The American Rustbelt lost its’ second legendary mob enforcer in as many weeks. After news broke last week of the passing of 73-year old retired Pittsburgh mafia drug lieutenant and strong arm Eugene (Nick the Blade) Gesuale from a heart attack, the Midwest underworld said to goodbye to retired Cleveland mafia muscle Eugene (The Animal) Ciasullo, who cashed in his chips as a result of natural causes at 85 over this past weekend.

Generally considered the most feared man in Cleveland in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, Ciasullo got out of the mob when the getting was good – following surviving two house bombings in the Cleveland mafia war of the late 1970s, one which severely punctured his stomach and lower intestines and landed him in the hospital for a month and the other which he missed all together because he and his family had already moved, the Animal hung up his mob spurs and called it a career as the Scalish crime family’s go-to goon. At that time, the Italian mafia in Cleveland was feuding with a local Irish mob brigade led by the charismatic, ambitious and headstrong Danny Greene.

Eugene “The Animal” Ciasullo in his latter years

Still, Ciasullo kept his feet wet in the shallow end of the ocean, continuing to dabble in Ohio underworld affairs until relatively recently. He did four years in prison in the 1980s for stabbing a man and was caught up in a drug conspiracy in the early 2000s while in his late 60s.

Raised in Cleveland’s rugged eastside Collingwood neighborhood, Ciasullo went on to become a top collector, bookie and loan shark for longtime Ohio Godfather and crime-family namesake John Scalish and his successor James (Jack White) Licavoli. The Animal would often do freelance collecting for the area’s preeminent Jewish racketeer Alex (Shondor) Birns too. According to FBI documents, Ciasullo was close with fellow Collingwood crew members like Pasquale (Butchie) Cisternino, Joseph (Joe Loose) Iacobacci, and Alfred (Allie Con) Calabrese in his mafia heyday.

Iacobacci eventually ascended to boss of the crime family.Today, he’s reported to be retired and the Cleveland mob is said to be barely standing. Licavoli, Cisternino and Calabrese each died behind bars. Greene and his mentor-turned-enemy Shondor Birns were both killed in car bombings.

The post Historic Cleveland Mafia Figure ‘Eugene the Animal’ Finally Tamed By Father Time, Dies At 85 appeared first on The Gangster Report.

More skeletons remain in former New England mafia boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme’s closet than just simply the Stevie DiSarro slaying, according to multiple retired FBI agents familiar with Salemme’s underworld tenure in Boston. Per these sources, Salemme took part in at least an additional seven gangland murders that he lied about to federal authorities at his 1999 debriefing following agreeing to become a witness for the government.

“There’s more, believe me there’s more,” one source said. “Frank was less than completely forthcoming in his wheeling and dealing with the Bureau. A lot of people knew he was telling them what they wanted to hear and picking and choosing what to share in terms of things that could hurt guys in his camp.”

The 82-year old Salemme was pulled out of the Witness Protection Program earlier this week and arrested for the 1993 homicide of DiSarro, a mob associate and nightclub owner Cadillac Frank and his son, Frank, Jr., were partners with in a South Boston alt-rock-music venue-turned-topless bar called the Channel. He intends to fight the charges in court. DiSarro, 43, was reportedly cooperating with the FBI and IRS in investigations into the elder Salemme’s reign as Godfather of the New England mafia. .

Cadillac Frank has been yanked out of the “program” before and for reasons related to the killing of DiSarro. He pled guilty to obstruction of justice charges for lying in his debriefing regarding his knowledge of the DiSarro hit in 2008 and did an extra year behind bars.

Salemme joined Team America in 1999 and originally walked free in 2004 after nine years in the can. Admitting his role in eight murders, he testified in front of the U.S. Senate and in court against retired FBI agent John Connolly, iconic Boston Irish mob lord, James (Whitey) Bulger’s mole inside the Bureau for almost two decades. Bulger, at one time Cadillac Frank’s close pal, is serving life in prison. Connolly was sentenced to 40 years.

Several former members of law enforcement claim Salemme lied under oath in his testimony on Capitol Hill and at Connolly’s trial. Specifically, Cadillac Frank denied involvement or knowing about the murders of fellow Beantown underworld figures Tommy Timmins, Pete Poulos, Robert (Bobby D) Donati, Rocco Scali, Barry Lazzarini, Vinnie Arcieri and Richard (Vinnie the Pig) DeVincent, which multiple sources both from cop and crook circles alike, say Salemme either helped personally carry out, ordered or sanctioned. Some of the still-unsolved murders spawn from Cadillac Frank’s early days as an east coast mob assassin in the 1960s, others from his vengeance-filled near half-decade on the throne at the helm of the Patriarca crime family in the 1990s.

Informants have told federal prosecutors that Stevie DiSarro was strangled to death on May 10, 1993 by Frank Salemme, Jr. as his dad and uncle, John (Action Jack) Salemme watched on in the dining room of the Salemme family homestead in suburban Sharon, Massachusetts. Salemme, Jr. died of complications resulting from the AIDS virus in 1995. Jack Salemme, Cadillac Frank’s baby brother, was an acting boss of the New England mob for a short period in the mid-1990s.

DiSarro’s remains were dug up back in March on property owned by mob associate Billy Ricci, a former lieutenant of Cadillac Frank’s underboss Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca’s in Providence, Rhode Island. Until he became a member of Team America in 2011, Bobby the Cigar was based his operations out of the Providence area. Ricci got busted in a drug conspiracy earlier this year and cut deal for himself, pointing the FBI to his converted mill building in Providence as to where it could unearth DiSarro, buried there 23 years ago by DeLuca and Salemme. It’s unclear at this time if Jack Salemme will face any future charges in the DiSarro hit as well.

Bobby the Cigar, who like his former boss Cadillac Frank had been spending his latter-years in the Witness Protection Program, was arrested on obstruction and perjury charges in connection with the DiSarro case in June. Salemme was living in the Atlanta, Georgia area, while DeLuca, 71, was residing in Florida. The pair ruled the New England mafia side-by-side from 1991 through 1995 when they were nailed for racketeering.

Released from a 15-year prison sentence in the late 1980s, Salemme maneuvered his way to the top of the Patriarca clan with a mix of master politicking, guile, gumption and a little bit of good luck. Cadillac Frank survived an attempted assassination in the summer of 1989, getting shot in the parking lot of a Saugus, Massachusetts pancake house by members of a faction in the crime family led by capos Joseph (J.R.) Russo and Vincent (Vinnie the Animal) Ferrara opposing Salemme’s rise to the boss’ chair. Salemme himself had been convicted of attempted murder in the January 1968 car bombing of a Boston mob attorney and future South Dakota Circuit Court Judge named John Fitzgerald.

Cadillac Frank Salemme being brought into custody in 1972 by FBI agents for his role in orchestrating the bombing of a mob lawyer & future judge’s car four years earlier

Per sources, Tommy Timmins was allegedly garroted to death by Salemme at Salemme’s Sharon, Massachusetts residence (the same one DiSarro was allegedly done in at) on April 27, 1968, almost three months to the day after Fitzgerald’s car was bombed and the lawyer lost a leg. Poulos was a Salemme confidant and killed by Salemme’s childhood friend Steven (The Rifleman) Flemmi, Whitey Bulger’s right-hand man in the mostly-Irish Winter Hill Gang, a month later out in Las Vegas at Salemme’s behest while Salemme hid out in New York trying to avoid arrest in the Fitzgerald bombing. Flemmi has told the FBI that he accidentally walked in on Salemme, his son and brother murdering Stevie DiSarro in the spring of 1993.

Bobby Donati, Rocco Scali, Barry Lazzarini and Vinnie Arcieri were all Russo-Ferrara loyalists that got clipped on Salemme’s say so once he took power as payback for the fact that Russo and Ferrara had tried to kill him during the “Unrest of ’89,” according to first-hand sources and government documents. Donati, Vinnie the Animal’s driver and a prime suspect in the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist from 1990 (a half-billion dollars of rare art stolen), was beaten to a bloody pulp and his throat slit ear-to-ear on September 24, 1991 outside his Boston area home and stuffed into the trunk of his car. Lazzarini was beaten to death, left hogtied inside his Manomet, Massachusetts residence on October 3, 1991. Scali, a North End restauranteur, was shot in the head at point-blank range in the parking lot of a Dedham, Massachusetts pancake house on October 2, 1992, Arcieri felled by a barrage of bullets in the driveway of his Orient Heights, Massachusetts home a little more than two months later on December 8, 1992.

Longtime New England mob thug “Vinnie the Pig” DeVincent lasted until April 3, 1996, eight months after Cadillac Frank was arrested, when he was killed in the mafia hotbed of Medford, Massachusetts. An FBI document from 1997 states that DeVincent, 63, was refusing to pay Salemme tribute to run his sports book and juice-loan racket and Salemme order him whacked from his jail cell. Vinnie the Pig, according to the document, was tight with Ferrara and groomed by Ferrara’s mentor in the mob, former Patriarca Family underboss Jerry Angiulo.

According to Rhode Island State Police records, Bobby Donati was killed by Salemme, his son, his bodyguard Richard (Richie the Hatchet) Devlin and East Boston capo and controversial FBI informant Mark Rossetti. The Salemmes, Devlin and Rosetti allegedly pummeled Donati with their fists and feet, an assault concluded by Rossetti slitting his throat, per the state police files. Lazzarini, per sources, was killed by the same foursome in a similar manner.

Devlin was slain in 1994, still the No. 1 suspect in the Scali murder. Another ace Salemme enforcer and Devlin’s gangland running buddy, Richard (Richie Nine Lives) Gillis, remains the main suspect as the triggerman in the Arcieri homicide. In the weeks prior to his slaying, Arcieri had gotten into a verbal spat with Rossetti, also thought to have been the shooter in the DeVincent hit. Rossetti’s name has been bandied about for playing a possible role in the DiSarro murder.

The post GR Sources: Salemme Is Masking More Than Just Role In DiSarro Rub Out, Can Shed Light On Over Half-Dozen Other N.E. Mob Hits He Denies Part In Too appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Instead of a jail cell, he got a promotion. Reputed Chicago mob captain Albert (Albie the Falcon) Vena can now add Outfit street boss to his gangland resume, according to sources in the Windy City. Avoiding a rumored racketeering indictment last year, the 67-year old Vena was reportedly upped to day-to-day Outfit caretaker by alleged Chicago mob acting boss Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis back in the winter, these sources claim.

“Albie’s calling shots for Solly…it’s been like that going on six months,” asserts a source. “They’re both being very cautious. Solly is sending orders through Albie via an intermediary. Albie is in charge of getting word to the capos and crew bosses.”

Vena bases his operations out of Chicago’s near Westside and the so-called Grand Avenue crew. DeLaurentis, 78, hails from the Outfit’s Cicero regime, specifically its’ Lake County wing. He’s said to have taken over as the crime family’s acting don in 2012. Longtime Outfit Godfather John (Johnny No Nose) DiFronzo, 88, has been removed from the syndicate’s daily affairs for several years, yet, according to sources, still receives “tribute”.

