Historic Detroiters Dave Johnson and Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone have roles based on them in the highly-anticipated upcoming Martin Scorsese film The Irishman about the murder of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and his friendship with east coast hit man Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran. Johnson was Hoffa’s grizzled aid-de-camp in Motown during his reign atop the monolithic labor union, the president of Hoffa’s home base at Local 299. Giacalone was one of the Motor City’s most feared mob captains and along with his brother, “Tony Jack,” acted as Hoffa’s longtime contacts in the underworld.

Blaise Corrigan is cast as the gruff, broad-shouldered Johnson (pictured above), while Jai Stefan gets the nod as Giacalone. Stefan serves as one of the producers of the movie as well. Corrigan has made a name for himself in Hollywood over the last two decades as a stunt man, getting work on a number of Scorsese projects.

A character loosely based on Johnson appeared in the 1978 movie Blue Collar, starring Keitel and Richard Pryor as union workers in Detroit. Tony Jack Giacalone was the inspiration for the Carol (Dally) D’Allesandro character in the 1992 movie Hoffa featuring Jack Nicholson as Hoffa, missing since a lunch meeting with Tony Jack more than 43 years ago. Patrick Gallo plays Tony Jack in Scorsese’s Hoffa tale.

The Irishman will be released next year and is an on-screen adaption of the 2004 New York Times Best Selling book, I Hear You Paint Houses penned by Charlie Brandt. Sheeran, who ran a Teamsters branch in Delaware and worked directly for Pennsylvania mob dons Russell Bufalino and Angelo Bruno, claimed in the book that he shot Hoffa to death on the afternoon of July 30, 1975 in a Northwest Detroit residence on Bufalino’s orders. He died in the months prior to the book’s publishing. Federal authorities and most experts give Sheeran’s confession little weight. Many investigators and researchers point to Billy Giacalone as the real triggerman in the still-open homicide probe.

The Scorsese flick features a star-studded cast filled with cinematic icons. Robert DeNiro is playing Sheeran in the film. Joe Pesci plays Bufalino and Harvey Keitel portrays Bruno. All are famous for past collaborations with Scorsese, arguably America’s top director of the past 40 years. In his first collaboration with Scorsese, Al Pacino snatched the Hoffa role. Production wrapped in the late summer and Scorsese is rumored to have been allowed to shoot more than 300 scenes for the blockbuster Netflix has footed a 150 million dollar budget for and hopes to become a cultural touchstone like past Scorsese classics Goodfellas, Casino, Taxi Driver, The Departed, Raging Bull and Mean Streets.

Hoffa rose through the ranks of the Teamsters in Detroit and eventually became the labor union’s international president. At the peak of his power in the 1960s, the popular firebrand of a union boss was one of the most recognizable and influential men in the country. But Hoffa was in bed with the mob and that relationship, although sky-rocketing him to meteoric heights politically, proved his ultimate downfall.

Imprisoned in 1967 for bribery and jury tampering, Hoffa relinquished his presidency to his No. 2 Frank (Big Fitz) Fitzsimmons in the coming years in return for a pardon from the Nixon White House. The mob preferred the easier-to-manipulate Fitzsimmons to the hard-charging, difficult-to-rein-in Hoffa anyway.

However, upon his hitting the streets again, Hoffa wanted his job back and despite warnings from his former mafia benefactors to stay on the sidelines, he set out on a mission to win the 1976 union election. Fitzsimmons also made a play to take control of Local 299 in Southwest Detroit, a Hoffa stronghold for decades, by having his son Richard (Little Fitz) Fitzsimmons to run in the ’76 election against staunch Hoffa loyalist Dave Johnson.

For months leading up to Hoffa’s disappearance, violence rang out in Detroit, as a mob-backed Teamsters-employed “goon squad” waged war against Hoffa’s campaign and his most relied-upon allies in Michigan. Johnson’s office windows were riddled with bullets in a drive-by shooting and his boat was blown to pieces in an explosion outside his summer cottage on Grosse Ile island. Little Fitz’s car was bombed outside Nemo’s Bar, a frequent Local 299 after-work gathering spot, in early July 1975.Three weeks later, Hoffa vanished.

Billy Giacalone

The Giacalone brothers were the faces of the Detroit mafia in the second half of the 20th Century, the Zerilli-Tocco crime family’s street bosses and junkyard dogs. Hoffa disappeared en route to a lunch date with Tony Giacalone at a Bloomfield Township, Michigan restaurant on July 30, 1975 to discuss union business and help square a beef Hoffa was in with an east coast mobster and union boss related to Giacalone via marriage.

Billy Giacalone was unaccounted for by his regular FBI surveillance unit for most of the day Hoffa went missing, having ditched his tail that morning. Both Giacalones would go to prison in subsequent years for crimes unrelated to the Hoffa case. Tony Jack died of kidney failure in 2001. Billy Jack eventually became the crime family’s underboss and died of natural causes in retirement in 2012.

The post New Scorsese Movie Has Dave Johnson & Billy Giacalone Characters, Supergroup Hoffa Pic In Post Production appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Chicago biker boss Orville (Orvie the Anvil) Cochran of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club pleaded guilty to racketeering offenses this week out of federal court in Milwaukee, a case tied to an indictment from almost two decades years ago. Cochran’s plea deal calls for prosecutors to drop two homicide conspiracies he was charged with taking part in during the 1990s. He faces a 20-year prison sentence when he is sentenced in December.

The 68-year old Cochran spent over a decade and a half on the run, evading arrest from the 2001 bust that brought down Outlaws leaders from Illinois and Wisconsin, the club’s so-called “White Region.” In the 1990s and first part of the 2000s, Cochran was the president of the Outlaws South Side Chicago, known as the “Mother Ship” in club circles for it being the club’s founding chapter. After 16 years as a fugitive, Cochran was apprehended in a suburban Chicago Meijer super store in April 2017 upon being arrested for shoplifting.

While the feds have agreed to drop murder charges in the 1994 Michael (Mad Mike) Quale and 1995 Jack (4-By-4) Castle homicides, Cochran is still being looked at for a possible role in the 1999 slaying of fellow Outlaws power, Thomas (West Side Tommy) Stimac. Quale and Castle were both members of the Hells Angels.

At the time of Stimac’s murder, Cochran and Stimac were feuding over  a woman and control of the club’s Southside chapter. Stimac led the chapter in the 1970s and early 1980s and was responsible of forging long-lasting ties between the Outlaws and the Windy City’s Italian mafia. West Side Tommy was killed on the night of July 27, 1999 in Lemont Township, Illinois, riddled with a barrage of bullets as he smoked a cigar on his back porch.

Quale headed the Hells Angels chapter in Rochester, New York and was stabbed to death in a brawl at a racetrack. Gunned down behind the wheel of his car on Chicago’s Northside, Castle was part of a growing presence of Hells Angels in Chicago in the early 1990s when the West Coast-based club decided to further expand into the Midwest. The Outlaws and the Hells Angels have been at war since the 1970s.

Last month, the FBI sought to question Cochran on his knowledge of the Stimac hit, according to The Chicago Sun-Times. Informants have told police that Stimac offered Cochran $10,000 in cash to settle their differences, but Cochran rejected the offer. Weeks after the money was offered, Cochran survived an assassination attempt outside the Southside chapter’s clubhouse, an attack, informants say, Orvie the Anvil felt came on Stimac’s orders.

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Federal authorities in Illinois are probing cold-case Chicago mob murders, including the 1977 Chuckie Nicoletti hit and the 1983 Allen Dorfman hit, according to sources in Windy City law enforcement. The fresh look at the unsolved gangland slayings is part of a multi-agency investigation into the Chicago Outfit’s West Side and Cicero regimes, per these sources.

The 61-year old Nicoletti, a veteran mob assassin himself – linked by some to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy –, was shot to death in the parking lot of a suburban Chicago restaurant on March 29, 1977. Dorfman, an insurance magnate and gatekeeper to the robust, mobbed up Teamsters union pension fund, was gunned down in the parking lot of a suburban Chicago hotel on January 20, 1983, weeks away from being imprisoned for racketeering offenses.

When he was slain, Nicoletti was under subpoena to testify in front of the U.S. Senate about the Kennedy assassination. He had been the top muscle for deposed Chicago Godfather Sam Giancana, executed in his kitchen two years earlier. The Dorfman hit was depicted in the 1995 movie Casino, with comedian Alan King portraying the 60-year old second-generation mob associate.

The feds have been investigating the West Siders, known as the Grand Avenue crew, and their alleged leader, captain Albert (Albie the Falcon) Vena since 2013. Vena is alleged to be the Outfit’s street boss, reporting directly to reputed Chicago mafia don Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis of the Cicero crew’s Lake County wing. Longtime Windy City mob player James (Jimmy I) Inendino allegedly runs the Cicero regime these days.

Vena, DeLaurentis and Inendino are all convicted felons who have been suspects in homicides before. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Inendino, 75 today, was part of the so-called “Wild Bunch,” an enforcement subunit within the Outfit tasked with high-priority murder assignments. DeLaurentis, 80, and Vena, 69, both beat murder raps in court in the 1990s.

