Quantcast
Channel: The Gangster Report
Viewing all 2774 articles
Browse latest View live

First “Big Meech” Left Monster Legacy In Detroit Dope Game, Shot Dead 30 Years Ago Inside Clothier

$
0
0

October 22, 2020 – The original “Big Meech,” legendary Detroit drug lord Demetrius Holloway, was slain 30 years ago this month in one of the Motor City’s most sensational homicides ever, a gangland hit most historians point to as the official end to the decadent and destructive crack era in the D.

Black Mafia Family boss Demetrius (Big Meech) Flenory, born and raised in Detroit and America’s most notorious dope boss of the last three decades, is alleged to have taken his nickname from Holloway, who was the king of the coke game in Motown during the late 1980s. Flenory, a genuine hip hop icon, has been in prison since November 2005 and is often name-checked in rap lyrics by the likes of Drake, Lil’ Wayne and Jay-Z. 

The sly, cultured and fastidious 32-year old Holloway was gunned down inside The Broadway, a trendy urban clothier in downtown Detroit, on October 8, 1990. At the time of his murder, Holloway was under assault on multiple fronts; the federal government was on the verge of dropping a drug and racketeering indictment and he was said to be at war with at least three separate crime factions.

“If you heard the words Big Meech back in the Wild West days of Detroit in the last half of 1980s, you were talking about Demetrius Flenory, he’s was head honcho around here, top dog in the drug trade,” retired DEA bureau chief Bob DeFauw said. “While all his contemporaries are wearing track suits and thick gold chains around their necks, Holloway was wearing $15, 20,000 Italian suits, looking more businessman chic than dope boy chic. The man was cut from a different cloth.”

Low-level drug world players, Lester (Little Les) Milton and Tommy (Toe Tag) Milton, wound up being convicted for carrying out the Holloway slaying. The Milton brothers were tied to a group of eastside drug dealers and extortionists headed by Waymon (World Benji) Kincaid, the reputed No. 1 shot-caller for the entire non-Muslim Black prison population in Michigan.

Kincaid was locked up for a murder he committed as a teenager in 1975. Both Kincaid and Holloway were schooled in street affairs as youngsters on Detroit’s eastside by the old Murder Row crew, also known simply as the Detroit Black mob. Murder Row imploded in the early 1980s in the aftermath of the Michigan Federated Democratic Social Club Massacre and the beheadings of two members and a member’s girlfriend. 

In April 1980, Holloway went to federal prison for a robbery conviction and came out in 1985 ready for action. Within a matter of months of walking free, Holloway planted his flag, building a mammoth wholesale cocaine operation with reach into every nook and cranny of the business in the state of Michigan. The multi-tiered organization would grow even bigger in the years to come.

Holloway’s drug empire was vertically integrated and cloaked in a web of shell companies, real estate holdings and offshore-banking protections. At his peak, DEA records estimate he was moving hundreds of kilos per week across the Midwest.

“Holloway came into the picture like a hurricane,” DeFauw recalled. “One day he’s in prison, the next he’s out here making moves, running the city. It felt like it happened that fast. We’re asking our informants, who is this guy?, where did he come from? He got really big, really fast and changed a lot of the way business was being done. The guy could have taught a class on how to make your dirty money work for you and become clean money. The money he was making was spread out all over the place. It was very difficult for us to track.”

Holloway teamed with his childhood best friend, the flashier and more impulsive Richard (Maserati Rick) Carter, to expand his territory and make contacts in the entertainment and pro sports scenes. He recruited the four towering and brutish Brown brothers (“Rocking Reggie,” “Boogaloo,” “Ghost,” & “Wizard,”) and their “Best Friends” crew to be his enforcement wing. His headquarters was the Chalk & Cue pool hall on Seven Mile and he opened up a chain of shoe and apparel stores called “The Sports Jam,” which Foot Locker was considering purchasing for tens of millions of dollars at the time of his death.

A private jet on standby, Holloway frequently went on lavish gambling-spree weekends in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, famously winning or losing millions at the dice and blackjack tables in single sittings. Him and Maserati Rick were childhood friends with pro-boxing champion Tommy Hearns and would travel with him and his entourage to fights. The Detroit Police Department considered him the most powerful dope boss in the city at the height of the crack epidemic and dubbed him Public Enemy No. 1.

Holloway’s kingdom of cocaine began showing cracks by late 1986, as the Brown brothers branched out from muscle work to wholesale distribution and declared war on their former boss. Ghost and Wizard Brown were killed within days of each other in December 1986.