The diminutive, but heavily-feared Albie the Falcon, assumed the Westside crew reins on an acting basis over a decade ago, officially grabbing the title in around 2009, per sources. Informants to the FBI dub him “the most dangerous man in Chicago.” Vena beat first-degree murder charges at trial in 1995.

He can frequently be seen at his Richard’s Bar headquarters off Halsted Street near Milwaukee Avenue during the day and dining next door at La Scola in the evenings. His entire Grand Ave. gang has been under siege by the government since the early 2010s, resulting in a string of state and federal busts for crew members and rampant speculation of a looming larger overall racketeering case engulfing Vena and his inner circle that has yet to materialize.

The new street boss gig has not forced Vena to drop his Westside capo duties, one source says, and the current Outfit structural arrangement at the top is similar to how it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s when John (Johnny Apes) Monteleone ran the syndicate’s Southside-Chinatown crew and acted as John DiFronzo’s overall street boss, communicating with the rank-and-file on his behalf. Monteleone died of natural causes in 2001.

The post GR SOURCES: Chicago Outfit’s ‘Falcon’ Flies To Street Boss Post, Vena Riding High Sans Handcuffs (For Now, At Least) appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Following the death of legendary east coast mob don Raymond Patriarca, Sr. of a heart attack and the incarceration of his longtime underboss Jerry Angiulo within less than a year of each other in the early 1980s, the New England mafia was standing on shaky ground. By the end of the decade, the crime family was in a violent freefall that would last on-and-off until 1996. The syndicate with territory which spans Boston, Rhode Island and Connecticut split into two camps, one loyal to Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme, a former Patriarca regime hit man released from a 15-year prison stretch in 1987 for the attempted murder of an underworld attorney back in the 1960s, and the other to Joseph (J.R.) Russo, the Family’s East Boston capo and soon-to-be consigliere, and Russo’s second-in-command, Vincent (Vinnie the Animal) Ferrara, an Angiulo protégé from the North End with a business degree from Boston College.

Even after Russo and Ferrara were imprisoned in 1990, the bloody conflict raged on for another half decade. The Beantown mob war of the 1990s resulted in more than a dozen gangland homicides. Russo died of cancer behind bars. The 67-year old Ferrara “went legit” after being released in 2005 and the appellate court tossed a prior murder conviction.

Cadillac Frank Salemme was back in the news last week, lifted out of the federal witness protection program and indicted for his alleged role in the 1993 slaying of nightclub impresario and New England mob associate Stevie DiSarro, whose remains were unearthed in the spring behind a converted mill in Providence and it was revealed in the indictment was a federal informant. Salemme, 82, has pled not guilty and is being held without bond. When he first flipped in 1999, he admitted to taking part of eight mob murders. Some think he severely undershot the number of homicides he was involved in.

New England Mafia War Murder Timeline (1989-1996)

June 16, 1989 – Unpopular and easily-unhinged crime family underboss William (Billy the Wild Man) Grasso, based out of Hartford, Connecticut and Raymond Patriarca Sr.’s former cellmate in prison, is shot to death inside a moving van by a hit team made up Genovese crime family assassins on-call from Western Massachusetts, his body dumped in a nearby riverbed. Grasso was Patriarca’s son and direct successor, Ray, Jr.’s primary muscle and protection in his weak five-year tenure at the helm of the New England mafia. Staunch Patriarca loyalist Cadillac Frank Salemme survives an assassination attempt the same day in suburban Boston, getting shot in the stomach, foot and knee as he exited his black-colored BMW in the parking lot of an International House of Pancakes. The attacks were coordinated by the Russo-Ferrara faction in an unsuccessful play to eliminate the younger Patriarca’s top two lieutenants and main backing.

*The Gambino crime family in New York orders the violence to stop and for the two sides of the feud in the Patriarca clan to make peace. For a while, they do: Ray, Jr. abdicates the syndicate throne to Nicky Bianco, a mutually acceptable selection for both wings of the Family, Cadillac Frank becomes underboss and Russo is named consigliere. But when Bianco, Russo and Ferrara get locked up in a racketeering case and Salemme grabs control of the organization and tensions quickly boil over once again in relations between Cadillac Frank’s crew spread out from Boston to Providence and remnants of the Russo-Ferrara faction arising out of East Boston and the North End (Little Italy). According to Massachusetts State Police informants, Salemme used the unrest to get even with those he deemed responsible for trying to kill him at the IHOP in the summer of 1989.

August 16, 1991 – Russo and Ferrara loyalist and Fall River, Massachusetts bookie, Howard Ferrini, is beaten and stomped to death at his Berkley, Massachusetts home. Ferrini’s badly-battered corpse was found at Logan International Airport on August 21, stuffed into trunk of his midnight-blue colored Cadillac, his hands bound and a plastic bag over his head.

*Early on in his regime, Salemme sought to expand outside of the Greater Boston area into cities like Fall River, Framingham, Lowell and Milford. Ferrini, 53, was linked to Fall River crime lord Timothy (Timmy the Bat) Mello and Salemme enforcer Gordon O’Brien.

September 24, 1991 – Vinnie Ferrara’s driver and close friend Robert (Bobby D) Donati, a longtime low-level mover-and-shaker in the Beantown underworld and jack-of-all-trades mobster, is beaten and stabbed to death at his Revere, Massachusetts home, his body like that of Ferrini’s five weeks earlier, found in the trunk of his own Cadillac automobile, hogtied and heavily battered.

*Donati, 50, died one of the top suspects in the still-unsolved Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist (the daring 1990 armed robbery of the prestigious private museum in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood yielding a cool half-billion dollars in precious artwork

October 3, 1991 – Russo and Ferrara loyalist Barry Lazzarini is beaten and shot to death inside his Manomet, Massachusetts home, left hogtied in a similar fashion to how Donati was. Lazzarini had formerly owned a restaurant that was a known hangout spot for gangster types in Boston

September 18, 1992 – Notorious Patriarca crime family enforcer and reputed hit man Kevin Hanrahan is killed after leaving a Providence, Rhode Island bar in Federal Hill (Little Italy) called The Arch, shot dead by two assailants on a street corner, waiting for what he had told people was his piece of a “big score.” Nobody has ever been arrested in the 39-year old Hanrahan’s murder and his homicide remains an open investigation with the Providence FBI today.

*Hanrahan worked for Cadillac Frank at the time he was slain, however was rumored to be freelancing, possibly drawing Salemme’s ire.

October 2, 1992 – Russo and Ferrara loyalist and North End restaurant owner Rocco Scali is shot in the back of the head as he sat in his car in the parking lot of a Dedham, Massachusetts International House of Pancakes.

December 8, 1992 – Russo and Ferrara loyalist Vinnie Arcieri is gunned down in the driveway of his Orient Heights, Massachusetts residence.

*Arcieri had allegedly gotten into a verbal altercation with Salemme’s East Boston capo Mark Rossetti at Arcieri’s restaurant in the weeks preceding his murder.

May 10, 1993 – Boston nightclub owner and New England mob associate Stevie DiSarro is strangled to death inside the Salemme family home in upscale Sharon, Massachusetts by Cadillac Frank’s son and protégé Frank Salemme, Jr., as Cadillac Frank and his brother and capo John (Action Jack) Salemme watched on, according to an FBI informant. DiSarro’s remains were finally unearthed back in the spring on property in Providence owned by an associate of Salemme’s Rhode Island-stationed underboss Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca.

*The 43-year old DiSarro was partners with the Salemmes in a South Boston music venue-turned-strip joint called The Channel and was cooperating with the FBI and IRS in an investigation into Cadillac Frank’s affairs. Frank Salemme, Jr. died of AIDS-related cancer in 1995 at 37. DeLuca was arrested for perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the DiSarro homicide in June. He entered the witness protection program five years ago and had been residing under a different identity in Florida

February 1994 – Seasoned Fall River racketeers Joseph (Joe the Animal) Savitch & Louis (Miami Beach Louie) Alexander vanish: their bodies are not discovered until three years later near hunting property Savitch owned in Maine.

*Authorities believe that the pair was either murdered by protégé-turned-rival Timmy Mello over internal Fall River business or by the Salemme mob regime (possibly with the help of Mello) for failing to get in line with Cadillac Frank’s expansion efforts.

March 31, 1994 – Frank Salemme’s No. 1 strong arm and sometimes-bodyguard Richard (Richie the Hatchet) Devlin is shot to death behind the wheel of his car adorned in a bullet proof vest outside an East Boston restaurant. Another one of Cadillac Frank’s ace enforcers, Richard (Richie Nine Lives) Gillis, Devlin’s best friend, gets wounded in the attack staged by Russo-Ferrara loyalists on the outside being advised by Russo’s step brother Bobby Carrozza in prison.

March 31, 1994 – The very same night Devlin is killed in Massachusetts, Patriarca crime family members Ronnie Coppola & Pete Scarpellini are shot to death inside a Cranston, Rhode Island social club by fellow New England mobster Nino Cucinotta over insults at a card game

*Coppola had dined with Kevin Hanrahan the night he was murdered and believed by some FBI agents who investigated the Hanrahan homicide as the hit’s “set-up man.”

September 2, 1994 – Russo-Ferrara loyalist and renegade faction “junior member” Mike Romano, Jr. is slain, only months after his father Mike Romano, Sr,, a staunch ally of J.R. Russo and Bobby Carrozza’s and renegade faction higher up, had seemingly negotiated a peace treaty with the Salemme camp in a sit down at an East Boston tavern.

Oct 31 1994 – Salemme-crew wiseguy Joe Souza succumbs to bullets wounds incurred 11 days earlier in an attack pulled off as Souza spoke on the phone in an East Boston phone booth

*The Russo-Ferrara camp believed Souza was the triggerman in the Romano, Jr. slaying

Dec 11, 1994 – Salemme-faction drug dealer Paul Strazzula is killed in Revere, his body found in his car, which had been set ablaze.

*Cadillac Frank Salemme is federally indicted in January 1995. The bloodshed went on.

Nov 6, 1995 – Salemme-faction members Bobby Luisi, Sr., Roman Luisi (Bobby’s son), Antonio Sarro & Anthony Pelosi are gunned down in a Charlestown bar and grill in what came to be known in the Boston media as the 99 Restaurant & Pub Massacre.

April 3, 1996 – Veteran Patriarca Family thug Richard (Vinnie the Pig) DeVincent is shot to death in Medford, Massachusetts after reportedly beefing with Salemme and his brother over street tax

*Vinnie the Pig had once been one of Jerry Angiulo’s loan sharks, bookies and go-to collectors. He came out of prison in the 1990s and allegedly bumped heads with the Salemmes

November 24, 1996 – Russo-Ferrara faction enforcer Robert (Bobby the Beast) Nogueira is shot to death in the parking lot of a Saugus hotel, riddled with more than 20 bullets in a late-night attack

*Nogueira was Russo-Ferrara faction younger generation leader Vincent (Gigi) Marino’s bodyguard and main muscle. The same night and within minutes of Bobby the Beast being killed, Marino himself survives an assassination attempt in front of a Revere nightclub

*Cadillac Frank Salemme enters the witness protection program in 1999. When he was collared last week on the DiSarro case, he had been living in Atlanta, Georgia. Salemme pled guilty to perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the DiSarro homicide investigation in 2008.