Vena’s name has popped up in the Dorfman murder before. His build and appearance matched witness descriptions of one of the two triggermen involved and when news of the current federal inquiry broke three years ago, the Dorfman hit was mentioned as possibly playing a role in what authorities were putting under the microscope. Per people familiar with the current federal probe into his activities past and present, Vena is being eyed for his role in other mob hits besides just Dorfman’s slaying.

The post GR EXCLUSIVE: Chicago Mafia’s Grand Ave. & Cicero Crews Getting Glimpses From Feds For Old Outfit Murders appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Vice Lords street gang erupted into war 25 years ago, as legendary Chicago crime lord Willie (The Chief) Lloyd squared off with his acting boss Tyrone (Baby Ty) Williams for bragging rights on the Windy City’s notoriously dangerous West Side after Lloyd was released from a prison stay in the early 1990s. Williams had looked after the gang’s affairs on a day-to-day basis while Lloyd served four years behind bars on a gun charge. Lloyd’s penchant for micromanaging and his decision to start taxing his own men didn’t sit well with Williams and others in the Vice Lords hierarchy and less than a year following Lloyd walking free from state lockup, a feverish street feud engulfed the organization for a solid eight months.

When heat began building from within for Lloyd on the West Side, he took his family out of the city and relocated to the swanky Northshore suburb of Deerfield, setting up shop in a collection of hotel suites at a local Residence Inn. Baby Ty, along with his four brothers (Kenny aka “Big Smooth,” Shelton aka “Mayor,” Cardell aka “C-Town” and Andre aka “A-Town”) joined forces with the Patterson brothers (Andrew aka “Bay-Bay,” Robert aka “Shaky,” and Henry aka “Bud,”) to oppose Lloyd’s leadership. Chaos ensued.

THE LLOYD-WILLIAMS VICE LORDS WAR TIMELINE

December 1992 – Willie Lloyd is released from Logan Correctional Institute in Lincoln, Illinois after four years on a weapons conviction, picked up by an entourage driving a fleet of limousines to usher him back to the West Side of Chicago

March 26, 1993 – Baby Ty Williams’ brothers and top lieutenants Shelton (Mayor) Williams and Cardell (C-Town) Williams are kidnapped by Williams loyalists and held for ransom over a $6,000 drug debt Willie Lloyd felt Baby Ty owed him. The Williams brothers forfeit a Mercedes-Benz automobile and are released.

March 27, 1993 – The Williams brothers stalk Lloyd to his hideout in Deerfield and open fire on his Chevy Caprice on a crowded Eisenhower Expressway in rush hour traffic near the Wolf Road exit. Lloyd isn’t in the car, but his infant son and sister are. The driver of the car, Lloyd lieutenant Victor (Trader Vic) Nichols is shot, but the Lloyds are unharmed.

March 28-29, 1993 – Willie Lloyd is arrested for kidnapping the two Williams brothers and Baby Ty’s men are busted for the expressway shooting within 24 hours of each other.

September 12-14, 1993 – Four murders and three more shootings occur on Chicago’s West Side. A pair of Lloyd’s teenage drug runners (Stanton Burch & Mike Purnham) are executed on train tracks by Roosevelt Road.

October 19, 1993 – Baby Ty’s men ambush Willie leaving a court session, boxing his car in at 19^th & South Kedzie and opening fire. Four of the five occupants of car are wounded, including Lloyd himself. His 18-month old son is again unscathed.

Oct 27, 1993 – Williams loyalist Artez (Tricky Ted) Thigpen is arrested for the Burch & Purnham slayings.

January 31, 1994 – Williams lieutenants Eugene Alexander and Keith Robinson are found guilty in the Eisenhower Expressway shooting.

April 8, 1994 – Lloyd is found not guilty at trial in the kidnapping of Williams brothers.

April 13, 1994 – Lloyd and 30 Vice Lord followers are indicted by the feds for drug and racketeering.

May 18, 1994 – Lloyd cops a plea and pleads guilty to a weapons possession charge stemming from a gun federal agents confiscated during a raid (he receives an eight-year prison sentence).

June 7, 1996 – The Williams brothers and the Patterson brothers are convicted of drug and racketeering charges and for giving guns to undercover corrupt cops as payoff in sting.

February 22, 2001 — Lloyd is released from federal prison and starts teaching a class in gang studies at DePaul University in Chicago’s posh Lincoln Park neighborhood.

August 20, 2003 – Lloyd is shot and paralyzed in Garfield Park on orders of Vice Lord leaders who resent his continual efforts to extort them.

June 19, 2016 – Willie Lloyd dies of natural causes.

The post Chicago Vice: The Lloyd-Williams War For Control Of Vice Lords Empire Raged On Windy City’s West Side In ’93 appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The quiet storm that was the 1970s Detroit drug empire led by Eddie (The Fat Man) Jackson is getting a deep dive this week in the acclaimed Crimetown podcast. Jackson ruled over the booming Motown heroin trade in the mid-1970s with panache and prudence, gaining a reputation for being a gentleman gangster and bridging the gap between two unruly, savage eras in the local drug world at the front and back end of the decade.

Produced by award-winning Gimlet Media out of New York and co-created by Oscar-nominated documentarian Marc Smerling, Crimetown focuses on the convergence of politics, culture and crime throughout the course of different city’s history each season. The Motor City is the subject of Season 2, after exploring Providence in Season 1 and procuring a scripted-television option from FX.

Season 2 premiered earlier this month. Episodes 3 and 4 center on the Jackson organization and feature interviews with Jackson’s second-in-charge Courtney (The Field Marshal) Brown and former lieutenants Thomas (Black Butch) Stearns and Charles (The Great Dolph) Rudolph. Black Butch was Jackson’s bodyguard and right-hand man. Listen to the podcast here.

Jackson rose to prominence in the wake of Detroit’s Black Godfather and resident dope baron Henry (Blaze) Marzette, a former decorated Detroit narcotics detective turned crime lord, dying of kidney failure in 1972. Jackson had been mentored in the drug game by Marzette and was able to stay out of the fray when Marzette went to war with a set of mafia-backed enemies in the years leading up to his passing. Marzette unsuccessfully tried to consolidate all the city’s Black heroin czars under a single banner as a means of cutting out their Italian mob wholesalers.

With the Fat Man at the helm of the city’s heroin trade, the fighting ceased and the portly kingpin made using violence as only a last-resort measure a hallmark of his legacy. The Fat Man instructed his troops to be street diplomats, not thugs. Jackson’s wholesale source was Italian mobster Carmine (The Doctor) Lombardozzi, a captain from New York’s notorious Gambino crime family.

The Jackson crew supplied drugs to many of the Motown Records music artists of the day and would often party with famous African-American comedians traveling through town like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx. Urban fiction author Donald Goines was a Jackson confidant and used the Fat Man as an inspiration for characters in his many novels over the course of his writing career.

The party for Jackson and his organization was broken up in the spring of 1977 when Jackson was jailed by the feds on a trafficking conviction from years prior, setting the stage for the ascendance of the innovative, yet bloodthirsty Young Boys, Incorporated gang. He was released from federal prison in 1983 on an appeal bond, however, was back behind bars within a year and a half for further involvement in narcotics sales. Jackson died in prison in 1995 of heart-related issues at 51 years old.

The post Chewing The Fat: Crimetown Season 2 Delves Into Detroit Drug Boss Eddie Jackson’s Run Atop ’70s Dope Game appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Chicago’s Black P Stone Rangers were founded on the Windy City’s South Side in 1962 when Jeff Fort’s Black Stone Raiders gang and Eugene (Bull) Hairston’s Harper Boys gang merged. Fort went on to become one of the most notorious urban gang leaders in Chicago history. By the mid-1960s, Fort and Hairston would consolidate 21 South Side gangs into the P Stone Nation and call the unified front “The Main 21.”

The newly-minted crime conglomerate ruled 3,500 soldiers and veiled itself as a community development organization, scoring big-dollar government grants Fort and his henchmen pocketed instead of using to better the neighborhoods they lorded over. Fort consummated drug distribution deals with Italian mobsters in Milwaukee and expanded his gang into the suburbs.

Soon, Fort and Hairston had a falling out and Hairston was edged out of power, eventually slain (1988). Fort masked the gang in a Muslim façade known as El Rukn in the late 1970s and 1980s. He was finally brought down in a trio of federal busts, a 1983 narcotics indictment and 1986 indictments for murder and conspiracy, a case which showed the gang’s ties to the Libyan government and Fort’s negotiations to undertake domestic terrorist activity on behalf of the foreign adversary in exchange for money

OG Roll Call (ChiTown Style):

THE MAIN 21

Henry (Mickey the Cobra) Cogwell — Leader of the Mickey Cobras (formerly the Egyptian Cobras, the oldest street gang in Chicago), Jeff Fort’s acting boss while he is locked up in the early 1970s and the P Stone Nation’s liaison to the Chicago mafia. Cogwell disagrees with Fort’s decision to turn the P Stone Nation into a Muslim sect and is killed February 25, 1977.