Come the summer of 1987, Maserati Rick Carter got himself and Holloway entangled in a beef with Eastside drug chief Edward (Black Ed) Hanserd, a one-time customer of the pair turned competitor with a sudden flush supply line out of California. Carter is shockingly shot to death in his hospital bed on September 12, 1988 and in the weeks that followed, Holloway staged his own kidnapping outside a fast-food burger joint and went into hiding.

FBI records allege Holloway was feuding with Benji Kincaid at this time too. Kincaid, according to the records, felt entitled to a piece of Holloway’s profits because it was his connections in the dope game that got Holloway on his feet after his release from prison three years earlier.

On the afternoon of October 8, 1990, Little Les Milton went into the Broadway clothing store and shot Holloway in the back of the head as he was purchasing a pair of designer Ralph Lauren socks at the front counter. Milton snapped his fingers, exclaimed “Got’em” and calmly walked out of the store whistling. Tommy Milton, his younger brother, was waiting on the corner outside in a BMW to whisk him away from the scene. They were convicted of the hit a decade later.

Kincaid had allegedly employed the Milton brothers for extortion duties on his behalf in the past, FBI records contend. The 63-year old World Benji came out of prison briefly in 2017, but was locked back up for a parole violation shortly thereafter.

DeFauw said the feds considered several possibilities regarding where the Miltons got the order from to kill Holloway, including Kincaid and his camp, the two remaining Brown Brothers, Rocking Reggie and Boogaloo, and the Black Ed Hanserd crew. Holloway’s successor, Cliff Jones and his “Monster Squad” got a looksee by investigators as well, according to FBI documents declassified in 2015. The Monster Squad had replaced the Browns and the Best Friends as Holloway’s strong-arm unit.

The post First “Big Meech” Left Monster Legacy In Detroit Dope Game, Shot Dead 30 Years Ago Inside Clothier appeared first on The Gangster Report.


Fed Judge In N.J. Slams Philly Mobster “Joey Electric,” Delves Out 15-Year Sentence For Drug Dealing

$
0
0

October 23, 2020 – The sentence was stiff. It exceeded the recommended guidelines. That’s just the way it goes sometimes in the Philadelphia mafia, where the feds gun for their targets with a full clip no matter what.

Philadelphia mob figure Joseph (Joey Electric) Servidio was sentenced to 15 years in federal court in New Jersey this week for drug trafficking. Ace reporter David Schratwieser (Fox29) broke the news of Servidio’s sentence on his social media accounts Thursday. The prosecutor recommended a 12.5 year term after Joey Electric pleaded guilty in the summer of 2019.

Servidio, 60, was popped in the spring of 2018 for pushing pills, cocaine, marijuana, heroin and crystal meth. He has a prior 2006 drug conviction and owns a contracting business for home renovations that he used to launder narcotics proceeds. The FBI believes he is a soldier in the Bruno-Scarfo crime family’s North Jersey wing.

The March 2018 indictment out of U.S. District Court in Camden, New Jersey included hours of damning audio surveillance featuring Servidio making a series of incriminating statements where he speaks freely about a past murder he committed when he was 19, trying to carry out a hit on a rival in 2017 and “kicking up” a percentage of his rackets to his superiors in the mafia. And he wasn’t done.

Joey Electric also spoke about how he hides his illegal cash through his construction company and how he had recently attempted a takeover of rackets in Atlantic City before he was instructed to stop by his bosses in Philly. The feds had a bug on Servidio’s phone and both a wired-up informant and an undercover FBI agent recording Servidio’s free-wheeling ramblings on life as a mobster.

Joey Electric was blunt in discussing what he actually does for a living.

“I’m a criminal, everything I do is criminal,” he said. “Ninety percent of my remodeling work is for free, for friends and family…..I need 250k cash in my pocket every year just to break even. I got to put the cash somewhere, I have to be able to show (legitimate) income….Last year, I robbed an armored car just to get even. There’s nothing better than making money (illegally), I do it every day. Who wants to do this other shit (legitimate work)?”

Servidio told the informant why he dealt narcotics.

“Drugs is the business I can make the most money in…..I like to spend a lot of money,” he bragged.

He spoke of his intentions to tax independent bookies and dope peddlers in Atlantic City, plans that were squashed before they really ever got off the ground.

“I said (to my bosses), ‘Look, we’re not looking to take over the whole town, people don’t even need to know who the fuck we are,” Servidio recalled to the informant. “The only time they’ll know who we are is if they give us a hard time. Then we tell ‘em, we puff out our chest and play our trump card.”