The post The Patriarca Purge Of The 1990s: New England Mafia War Murder Timeline (Cadillac Frank’s Revenge) appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Ralphie Santaniello, the 49-year old reputed co-leader of a mafia crew in Springfield, Massachusetts, was denied bail in the six-count federal racketeering case lodged against five alleged members of the city’s mob clan earlier this month. Santaniello’s co-defendants, Gerald Daniele, Frank (The Shark) Depergola, Giovanni (Johnny Cal) Calabrese, Richard (Richie the Postman) Valentini, were released on bond this week. They’ve all pled not guilty and face potential 20-year prison sentences if convicted.

The indictment includes charges of gambling, loan sharking and extortion. According to the indictment, Santaniello slapped around an extortion victim who owned a local towing business suspecting he might be wearing a wire, threatened to kill him, cut off his head and bury him in the backyard of his home if he didn’t reactivate tribute payments to the area organized crime faction he had discontinued the previous decade. Santaniello, said to be a recovering addict, did two years in the joint in the 2000s (2005-2007) for gambling and loan sharking offenses. He pled guilty twice to assault charges in the 1990s.

The Springfield mob crew has long acted as the Western Massachusetts wing of the Genovese crime family out of New York. Per Springfield underworld insiders, Santaniello and his first-cousin Albert Calvanese are currently in charge of mob activity in the region, reporting directly to Genovese powers in New York and Connecticut.

Calvanese, 53, is a convicted racketeer, but dodged this most recent indictment, part of a sweeping east coast mafia takedown netting more than 45 alleged wiseguys representing five crime families spanning six states. Genovese syndicate acting capo Ernest (Rooster) O’Nofrio, according to the indictment, officially oversees affairs in Western Massachusetts for mob superiors in NYC from his home base in New Haven, Connecticut.

Depergola, 60, is the No. 3 man in the Springfield mob pecking order, per sources and Santaniello’s father, Amedeo Santaniello, is the crew’s elder statesman and de-facto consigliere. Daniele (51), Calabrese (53) and Valentini (51) are alleged to be collectors and muscle for Depergola, Calvanese and Santaniello. Valentini and Daniele have been co-defendants with Santaniello in the past (2000s racketeering case).

Amedeo Santaniello, 77, was the one-time right-hand man to slain Springfield mafia capo Adolfo (Big Al) Bruno, killed gangland style in the fall of 2003, shot to death outside his South End social club by local street tough Frankie Roche on orders from Bruno’s protégé-turned-rival Anthony (Bingy) Arillotta, who has since become a witness for the government. Bruno, 58, had beaten an attempted murder rap in 1993 with an acquittal at a second trial. The younger Santaniello was a mob running buddy of Arillotta’s in Arillotta’s heyday as crew boss in the mid-to-late 2000s.

The elder Santaniello and Bruno were feuding at the time of Bruno’s murder, a beef which saw Santaniello temporarily relocate to Florida to take refuge. Depergola was with Bruno when he was gunned down in front of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Social Club leaving his weekly Sunday evening card game on November 23, 2003.

The post Springfield (MA) Goodfella Santaniello Denied Bail, Will Have To Fight Most Recent Case From Behind Jailhouse Walls appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Venerable retired professional boxing manager and former Detroit mob associate Billy Gutz (originally “Gutzi,” pronounced GOOT-SEE) died of natural causes this month, possibly the final link to the days when the Tocco-Zerilli crime family ruled a sizeable chunk of pro prize fighting in the United States. Small, but spunky, Gutz, 86, trained and managed the careers of world-champion boxers Lindell Holmes and Bernard (The Bull) Benton and served as a one-time driver and bodyguard for Detroit mafia captain Salvatore (Little Sammy) Finazzo, who oversaw the prize-fighting industry in Michigan and his slate of rackets from the Motor City Boxing Gym.

News of Gutz’s death broke this week via boxing historian, journalist and Gutz-confidant Lindy Lindell on www.fightnews.com. Finazzo passed away back in 1994.

Under Gutz’s tutelage, Benton won the WBC cruiserweight belt in 1985 and Holmes captured the IBF super-middleweight crown in 1990. Both fighters hailed from nearby Toledo, Ohio. Holmes (45-8 record) is considered by many experts as one of the more underrated boxers of his era.

Gutz battled health issues in his final years, suffering a pair of strokes. Prior to his health concerns, he dabbled in screenwriting, penning a movie script about golf hustlers in the American south.

During his younger days in the 1950s and 60s, Gutz served as Little Sammy Finazzo’s “chief of staff,” chauffeuring the mob power around town and acting as a buffer for Finazzo to the fight game. Because he was a former fighter himself, Gutz picked up the nickname “Billy Gloves” amongst certain underworld circles. He would frequently travel to the east coast for Finazzo as Finazzo’s representative, taking meetings with mobsters tied to the boxing world like Frank (Blinky) Palermo and Frank (The Man in Grey) Carbo,

Finazzo partnered with fellow Detroit mafia heavyweights Raffaele (Jimmy Q) Quasarano and Peter (Bozzi) Vitale in a myriad of gangland endeavors running the gamut from gambling, loan sharking and extortion to larceny, large-scale narcotics trafficking and labor-racketeering. The triumvirate often staked pro boxers together. All three were known as “shooters” in their respective mob heydays. Vitale died in 1998, Quasarano held on until 2001.

Lindell Holmes and Billy Gutz (right)

The post A Heavenly Weigh-In: Detroit Boxing Scene Luminary, Fmr. Mob Associate Billy Gutz Dead At 86 appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Raging Bull himself, Jake LaMotta, was wined and dined by the Motown mafia whenever he was town to fight in Detroit during his storied boxing career, recalled recently-deceased boxing manager and mob associate Billy Gutz in an interview conducted in the latter years of his life. A driver and bodyguard for Detroit mob captain Salvatore (Little Sammy) Finazzo in the 1950s and 60s before going on to train and manage a pair of world-champion pugilists in the 1980s and 90s, Gutz (originally “Gutzi,” pronounced GOOT-SEE) died earlier this month at age 86.

“If Jake was in Detroit fighting, the boys in the Outfit (the mob) laid out the red carpet for him, we’re talking huge spreads for every meal,” Gutz remembered. “We’d all be over at Sammy Finazzo’s place or his girlfriend’s place, partying, drinking, eating, laughing, busting balls. Those were good times.”

LaMotta, the subject of the classic American sports film Raging Bull directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, is still alive at 95. De Niro won the Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of the brooding, quick-tempered LaMotta, a confessed associate or organized crime and prototypical brawler during his days in the ring. In November 1947, LaMotta admittedly took a dive for the mob in his fight against Billy Fox at Madison Square Garden in New York. Less than two years later, LaMotta won the world middleweight crown with a tenth-round knockout of Frenchman Marcel Cerdan in Detroit at the old, long-since torn-down Olympia Stadium.

“Just like you saw in the movie, Jake had a wicked streak in him, he could go from 0-to-100 miles an hour in two seconds and you didn’t know why, it would be for the most ridiculous things” Gutz said. “One night, we’re out for dinner at this place, this whole crew of wiseguys at the table and Jake goes nuts because his steak was overcooked. I thought he was gonna tear the waiter’s heart out, grab the guy by the neck or something, it was like someone insulted his mother. He was off the wall, screaming, hollering, getting all worked up. Sammy finally had to tell him to knock it off he was causing a scene.”

The city of Detroit served as the Midwest hub of the pro fight game in the United States in the mid-to-late 20^th Century. LaMotta fought in Detroit at the Olympia on 19 separate occasions. He retired in 1954 with an 83-19 record.

Salvatore Finazzo (right w/ glasses) in 1958.

Little Sammy Finazzo, a one-time bootlegger and alleged triggerman in a string of early-century gangland slayings, ran all of boxing in Michigan from the 1940s well into the 1970s. Finazzo headquartered his activities out of the Motor City Boxing Gym and oversaw a crew of racketeers for the Detroit mob, sometimes referred to as the Tocco-Zerilli crime family.

Gutz was Finazzo’s buffer to the boxing world for a good chunk of his reign as capo. By the 1980s, though, Little Sammy (d. 1994) found himself imprisoned on bribery and conspiracy charges and Gutz gravitated towards managing and training fighters on the up-and-up. Gutz steered Lindell Holmes to a super middleweight title in 1990 and Bernard (The Bull) Benton to a cruiserweight crown in 1985. He also went on to train others, including Floyd Mayweather, Sr., current world-champion Floyd (Money) Mayweather, Jr.’s father, and accomplished lightweight-contender Greg (The Candy Man) Coverson.

The post Jake LaMotta Often Rubbed Shoulders With Detroit Mob In Fight Career, Gutz Recollected Specifics appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Incarcerated former teenage drug dealer and underage federal informant Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe, Jr. experienced a potential watershed moment late last week in his painstakingly arduous fight for freedom after almost 30 years in prison for a single cocaine possession conviction stemming from an arrest during a routine traffic stop when he was 17 in May 1987. Wershe’s longtime nemesis, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, issued a statement to WDIV Channel 4, Detroit’s NBC television affiliate, saying she was going to “rethink” her office’s stance opposing Wershe’s parole. Well, it’s about time!

Wershe, today 47, is the Michigan Department of Corrections’ longest-serving non-violent offender. Up until last week, Wayne County had always been vocal in its’ belief Wershe should serve life in prison even though the law he was convicted under was thrown off the books 18 years ago, ruled unconstitutional.

It’s been confirmed that Wershe was recruited by a federal narcotics task force out of the eighth grade at just 14 and put to work as an undercover mole in a dark, dangerous inner city drug world. His cooperation with the government resumed while he was imprisoned and he helped the FBI build one of the most successful corrupt cop busts in Motor City history, among other cases. None of it seems to matter to the powers that be in this state.

I honestly, in my heart of hearts, hope Worthy, who has always been staunchly anti-Wershe (and to a practically unfathomable degree), is sincere. I have my doubts. And question the timing of this sudden revelation on her part as well as her motives. Just like everything else in Wershe’s case, there is obviously more than meets the eye here.

Now, if it all results in Wershe’s release, something that’s obviously been long overdue, I guess that’s all that matters. However, ideally you’d like to see people do the right thing for the right reasons. Whether Worthy even intends on doing anything in this situation still remains to be seen. If she does, I can assure you it’s not out of the kindness of her heart, due to a desire to finally do the right thing or because she’s suddenly realized the error of her clearly vengeance-inspired political motivations in campaigning to keep Wershe locked up all these years. Again, just like almost every single thing about Wershe’s plight to get out of prison, this goes considerably deeper than what it appears on the surface.

First off, what does Worthy’s purported intention of “rethinking” this matter really mean? Secondly, what’s prompting this possible shift in philosophies for Worthy and her office and where was this compassion less than a year ago when Worthy essentially blocked Wershe’s trial judge’s intention of setting him free by successfully appealing the judge’s resentencing order to the higher court last fall?

Worthy saying she’s going to rethink her office’s stance on Wershe is a vague notion. We’ll she eventually actively lobby the parole board and/or governor for his release? I highly doubt it. More likely, if she decides to do anything, she’ll stop lodging objections when he comes up for parole again (he’s eligible to see the board next year).