Charles (The Bear) Bey — Involved in the 1970 murder of Chicago Police Detective Jim Alfano and the 1986 conspiracy to assassinate South Side drug kingpin Willie (Flukey) Stokes.

George (Mad Dog Watusi) Rose — Jeff Fort’s top enforcer, the P Stone Nation’s first official “Warlord” and eventually a government witness against the Nation.

Lee (Stone) Jackson

William (Sweet Pea) Troope — Convicted in the 1970 killing Chicago Police Detective Jim Alfano.

Melvin (Lefty) Bailey — Convicted of trying to kill Black Gangster Disciples gang boss David Barksdale in May 1968.

Herbert (Thunder) Stevens — Leader of the Titanic Stones wing of the P Stone Nation along with his gangland running buddy Randy (Rube) Dillard.

Lawrence (TNT Tom Tucker) White — Leader of the Apache Stones wing of the P Stone Nation.

Adam (Lito) Battiste

Sylvester (Big Hutch) Hutchins

Charles (Bosco) Franklin

George (Georgie Porgie) Martin

Andrew (A.D) McChristian — Convicted of trying to kill Black Gangster Disciples gang boss David Barksdale in May 1968.

Fletcher (Bo Peep) Pugh

Edwin (Little Charlie) Codwell

Herman (Moose) Holmes — Leader of the Gangster Stones wing of the P Stone Nation, the original Black Gangster Disciples.

Robert (Dog) Jackson & Moses (Big Moose) Jackson — Dog Jackson was murdered by Jeff Fort’s brother Drew.

Paul (The Profit) Martin — Bull Hairston’s top advisor, sometimes referred to as “Crazy Paulie.” Martin is killed in 1968 in the early stages of a power play by Jeff Fort.

Lamar (Bop Daddy) Bell — Ran the P Stone Nation’s youth center.

John (Cool Johnnie) Jones

Bernard (Droop) Green — Acted as one of Jeff Fort’s key enforcers.

The post 21 Questions: Jeff Fort’s Black P Stone Rangers’ ‘Main 21’ Made Mark In Chicago Gangland Scene appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Famous Midwest mob buster Ed Kovacic, the man who spearheaded the dismantling of the Cleveland mafia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, died of natural causes last week when he suffered a stroke. Actor Val Kilmer played a role based on Kovacic in the 2011 Hollywood film Kill The Irishman.

The notoriously hard-nosed Kovacic was 88 years old and served as the city of Cleveland’s police chief from 1990 until 1993. He left the department briefly in the 1980s to be the chief of detectives for the Cuyahoga County Sherriff’s Office .

Kovacic’s exploits taking on the Italian and Irish mobs in Cleveland in the 1970s led to his rapid rise in the local law enforcement community, getting promoted from sergeant, to lieutenant, to captain in less than five years. Cleveland’s Italian and Irish crime syndicates went to war in 1977 in the aftermath of longtime Italian don John Scalish’s sudden passing while undergoing heart surgery. The subsequent battle for power in the city’s rackets pitted Danny (The Irishman) Greene’s “Celtic Club” club versus Scalish’s reluctant successor, James (Jack White) Licavoli, and quickly degenerated into competing execution and car-bombing campaigns.

Danny Greene

Greene once delivered a car bomb he found underneath his Cadillac and then took apart to Kovacic at his office inside Cleveland Police headquarters. Within weeks, Greene’s house was bombed, but he survived with barely a scratch. His luck ran out though in October 1977 and he was blown up in a car bomb attack in the parking lot of his dentist’s office.

Kovacic cracked the Greene homicide investigation by arresting Pennsylvania mobster Ray Ferritto, the man imported from across the state line and given the murder contract on the stubborn and fearless Irish crime lord. Kovacic’s continued work combating mob activity resulted in thwarting an effort to assassinate then Cleveland Mayor and future U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich a year later.

Licavoli became the first American mafia boss convicted under the federal RICO statute in 1982. Angelo (Big Ange) Lonardo, Licavoli’s underboss and successor, became the first American mafia boss to turn government witness shortly thereafter. The Cleveland mob family stumbled along at a significantly-diminished pace for another decade or so, before losing most if not all true structure in the 2000s.

During the final years of his life, Kovacic worked in City Hall as an advisor to Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson. He co-produced a 2009 documentary on Danny Greene, a rugged, yet charming gangland figure he developed a level of begrudging respect for. Greene was portrayed by actor Ray Stevenson in To Kill The Irishman. Licavoli was played by Tony Lo Bianco, known for his role as a drug-pushing wiseguy in the Oscar-winning 1971 film The French Connection.

At the height of his reign, Greene was playing both sides of the fence and was a confidential FBI informant. Kovacic had cultivated informants of his own inside Greene’s camp and they tipped him off to Greene’s informant status. Joining the Cleveland Police Department in 1959, his time as chief in the 1990s is remembered for the department regaining respect and integrity in the wake of a drug scandal.

The post Super Cop & Cleveland Mob Nemesis Ed Kovacic Dies At 88, Leaves Behind Sparkling Body Of Work appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Hip hop superstar and the music world’s resident provocateur Kanye West spewed so-called “Fake News” in his much-publicized appearance at the White House last week, ranting vociferously, yet extremely inaccurately about the continued incarceration of Chicago crime lord Larry Hoover, imprisoned on a murder conviction from the 1970s and a racketeering conviction from the 1990s. Hoover is one of the most powerful and feared street gang bosses in American history and leader of the Gangster Disciples, a vicious criminal organization from the South Side of Chicago which has spread across the country in the last few decades. He’s been name-checked in numerous rap songs over the years, most notably in the hook of Miami-rapper Rick Ross’ 2009 hit single B.M.F. (Blowing Money Fast).

West, who hails from Chicago and has been awarded 21 Grammys, attended a meeting with President Donald Trump Thursday afternoon, and along with Hoover’s attorney, pleaded with Trump to intervene in the Hoover case. The 68-year old “GD” Godfather is serving six consecutive life sentences in the federal supermax lock-up in Florence, Colorado.

“Larry Hoover is a prisoner who was focused on. He has six life sentences. He’s doing his time next to the Unabomber. Doing 23 and 1. That means he’s locked up 23 hours a day,” West told Trump.

Yes, Hoover was “focused on,” due to him being an incredibly dangerous individual. In the late 1960s, Hoover merged his Supreme Gangsters gang with David Barksdale’s Devils Disciples gang to form the Gangster Disciples. He was convicted of ordering the February 1973 murder of William (Pookie) Young for Young’s stealing of money and drugs from the gang weeks earlier. Sentenced to life in the Young slaying, he had additional prison time tacked on in 1997 after getting convicted of conspiracy in the running of the Gangster Disciples from behind bars in the Operation Headache bust.

Upon Trump asking West what Hoover was convicted of, West deferred to Hoover’s lawyer Justin Moore.

“Allegedly, it’s for conspiracy from prison, from state prison. You know, it’s alleged. But we do believe even if he did commit those crimes, the sentence was overly broad and too strict,” he said.

Well, actually counselor, it’s not alleged. He was convicted of it in a court of law by a jury of his peers. Oh, and you conveniently forgot to tell The Donald about Hoover being found guilty of first degree murder.

West then regained the floor and began telling more falsehoods about Hoover’s legal woes.

“And really, the reason why they imprisoned him is because he started doing positive for the community. He started showing that he actually had power, that he wasn’t just one of a monolithic voice. But he could wrap people around. So there are these theories that there are infinite amounts of universes and there are alternate universes. So it’s very important for me to get Larry Hoover out. Because in an alternate universe, I am him. I have to go and get him free because he was doing positive things inside Chicago. Larry Hoover is an example of a man who was turning his life around. And as soon as tried to turn his life around, they hit him with six life sentences. You say don’t tear down statutes. Larry Hoover is a living statute. He’s a beacon for us and he needs to see his family. He needs to go out and represent…”

Hoover’s rebranding of the Gangster Disciples as a community outreach organization dubbed “Growth & Development” in the late 1980s proved to be just a front for further criminal activity. Until the Operation Headache case dropped in 1995, Hoover ran the gang through his street boss Gregory (Shorty G) Shell. The Operation Headache investigation led to the murder of two GDs either helping the feds build their case or trying to negotiate a deal to do so. Informants told police that Hoover sanctioned the hits one of his lieutenants — Darryl (Pops) Johnson — was convicted of putting into motion.

The post Kanye’s Fake News: Rapper Shows Ignorance In Pleading For Chicago Gang Boss’ Prison Release To Prez appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Larry Hoover’s Gangster Disciples street gang empire in Chicago crumbled 25 years ago when a top lieutenant flipped and the government got innovative. Hoover was already behind bars on a murder conviction when he and 40 GD leaders and enforcers were brought down in 1995’s sprawling Operation Headache bust. The most damning evidence against Hoover came from tiny recording devices Hoover’s visitors were unknowingly wearing on their person as they conversed with him inside an Illinois state correctional facility.