His assessment of the damage that results from being caught on government recordings is spot on and proved prophetic.

“Tapes kill you….almost all the eyewitnesses get the wrong person, you can beat that, you know what you can’t beat? Tapes. Tapes with you saying it right there staring back at you.”

Servidio allegedly reports to old school Bruno-Scarfo Family capo Joseph (Joe Scoops) Licata. Authorities think Licata runs the Philly mob’s North Jersey crew. The informant Joey Electric was doing business with was family soldier Anthony Persiano.

The post Fed Judge In N.J. Slams Philly Mobster “Joey Electric,” Delves Out 15-Year Sentence For Drug Dealing appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Buffalo Mafia Vs. The Boyz In The Hood: Bifulco Sought Vengeance On Drug Boss He Blamed For Stepson’s Murder

$
0
0

October 24, 2020 – According to FBI records, recently-deceased Buffalo mob capo Frank (Butchie Bifocals) Bifulco put out open murder contracts on a crime baron and two of his enforcers he held responsible for the drug-related killing of his teenage stepson.

Nobody collected, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The government swooped in before the contracts were carried out. And as a result, Buffalo’s Italian mob and Black mob never went to war.

Bifulco died earlier this week of natural causes at the age of 76. Butchie Bifocals is alleged to have overseen all underworld activity on the city’s West Side for the Magaddino crime family throughout much of the past four decades.

Carmen Gallo, his 15-year old stepson, was brutally gunned down in a hail of automatic weapon fire on the night of May 12, 1993 by members of the WAG Boys, an African-American drug gang operating out of the East Side of Buffalo. East Side drug kingpin Roy (Pee Wee) Highsmith ran the WAG Boys (Winslow Avenue Gang) and was the man BiFulco believed gave the order to murder Gallo, a punky, pintsized 5-foot-4, 100-pound teenage drug boss with his eye on achieving “made” status in his stepdad’s crime family as quickly as possible.

Gallo hailed from a rich Buffalo mafia lineage. His great grandfather, Joe (The Gyp) DiCarlo was Magaddino crime family consigliere in the late 1960s and early 1970s. DiCarlo’s dad had been one of the organization’s founding fathers. When BiFulco married Gallo’s mother, he took Gallo under his wing and was said to often speak with him about what he needed to do in order to get his button, per court documents.

One of those things was becoming an “earner.” From the time he was a little kid, Gallo was learning how to score. Pushing dope at Lafayette High School was a good start.

On the afternoon of May 12, 1993, Gallo and his partner in the high-school drug game, Eric Harkins, went to the city’s East Side to purchase drugs from WAG Boys lieutenant Jeff (Jazz) Culbreath. In exchange for free narcotics for his personal use, the 17-year old Harkins let Culbreath and WAG Boys enforcers Forrest (DMC) Miles and Michael (Middle Mike) Ridgeway use his Taurus for a crosstown drug run.

While they waited for the return of Harkins’ car, Harkins and Gallo did cocaine at an East Side trap house and at some point spoke with Pee Wee Highsmith and his brother and right-hand man Lawrence (Larry Bird) Highsmith about future transactions. Pee Wee Highsmith was allegedly offended at the way Gallo was speaking to him. Gallo would often threaten to have people killed by way of his family connections to the Buffalo mob, per grand jury testimony.

Jazz Culbreath, DMC Miles and Middle Mike Ridgeway returned to pick Gallo and Harkins up at around 10:30 and told them they would drive them back to the West Side. Ridgeway was driving the Taurus, Miles was in the front passenger’s seat and Culbreath sat in the back with Gallo and Harkins.

Minutes into the car ride, Jazz shot Harkins with a double-barrel pistol and Miles opened fire with an AK-47 on Gallo. Both teenagers were blasted out of the vehicle and onto the pavement on Woodlawn Avenue. Gallo was killed instantly. Harkins survived the attack.

Bifulco blamed Pee Wee Highsmith. He wanted Highsmith, Culbreath and Miles all killed and was offering $50,000 bounties for each hit, per informants. The cops beat him to the punch, though and Culbreath and Miles were arrested in November 1993 and charged with Gallo’s murder. Highsmith went down in a massive racketeering case months later.

Prosecutors presented evidence that suggested Pee Wee Highsmith followed the Taurus in his Pathfinder and upon pulling up next to the Taurus at the light, gave Culbreath and Miles a signal to start firing. Highsmith was also alleged to have given Jazz Culbreath the pistol he used for the hit.