As Worthy noted in her statement Friday though, the decision to let Wershe go ultimately resides with the state’s parole board, not exactly Wershe’s biggest fan either – since becoming eligible he’s been rejected three times in a row and hasn’t even received a hearing in over a decade. So in some ways, she’s already in PR mode, passing the buck and shedding responsibility for any possible future problems Wershe might encounter gaining his freedom.

Ok, so why is Worthy finally appearing to crack? She claims it has to do with her recent immersion in reviewing other juvenile lifer cases similar to Wershe’s. Yeah, that’s what made her finally see the light last Friday (lol). And I’m going to be hitting lead-off for the Tigers next spring, starting in centerfield.

It couldn’t have to do with the fact that a trailer for an upcoming documentary film entitled 650 Lifer – The Legend of White Boy Rick was released to the public and various local, national and international news outlets 48 hours previous to Worthy’s declaration featuring clips alleging massive political and police wrongdoing in the Wershe case, including allegations of a murder contract placed on Wershe’s life back in 1987 initiated by a high-ranking law enforcement figure.

Or the fact that world-wide news leader, the Daily Mail out of the UK printed a piece on Wershe and the doc less than 24 hours prior to Worthy’s statements quoting the film’s director as saying the trailer is “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Or that Worthy’s alleged mentor Gil Hill, the former city council president and Inspector of the Detroit Police Department Homicide Division, not to mention maybe the person with the biggest axe to grind with Wershe, who for decades has implicated him in taking a payoff to cover up a still-unsolved slaying from 1985, died back in February and is no longer around for her to answer to or possibly do bidding on behalf (Hill was rumored to blame Wershe for his losing the 2001 Detroit Mayoral election) .

Or even the fact that news surfaced in Hollywood earlier this month that a major motion picture with an Oscar-winning producer, a pair of Oscar-nominated screenwriters and a reported 40 million dollar budget was on the verge of getting off the ground and negotiating with mega star Brad Pitt to possibly headline the project (he’s since broken off negotiations).

In other words, this story is about to blow through the roof. It’s going to go viral, it’s going to be part of the national consciousness in a major way very soon. As one local pundit put it, the freight train is picking up steam and Worthy is getting off the tracks, simply trying to avoid getting flattened by this story’s pending monstrosity of momentum.

Here’s to hoping that freight train busts through those prison walls holding Wershe, sooner rather than later, and frees him from the chains of his oppressors, providing him the second chance he’s deserved for way too many years now.

Scott M. Burnstein, Wershe autobiographer

The post BURNSTEIN OP-ED: Worthy’s Motives Open To Question In Her Reexamining Of Whether White Boy Rick Deserves Parole appeared first on The Gangster Report.

On his current media tour touting his personal transformation, Tennessee-based ministry and a new book project, east coast mafia capo-turned-pastor Robert (Boston Bobby) Luisi, Jr. has waxed poetic on his former life in the mob, from associate in the Patriarca crime family out of Boston to satellite crew boss on behalf of Philadelphia don Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino. Following Luisi, Jr.’s June 1999 arrest alongside Merlino, he decided to become a witness for the government, before reneging on his cooperation agreement at the last minute. Both he and Merlino were convicted – Boston Bobby of narcotics trafficking and racketeering, Skinny Joey, just of racketeering, beating drug and murder counts lodged against him.

According to an interview the 55-year old Luisi, Jr. (today living as Reverend Al Esposito) did with legendary Philly mob reporter George Anastasia last week for PhillyVoice.com, if he had stayed true to his word to cooperate with the feds, Merlino would have been nailed on the narcotics charges. Some think they might have been able to get a homicide conviction too.

Informants told the FBI, the Philadelphia mob’s Luisi, Jr.-led Beantown crew was responsible for the 1999 gangland slaying of South Philly resident Gino Marconi. It’s unknown which members of the Luisi, Jr. crew are alleged to have actually carried out the unsolved hit or if admitting to any role in the murder was included in Boston Bobby’s unfulfilled cooperation agreement with the feds.

“The Boston crew banged out Gino Marconi,” a source said. “That was them pledging their loyalty to the Philly family that had taken them in.”

The 42-year old Marconi, an auto body shop owner and low-level mafia associate and drug peddler, was shot in the head leaving his house by a rifle-toting assailant on the night of April 10, 1999. His longtime girlfriend Patricia Miley was struck in the attack (shot three times in the chest and neck), but survived. Marconi himself wasn’t so lucky. He died at the hospital the next morning. The murder weapon and getaway vehicle were found torched across the block.

Per federal informants, Marconi was butting heads with the Skinny Joey regime for his refusal to fork over a street tax on his drug sales. Skinny Joey was acquitted of multiple murder counts not related to the Marconi homicide at trial in 2001. Police uncovered nearly five pounds of marijuana and seven unregistered firearms inside Marconi’s residence. Nobody has ever been charged in his slaying.

Merlino, Luisi, Jr. and the rest of the Boston crew were indicted and jailed two months later on the drug charges Skinny Joey would beat and Boston Bobby and his band of Beantown soldiers were all convicted of. Marconi was the son of Philly mob soldier Mark Marconi and a nephew to Philly mob soldier Funzi Marconi.

“Gino thought he was protected because of who he was related to,” said one source who was tight with Marconi. “He didn’t think he had to answer to anyone with what he was doing.”

The 54-year old Merlino was indicted earlier this month on more racketeering charges in federal court in New York. He pled not guilty last week and is out on bond awaiting trial, confined to his posh Boca Raton, Florida condo until his trial gets underway. If convicted, taking in account his two prior federal collars and convictions, Merlino would be staring at a stiff prison sentence.

Since being released from his previous federal racketeering beef in early 2011, Merlino has relocated south and according to the indictment and numerous sources, has been running his crime family from afar in the Sunshine State. Sprung from the clink in 2013, Bobby Luisi, Jr. entered the Witness Protection Program after agreeing to testify against a one-time associate back in Boston, moved to Memphis, Tennessee, changed his name to Alonso Esposito, joined a ministry as a pastor and has written a book he’s currently promoting.

Luisi, Jr. was brought up in the Patriarca crime family stationed jointly out of Boston and Providence. He, his dad, Robert (Bobby the Blade) Luisi, Sr., his brother Roman and cousins were on the frontlines of a war that erupted within the Patriarca clan in the late 1980s and lasted until the mid-1990s when tensions peaked at the infamous “99 Restaurant & Pub Massacre” on November 6, 1995 where Bobby Sr., Roman, his first cousin and another man were gunned down while eating in the Charlestown, Massachusetts bar and grill.

With his dad and his younger brother dead and members of the opposing mob faction in Boston wanting him either killed or shelved, Luisi, Jr. sought refuge with the Philadelphia mafia. Introduced to Ralph Natale, Merlino’s predecessor as don in the City of Brotherly Love, by a mutual acquaintance Natale had met in prison, Boston Bobby became property of the Bruno-Scarfo crime family in Philly following a face-to-face meeting at a swanky saloon called the Pub, a favorite Natale haunt during his reign as boss.

After Natale was jailed in the summer of 1998 and Merlino became boss, he inducted Luisi, Jr. and three of his associates, Robert (Uncle Bobby) Guarante, Robert (Bobby the Cook) Gentile and Shawn Vetere into the Philly mob and installed Luisi, Jr. as official capo of his new satellite wing. Per FBI records, imprisoned New England mob power Bobby Carrozza vouched for Luisi, Jr. with both Merlino and Natale, who soon flipped and testified against Merlino at trial.

The Luisi, Jr. crew specialized in drugs and dabbled in bookmaking, numbers running and loansharking. Merlino assigned his then-consigliere George (Georgie Boy) Borgesi to be responsible for Boston Bobby and his band of Beantown drug pushers and wiseguys. One source tells Gangster Report, Borgesi relayed orders from Skinny Joey to Luisi, Jr.’s crew for the Gino Marconi hit. Borgesi was found not guilty of several gangland slayings alongside Merlino at their 2001 trial, however at a pair of future racketeering trials which he walked away from unscathed in 2013 and 2014 respectively, a witness testified that Borgesi had once bragged to him about taking part in 11 mob murders.

The FBI believes Bobby Guarente and Bobby Gentile had access in the past to at least portions of the stolen artwork ripped off in the notorious and still-unsolved 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery – the biggest rare art theft in history, over a dozen pieces taken worth an estimated half-billion dollars back then and even more now. Guarente died of cancer in 2004. Gentile is alive and in prison.

In a recent interview with the Boston Globe, Luisi, Jr. claimed Guarente once bragged to him that the pilfered precious artwork was buried in Florida under a concrete floor at a private residence. Real estate records show Guarente owned a vacation home in Orlando. Guarente’s wife came forward after her husband’s death and told the FBI that prior to him dying Guarente had given three of the boosted paintings to Gentile in the parking lot of a diner in Maine. Authorities are of the opinion that the men that actually pulled off the daring heist on St. Patrick’s Day 26 years ago are dead as well.

More than one FBI informant alleges that paintings from the heist were taken by Skinny Joey Merlino’s Boston crew from Massachusetts to Philadelphia in an attempt to get the artwork appraised and find potential buyers on the black market. Gentile was caught possessing a hand-written list of the stolen artwork with corresponding anticipated black market values for each piece.

The post Philly Godfather ‘Skinny Joey’ Merlino Dodged A Bullet (Or Two) When Bobby Luisi Decided Not To Testify Against Him In 2000s appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Ten years ago this week Chicago mob underboss Anthony (Little Tony) Zizzo disappeared never to be seen again in the wake of an alleged dispute with the Outfit’s newly-appointed acting boss. Zizzo vanished on the afternoon of August 31, 2006 on his way to a suspected sit down on Rush Street, downtown Chicago’s primary nightlife district and long an area tied to mafia activity in the Windy City.

The 71-year old Little Tony is presumed slain, his hit dubbed by many in the local underworld “housecleaning” by Michael (Fat Mike) Sarno following him becoming the Outfit’s day-to-day don upon the incarceration of his predecessor, Zizzo’s close friend and gangland confidant James (Jimmy the Man) Marcello, in the historic Operation Family Secrets case the year before. Informants have told the FBI that shortly after Marcello got locked up in April 2005, Zizzo, his No. 2-in-charge, and Sarno, his replacement, had a falling out over mob-controlled video-poker machine routes.

The sit down Little Tony thought he was headed to the day he went missing, according to these informants, was purportedly to resolve the situation with Sarno. Instead, the Outfit underboss was killed.

As first reported by award-winning Chicago investigative journalist Chuck Goudie of ABC7 television news on Wednesday, the FBI in Illinois is actively seeking fresh tips on the Zizzo case and is offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest. Zizzo’s silver-colored Jeep Grand Cherokee was found abandoned in a Melrose Park restaurant parking lot.

Jimmy Marcello and Tony Zizzo were convicted together in a racketeering case in the 1990s. When they emerged from prison in the early 2000s, they shot to the top of the Outfit pecking order, running daily affairs for the crime family on behalf of Godfather John (Johnny No Nose) DiFronzo. While Marcello was caught up in the Family Secrets case (14 mobsters and mob associates indicted, 18 murders charged) in the spring of 2005, Zizzo was not. Marcello’s absence on the street left Little Tony unprotected.