Chicago rap legend Kanye West went to the White House last week to campaign for Hoover’s release via a Presidential Pardon, speaking with President Donald Trump extensively (and often minus context and critical facts) about Hoover’s predicament – serving six life sentences in a Supermax facility in Colorado. At the height of Hoover’s reign, the GDs were the biggest street gang in the Midwest, with roughly 30,000 soldiers on the books.

In the months before the indictment for Operation Headache was filed in August 1995, amid rumors swirling about the pending case and who was cooperating, gang members Charles (Jello) Banks and Darryl (D-Blunt) Johnson, were executed in an effort by GD brass to clean up loose ends. Johnson and Banks had been arrested in the same 1994 drug case. Banks was a high-ranking Hoover lieutenant on the street and his work with the DEA was the final nail in Hoover’s proverbial coffin, making sure he’d never see the light of day again. Johnson’s attorney reached out to prosecutors about securing a cooperation deal in the weeks preceding his slaying.

Hoover formed the Gangster Disciples in 1969 on the South Side of Chicago when he merged his Supreme Gangster gang with David Barksdale’s Black Disciples gang. He ordered the February 1973 murder of William (Pookie) Young after discovering Young had stolen from the gang and in November of that year was found guilty in Young’s homicide and sentenced to life in prison. Barksdale died of kidney failure in 1974, complications from a bullet wound suffered years earlier, and Hoover began running the gang from his prison cell, first in Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, then Vienna Correctional Center in Johnson County on the south side of the state and finally out of Dixon Correctional Center in Lee County in northern Illinois.

By the early 1990, Hoover was sending his orders through GD street boss Gregory (Shorty G) Shell. Shell and Hoover’s main enforcer was the gang’s No. 3 in charge, Darryl (Pops) Johnson, no relation to D-Blunt Johnson. Shell headquartered out of a fried-seafood joint, June’s Shrimp on the 9 and refused to talk business on the phone. DEA agents would trail Shell and other prominent GD dignitaries the six-hour drive from Chicago’s South Side to the state prison in Vienna where Hoover held court in a visiting room.

The DEA eventually bugged the visitor badges worn by Hoover’s lieutenants and listened to two months of conversations in late 1993, collecting a treasure trove of incriminating discussions on the day-to-day operations of the organization.

Hoover spoke of a street tax for non GDs engaging in criminal activity on the South Side. He wanted profits from one day a week of drug sales as tribute and instructed Shell to use violence if necessary.

“Do a survey around town, I want to know what everybody is doing, heroin, reefer, cocaine, whose moving what….This is our land. We fought battles on this land. So everybody is going to have to pay taxes, you know. That’s just the way it is. You tell everyone, if we have to start shooting and fucking shit up that way, then nobody making any money. All I’m asking for is one measly day.”

Jello Banks, a tubby and talkative middle manager in the gang, soon began his work as a double agent, spying for the feds to get out of his dope pinch. Banks helped the DEA get taps on cell phones used by Shell and Pops Johnson and search warrants for key GD business fronts, like Hoover’s girlfriend’s rap-concert promotion office where a hand-written GD hierarchy chart was confiscated from a file cabinet.

Hoover’s camp had paid moles of its own feeding them information. Shell’s lover was a Chicago policewoman assigned to the gang unit. Johnson’s attorney had someone inside the government providing him details of ongoing investigations focusing on GD Nation. Within hours of DEA agents planting a video surveillance device inside Shell’s June’s Shrimp on the 9 , Shell came storming into the restaurant and ripped the device, which was hidden under a clock, down off the wall.

“You ain’t got shit on me and you ain’t gonna to get shit on me,” he hollered into the camera before dismantling it.

Pops Johnson got word in the spring of 1995 that Jello Banks and D-Blunt Johnson were informants. Banks was, Johnson was trying to be. Nevertheless, Pops put murder contracts on both their heads. According to informants, Hoover and Shell signed off on the contracts, but only Johnson would go on to be indicted and convicted for them as part of Operation Headache.

D-Blunt Johnson was gunned down May 7, 1995. Jello Banks was slain June 9, 1995, shot to death on the same street corner off Ashland Avenue as D-Blunt Johnson had been a month before.

The Operation Headcase case hit on the morning of August 31, 1995. Hoover was awoken by DEA agents inside his cell at Dixon Correctional Center and taken back to Chicago for booking and arraignment on a government airplane. It was the first time the legendary street gang overlord flew on a plane. He was found guilty at a 1997 trial. Today, he is 68.

The post Head Games, ChiTown Style: Operation Headache Crashed Larry Hoover’s Gangster Disciple Kingdom In 1990s appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The man who murdered New Orleans gangland figure Kent (Frenchy) Brouillette was sentenced to four years in Louisiana state prison this week. Big Easy guitarist Bill Bonham fatally stabbed the big-living mobster in 2015 in a fight at a New Orleans flophouse over Brouillette’s selling off Bonham’s instruments to maintenance his drug habit.

The 53-year old Bonham pleaded guilty back in the summer to second-degree homicide charges stemming from the December 3, 2015 fatality. Around the city’s famous French Quarter, Bonham was known as a journeyman musician tied to the area’s jazz and rock scene.

Brouillette, 79 at the time of his death, had a seesaw career in the Louisiana underworld, going from a juiced-in power player at the height of the Marcello crime family’s reign in the mid-to-late 20th Century to a destitute junkie in his latter days. His ascent in the mob was connected to his close relationship with legendary Bayou crime boss Carlos (The Kingfish) Marcello, one of the most respected and far-reaching mafia dons in America.

Bill Bonham

Rising through the New Orleans mafia as a pimp, political fixer and drug pusher, Brouillette crafted a reputation for flashy behavior and extravagant tastes. He acted as Marcello’s go-between with corrupt policemen, judges and politicians, including Louisiana Governor and U.S. Congressman Edwin Edwards. Because he wasn’t Italian, Brouillette was never formally inducted into the mob.

Marcello died of natural causes in 1993. With Marcello’s passing, Brouillette fell into a downward spiral of boozing and drug addiction and lost any standing in the underworld as the Marcello crime family faded from relevance.

In 2014, Brouillette published a book titled Mr. New Orleans – The Life of a Big Easy Underworld Legend with author Matthew Randazzo and briefly re-attained some local celebrity. Failing in a bid to leverage his return to the spotlight for a mob-themed tourist-attraction business, Brouillette descended back into the depths of severe substance abuse.

The post Facing The Music: Killer Of Disgraced New Orleans Wiseguy Gets Four Years In The Can appeared first on The Gangster Report.

According to sources in South Philadelphia and the newest edition of the cult classic Mob Talk Sitdown video blog hosted by award-winning journalists and Philly mobologists Dave Schratwieser and George Anastasia, Bruno-Scarfo crime family old timer Francis (Faffy) Iannarella is back in the fold in high-end mob affairs out of the City of Brotherly Love (you can watch the latest Mob Talk Sitdown here). The 70-year old wiseguy has been spotted in frequent company with modern-day leaders of the Philly mafia recently, even appearing at a meeting of top syndicate brass earlier this month.

Iannarella did three decades in federal prison for a racketeering and murder conviction (he’d eventually have the homicide thrown out on appeal and be found not guilty in a second trial). He walked free in the winter of 2016 and is no longer on parole. Sources claim Iannerella may be getting a crew to run and could be acting as a conduit between current crime family administrators and button men from the past, like him, paroled from federal custody in the last decade.

Before being locked up in the late 1980s, Iannarella was a captain under Atlantic City-based mob don Nicodemo (Little Nicky) Scarfo, who oversaw a volatile era in the Philly underworld where bodies were dropping on a regular basis and treachery loomed large. A U.S. Marine vet, Iannarella was a suspect in at least four Scarfo era gangland slayings. His father was one-time Philly mob soldier Frank (Snuffy) Iannarella.

Current reputed Philly mafia boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino got hit with a two-year prison sentence this past week on gambling charges stemming from a plea deal tied to a racketeering case that went to trial and wound up with a hung jury. Merlino, 56, lives most of the year in Florida, but was at the meeting Faffy Iannarella was observed attending in the first week of October, per Schratwieser and Anastasia. Last weekend, Merlino threw his wife a glitzy 50th birthday party in Philadelphia in which virtually the entire crime family (including Iannarella) as well as representatives from other regional crime syndicates (New York, Boston, etc.) came bearing expensive gifts and tribute envelopes.

Iannarella used to report to Merlino’s dad and Scarfo’s eventually-deposed underboss Salvatore (Chucky) Merlino. In the years directly after the elder Merlino was demoted, Iannarella was one of those tasked with looking after mob activity in South Philly on a day-to-day basis for the bloodthirsty Scarfo — the pair can be seen together in this article’s cover photo.

In his younger years, Iannarella was known as a “hitter.” The FBI believes Iannarella was involved in the murders of mobsters John Calabrese (1981), Robert Riccobene (1983), Sammy Tamburrino (1983) and Frank (Frankie Flowers) D’Alfonso (1985). Authorities tag Iannarella as the trigger man in the Calabrese and Riccobene murders and a co-conspirator in the others.

