate developer in the state of Rhode Island. He’s been known to rub elbows with Patriarca crime family members dating back over 30 years. In the 1980s, he developed a series of properties with then-boss Raymond Patriarca, Jr., who took the reins from his father, syndicate namesake Raymond Patriarca upon the elder Patriarca’s death of a heart attack in the summer of 1984. In 1986, Zammiello helped Patriarca, Jr. secure bond in a federal criminal case and then did the same less than five years later.

It was through Patriarca, Jr. that Zammiello was introduced to Cadillac Frank Salemme, fresh off a 15-year state prison stint for blowing up the car of a mob attorney in Massachusetts on Raymond Patriarca’s orders. Salemme was “made” into the Patriarca clan by Patriarca, Jr. in around 1988, made a “kingsman’s capo” and went to work with Patriarca, Jr. and Zammiello building houses. By 1991, Patriacra Jr. was behind bars and Salemme was on top of New England mafia in his place, surviving a shooting war with rivals in opposition to his rapid ascent to the throne.

Founded in 1980 by the Greek Bouras brothers (Harry & Pete), The Channel was the premier small-scale rock-and-roll venue in the Boston area. The club fell on hard times though when the nation’s economy tanked at the end of the decade. Enter the Salemmes and Stevie DiSarro.

Frankie Boy Salemme, Jr. was pals with Providence-native DiSarro, owner of another night spot in town called Club Soda and other clubs in Florida, and convinced his dad Cadillac Frank to put together a funding package in order to attempt a purchase. Cadillac Frank, according to sources familiar with the Channel’s business dealings, sought out Zammiello for capital. DiSarro and Zammiello knew each other from DiSarro’s building ventures, where he specialized in converting apartments to condominiums and were close friends. Both Salemmes were caught bragging of their silent ownership in the club on FBI wires.

Zammiello has claimed publically although he initially showed interest in putting up the cash for the club, he never followed through. Two different sources tell Gangster Report he gave Salemme $100,000 towards buying the club, some of which he used for that purpose and the rest of which he pocketed. Witnesses at Salemme’s trial say Salemme was shaking down DiSarro for $5,000 a month in their business arrangement.

The Bouras brothers and their partner Jack Burke filed for bankruptcy in 1989 and agreed in principle in 1990 to sell the Salemmes and DiSarro the club once they got the financing for it. As a gesture of good faith, they allowed DiSarro to take over management of the premises on a day-to-day basis. On New Year’s Eve 1991, The Channel held its final concert under the Bouras’ stewardship.

The club went up for auction in 1992, however, the Salemme-DiSarro group lost the bidding to another group (“Main Act”), which offered $310,000 for the place, well above the number the mob contingent came in at. Undeterred, Frankie Boy Salemme, Jr. and DiSarro took the main investor in Main Act out for dinner to discuss the situation and after Salemme, Jr. broke a plate over his head, the investor agreed to pull out of the sale. Weeks later, the club went back up for auction and the Salemmes and DiSarro won with the lone bid of $58,000, quite the discount from market value and considerably lower than their original offer.

Pete Bouras testified that he was pushed out of the club’s ownership and walked away with nothing. He and Burke both testified to getting into physical altercations with Salemme, Jr. at the club around the time of the sale. The reopening as a rock club kicked off in the summer of 1992 with a performance by red-hot grunge music group Alice in Chains.

Changing its name to Soiree, the club rebranded in early 1993 as a nude-dancing establishment, but its ramshackle accommodations made it difficult to attract dancers and clientele. At the time of DiSarro’s disappearance, there had been a decision made to change back to the rock-club format. The club shut down for good in the months after DiSarro was killed. Salemme, Jr. died of AIDS-related cancer in June 1995 at 38.

Cadillac Frank didn’t make it to his son’s funeral because he was on the run from the law, finally nabbed in August 1995 hiding in West Palm Beach, Florida and jailed for racketeering. Zammiello is allegedly tight with Salemme’s direct successor, Luigi (Baby Shacks) Manocchio. The pair reportedly vacation together and Zammiello provides the stately now-retired don use of his private jet, the same jet he was contracted by the U.S. government to fly members of the Saudi royal family out of the country and to Paris in the days following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Manocchio did four years in prison for extortion earlier this decade and today the 90-year old mafiso emeritus spends most of his time in the Florida sun. It’s said he voluntarily stepped down from his position as boss of the Patriarca crime family in 2009, two years prior to his extortion arrest for shaking down Providence area strip clubs.

The post The Millionaire & The Mob: N.E. Mafia Boss “Cadillac Frank” Milked R.I. Business Mogul For Nightclub Cash appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Boston mob figure Jimmy Martorano helped finance and owned a piece of the New Kids on the Block music group in the band’s enormous heyday of the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to court testimony this week and court records from almost 30 years ago. Music promotor and film producer John McAveeney took the stand for the defense Thursday afternoon in former New England mafia don Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme’s murder trial and testified that Martorano, a top Salemme lieutenant during Cadillac Frank’s notoriously bumpy reign in the 1990s, introduced him to Salemme’s alleged victim, nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro. He referred to Martorano, 76, as “one of the founders of New Kids on the Block.”

The group made up of five blue collar kids from Boston got off the ground in 1984 and by the end of the decade was selling out arenas worldwide and the crush of seemingly every girl between the ages of 7 and 17. New Kids on the Block split up in 1994 amid the hip-hop and grunge music explosions, eventually reforming in 2007. A pop-culture nostalgia wave has brought them back to touring in recent years.