The FBI names Fat Mike Sarno, Outfit elder stateseman Joseph (Joe the Builder) Andriacchi and current Chicago mob street boss and Grand Avenue crew capo Albert (Albie the Falcon) Vena as “persons of interest” in its’ Zizzo homicide probe. Sarno is in prison on a 2010 extortion conviction. Andriacchi, 83, has overseen Outfit interests on Rush Street for years and can frequently be seen holding court at a number of his favorite haunts like Carmine’s, Rosebud, Gibson’s and Tavern on Rush. Vena, 67, is considered the “most dangerous person in Chicago” by many in law enforcement and has allegedly been the focus of a separate federal inquiry into racketeering on the Windy City’s Westside for the last few years.

According to one “insider’s account,” Vena lured Zizzo to what he thought was going to be a sit down lunch with Sarno mediated by Andriacchi at a ritzy Rush Street restaurant and used it as a way to orchestrate his slaying. Vena beat a murder rap at trial back in 1995.

John DiFronzo, 87, is retired these days, his Outfit portfolio being looked after by his younger brother and Elmwood Park capo, Peter (Greedy Petey) DiFronzo. Per sources, the modern-day Chicago mob hierarchy consists of Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis as acting boss, Vena as his street boss, Sarno’s former second-in-command Salvatore (Sally Cards) Cataudella holding things down as underboss and DiFronzo family confidant Marco (The Mover) D’Amico performing advisory duties as consigliere.

Andriacchi, per these sources, is described as a “super consigliere,” and popped out of semi-retirement in recent years to help ease the transition from Sarno to DeLaurentis in 2012. In years past, Joe the Builder, sometimes referred to on the street as “Joe the Sledgehammer” has served as capo of the now-defunct Northside crew, Outfit underboss and Outfit street boss.

“Little Tony” Zizzo

The post ‘Little Tony’s’ Last Lunch Date: Windy City Mafia Chieftain’s Murder Still On The Minds Of Investigators A Decade Later appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Grab a look at this new Gangster Report mini-documentary on the Kronk Boxing Drug Case of the early 1990s and the government’s use of controversial DEA informant Andrew Chambers to get the conviction watch here.

The post Gangster Report Mini-Doc: The Kronk Boxing Drug Case Was Achieved With Help Of Suspect DEA Snitch appeared first on The Gangster Report.

In the wake of the death of Chicago mob street boss John (Johnny Apes) Monteleone in January 2001, the upper echelons of the Outfit fractured, resulting in tensions that didn’t completely seize until a half-decade later with the kidnapping and murder of crime family underboss Anthony (Little Tony) Zizzo in the late summer of 2006. The 71-year old Zizzo disappeared 10 years ago last week on his way to a lunch-meeting downtown on Rush Street he thought was to resolve the long-simmering dispute. He was last seen by his wife leaving his Westmont home on the afternoon of August 31, 2006.

Monteleone was the Outfit’s Southside capo and overall day-to-day boss from 1993 until he died of natural causes in 2001 at the age of 77. His passing set off fireworks within the Chicago mob’s Cicero crew. Monteleone’s rackets spanned the Windy City’s Southside and Westside suburbs, home to the Outfit’s Cicero crew, the local mafia’s “county seat” for decades prior to Monteleone assumed power in the early 1990s. As soon as the heavily-respected Johnny Apes died at the beginning of the New Millennium, the Cicero regime got the nod to take over the syndicate again, per an internal Chicago Crime Commission report dated 2009.

The pressing question became what part of the Cicero crew was the Chicago mob’s new leader going to come from? Battle lines were formed, according to the CCC report, pitting Little Tony Zizzo and his best friend James (Jimmy the Man) Marcello against Michael (Fat Mike) Sarno. At the time of Monteleone’s death, Sarno was on the streets, while Marcello and Zizzo were on the verge of being released from federal prison.

“After Monteleone was gone, there were two sides within the Cicero group jockeying for control,” recalled one retired FBI agent. “It got pretty heated. Johnny Apes was the glue in that Borgata for a while. His absence was felt.”

Johnny Apes’ reign through most of the 1990s was relatively peaceful. Compared to the decades of the past in the Windy City, the 90s was a veritable love fest with minimal mob carnage.

“Johnny Apes” Monteleone

Marcello and Zizzo spawned from the wing of the Cicero crew once belonging to former Outfit don Sam (Wings) Carlisi. Sarno hailed from the wing of the crew once headed by former underboss Ernest (Rocky) Infelise. All three were busted for racketeering offenses in the 1990s, Sarno going down with Infelise and his brigade of menacing foot soldiers known jokingly as the “Good Ship Lollipop” in 1990 and Marcello and Zizzo being brought down alongside Carlisi in a December 1992 indictment.

Carlisi died in prison of cancer in 1997. Infelise also died behind bars of natural causes (2005).

The indictment described Marcello as Carlisi’s second-in-command and Zizzo his No. 3 in charge. Both Marcello and Zizzo came from formidable Midwest mafia lineages – Marcello’s dad was slain Outfit loan shark Sam (Sammy Big Eyes) Marcello, Zizzo’s father was Frank (Frankie Cease) Zizzo, a Chitown mafia sub-unit chief tasked with overseeing gambling and juice loans in Northwest Indiana. Jimmy Marcello, per FBI informants, “made his bones” in the mob in the late 1970s by killing the debtor that killed his dad. Marcello and Little Tony Zizzo were inducted into the Outfit in the same 1983 making ceremony, according to FBI documents.

Fat Mike Sarno got out of prison in the fall of 1999 and quickly reestablished him as an up-and-coming player on the street in Cicero. Zizzo walked free on October 24, 2001. By the end of the next month violence would breakout.

Immediately following Johnny Monteleone’s death earlier in the year, Zizzo and Marcello sought to assert their authority on the outside from behind bars, dispatching their top muscle, the highly-feared Anthony (Tony the Hatchet) Chiaramonti to all the other Outfit heavyweights to let everyone know the crime family’s acting boss and acting underboss positions belonged to them, clearly marking their territory.

Some didn’t listen.

Marcello still had another two years to serve, but knew Zizzo was about to be released and would hold the fort down in his place. Less than a month after Zizzo was sprung from the joint, Chiaramonte was murdered. Informants have told law enforcement, Sarno played a role in setting up the hit contract.

Chiaramonti had run all Sam Carlisi’s loansharking operations and was known as a wildcard of a gangster with a hair-trigger temper, but he was well liked. He was busted with Carlisi, Marcello, Zizzo and others in 1992 and went to prison for six years, reemerging on the streets in 1998, where he was rumored to be difficult to keep a lid on, especially in the aftermath of Monteleone’s death. Tony the Hatchet, nicknamed for his weapon of choice on collection jobs, was rumored to be openly campaigning for stewardship of Monteleone’s Southside crew. Even Marcello and Zizzo had trouble keeping Chiaramonte in check.

According to sources with knowledge of the hit, Sarno pounced, taking advantage of the opportunity to leverage the situation to his advantage, using it as a chance to get rid of his competition’s main enforcer. Tony the Hatchet didn’t help his cause when he got into a public shouting and pushing match with notorious Outfit strong arm and reputed assassin Francis (Frank the German) Schweihs in the days before his slaying on the afternoon of November 15 2001 witnessed by an FBI surveillance team outside a Cicero diner.

Schweihs, who represented the crime family’s Grand Avenue crew on the city’s Westside, was meeting with Chiaramonte to instruct him to “calm down, stop stepping on everybody’s toes, wait until Jimmy (Marcello) comes home in two years and you’ll get what’s coming to you,” per one source. Frank the German was accompanied to his lunch meeting with Chiaramonte by Jimmy Marcello’s half-brother Michael (Big Mickey) Marcello of the Cicero crew.

Chiaramonte lasted exactly another week. Tony the Hatchet was killed on November 22, 2001, Thanksgiving evening, felled by five gun shots at close range in the vestibule of suburban Chicago fast food restaurant (Brown’s Chicken). Authorities believe Chiaramonte was gunned down by Cicero crew enforcer Anthony (Tough Tony) Calabrese, currently incarcerated for armed robbery. Calabrese’s partner-in-crime, Bobby Cooper turned witness for the government and admitted to being the getaway driver in the Tony the Hatchet hit.

Cooper and Calabrese reported to Sarno and fellow Cicero crew lieutenant James (Jimmy I) Inendino, per the 2009 CCC report. Jimmy I had been locked up on racketeering charges the previous summer. More recently, he’s been tagged by law enforcement as capo of the Cicero crew.

Multiple sources claim in the weeks after Jimmy Marcello got out of prison in the spring of 2003 he and Little Tony Zizzo attended a sit down with Fat Mike Sarno mediated by the Outfit’s then-boss and underboss John (Johnny No Nose) DiFronzo and Joseph (Joe the Builder) Andriacchi, respectively, which temporarily quelled the beef. Marcello became the Chicago mob’s acting boss and Zizzo, his acting underboss. Sarno was capo of Cicero, mafia territory settled by Al Capone himself back during Prohibition in the 1920s.

DiFronzo still reigns as the overall Godfather of the mafia in the Windy City, but at 88 years old he’s basically retired. Andriacchi, 83, remains semi-active in an advisory capacity, per sources.

Long groomed for the throne, Marcello’s reign atop the Outfit was short lived. He was indicted with his younger brother “Big Mickey” and “Frank the German” Schweihs and 15 others in the epic Operation Family Secrets case in April 2005. Schweihs died of cancer before he reached trial. Jimmy Marcello was convicted of murder at trial in 2007 in connection with the infamous Spilotro brothers’ slayings back in 1986 (depicted at the end of the Martin Scorsese-helmed movie Casino).

Marcello lured the Outfit’s Las Vegas point man Anthony (Tony the Ant) Spilotro and his baby brother and protégé Michael to their slaughter, driving them to the Southside residence of a local mobster for what they were told was going to be a making ceremony for Michael and promotion to capo for Tony, however in fact was a kill party – the Spilotro brothers were heinously beaten, stomped and strangled to death in a Bensenville basement by more than a half-dozen Outfit hitmen as a group of Chicago mob dignitaries led by Carlisi watched on with bloodlust and glee.

Informants tab DiFronzo as the coordinator of the Spilotros double homicide, given the assignment by Carlisi, who was the Outfit’s underboss then. DiFronzo was never charged despite Chicago mob turncoat and hitman and Family Secrets star witness Nick (Nicky Slim) Calabrese fingering him as being present at the hit and having organized all the specifics of the murder conspiracy from its’ inception months earlier.

Little Tony Zizzo dodged the Family Secrets bust. He was passed over for acting boss though when Marcello got locked up in favor of Sarno and ill will between the pair persisted. Things are said to have come to a head over video-poker machine routs. With Tony the Hatchet long gone and Jimmy the Man playing his poker in the Big House, Zizzo had nobody watching his back.

Again, according to sources, Fat Mike Sarno used the situation to his advantage, convincing syndicate elder statesmen DiFronzo and Andriacchi that Little Tony had to go. His body has never been uncovered and nobody has ever been charged in Zizzo’s kidnapping and murder  The FBI has named Sarno, Andriacchi and Outfit Grand Avenue crew capo Albert (Albie the Falcon) Vena as suspects in the ongoing Zizzo homicide inquiry.