Calabrese was a South Philly drug dealer who fell out of favor with the Scarfo gang. The Calabrese hit got Iannarella “made,” per court testimony, inducted into the mob. Riccobene, a lieutenant in a rival Philly mob contingent led by his big brother, Harry (The Hunchback) Riccobene, was executed in front of his mother, who looked on in horror and was struck in the face with the butt of a shotgun, allegedly by Iannarella as he fled on foot.

Tamburrino, an associate of the Riccobene brothers, was killed just weeks before Riccobene, with his mother watching on as well and Iannarella allegedly acting as the getaway driver. D’Alfonso was a stubborn Scarfo rival gunned down on the streets of South Philly in broad daylight for continually rebuffing Little Nicky’s extortion efforts in a slaying Iannarella was convicted of taking part in at a 1989 trial but acquitted in a 1997 retrial. Scarfo died in prison last year at 87.

The post Returning To The Frontlines: Philly Mob Figure Faffy Iannarella Gets In Merlino Crew’s Good Graces, Per Reports appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Retired FBI agent Jim Dixon, the man responsible for the controversial recruitment of Detroit teenager Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe, Jr. as a confidential informant fresh out of the eighth grade at just 14 years old three and a half decades ago, died of cancer this month. He was 70. Wershe, 49 today, has been locked up since he was 18 on drug and now auto-theft conspiracy charges, the longest-serving non-violent offender in the American prison system.

Award-winning investigative journalist Vince Wade – a staple of Detroit TV news broadcasts in the 1970s and 1980s – broke the news about Dixon’s passing on his blog last week. Wade has been at the forefront of chronicling the Wershe saga for the last five years, developing an entire website devoted to the case and penning a book he released back in the summer (Prisoner of War – The Story of White Boy Rick & The War On Drugs). The movie, White Boy Rick, starring Matthew McConaughey and newcomer Richie Merritt as Wershe, is currently in theatres.

“For a 14 year old kid, he had so much information,” said Dixon in an interview with Wade. “It was unbelievable what he had been involved in at that particular time. He’d start rattling stuff off (names, places) and you’d ask yourself how does a 14 year old know all of this? But he was a street kid. He knew all these guys, he ran with them.”

Playing ball on both sides of the law, the savvy and charismatic Wershe rose to street-legend status in the dangerous and colorful Motor City drug game of the late 1980s, before being imprisoned on a cocaine possession case arising out of a routine traffic stop when he was 17 (in retrospect it’s been revealed his reputation far exceeded his actual numbers in the dope world). Today, he’s almost 50 and serving out the final years of his time behind bars, only weeks removed from having a Hollywood movie adaption of his corruption-laced and adrenaline-infused teenage years hit the big screen from coast to coast.

In 1984, Jim Dixon was on a federal drug task force investigating Detroit crime lord Johnny Curry, the emperor of Motown’s eastside dope trade and at that time married to Mayor Coleman Young’s favorite niece, Cathy Volsan. Young was the most powerful politician Detroit had ever seen and rumors of wrongdoing surrounded his administration for his entire 20-year reign. The feds lusted equally to bust both Young and Curry and saw taking down Curry’s criminal empire as the first step in bringing down the Mayor.

Dixon was tipped to the young Wershe’s friendship with Curry’s baby brother Rudell (Boo) Curry by an undercover cop and through an introduction to Wershe from his father, Richard, Sr. a known informant for illegal gun trafficking activity in the area, convinced him to go to work for the FBI infiltrating the Curry organization. He was the lone white kid in the neighborhood, hence the nickname.

Wershe worked for the task force from June 1984 through the fall of 1986 and received roughly $45,000 in compensation. Dixon was reassigned, transferred off the task force in early 1985. Mayor Young was never indicted for any criminal activity and left office on his own accord in the 1990s.

Over the course of more than two years employed by the federal government, Wershe was shot and almost killed, encouraged to the drop out of high school by the task force he was putting his life on the line for and provided the FBI enough insider intelligence to bust Johnny Curry in 1987 — Curry did 13 years in the joint for a narcotics and racketeering conspiracy. Wershe had become Curry’s protégé and eventually began a romance with his wife. His flashy style and quick-witted manner combined with his age, race and choice of high-profile girlfriend attracted a white-hot media spotlight in his final year of freedom and inspired storylines on popular television shows of the day like Miami Vice and 21 Jump Street.

Found guilty of possession with intent to distribute eight kilos of blow in January 1988, Wershe was sentenced to life in state prison under the now-defunct “650 Lifer Law.” Three years into his sentence, he reconvened his relationship with the FBI and helped the government dismantle a ring of dirty cops. Still, he wasn’t released from the state of Michigan until July 2017, the last person convicted under the law to be granted parole. While in a Florida prison in a federal witness protection unit in the 2000s, Wershe was convicted of middling stolen-car transactions and slapped with five more years he’s in the process of serving right now. He’s scheduled for release in December 2020.

The fresh-faced Richie Merritt, a teen from Baltimore plucked by a casting scout in his inner-city high school, plays Wershe in the movie released by Studio 8, a Sony Pictures subsidiary, and produced by Scott Franklin (Black Swan) and Jon Lesher (Birdman, Black Mass). McConaughey plays Wershe’s down-on-his-luck dad, the Oscar-winner and filmmakers taking major creative license with the depiction (in the movie, Wershe is falsely shown being blackmailed into working with the FBI to try to protect his dad from a murder charge tied to a gun he had allegedly sold). Actors Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane play FBI agents in the film who are composite characters inspired by Dixon and other agents connected to Wershe’s handling as an illegal underage informant.

The post The G-Man Who Jumpstarted ‘White Boy Rick’ Urban Legend Dies, Fmr. Star Teen Informant Remains Locked Up appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The acclaimed Crimetown podcast tackles the groundbreaking Detroit drug gang, Young Boys, Incorporated (YBI) in Episode 5 of its second season. YBI boldly and flamboyantly ruled Motown’s heroin trade in the late 1970s and early 1980s, revolutionizing the way narcotics were marketed and distributed in a city long known as an international drug-world mecca. Original YBI lieutenant James (Pep) Cooper gave an interview for the episode and proclaimed “I’m YBI until the day I die,” in turn giving the episode’s it’s title.

Produced by award-winning Gimlet Media out of New York and co-created by Oscar-nominated documentarian Marc Smerling, Crimetown focuses on the convergence of politics, culture and crime in a different metropolis each season. Detroit is the subject of Season 2 after exploring Providence in Season 1 and procuring a scripted-television option from FX.

Season 2 premiered earlier this month. Episodes 3 and 4 center on the quieter Eddie Jackson era which preceded the YBI years in the Detroit African-American underworld. Jackson ran the city’s heroin game in the mid 1970s with virtually no violence, opposed to YBI where shooting wars with rivals and lethal infighting became commonplace. Listen to the podcast here.

Founded in 1978 by Milton (Butch) Jones, Raymond (Baby Ray) Peoples, Dwayne (Wonderful Wayne) Davis and Mark (Block) Marshall, four west side Detroit drug crew bosses who joined forces to create a megawatt enterprise that would rank up there with the richest and most powerful urban crime syndicates in American history, YBI made its name by installing a group of elementary school-aged kids as its primary retailers, transporting their product in taxi cabs with unsuspecting drivers and stamping catchy, designer-brand style names on the glassine pouches they sold it in. Before long, they had taken over the city’s heroin trade literally block-by-block.The YBI era was the first time teenage street dealers, foot soldiers and middle-managers were making kingpin-type money.

Jones famously referred to himself as the “Henry Ford of Heroin,” and owned multiple estates in the suburbs and out in Arizona. Davis expanded the YBI model to Boston and Seattle before returning to Michigan in 1982 and falling out with his fellow YBI bosses over a desire to go off on his own under his new H2o crew banner. Peoples and Jones fell out in the wake of a federal bust that same year and Peoples plotted an ill-fated robbery of Jones’ house when Jones was away in prison in which the two intruders he sent on the job were killed. Davis and Peoples were both allegedly slain on Jones’ orders.

Marshall fled town in 1980 following feuding with Peoples over a woman and Peoples shooting him. It was Marshall’s life-insurance payout from his parents’ double-murder — a crime he was suspected in perpetrating, but never charged with — that acted as the seed money for YBI’s start back in 1978.

The post The Young & The Wealthy: Crimetown Podcast Points The Spotlight On Detroit’s iconic YBI Drug Crew appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Philadelphia mobster Francis (Faffy) Iannarella has a heavier workload these days. The old-school Mafioso is in line to be the Bruno-Scarfo crime family’s new consigliere and has been middling for Family administrators lately, holding meetings with subordinates on their behalf, per sources. The highly-trusted 71-year old Iannarella was released from a 29-year prison stint in 2016.

According to Philly mobologists Dave Schratwieser and George Anastasia in their most-recent Mob Talk Sitdown video blog, (you can watch it here), Iannarella has cozied up to the crime syndicate’s current leadership, frequently being observed in the presence of organization shot callers and appearing at a recent meeting of major players in the pecking order, including boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino.