Culbreath and Miles were found guilty at trial in 1995, the same year Highsmith, 54 today, was sentenced to 65 years in prison. In appeal briefs, Culbreath and Miles point the finger at Ridgeway as the shooter.

Bifulco’s marriage came to an end in the wake of Gallo’s slaying. He was charged with assault for allegedly hitting his wife, Gallo’s mom, Sissie with a baseball bat in a domestic dispute that erupted on the night of Gallo’s funeral.

The post The Buffalo Mafia Vs. The Boyz In The Hood: Bifulco Sought Vengeance On Drug Boss He Blamed For Stepson’s Murder appeared first on The Gangster Report.

U.S. District Judge Questions Avengers MC Hit Man’s Sincerity In Denying Plea For Early Release From Prison

$
0
0

October 28, 2020 – Avengers Motorcycle Club member Ward (The Anvil) Wright had his bid for compassionate release rejected by U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Murphy in Detroit this week, as Wright saw his dream of finagling his way out of a life sentence for murder and drug trafficking shattered with the swift pounding of Murphy’s gavel. The ailing 61-year old Wright was an enforcer for the Avengers MC in the 1980s and early 1990s, working in conjunction with the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia.

In his ruling, Murphy said he didn’t feel Wright, suffering from a variety of physical ailments that leave him more susceptible to COVID-19, showed any sincere remorse for his crimes until it behooved him for his motion to get out of prison early. Wright’s quest for freedom was chronicled by The Detroit News last month upon lawyers for Wright filing the request for a compassionate release.

On July 30, 1993, Wright shot Avengers MC vice president David (Slap) Moore to death in a Columbus, Ohio hotel room after Moore pressed for a commission on drug transactions the cartel was making in Detroit he helped set up. Moore traveled to Ohio that summer to be at the side of then-Avengers MC boss William (Bronco Billy) Burke, who was hospitalized in Columbus for injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash on the Ohio Turnpike.

Wright received $50,000 for the hit. He worked as an air pirate, stealing planes for the cartel headed by iconic narco kingpin Pablo Escobar, in the years that followed. He was dealing cartel cocaine in Michigan at that time as well. His run in the drug and murder-for-hire game came to an abrupt end with his arrest in 1996.

Escobar was killed in a hail of bullets during a rooftop shootout with Colombian and U.S. Military in his hometown of Medellin five months after Wright murdered Moore in Ohio as he slept in his hotel bed. Wright feigned wanting to pay his respects to Burke in the hospital as a means of getting Moore to allow him to share his hotel room.

The Avengers MC was founded in Michigan in the 1960s. The club boasts current chapters in Detroit, Flint, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Florida and West Virginia.

The post U.S. District Judge Questions Avengers MC Hit Man’s Sincerity In Denying Plea For Early Release From Prison appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Just Some Of The Guys: Peterson Bros. & Their “It’s Just Us” Gang Go Down For The Count In Detroit

$
0
0

October 29, 2020 – Detroit breakdown. Motor City shakedown. Just like the old J. Geils Band used to rock out to.

The feds in Motown took down the It’s Just Us Gang in a drug, racketeering and murder case that dropped last week in U.S. District Court out of Detroit, Michigan. The It’s Just Us crew is allegedly led by 35-year old Duane (Don Juan) Peterson and his three younger brothers and is centered on the city’s Eastside, but with branches in other Michigan outposts like Flint, Jackson and Benton Harbor and out-of-state in West Virginia.

Dionne (Chapo Streets) Peterson, Deshawn (D-Red) Peterson and Luther (Mookie) Peterson were the No. 2 , No. 3 and No. 4 defendants in a case which could bring life sentences to the Peterson brothers and 15 of their reputed lieutenants and associates if they are found guilty on all counts. One of the Petersons’ crews in Huntington, West Virginia was busted two years ago.

It’s Just Us boss “Don Juan” Johnson is already behind bars in state prison on assault and weapons charges. According to the indictment, the Peterson brothers founded the It’s Just Us Gang in 2014. The group would also refer to itself as the “258 Crew,” a reference to the letters IJU on a keypad for a phone, and distributed cocaine, heroin, pills and marijuana.  

On the night of May 17, 2017, Duane and Mookie Johnson and It’s Just Us Gang members Dayquon (Day-Day) Johnson and Melvin (June Bug) Brown stalked Chris Marcillis to a bar near the Harper Avenue and I-94 Expressway interchange called B.O.B’Z Lounge, and “Don Juan” chased him out of the establishment into the parking lot and gunned him down in coldblood execution style, prosecutors contend. Johnson and his brother Mookie were reportedly paid $10,000 by allies of theirs to kill Marcillis for bad-mouthing a fallen friend.