“Mikey (Sarno) is a savvy motherfucker,” one source tied to Sarno remarked. “With that entire Carlisi crew (Zizzo, Chiaramonte and Marcello) off the map, he had nobody to challenge him, he could put in his own people. He took care of Little Tony and the Hatchet and the G (the government) did him a favor by swooping up Jimmy (Marcello). Once Little Tony was out of the way, Mikey’s path was cleared. Jimmy could only do so much staring at a life sentence in the can and a big, high profile trial coming up (the 2007 Family Secrets trial). In a cut throat world, he cut enough throats to take the top seat. But shit, he still had a target on his back and in this life you can only stay on top for so long.”

Sarno, 58, was convicted of extortion in 2010, sentenced to 25 years in priso, where he sits today. The 83-year old Andriacchi allegedly serves as a trusted advisor to Sarno’s reputed successor as acting boss, Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis out of the Cicero crew’s Lake County branch. Vena, 67, beat murder charges at a trial 21 years ago and is considered by many “the most dangerous man in Chicago.” One popular theory explored by investigators in the Zizzo case is that Little Tony was told by Vena that he was being taken to a sit down with Sarno to be arbitrated by Andriacchi at a unknown location on Rush Street and killed by Vena and others instead.

Andriacchi and Vena are close friends – Vena rose through the ranks of the Chicago underworld in the 1970s and 80s as a go-to collector for the Outfit’s now-defunct Northside crew which Joe the Builder was a leader of. For years, Andriacchi has headquartered his affairs in the Windy City’s trendy Rush Street restaurant and entertainment district. When Andriacchi went from capo to underboss in the late 1990s, the Northside crew was merged with the near-Westside-based Grand Avenue crew.

Even though he wasn’t arrested with Zizzo, Marcello and Carlisi in 1992, Vena’s mentioned more than once in their indictment. Carlisi, per the indictment, through a set of intermediaries (Zizzo and Marcello being two of them) assigned Vena to firebomb a movie theatre that was refusing to join the mob-influenced projectionist union and to an attempted murder conspiracy of a local wiseguy on thin ice with Outfit administrators. Neither the firebombing attack nor the proposed hit contract were carried out.

The post Absence Of ‘Johnny Apes’ Sent Chicago Outfit Into Shaky Era In First Half Of 2000s, Zizzo, Chiaramonte Hits Followed appeared first on The Gangster Report.

By SCOTT M. BURNSTEIN – Less than two weeks after Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced she would rethink her office’s longstanding opposition to paroling former teenage drug dealer and underage federal informant Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe, clips from an upcoming documentary film on Wershe have been released featuring a notorious convicted hit man claiming Gil Hill, the recently-deceased former Detroit City Council President and one-time head of the Detroit Police Department’s homicide division, offered him $125,000 to murder Wershe in 1987.

In an interview for Christopher Shawn Rech’s new documentary 650 Lifer – The Legend of White Boy Rick, one-time prolific street assassin and member of the infamous Best Friends gang, Nate (Boone) Craft, a man who admitted in court to killing 30 people, says he was given three separate murder contracts on Wershe in 1987, one of which came directly from Hill (the other two from fellow drug chiefs). Craft testified against leaders of the Best Friends and did 17 years behind bars. WDIV Channel 4, the NBC television affiliate in Detroit will show the clip of Craft implicating Hill in a Wershe murder plot tonight.

Rech’s film will be released next year. Two major Hollywood studios intend on making movies based on Wershe’s life.

Worthy issued a statement to the media late last month saying she plans on reviewing Wershe’s case in light of studying other similar juvenile lifer cases. She blocked Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Diane Hathaway’s decision to resentence and release Wershe last fall by taking the resentencing order to the Michigan Court of Appeals, which overruled Hathaway.

Wershe, 47, is the longest-serving non-violent offender in the state of Michigan’s Department of Corrections, incarcerated on a life prison sentence stemming from a routine traffic stop on the eastside of Detroit in May 1987 where police found cocaine buried under a nearby porch when he was 17 years old. He was living in Southfield at the corner of 11 Mile Road and Evergreen at the time of his arrest. The law he was sentenced under was tossed off the books in 1998. His next chance for parole is in December 2017.

Over the past decade, a number of ex-FBI agents and Detroit Police Officers have come forward and admitted they recruited Wershe out of the eighth grade at just 14 as part of federal narcotics task force and began paying him to infiltrate eastside Detroit drug gangs. The relationship between Wershe and the government lasted for two years.

Hill died of natural causes in February, best known nationally as a co-star with actor Eddie Murphy in his three Beverly Hills Cop movies of the 1980s. He was 84 and had staged an unsuccessful bid to become Mayor of Detroit in 2001. During his work with the government as a teen, Wershe told the FBI that Hill took a payoff to hinder the homicide probe in the accidental murder of a 13-year old boy in a drive-by shooting in 1985. Steadfast in his denial of the allegation, Hill was investigated, but never charged with any wrongdoing.

Craft claims in the years that followed Hill took him to Belle Isle and solicited him to kill Wershe. According to Craft, Hill offered him more than two drug kingpins did to carry out the murder.

“The most I was ever offered to kill White Boy Rick was $125,000 and that was from Gil, from Gil Hill..….. he decided (Wershe) knew too much about him, the mayor, the chief of police and those kind of people,” one clip of the documentary shows him saying.

As a teenager on the street, Wershe dated Mayor Coleman Young’s niece. While in prison, Wershe helped the FBI build a historic corrupt cop case in Detroit that came down in 1992. Craft admits to trying to complete the contract on Wershe’s life on numerous occasions to no avail. Wershe and Craft made peace while locked up together in the Witness Protection Program in the 1990s. Craft attended Wershe’s resentencing hearing last year to show his support.

Nate “Boone” Craft

The post New Doc: Gil Hill Wanted White Boy Rick Dead, Gave Contract To Seasoned Motown Hit Man According To Intv. appeared first on The Gangster Report.

“American Dope” is a 7 part docu-series presented by Al Profit & Gangster Report.

Episode 1: Dope in America

Episode 2: The French Connection

Episode 3: Enlightenment & Control

Episode 3: Black Ceasars

Episode 4: Cocaine Condor

Episode 5: City of Dope

Episode 7: The New Dope Game

The post American Dope appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Raging Bull himself, Jake LaMotta, was wined and dined by the Motown mafia whenever he was town to fight in Detroit during his storied boxing career, recalled recently-deceased boxing manager and mob associate Billy Gutz in an interview conducted in the latter years of his life. A driver and bodyguard for Detroit mob captain Salvatore (Little Sammy) Finazzo in the 1950s and 60s before going on to train and manage a pair of world-champion pugilists in the 1980s and 90s, Gutz (originally “Gutzi,” pronounced GOOT-SEE) died earlier this month at age 86.

“If Jake was in Detroit fighting, the boys in the Outfit (the mob) laid out the red carpet for him, we’re talking huge spreads for every meal,” Gutz remembered. “We’d all be over at Sammy Finazzo’s place or his girlfriend’s place, partying, drinking, eating, laughing, busting balls. Those were good times.”

LaMotta, the subject of the classic American sports film Raging Bull directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, is still alive at 95. De Niro won the Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of the brooding, quick-tempered LaMotta, a confessed associate or organized crime and prototypical brawler during his days in the ring. In November 1947, LaMotta admittedly took a dive for the mob in his fight against Billy Fox at Madison Square Garden in New York. Less than two years later, LaMotta won the world middleweight crown with a tenth-round knockout of Frenchman Marcel Cerdan in Detroit at the old, long-since torn-down Olympia Stadium.

“Just like you saw in the movie, Jake had a wicked streak in him, he could go from 0-to-100 miles an hour in two seconds and you didn’t know why, it would be for the most ridiculous things” Gutz said. “One night, we’re out for dinner at this place, this whole crew of wiseguys at the table and Jake goes nuts because his steak was overcooked. I thought he was gonna tear the waiter’s heart out, grab the guy by the neck or something, it was like someone insulted his mother. He was off the wall, screaming, hollering, getting all worked up. Sammy finally had to tell him to knock it off he was causing a scene.”

The city of Detroit served as the Midwest hub of the pro fight game in the United States in the mid-to-late 20^th Century. LaMotta fought in Detroit at the Olympia on 19 separate occasions. He retired in 1954 with an 83-19 record.

Salvatore Finazzo (right w/ glasses) in 1958.

Little Sammy Finazzo, a one-time bootlegger and alleged triggerman in a string of early-century gangland slayings, ran all of boxing in Michigan from the 1940s well into the 1970s. Finazzo headquartered his activities out of the Motor City Boxing Gym and oversaw a crew of racketeers for the Detroit mob, sometimes referred to as the Tocco-Zerilli crime family.

Gutz was Finazzo’s buffer to the boxing world for a good chunk of his reign as capo. By the 1980s, though, Little Sammy (d. 1994) found himself imprisoned on bribery and conspiracy charges and Gutz gravitated towards managing and training fighters on the up-and-up. Gutz steered Lindell Holmes to a super middleweight title in 1990 and Bernard (The Bull) Benton to a cruiserweight crown in 1985. He also went on to train others, including Floyd Mayweather, Sr., current world-champion Floyd (Money) Mayweather, Jr.’s father, and accomplished lightweight-contender Greg (The Candy Man) Coverson.

The post Jake LaMotta Often Rubbed Shoulders With Detroit Mob In Fight Career, Gutz Recollected Specifics appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Normally, mob memoirs or first-hand tales of organized crime are told by washed up or turncoat Mafiosi hoping to make a fast buck and get one last jolt of fame before they kick. Bugs, Bull & Rats – An Insider’s Account of How The Mob Self-Destructed, recently released by Brighton Publishing, is as far away from a run-of-the-mill book about the mafia as possible. It’s written by an active member of one of New York’s ‘Five Families’ under the alias Frank Palmeri.

Unlike almost every other mobster to pen a book, Palmeri has never cooperated with the government. He says he was so disgusted at what the Italian mafia in the United States had become when he emerged from a lengthy prison sentence, he felt compelled to speak out against the “bugs and rats” that had transformed the La Cosa Nostra organization he joined with pride and honor in the 1970s into its’ current bunker state due to a deluge of informants and witnesses.

Palmeri’s book isn’t a traditional underworld autobiography. Bugs, Bulls & Rats is packaged as a series of intriguing insider anecdotes, touching on all five NYC crime families and featuring Palmeri giving a play-by-play analysis on certain key points in mob history. One eerily foreshadowing moment Palmeri recounts involves a conversation between legendary Genovese crime family boss Vincent (The Chin) Gigante and Bonanno crime family capo and insurgent faction leader Alphonse (Sonny Red) Indelicato in 1981 where Indelicato tried to argue with Gigante and Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano over their demand that he make peace with his rivals in the Bonanno clan.

“You don’t understand, if you go to war, we’ll kill all of you on the spot, end of story,” Gigante warned Sonny Red.