Iannarella was convicted of racketeering and murder conviction in 1989 (he’d eventually have the homicide thrown out on appeal and be found not guilty in a second trial). No longer on any form of parole restrictions, sources say Iannerella is acting as a conduit between the tight-knit Merlino camp and button men from the past, guys like him who came up in the mob during the turbulent 1980s reign of deceased don Nicodemo (Little Nicky) Scarfo and have been sprung from federal prison in the past decade.

Under the diminutive and deadly Scarfo’s regime, Iannarella was a captain and then a street boss for affairs in South Philly in the year before his arrest in 1987. He replaced Skinny Joey Merlino’s dad, deposed Scarfo underboss Salvatore (Chucky) Merlino, as Philly street boss when Scarfo pulled the elder Merlino’s stripes for his alcoholism. Having served in the Marines as a young man, Iannarella was a suspect in at least four Scarfo era gangland slayings. His father was one-time Philly mob soldier Frank (Snuffy) Iannarella.

Skinny Joey is about to begin serving a two-year prison term for gambling. Merlino’s former acting boss and consigliere Joseph (Uncle Joe) Ligambi is spending more time in Florida, leaving an opening in the crime family’s hierarchy some are saying Iannarella will soon fill. Another former Scarfo capo, 83-year old Joseph (Chickie) Ciancaglini, had acted in a consigliere capacity since his release from prison a few years ago, but per sources, would rather advise in a non-formal capacity going forward.

The FBI believes Iannarella was involved in the murders of mobsters John Calabrese (1981), Robert Riccobene (1983), Sammy Tamburrino (1983) and Frank (Frankie Flowers) D’Alfonso (1985). Authorities finger Iannarella as the trigger man in the Calabrese and Riccobene murders and a co-conspirator in the others. The Calabrese hit resulted in Iannarella being “made” into the mob.

Ligambi, 79, and  Iannarella were both convicted in the D’Alfonso slaying, however  had the guilty verdicts tossed on appeal. They were acquitted of the murder in a 1997 retrial. D’Alfonso, one of the premier loansharks and bookies in South Philly in the 1970s and first half of the 1980s, refused repeated extortion efforts from Scarfo paving the way for his killing.

The post What Position Is Faffy Iannarella Playing In The Philly Mafia? Scarfo Era Captain Back In The Mix With Merlino Gang appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Detroit mafia did business with legendary Boston Irish mob boss James (Whitey) Bulger in the late 1970s, as the Zerilli-Tocco crime family and Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang joined forces to fix horse races. The Winter Hill Gang’s race-fixing crew operated in the Motor City for almost two years at Zerilli-Toco controlled stables until its was busted by the Detroit FBI in 1978. Neither Bulger, a longtime FBI informant, nor any Detroit mob leaders went down in the case.

The 89-year old Bulger was brutally bludgeoned to death this week in a West Virginia federal prison. He was convicted of ordering or taking part in over a dozen gangland-related slayings in 2013 after spending 16 years on the run from the law as a fugitive. His Winter Hill Gang was a hodgepodge of mainly Irish and Italians hoodlums, thieves, drug pushers and professional killers operating out of South Boston for most of the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

Winter Hill’s race-fixing wing was prolific and led by Anthony (Tony the Fixer) Ciulla. Starting in the late 1960s, Ciulla and his crew began infiltrating race-course venues across the east coast, setting up shop in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Bulger eventually partnered with Italian mobsters from New York’s Genovese crime family and Pennsylvania’s Bruno crime family in these ventures.

In 1975, Ciulla and his band of Winter Hill wiseguys landed in Michigan and teamed up with the Zerilli-Tocco clan, which owned the state’s premier horserace track, the Hazel Park Raceway, just a mile north of Detroit’s city limits. The Detroit mafia’s founding fathers Vito (Black Bill) Tocco and Giuseppe (Joe Uno) Zerilli gave the gleaming race track to their sons and successors, Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco and Anthony (Tony Z) Zerilli in 1949 as a college graduation present. Ciulla’s guys also got their hooks into the nearby Detroit Race Course or “DRC” as it was called.

Ciulla had a three-man crew. Robert (Bobby the Teacher) Owen was his right hand man. Salvatore (Sally Mac) Macarano was the crew’s stable man and Oscar (Fat Jerry) Friedman handled crew duties on the track’s floor. They headquartered out of The Derby bar, down the street from the Hazel Park Raceway and manipulated outcomes on more than 100 hundred races. The feds indicted them in May 1976. Ciulla, 32, turned government witness.

One snippet of grand jury testimony showed how much sway and intimidation Ciulla held at the Hazel Park track:

“I had the whole place wired….if the jockeys didn’t do what I said, they got hurt….this one jockey didn’t dump a race when I told him to so I smacked him six ways to Sunday, every way but loose, left him bleeding on the stable floor.”

Ciulla died of a heat attack in 2003 at 60 years old. He entered the Witness Protection Program living first in California and then back in Massachusetts before he passed away.

With Ciulla in the FBI’s pocket and Zerilli convicted of skimming $6,000,000 from a Las Vegas casino (The Frontier), Tocco and Zerilli were forced to sell the Hazel Park Raceway. The sale and Tocco’s ascent to don status while Zerilli was away in prison, causing strife between the mob princes, acrimony that lasted until the day they both died. Tocco passed away from a heart attack in the summer of 2014. Zerilli died of dementia in the spring of 2015.

The post Whitey Bulger & The Detroit Mafia: Boston’s Winter Hill Gang Came To Motown To Fix Horse Races appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The path to power for epic Boston crime lord James (Whitey) Bulger was paved by a blood-spattered Irish mob war which lasted over a decade. The war first saw mob crews from Charlestown and Somerville lock horns and then South Boston’s Killeen Brothers Gang and the Mullens Gang get involved in the action. In the end, the recently-slain Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang, an offshoot of the Killeen Brothers Gang and the Somerville group, was the only one left standing.

Bulger ruled the rackets in South Boston and Somerville from the 1970s until 1995 when he went on the run dodging a federal indictment for multiple murders. He rose through the ranks of the underworld as Donald Killeen’s protégé and was on the frontlines for most of the Irish mob war Killeen participated in commanding.

During his reign as boss of the Winter Hill Gang, Bulger was a confidential informant for the FBI, using his relationship with the government to rid himself of rivals, both Irish and Italian. Apprehended while hiding out in California in 2011, he was convicted of the charges at trial two years later. Last week, he was killed behind bars, beaten to death with a metal lock placed in a sock in a West Virginia federal penitentiary.

THE BOSTON IRISH MOB WAR TIMELINE

September 4, 1961 — Charleston Gang member Georgie McLaughlin is beaten unconscious during a Labor Day party on Salisbury Beach after making a pass at a girlfriend of Somerville Gang member Alex (Bobo) Petricone’s girlfriend starting close to 15 years of violent instability in Boston’s Irish underworld.

*Petricone soon fled to Hollywood, changed his name to Alex Rocco and became a well-respected  character actor, even winning an Emmy Award.

October 30, 1961 –  Charlestown Gang boss Bernie McLaughlin is shot to death leaving The Morning Glory Bar.

*Infuriated over the beating his younger brother Georgie, he had taken out a murder contract on the head of Somerville Gang boss James (Buddy) McLean, who survived a car bombing in the weeks following the Labor Day dustup. Petricone was a top suspect in the McLaughlin homicide conspiracy.

March 15, 1964 – William Sheridan

May 14, 1964 – Frank Benjamin

Summer of 1964 – Two low-level McLaughlin Gang members are kidnapped from Charleston, taken to Somerville apartment and tortured and killed.

August 4, 1964 –Willie Delaney

September 4, 1964 – Ronnie Dermody

December 1964 – George Ash

February 18, 1965 – Henry Reddington

March 12, 1965 – Teddy Deegan

*Future New England Italian mafia boss Peter (The Crazy Horse) Limone and then Patriarca crime family underboss Enrico (Henry the Referee) Tameleo, among others, were wrongfully convicted of Deegan’s murder on the false testimony of famous Boston mob turncoat Joe (The Animal) Barboza.

October 20, 1965 – Edward (Punchy) McLaughlin

October 31, 1965 – James (Buddy) McLean

*The Somerville mob boss is shot to death leaving The Peppermint Lounge in Winter Hill

May 26, 1966 – Connie Hughes and Sammy Lindenbaum

July 1966 – Romeo Martin

September 23, 1966 – Stevie Hughes

January 1967 – Edward (Wimpy) Bennett

*The South Boston and Roxbury rackets boss is gunned down in his garage

February 1967 – Andy (The Baron) Von Etter

March 1967 – Johnny Locke

December 1967 – Richard Grasso

November 18, 1969 – Donnie McGonagle

*Killed by Bulger in a case of mistaken identity

*After a brief reprieve from violence, a 1971 bar fight between Mullen Gang member Mickey Dwyer and Kileen Brothers Gang member Kenny Killeen at The Transit bar, which served as the Killeens’ headquarters in South Boston, reignited tensions.  Kenny Killeen bit off part of Dwyer’s nose in a drunken rage and the flames of war engulfed the local Irish underworld once again (“The Mullens” got its moniker for the gang’s home base being in Mullen Square). 