The 43-year old DiSarro co-owned the famous Channel nightclub in South Boston, with Salemme and Salemme’s son, Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr., and disappeared on the morning of May 10, 1993 on his way to a meeting with his wiseguy partners. Prosecutors say that was the day Salemme, Jr. strangled DiSarro to death on his dad’s orders in their family home in Sharon, Massachusetts for the belief that DiSarro, on the verge of being indicted for bank and real estate fraud, was stealing from then and cooperating with authorities.

Salemme, 84, was in the Witness Protection Program when he was arrested in the months after DiSarro’s remains were found in Providence in the spring of 2016. Salemme, Jr. died of natural causes at just 38 years old in June 1995.

Jimmy Martorano was a captain in the elder Salemme’s mob empire before he went to prison for racketeering in 1992. He had acted as Salemme’s go-between with crime families in New York. Court documents in a civil bankruptcy law suit filed in 1990 alleged Martorano loaned late 20^th Century pop-music impresario, Maurice Starr $50,000 for a 25% ownership interest in the group, which would go on to sell close to a million records.

Years earlier, Starr had founded and conceived pop-R&B group sensation New Edition. Upon the court filing becoming public, Starr, 65 today, adamantly denied taking money from Martorano, but admitted accepting a loan from a business partner of Martorano’s to open a club.

McAveeney took the stand this week at Salemme’s trial to help refute testimony provided by one-time Salemme ally, Stevie (The Rifleman) Flemmi, the former second-in-charge of the Boston Irish mob, known locally as the Winter Hill Gang, who told jurors he accidentally walked in on DiSarro’s murder while it was occurring. Just weeks prior to his slaying, DiSarro confided to McAveeney that Flemmi was threatening to kill him if he didn’t fork over $60,000, per McAveeney’s testimony.

The Italian Flemmi and the half-Irish Salemme were groomed together in the Boston underworld under Irish mob boss Edward (Wimpy) Bennett and Italian mob capo Larry Zannino. According to his testimony, McAveeney grew up around members of the Winter Hill Gang, including iconic Irish Godfather James (Whitey) Bulger and Jimmy Martorano’s older brother Johnny Martorano, Bulger and Flemmi’s most-trusted hit man. Johnny Martorano became a cooperator after he, Flemmi, Bulger and Salemme were all busted in a January 1995 federal racketeering indictment.

Flemmi admits to killing upwards of 50 people. Bulger was convicted of 11 murders at trial in 2013 after 16 years on the run with Flemmi being the star witness against him in court. McAveeney claimed in his testimony that he aided in the brokering of the film rights of the best-selling book Black Mass about Bulger and Flemmi that finally made it to the big screen in the 2015 Johnny Depp starring vehicle.

Jimmy Martorano, a college-educated wiseguy, started his gangland career in the Winter Hill Gang, however, once Salemme rose to the boss’ seat in the area’s Italian Patriarca crime family, he shifted his allegiances and was part of Cadillac Frank’s first mob induction class. Martorano got out of prison in 2001.

The post New Kids On The Block & The Mob: Boston Mafia Lieutenant Owned Part Of Wildly Popular Band, Per Testimony appeared first on The Gangster Report.

American-born Mexican drug cartel leader Edgar (El Barbie) Valdez was sentenced to 50 years in prison and ordered to forfeit close to $200,000,000 in cash from his criminal operations in federal court out of Atlanta this week. The 44-year old Valdez, who used to be a bodyguard for the world’s biggest drug lord of the New Millennium, Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman — currently incarcerated in New York awaiting trial — pled guilty in his case and has been in custody since 2010. The man nicknamed for his resemblance to a character from the Barbie Doll franchise universe was extradited to the United States in 2015.

Valdez was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, where he was a high school football star before dipping into the world of high-end drug dealing. Beginning his career in the underworld as local marijuana kingpin, he fled the U.S. in the late 1990s upon being indicted in a major drug conspiracy case and went to work for El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico’s Sinaloa region, handling affairs in the area surrounding the Gulf of Mexico. He was responsible for the smuggling of roughly 2,000 kilos of cocaine a month into the U.S. which he brought in and distributed across the country in tractor trailers.

When the seven Beltran-Leyva brothers decided to break off from the Sinaloa Cartel and start their own narcotics conglomerate, Valdez joined them and headed an enforcement unit known as “Los Negros.” While living in Mexico, he met and married the daughter of fellow drug world figure Carlos (El Charro) Montemayor.

After Beltran-Leyva Cartel boss, Arturo (Botas Blancos) Beltran-Leyva, was killed in a shootout with federal authorities in 2009, Valdez squared off against his brother, Hector (El Ingeniero) Beltran-Leyva, for control of the organization in a bloody power struggle that resulted in hundreds of slayings. Valdez became notorious for videotaping murders, decapitations and torture sessions and circulating them as an intimidation tactic.

There are currently two Hollywood films in development trying to chronicle Valdez’s rise and fall for the big screen. In 2011, Legendary Pictures optioned a Rolling Stone Magazine article about Valdez and have attached Charlie Hunnam of Sons of Anarchy fame to the project as El Barbie. Actor Arnie Hammer personally purchased the life rights of Valdez and his family in 2016 and intends on starring and producing in a biopic as well.

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