Indelicato and his fellow renegade capos failed to listen to Gigante and just as the Chin had told him, they all wound up dead – viciously slain in the infamous Three Captains Hit dramatized on the silver screen in the 1997 film Donnie Brasco. Gigante was convicted of eight counts of racketeering and conspiracy in July 1997, just four months after Donnie Brasco, starring Johnny Depp and Godfather saga alums Al Pacino and Bruno Kirby hit theatres.

According to Palmeri and most mob experts and historians, the Genovese Family has always been the gold standard.

“They run the show,” he said. “As a family, they dictate the pace, everyone follows their lead, that’s how its been for years” he said.

Liborio (Barney) Bellomo, 59, is alleged to be the don of the Genovese syndicate in 2016. He was released from federal prison in 2008 after a 12-year stint on two separate racketeering convictions and one for mail fraud that ran concurrently.

Palmeri grew up in Brooklyn and admits to being “made” into the mafia in the late 1970s as part of a wave of new initiates brought in by all five traditional NYC mob families after a multi-year embargo on inductions was lifted.

“That was a great time (for the mob), there was a lot of money for everybody, a lot of prosperity” said Palmeri of the era in which he was inducted into La Cosa Nostra.

By the 1990s, informants were ravishing the mob across the nation. Palmeri was indicted for racketeering in the early 2000s, copped a plea and did a decade in the can.

“It was already over by the time I went to prison in 2001, the rats were everywhere, guys wearing wires all over the place” he said. “These type of men are born that way. They don’t just become rats. They were like that from the start,”

Admittedly, Palmeri is no saint. He’s back to making his living on the street, but doesn’t seem contented, rather resigned.

“You change with the times…. it’s a tough life to lead,” he said.

This is a quick, interesting read. At less than 200 pages, it gets straight to the point and hits its’ target, giving fresh perspective to some old, yet-still fascinating terrain, while throwing in never-before-revealed details and specifics of life at the higher levels of the mafia in New York during the late 20th Century all fans of the genre will appreciate. Gangster Report recommends Bugs, Bull & Rats for every mob-book aficionado’s library.

You can purchase a hard copy or ebook copy of Bugs, Bull & Rats here.

The post The Insider: Active New York Wiseguy Gives His Two Cents On Today’s American Mafia In New Book appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Newly-filed documents in the Stevie DiSarro murder case sheds light on who exactly Patriarca crime family associate Paul Weadick is. DiSarro, a Boston nightclub impresario and FBI informant, was murdered on May 10, 1993. His remains were finally unearthed back in the spring in Rhode Island. Weadick, former New England mob boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme, and Salemme’s former underboss Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca, were all indicted in federal court in Massachusetts on charges related to the DiSarro slaying this past summer. DiSarro can be seen in this article’s cover image.

Cadillac Frank Salemme, 83 and living in the Witness Protection Program at the time of his arrest in August, and Weadick, 61 and already a convicted murderer, were arraigned earlier this month. Both have pled not guilty. The 71-year old Bobby the Cigar DeLuca, like Salemme living under an assumed identity in the Witness Protection Program when he was brought into custody (at the end of July on perjury and obstruction charges), is cooperating with authorities.

Employed by a mobbed-up construction and real-estate management company in Boston, Weadick was close friends with Cadillac Frank’s now-deceased son, Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr. in the late 1980s and first part of the 1990s. An order filed in court last week by prosecutors seeking to detain Weadick without bail shows that Weadick works for Modica Associates owned by David Modica, a general contractor and builder connected to the highest levels of the mafia in Beantown, per federal wiretaps.

In 1982, Weadick was convicted of second degree murder in the Joe Mistretta homicide and served seven years behind bars. Upon his release from prison, Weadick went to work for Stevie DiSarro at the Channel in South Boston, a nightclub DiSarro and the Salemmes were partners in. Also partners with DiSarro and the Salemmes in the Channel were notorious “Southie” crime lords James (Whitey) Bulger and Stephen (Stevie the Rifleman) Flemmi of the mostly-Irish and extremely vicious Winter Hill Gang. Weadick’s detention memo claims Bulger and Flemmi were cut in for a piece of the club after providing operating permits and a liquor license for the establishment following its’ purchase.

Cadillac Frank suspected DiSarro of skimming cash from the club’s coffers and informing on him to the FBI and IRS, states the detention memo, and told his then-second in command, Bobby DeLuca, he intended to kill DiSarro and was going to have “Frankie Boy take care of it.” DeLuca originally flipped in 2011, but denied any knowledge of the DiSarro hit in his initial debriefing sessions. Salemme pled guilty in 2008 to lying in his 1999 debriefing when he first flipped about his knowledge of DiSarro’s murder – he falsely implicated another mobster (Nicky Bianco) for ordering the hit.

According to this summer’s indictment, DiSarro, 43, was strangled to death in the spring of 1993 by Frankie Boy Salemme, Jr. in the kitchen of the Salemme family home in swanky Sharon, Massachusetts as Weadick held DiSarro’s legs and Cadillac Frank and his baby brother John (Action Jack) Salemme watched on. Jack Salemme, Cadillac Frank’s acting boss at times during his reign, hasn’t been charged and its unknown if he will be. Salemme, Jr. died of complications arising from the AIDS virus in 1995.

Per the detention memo, DeLuca admits to burying DiSarro’s body at a construction site of what became a converted mill property in Providence on Salemme’s request. DeLuca, according to his statements, took possession of DiSarro’s corpse in Rhode Island delivered to him by Cadillac Frank and his brother Jack. The converted mill was owned by DeLuca’s then-associate and crew member Billy Ricci, who got busted in a drug conspiracy case at the beginning of the year and cut a deal with prosecutors pointing them to DiSarro’s burial site.

DiSarro was picked up from his house the day he was killed by Salemme, Jr. in Salemme. Jr.’s girlfriend’s red-colored Jeep Grand Cherokee, according to Weadick’s detention memo. Cadillac Frank is alleged to have told both DeLuca and Stevie Flemmi that Salemme Jr. garroted DiSarro to death as Weadick held him still. Flemmi, a government cooperator since 2003, admitted in his FBI debriefing over a dozen years ago that he accidentally walked in on Salemme. Jr. and a man he didn’t recognize strangling DiSarro inside Cadillac Frank’s kitchen and that Cadillac Frank claimed to have witnessed DiSarro meeting with the FBI at a local shopping mall.

Weadick was arrested in the Joe Mistretta murder in 1982 with Mistretta’s blood literally on his hands. Mistretta’s body was found in the trunk of his car parked outside of Weadick’s home where he had been slain. Weadick’s current employer David Modica is linked by federal officials to Carmen (The Big Cheese) DiNunzio, the Patriarca clan’s reputed underboss and acting boss as well as DiNunzio’s younger, less-rotund brother, Anthony, incarcerated on an extortion collar and the New England mob’s day-to-day don from 2009 to 2012.

The post Who Is Paul Weadick? Detention Memo Gives Insight On New England Mafia Associate, Salemme Family Friend appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Aging New England mobster Joseph (Joe the Bishop) Achille is the Patriarca crime family’s new consigliere, according to sources in law enforcement. The 80-year old Achille, per these sources, is the go-to advisor these days for New England mafia acting boss Carmen (The Big Cheese) DiNunzio and acting underboss Matthew (Good-Looking Matty) Guglielmetti. Guglierlmetti got a promotion from capo to acting second-in-command last year, sources claim.

“Joe Achille and Matty Guglielmetti have had their status on the streets upped in the past year, they’re administrating so to speak,” one state police officer said. “People trust and fear Joe. He’s nobody to trifle with. He goes way back to the ‘Old Man’ Patriarca days. He knows the unions, he knows all the angles on the rackets. He has a lot of respect.”

DiNunzio and Guglielmetti were both released from federal prison stretches for racketeering-related offenses in recent years – the Big Cheese, 59, came out of the can in the winter of 2015, Good Looking Matty, 67, was sprung from the clink in the summer of 2014. Achille did just over a year of prison time in the mid-2000s for heading a multi-million dollar per year bookmaking operation (between November 2004 and February 2005 the Achille-led sports book cleared a half-mil in profits).

The case against Achille filed in the winter of 2005 revealed allegations of him ordering one of his sons to shoot a pair of labor-union rivals in the kneecaps at a construction site. Achille and his two sons, David and Joe Jr. have long been tied to labor racketeering. Joe the Bishop takes over a No. 3 position in the organization vacated by Anthony (Ponytail Tony) Parrillo, who was sent to prison in the spring on felony assault charges.

Parrillo, Guglielmetti and Achille are from the Providence, Rhode Island faction of the Patriarca clan. DiNunzio represents Boston, as does the crime family’s reputed 82-year old Godfather Pete (The Crazy Horse) Limone, living out his final gangland years in semi-retirement after serving three decades in the pen for a murder he didn’t commit. Limone is alleged to have replaced Providence-based boss Luigi (Baby Shacks) Manocchio atop the New England mob back in 2009 upon Manocchio reportedly voluntarily relinquishing his post and stepping down.

Achille was one of Manocchio’s main lieutenants during his peaceful 13-year reign, headquartering his activities on the Northside of Providence, according to Massachusetts State Police records.Television cameras were on hand at Rhode Island State Superior Court in downtown Providence two years ago to catch Joe the Bishop attending a sentencing hearing for his friend and fellow Manocchio capo and disciple Eddie Lato.

DiNunzio was Baby Shacks’ second-in-charge from 2004 forward. He allegedly also takes counsel from East Boston mob powers Bobby Carrozza and Frederick (Freddie the Neighbor) Simone, per sources in law enforcement, as well as Manocchio himself, currently living back in Federal Hill (Providence’s Little Italy neighborhood) following a near five-year prison term for extorting local strip clubs.

Joe “The Bishop” Achille

The post GR SOURCES: Rhode Island Goodfella “Joe The Bishop” Gets Nod As New England Mob Consigliere appeared first on The Gangster Report.

A federal court judge in Boston denied bail to New England mob associate Paul (Paulie the Plumber) Weadick this week in the Stevie DiSarro murder case, citing his past violent behavior as means of concluding that he would “pose a risk to the public and the witnesses in the case.” Specifically, the judge is referring to the 61-year old Weadick’s prior conviction for second-degree murder. Paulie the Plumber pled guilty to manslaughter charges in the gruesome 1982 gangland slaying of fellow mob associate Joe Mistretta. A blood-soaked Weadick was arrested while in the process of cleaning up the Mistretta murder scene at his own residence in Burlington, Massachusetts, Mistretta’s body “trunk music” less than a hundred feet away outside.

Earlier this month, Weadick was arraigned alongside former Patriarca crime family boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme in the DiSarro homicide, which took place in the spring of 1993. They’ve both pled not guilty to the charges and will await trial behind bars.

Authorities believe Cadillac Frank’s son, Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr. strangled DiSarro to death as Weadick helped him by holding their victim’s legs and Cadillac Frank and his brother, Jack, looked on – Jack Salemme hasn’t been charged. DiSarro, 43, was the Salemmes’ partner and front man in a South Boston nightclub called the Channel where Weadick got a job after getting out of prison for his role in the Mistretta hit.