March 28, 1971 – William (Billy O) O’Sullivan

May 13, 1972 – Donald Killeen

*The Killeen Gang boss and “Southie” crime lord is slain by gunmen in front of his Framingham residence getting into his Chevy Nova following his young son’s birthday party.

December 1, 1973 – James (Spike) O’Toole

November 1974 – Paulie McGonagle

June 25, 1975 – Eddie (The Bulldog) Connors

November 25, 1975 – Tommy King

November 25, 1975 – Frank (Buddy) Leonard

The post Boston’s Brutal Irish Mob War Set The Stage For Whitey Bulger’s Ascent In The Underworld appeared first on The Gangster Report.

According to a retired European cop, recently-slain Boston Irish crime lord James (Whitey) Bulger sent the IRA the stolen masterpieces from the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist back in the 1990s as compensation for weapons seized by authorities in an overseas shipment arranged by the Southie mob boss years earlier that went awry. The brazen 1990 Gardner Museum Robbery was the biggest art-theft in history, seeing two perpetrators get away with a half-billion bucks in precious works painted by the likes of Rembrandt, Manet and Vermeer. No arrests have ever been made in the case and the 13 pieces of artwork remain missing.

The 89-year old Bulger, a genuine gangland icon, was murdered in a West Virginia prison last week. He was serving a life prison sentence for racketeering and either ordering or personally carrying out 11 gangland slayings. Bulger ran South Boston’s Winter Hill Gang while also being a protected FBI informant from the 1970s through the mid-1990s . At the peak of his power, few, if any, American crime czars, held as much sway as Bulger did. Hollywood actors Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp have portrayed him in the movies The Departed and Black Mass, respectively.

Former Scotland Yard undercover detective Charles Hill told a British newspaper this week that Bulger felt like he owed IRA leaders after a cargo ship filled with guns and ammunition was intercepted in 1984 nearing the Ireland coastline by the Irish Navy. Shortly thereafter, Bulger associate, John McIntyre, his middleman with the IRA, a group Bulger would often help from afar with shipments of cash, weapons and narcotics, began cooperating with authorities. McIntyre soon wound up dead — Bulger garroted him until the rope broke and then put him out of his misery by shooting him point-blank in the head.

On March 18, 1990, in the early morning hours of St. Patrick’s Day, two men dressed as police officers forced their way into the private, very elite Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum located in Boston’s Fenway-Kenmore district and had unfettered access for two hours. Although experts are certain the burglars were amateurs to the sophisticated world of art rip offs, they took home a haul worth roughly $500,000,000.

The robbers, who many tie to Boston’s Italian mafia, are thought to be long dead. The 13 masterpieces remain unaccounted for 28 years later and the common belief is that they sit in storage somewhere, never actually profited from in any real manner.

In 2017, the FBI put out a $10,000,000 reward for the return of the artwork. Any arrests in the crime itself are off the table now, since the statute of limitations has already expired.

Hill worked high-end art-theft cases in Europe in the 1990s. His investigations recovered Edvard Munch’s The Scream painting, pilfered from the National Museum of Norway in 1994 and a stolen Vermeer in 1993. Hill told the media that he heard from informants in the European underworld that “everyone, even the dogs on the street of South Boston, knew Whitey was behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Heist.” He is of the opinion that the paintings are currently being stashed in Ireland.

Police in American pursued the Bulger angle early on in the investigation after hearing reports of him asking for his cut from the robbery in the months that followed. Over the years, organized crime figures in Boston, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania have popped up as suspects in the still-ongoing probe as well. One mobster connected to the Philadelphia crime family but living in Connecticut once offered to sell two of the paintings to an undercover FBI agent, however publically denies any knowledge of the paintings’ whereabouts.

The post Whitey Bulger Had Paintings From Famous Gardner Museum Robbery, Sent Them To IRA, Per Former Cop appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Storied South Boston Irish mob boss James (Whitey) Bulger was killed last week behind bars at a federal correctional facility in West Virginia. Bulger, 89, was one of America’s most powerful crime lords of the late 20th Century and a longtime FBI informant. He was convicted of racketeering and murder in 2013 after more than a decade and a half as a fugitive from justice. During his gangland career which spanned from the 1960s until he went on the run in 1995, Bulger was a suspect in close to two dozen homicides.

Gangster Report breaks all of them down below:

THE WHITEY BULGER HIT LIST TIMELINE

November 18, 1969 – Bulger shot Donnie McGonagle in the head at point-blank range in front of his brother, Mullens Gang boss Paulie McGonagle’s house in a case of mistaken identity. Paulie McGonagle’s Mullens crew was at war with Bulger’s Killeen Gang.

March 8, 1973 – North End bartender and bookie Mike Milano is killed in a drive-by shooting in a case of mistaken identity. The Winter Hill Gang was on assignment stalking Milano’s boss, Alfred (Indian Al) Notarangeli, a local racketeer feuding with Boston Italian mob don Jerry Angiulo but accidentally murdered Milano because he drove a similar-looking Mercedes Benz to the one Indian Al tooled around town in.

March 19, 1973 – Indian Al’s lieutenant Al Plummer is killed in a drive-by shooting in the North End, caught in the crossfire when Winter Hill gunmen unload on a car carrying Notarangeli which is idling next to Plummer’s vehicle on Commercial Street.

March 23, 1973 – Indian Al’s lieutenant Billy O’Brien is killed behind the wheel of his car in a drive-by shooting as he left a gun deal and was headed to his son’s tenth birthday party.

April 18, 1973 – Indian Al’s brother and lieutenant, Joseph (Indian Joe) Notarangeli is gunned down inside a Medford pub in the middle of the afternoon.

December 1, 1973 – Irish mobster and Winter Hill Gang rival Jimmy (Spike) O’Toole is gunned down as he leaves a Dorchester bar owned by a Winter Hill member in the days after word hit the street that the scrappy independent mob figure had placed a murder contract on the head Winter Hill Gang leader Howie Winter.

February 11, 1974 – Boston mobster Alfred (Indian Al) Notarangeli is shot to death as he arrives at what he thinks is a meeting to make peace, holding a bible in one hand and a shopping bag with $50,000 cash.

October 15, 1974 – Winter Hill Gang member Jimmy Sousa is killed inside Marshall Motors, an auto garage that served as the gang’s Somerville headquarters.

November 20, 1974 – Mullens Gang boss Paulie McGonagle is shot to death by Bulger in the backseat of a car after being lured inside the automobile with a peace offering accompanied by the display of a briefcase full of money.

June 25, 1975 – Fearing Winter Hill wiseguy and one-time boxer Eddie (The Bulldog) Connors was going to begin cooperating with police in the Spike O’Toole homicide probe, Bulger personally guns him down in a phone booth. Connors owned the bar O’Toole was leaving when he was slain.

November 25, 1975 – Mullens Gang enforcer Tommy King is shot in the head while riding in a car with Bulger and his frequent hit man accomplice Johnny Martorano. King’s murder was the first one committed with Bulger officially on the government payroll as a top-echelon confidential informant.

November 25, 1975 – Mullens Gang member Frank (Buddy) Leonard, a close friend of Tommy King’s, is shot in the head by Bulger only hours after he did the same to King.

December 30, 1976 – Fast-living Boston Italian gangster Richie Castucci was killed by Bulger and Martorano, shot to death inside a Somerville apartment after Bulger finds out he is an FBI informant – the first of four criminal associates of Bulger’s to be slain once his own connections in the federal government tipped him to their own respective dealings with the feds. Castucci, known to pal around with Frank Sinatra whenever Ole’ Blue Eyes blew into Beantown, was owed $100,000 in winning bets from Winter Hill Gang bookmakers at the time of his slaying.

April 12, 1980 – South Boston bookie Louis (Louie the Arab) Litif, a Winter Hill Gang associate, is killed when Bulger is angered by Litif’s unsanctioned activity (murder, drugs) and finds out he is trying to furnish information to the Boston Police Department and the FBI.

May 27, 1981 – Oklahoma-based millionaire Roger Wheeler, a Boston native, is gunned down by Martorano in the parking lot of the ritzy Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa. Wheeler owned the Winter Hill Gang-controlled World Jai Alai sports league and was on the losing end of a power play hatched by Bulger and former World Jai Alai president and Winter Hill Gang associate John Callahan.

September 17, 1981 – Bulger strangles Debbie Davis, the young girlfriend of his right-hand man, Stevie (The Rifleman) Flemmi, to death when Flemmi admits to telling her they were both FBI informants.

May 11, 1982 – Drug-addled Winter Hill Gang lieutenant Brian (The Balloon) Halloran & his neighbor Mike Donahue are gunned down by Bulger in the parking lot of Anthony’s Pier 9 on the South Boston waterfront. Halloran had knowledge of the Wheeler hit and began informing to the FBI when he worried he was going to be arrested for another murder he took part in months earlier. Bulger learned from his FBI handlers of Halloran’s cooperation. Donahue was just an innocent bystander, hitching a ride home with Halloran from the restaurant.