In April 2018, Willie (Chill) Peterson, a Peterson brothers’ cousin, was nailed in the DEA’s Operation Saigon Sunset out of West Virginia. Chill Peterson ran an It’s Just Us affiliate crew in Huntington.

The post Just Some Of The Guys: Peterson Bros. & Their “It’s Just Us” Gang Go Down For The Count In Detroit appeared first on The Gangster Report.

A Most Reliable Source: Slain Montreal Mob Boss Aided In Writing Of Book, Gave Police Info In Final Years

$
0
0

October 30, 2020 – At the same time he was acting boss of the Montreal mafia, Andrew Scoppa was secretly helping two Quebec crime writers work on the a book about the mob war he was immersed in and feeding information to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The 55-year old Scoppa, who was gunned down in a shopping mall parking lot on October 21, 2019, is the subject of the fascinating new book The Source by reporters Felix Seguin and Eric Thibault of the Montreal Journal.

Seguin developed Scoppa as a source in 2014. The appearance-conscious Scoppa felt his days were numbered. He wasn’t far off.

Scoppa’s slaying was part of the ongoing Canada mafia war, a blood-drenched conflict that began within Montreal’s Rizzuto crime family in the late 2000s and spread to Ontario mob enclaves in Toronto and Hamilton in the 2010s. Salvatore Scoppa, 49, Andrew’s little brother, was killed in a brazen attack carried out during a wedding at a suburban Montreal Sheraton hotel on May 4, 2019. The Scoppas headed the Calabrian faction of the Rizzuto organization.

Andrew Scoppa was one of Montreal’s biggest narcotics traffickers and a rising lieutenant in Godfather Vito Rizzuto’s inner circle at the time Rizzuto was shipped off to a U.S. prison in the late 2000s to serve time for a famous triple murder in New York years earlier and his mob empire imploded. Rizzuto came out of prison in 2012, but died just over a year later of cancer.

Per the new book, Scoppa and his brother butted heads with Rizzuto’s successors, Lorenzo (Skunk) Giordano and Rocco (Sauce) Sollecito. RCMP believe the Scoppas had Giordano and Sollecito assassinated in 2016 in a pair of hits that took place two months apart. They died suspects in ordering at least four murders in the war.

According to Seguin and Thibault’s reporting, Andrew Scoppa was a confidential informant for the RCMP at the time he was murdered, as well as other law enforcement agencies. RCMP records, alleges Scoppa became acting don of the Rizzuto crime family in the fall of 2015 and held the title unchallenged until 2017. Over the last two years of his life, Scoppa battled with Leonardo Rizzuto, Vito’s son, and Stephen Sollecito, Sauce Sollecito’s progeny, for power.

The post A Most Reliable Source: Slain Montreal Mob Boss Aided In Writing Of Book, Gave Police Info In Final Years appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Free & The Guilty: Two More Latin Kings See Judge In Boston, “King Humble” Coming Home

$
0
0

October 30, 2020 – One Latin Kings boss in Massachusetts went free this week and another pleaded guilty in continuing fallout from last year’s Operation Throne Down. More than 60 members of the mostly Hispanic organized crime group across multiple states were indicted in a RICO case in December 2019 out of Boston.

Worcester chapter president Alvin (King Humble) Mojica was given time served by U.S. District Court Judge Rya Zobel on Wednesday and three years of probation in exchange for a cop to a single drug charge. Days earlier, Zobel accepted a guilty plea from 33-year old Bienvenido (King Apache) Nunez, the leader of the Latin Kings in all of Massachusetts, on cocaine charges.

With Nunez’s plea, the feds can now chalk up 16 guilty pleas in the case. Nunez, a former MMA fighter, was based in Springfield in the western part of the commonwealth, having moved to Massachusetts from New Jersey.

Mojica, 32, did ten months in the can (denied bond upon his arrest last year) and agreed to his deal with the government back in the summer. Nunez faces up to 20 years when Zobel sentences him in February.

All the chapter presidents in Massachusetts reported to Nunez and Nunez reported to reputed east coast boss Michael (King Merlin) Cecchetelli, who answered only to national administrators in Chicago. Cecchetelli, 41, is the No. 1 defendant in the Operation Throne Down case and currently awaiting trial. 