The Salemmes suspected correctly that DiSarro was cooperating with the FBI. Salemme, Jr. died of natural causes (complications via the AIDS virus) two years later. Cadillac Frank was indicted in 1995 in the months preceding his son and co-defendant’s death and eventually became an FBI informant himself and entered the Witness Protection Program.

Salemme, 83 and living under an assumed identity in Atlanta at the time the DiSarro indictment dropped in August, admitted to lying to authorities in his 1999 debriefing sessions regarding his knowledge of DiSarro’s murder and pled guilty to perjury and obstruction of justice charges in 2008. DiSarro’s remains were dug up in March behind a converted mill in Providence, Rhode Island. Witnesses will testify that Cadillac Frank drove DiSarro’s body from Massachusetts to Rhode Island to be buried.

Weadick and Salemme, Jr. were good friends and frequent social companions. Cadillac Frank and Jack Salemme grew up with and were closely aligned with ruthless Boston Irish mob boss James (Whitey) Bulger, who led what was known as the Winter Hill Gang out of “Southie,” the same neighborhood the Channel was located in, and was a longtime top-secret informant for the FBI. The Salemme brothers are half Irish themselves and fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Bulger in the city’s bloody Irish mob war of the 1960s and early 1970s.

According to Massachusetts State Police records, Weadick was used as one of the primary go-betweens for Salemme’s regime and the Bulger camp in the first half of the 1990s, the point in time that Cadillac Frank was at his most powerful. Bulger owned a percentage of the Channel nightclub with DiSarro and the Salemmes. Bulger’s right-hand man Stephen (Stevie the Rifleman) Flemmi told the FBI when he flipped over a decade ago that he accidentally walked in on DiSarro being killed at the Salemme family homestead in posh Sharon, Massachusetts on the afternoon of May 10, 1993.

Exclusive Gangster Sources claim Joe Mistretta was connected to both Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang and Cadillac Frank’s faction of the Boston Italian mafia and fell out of favor with them in the early 1980s. Weadick and another Bulger associate named James Haney lured Mistretta to Weadick’s house in Burlington, a suburb of Boston (the same city where Mistretta lived) and murdered him there.

Although Cadillac Frank was away in prison serving a 15-year sentence for a car-bomb attack on a underworld turncoat’s attorney when Mistretta was killed, Bulger was on the ascent, highly active and as homicidal as ever in the early 1980s. The iconic Bulger, 87, is prison for a series of murder and racketeering offenses he was found guilty of at trial in 2013 after 16 years on the run from the law.

Per court documents, Haney shot Mistretta multiple times in the head and then Haney and Weadick stuffed his body in the trunk of Mistretta’s car, parked outside the Weadick residence. As Weadick and Haney were inside the home cleaning up all the carnage the hit left behind, a neighbor noticed blood dripping from Mistretta’s trunk and called the police. Haney, a convicted armed robber, fled. Weadick told responding officers the blood on his hands and clothes came from him having killed a pig for dinner. He got a ten-year sentence after his manslaughter plea and did seven, walking free in 1989.

More recently, Weadick has been employed as a plumber at Modica Associates, a real estate management firm and general contractor owned by reputed mob associate, David Modica. FBI surveillance logs from the mid-2000s paint Modica a close confidant to the Boston North End-based DiNunzio brothers, Carmen and Anthony, the New England mafia’s current and former acting boss, respectively.

Anthony DiNunzio, 57, is in prison for extortion and won’t see daylight for another year and a half. Carmen DiNunzio, 59, emerged from a prison stint for racketeering early last year.

The post N.E. Mafia Associate Will Keep Cooling His Heels Behind Bars ‘Til Trial, Bail Request Blocked Due To ’82 Boston Mob Murder Conviction appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Chicago mob enforcer Giovanni (Big John) Fecarotta was executed 30 years ago this week, his slaying setting off a chain of events eventually resulting in the landmark Operation Family Secrets case that charged 14 Windy City wiseguys with 18 gangland homicides in the mid-2000s and wound up taking down a number of key Outfit powers. The 58-year old Fecarotta was shot to death by Outfit hit man Nicholas (Nicky Slim) Calabrese in front of a Northside Chicago bingo hall on September 14, 1986 after upsetting his superiors in the mafia with his sloppy work and increasing lapses in judgement.

Wounded himself in the Fecarotta hit, Calabrese was the government’s star witness in the 2007 Family Secrets trial. He flipped in 2002 faced with the fact that the FBI had finally matched previously-unknown blood splatters left at the murder scene to him via a tip from his nephew.

“The whole Family Secrets case can be traced to the John Fecarotta murder, everything spawned from there….it might have taken 20 years to crack the thing, but the tipping point was solving that homicide,” one former Chicago mob buster said. “Nick Calabrese gets jammed up in that hit and all of a sudden the floodgates open up, we get over a dozen more cold case murders off the books and cleared. The Fecarotta hit, that’s where it all started.”

Fecarotta’s murder was one of the 18 charged in the case that sent acting boss James (Jimmy the Man) Marcello, consigliere Joseph (Joey the Clown) Lombardo and crew leader Frank (Frankie Breeze) Calabrese, Nick’s older brother, to prison for the rest of their lives. Frank Calabrese died behind bars of cancer in 2012 – he can be seen pictured with his son in this article’s feature image.

Both Calabrese brothers and Big John Fecarotta came from the Chicago mob’s Southside crew, sometimes called the Chinatown crew or 26^th Street crew. Exactly three months earlier Fecarotta and Nick Calabrese took part in the high-profile assassination of brazen Outfit lieutenant, Anthony (Tony the Ant) Spilotro, the crime family’s crew boss in Las Vegas, and his younger brother Michael, a grisly double homicide recreated for the silver screen in the 1995 Martin Scorsese movie Casino.

Nick Calabrese was one of the Spilotros actual killers, part of a hit team that beat, stomped and strangled their victims to death in the basement of a suburban Chicago home on the afternoon of June 14, 1986, while Fecarotta was tasked with arranging a disposal squad for the Spilotros’ bodies after the deed was done. Fecarotta assigned burial duties to Chicago Heights captain Albert (Caesar the Fox) Tocco and his crew, who botched the job. Tocco was stranded by his men in the midst of digging the hole in Northwest Indiana and the bodies themselves were found in a shallow grave just days later.

Already on thin ice with Outfit brass for past indiscretions such as being thought to be possibly skimming gambling and loansharking proceeds he was responsible for collecting and bringing his hairdresser girlfriend with him on muscle jobs and murder “scouting assignments,” according to Chicago Crime Commission documents, the burial fiasco was the final straw for Big John Fecarotta. He had a hit put on his head and the Calabrese brothers were given the murder contract.

Nick “Nicky Slim” Calabrese

Telling their target that they were going to bomb the office of a local dentist that owed them money, Nick Calabrese and Big John drove in one car and Frank Calabrese followed in another. When they got to the parking lot of the dentist’s office, Nick turned to shoot Fecarotta at close range, but Big John grabbed the gun and as the pair struggled, Nick was shot in the shoulder instead.

Fecarotta bolted from the stolen Buick across Belmont Avenue, hoping to take refuge inside Brown’s Banquet Hall, which was hosting its weekly bingo night. It was a futile effort. Nicky Slim sprinted after him and shot him twice in the back of the head in the banquet hall foyer in front of a handful of stunned witnesses. As Nick Calabrese ran to his brother, Frank’s getaway car back in the dentist’s office parking lot, he left behind a trail of his own blood leaking from his shoulder and a leather glove he had worn on his shooting hand. Well over a decade later, it would be his and several other Midwest mobsters’ undoing.

In early 1997, Nick and Frank Calabrese were sent to prison for racketeering. Doing time in a Michigan federal correctional facility alongside Frank Calabrese was his son, Frank, Jr., busted with his dad and his uncle for loansharking and extortion. Frank Jr. reached out to the FBI in the summer of 1998 to offer his cooperation in building a murder case against his father. During his initial conversations with the feds, he told them of what he knew of the Big John Fecarotta murder, specifically how he had heard first-hand accounts of how his uncle Nick was shot in the process of bumping off Big John.

Armed with a court order to x-ray Nick Calabrese’s shoulder and take a sample of his DNA to link to the blood found at the Fecarotta hit scene, the FBI leaned on him heavily for years before he finally broke and joined Team USA in early 2002. Audio surveillance presented to him of his brother Frank basically signing off on his murder pushed him over the edge, sending him scurrying for cover with the government.

“That x-ray lit up like a Christmas tree, you could see that damage from the bullet wound as clear as day,” retired FBI agent Tom Bourgeois recalled in a past interview. “He knew he had nowhere else to turn. The walls were closing in on him. Even his brother was turning his back on him…..He held out as long as he could…..it was the smart move.”

Operation Family Secrets landed in April 2005. The FBI uncovered a plot by the Chicago mob to find out where Nick Calabrese was being hidden so he could be rubbed out prior to taking the witness stand. Nonetheless, Calabrese still made it to court in the summer of 2007 to point the finger at his smirking elder sibling at the defense table. Nicky Slim has been free since 2013 and currently resides in the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Giovanni “Big John” Fecarotta

Big John Fecarotta grew up on the Windy City’s Westside. He was connected to the local labor unions and accumulated an arrest record of 17 collars and two felony convictions (armed robbery, burglary) from an early age. His first arrest came at 14 years old. Frequenting the area’s horse-track and betting parlor scene, wagering large sums of cash watching the ponies run and on sports action, he made a fast reputation on the streets as a tough guy and ace strong arm. He’d be booted from the Industrial Workers Union in 1982 due to his links to the underworld.

Authorities in both state and federal law enforcement considered Fecarotta a suspect or person of interest in at least a half-dozen mob murders at the time of his own death in 1986. That spring he had been jailed for contempt following refusing to answer certain questions in organized crime hearings being held on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. Chicago Crime Commission charts from the 1980s listed Fecarotta as a collector for Southside capo Angelo (The Hook) LaPietra and Northside capo Vincent (Innocent Vince) Solano, tapped to work as personal muscle for Outfit gambling whiz Ken (Tokyo Joe) Eto.

Like Calabrese, Eto became a witness for the government. Eto survived being shot in the head in a mob hit gone haywire in the winter of 1983 on the verge of being sentenced in a gambling case. The two hit men that botched the Eto hit were each killed shortly thereafter.

Per Calabrese’s testimony, Big John Fecarotta was the set-up man in the gory 1978 “Strangers In The Night” double homicide of Chicago cop-turned-Outfit-thief Vince Moretti and Moretti’s friend Don Renno, an innocent bystander. Fecarotta lured Moretti and Renno to a Chicago area tavern where they were beaten to death as the Frank Sinatra tune played on the bar’s jukebox. The Moretti and Renno murders were charged in Family Secrets.

Moretti was a member of a prolific burglary crew that infamously robbed the house of legendary Outfit Godfather Tony Accardo when Accardo was on vacation with his family for the Christmas holidays in California and were all heinously slain in the ensuing year, some within weeks. On the street in the 1970s, Moretti was known as one of Chicago’s top fences of stolen property.

The post THE DOMINO EFFECT: Big John Fecarotta Murder Laid Groundwork For Family Secrets Case In ChiTown 30 Years Ago appeared first on The Gangster Report.