July 31, 1982 – Boston finance whiz kid turned Winter Hill Gang crony John Callahan is shot to death by Martorano in Florida on Bulger’s orders when Bulger worries he won’t be able to keep his mouth shut to the feds in the Wheeler murder investigation.

August 4, 1983 – South Boston bank robber and drug dealer Arthur (Bucky) Barrett is kidnapped, robbed and shot to death by Bulger for failure to pay him tribute.

November 30, 1984 – Charlestown Irish mob crew member John McIntyre is choked and shot to death by Bulger after he begin cooperating with the DEA. McIntyre would help the Charlestown and South Boston crews’ ship money, guns and dope overseas to the IRA on cargo boats. McIntyre’s cooperation resulted in authorities seizing contraband drawing Bulger’s ire.

January 5, 1985 – Bulger strangled Debbie Hussey, his partner-in-crime Stevie Flemmi’s stepdaughter and lover, to death, after she began using her proximity to the Winter Hill Gang as leverage on the street with both cops and crooks. Hussey was a stripper and prostitute in Boston’s red light district known as the Combat Zone.

The post The Whitey Bulger Hit List Timeline (1969-1985): Boston’s Legendary Crime Boss Killed Often In Heyday appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Mexican drug lord Juan Francisco (Kiko) Trevino was sentenced to five concurrent life prison sentences in a U.S. Federal Court in Texas this week, following a seven-count conviction for racketeering and narcotics trafficking back in the summer. Kiko Trevino, 38, is the don of Mexico’s Del Noreste Cartel, a breakoff faction of the lethal Los Zetas Cartel.

Taken into custody in Baytown, Texas, just outside of Houston, in September 2016, Trevino is one of the most influential cartel leaders ever convicted on U.S. soil. Prosecutors claim he’s been behind more than 125 gangland murders since 2004. He was first indicted by the feds in 2011.

Founded as an enforcement wing of the Gulf Cartel in the 1990s, the Los Zetas Cartel was started by ex-military personnel. Over the years, the hit-for-hire crew transitioned into distribution, leveraging its reputation as killers to great success in the sales department. By the mid-2000s, Los Zetas was smuggling tens of millions of pounds of cocaine and marijuana into the U.S. annually. The “Zetas” officially broke off from the Gulf Cartel in 2010.

Brought into the drug world by his kingpin uncles, Trevino headed wholesale distribution outposts in Dallas and Waco, where most of the cartel’s drugs went to be packaged and were then sent around the country for sale on the street. A jury in Waco found him guilty of drug-dealing, extortion, money laundering and weapons offenses in July.

Trevino hails from Nuevo Laredo, a Los Zetas hotspot in northern Mexico located on the Rio Grande River and directly across the border from Laredo, Texas. He is the nephew of former Los Zetas boss Miguel (Z-40) Trevino Morales, who was jailed in 2013. In the wake of his uncle’s imprisonment, Kiko Trevino took his family’s powerbase and established the Del Noreste Cartel.

The younger Trevino’s drug and weapon-sales operation routinely cleared $300,000,000 a year in profits. One of his indictments cited almost two billion dollars-worth of drugs sold at the peak of his reign. DEA agents tracked Trevino personally delivering a shipment of $25,000,000 in cash to his uncles in Nuevo Laredo. Jose (Z-42) Trevino Morales, Kiko’s other uncle, was smacked with a 20-year prison term in 2013 for laundering drug money through a horserace outfit in Oklahoma.

The post Adios Kiko: Mexican Drug Boss “Kiko” Trevino To Do Life In Prison, U.S. Judge Sends Cartel Leader Away appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Many people close to the situation point to the aftermath of Detroit mob boss Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco’s 1998 federal racketeering conviction as an example of how far and deep his connections ran in white-collar circles. Tocco, who passed away in the summer of 2014 and jurors found guilty of heading a 30-year organized crime conspiracy, collecting millions of dollars of street tax as well as having profited from hidden ownership in three cash-cow Nevada casinos, was initially sentenced to a head-scratching 10 months in a halfway house by U.S. District Court Judge John Corbett O’Meara 20 years ago this week on November 13, 1998.

Considering Tocco was one of the nation’s most powerful crime lords and a prime suspect in the infamous Jimmy Hoffa murder mystery, O’Meara’s decree could barely be categorized as a slap on the wrist and raised a lot of eyebrows. It was definitely perceived as a slap in the face to the lawyers and lawmen responsible for building the landmark Operation Game Tax case. Prosecutors and FBI agents were outraged at what appeared like preferential treatment for the long-serving mafia don. In comparison, a foot-soldier cousin of Tocco’s did 12 years.

“Everyone knew Jack had a backdoor in his case, he had people looking out for him,” said one street source. “That original sentence was only surprising to outsiders. People in his world expected it.”

Six weeks later, in late December 1998, under pressure from prosecutors, O’Meara resentenced Tocco to a year behind bars. The U.S. Attorneys’ Office still wasn’t satisfied though and filed an appeal — in January 2000, the U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with prosecutors that the sentence was too light and Tocco had another year and a half tacked on to his time. The notoriously-understated and equally business and underworld savvy Midwest Godfather finally walked free on November 21, 2001. He reigned on his throne for 14 more years, continuing to emphasize corporate diversification as the hallmark of his regime, and died peacefully of heart failure, successfully avoiding any further run-ins with the law in his last years atop his Rustbelt mafia dynasty.

“We were upset by the punishment the judge handed out and we made our anger and frustration known,” retired U.S. Attorney Keith Corbett said. “The type of conviction Jack took sent other people of his ilk to prison for 20, 30 years and he gets the halfway house? Something didn’t make sense, so we pressed the issue. In the end, Jack still got a break and wasn’t gone for all that long anyway.”

Tocco’s dad and uncle, Vito (Black Bill) Tocco and Giuseppe (Joe Uno) Zerilli, founded the Detroit mafia, known locally as the Zerilli-Tocco crime family, “The Combination” or “The Partnership,” in 1931 following their victory in the so-called Crosstown Mob War. The elder Tocco died of a heart attack in 1972 and the younger Tocco took over as the boss of the crime family in the wake of his uncle’s death of natural causes in 1977.

According to FBI informants, Tocco was a principal conspirator in the July 1975 kidnapping and execution of Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa, helping his uncle and others coordinate the details of maybe the most talked-about mob hit of all-time. Hoffa vanished from a Detroit area restaurant’s parking lot on his way to have lunch with two labor-union linked gangsters. Acting on a tip from an informant, FBI agents were on hand snapping photos at Tocco’s official inauguration ceremony in June 1979 at an upscale hunting lodge near Ann Arbor.

During his ascent to becoming a boss, Tocco bypassed his first cousin Anthony (Tony Z) Zerilli, the original heir apparent to the crown, in the syndicate succession order. Upon Zerilli getting caught skimming $6,000,000 from The Frontier casino in Las Vegas and being sent to prison, his father, longtime Michigan don and national Commission member Joe Zerilli, decided to name his nephew Tocco his successor instead of his own son. The younger Zerilli begrudgingly accepted a role as Tocco’s underboss, but skipped his cousin’s 1979 coronation.

Using a bug in Zerilli’s nephew’s car to gather evidence and the cooperation of Tocco’s consigliere Michael (Big Mike) Polizzi’s son, an in-house attorney for his dad and his dad’s mob pals, Tocco, Zerilli, Polizzi and virtually their entire command structure were indicted in March 1996 in what came to be known as the Operation Game Tax bust. The moniker came from the fact that the main focus of the probe was extortion and the taxing of independent gambling operations and business owners. Part of the evidence presented at Tocco’s spring 1998 trial was an FBI surveillance photo taken during the hunting lodge ceremony two decades earlier and documents and testimony tying him to silent ownership in a string of glitzy gambling palaces in the desert.

While Zerilli and Polizzi were the ones originally slapped with charges in The Frontier case back in the 1960s, Operation Game Tax unveiled the fact that Tocco had received a percentage of the sale to reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Shortly thereafter, the Detroit mob grabbed control of The Aladdin casino until its front men were nailed in a 1978 conspiracy and fraud case. Entertainer and Vegas staple Wayne Newton purchased the casino in 1980 for close to $100,000,000 and an FBI surveillance unit tracked Tocco to a 1983 meeting in Florida where he and St. Louis mob leaders negotiated portions of profits from divestment of past ownership shares in The Aladdin.

By 1981, Tocco had his hooks into The Edgewater casino in Laughlin, Nevada, some 90 miles southeast of The Strip resting on the banks of the Colorado River. Again using a series of front men as buffers, Tocco and Detroit wiseguys fleeced the place for roughly $10,000,000 in 26 months before selling it to the owners of Vegas’ Circus Circus casino for $18,000,000.

A year before Tocco died, the FBI searched a piece of farmland property in Oakland Township, Michigan he once owned for Jimmy Hoffa’s remains based on a tip from a disgruntled Tony Zerilli, who Tocco shelved after they both got out of prison in the 2000s. Zerilli died of natural causes in March 2015.

The post Jack In The Box: Detroit Don “Black Jack” Tocco Benefited From Controversial Sentence 20 Years Ago appeared first on The Gangster Report.