The feds believe the Italian Cecchetelli maintains ties to the Genovese crime family’s Western Massachusetts wing in his hometown of Springfield. Cecchetelli’s uncle, “Fat Chicky,” is a former bookie for the Genovese’s Springfield mob crew and King Merlin and King Apache held at least two Latin Kings meetings at the mob-controlled Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Society Social Club in the city’s South End that were under surveillance and wired-for-sound by authorities.

The post The Free & The Guilty: Two More Latin Kings See Judge In Boston, “King Humble” Coming Home appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Harlem Homecoming: The Great Guy Fisher Returns To NYC, Fmr. Heroin Chief Receives Medical Pardon

$
0
0

October 31, 2020 – One-time New York drug don Guy Fisher got a ticket home from the federal government this week, let out of prison Wednesday on a medical pardon after 36 years behind bars on a drug and racketeering conviction from the early 1980s. The 73-year old Fisher led The Council, a syndicate of African-American heroin bosses in Harlem founded by his mentor, the notorious Nicky (Mr. Untouchable) Barnes.

Barnes and Fisher fell out over a woman and Barnes eventually became the government’s star witness in a case against Fisher and the five other “Council” members. Fisher, known for being suave and business savvy on the street, was sentenced to life in prison in 1984. He became Barnes’ acting boss in the late 1970s when Barnes got locked up and ascended to gangland royalty in the Big Apple. The residents of Harlem dubbed him a folk hero.

The woman responsible for coming in between Fisher and Barnes was Beverly (Shemecca) Ash. Fisher began romancing Ash once Barnes was away in prison. Ash and her brother Steve looked after Barnes’ interests in the drug game with him doing time.

Upon word leaking that Barnes was jumping ship to Team USA, Shemecca and Steve Ash were murdered on orders of an Italian mob associate from the Gambino crime family named Mark Reiter as revenge. Barnes had forged strong ties to the Italians in his rise through the ranks of the New York underworld, leveraging them to his advantage whenever he could.

This time those ties worked against him.

Shemecca Ash was gunned down inside The Monarch Bar in Manhattan on December 13, 1982. Steve Ash was shot to death less than a year later.

In the years before he went away, Fisher became the first-ever Black owner of the famous Apollo Theatre. During his incarceration, he earned a PHD in the sociology.

Barnes died under an assumed identity in the Witness Protection Program in 2012 at the age of 78. Both Barnes and Fisher are often name-checked in hip-hop and rap lyrics cementing their legacies in pop culture crime lore.

The post Harlem Homecoming: The Great Guy Fisher Returns To NYC, Fmr. Heroin Chief Receives Medical Pardon appeared first on The Gangster Report.


The Pointes Of Contention: JoAnn Matouk Romain’s Suspicious Death Was Most Likely A Murder

$
0
0

October 31, 2020 — Back in the summer, I was approached by Google News to write an investigative piece on the JoAnn Matouk Romain case from 2010, a disturbing murder mystery out of my hometown of Detroit that was being featured on Netflix’s reboot of Unsolved Mysteries. I didn’t know anything about the case at the time, but I soon would become an expert on a real-time tragedy with earmarks of possible widespread police and governmental conspiracy and potential mob ties.

Below is my in-depth investigation that shows what was sold to the public by the police as a suicide by drowning was probably in actuality a lurid homicide that has been covered up for the last decade:

THE POINTES OF CONTENTION: JOANNE MATOUK ROMAIN WAS FOUND FLOATING IN THE DETROIT RIVER IN 2010. POLICE RULED IT A SUICIDE. IT MOST LIKELY WASN’T.

The skyborne messages began appearing seven years ago and haven’t stopped since.

As soon as Metro Detroit shakes off winter and descends into spring, planes start appearing in and around Grosse Pointe, the affluent suburb right next to Detroit, towing banners with questions posed to a local businessman and his police officer cousin regarding a suspicious death in their family circle.

Many believe it was a coldblooded murder, but officially, it’s considered a suicide. Those crying foul play have made certain their feelings are widely known and have let the lurid accusations fly, both by way of the inflammatory air-flown messages and through the federal court system. 

“Did you think you could get away with it,” one message read.

“Bill and Tim, why won’t you take a polygraph test?” read another.

“Your time is up #handcuffs,” read the most recent message that flew over Labor Day weekend.

The story of JoAnn Matouk Romain’s Jan. 12, 2010, death appears much like an episode of the Jerry Springer Show mixed with the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with a dash of The Sopranos.

“Your head spins looking at all the facts here, it’s hard to tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are,” said retired FBI agent Bill Randall, a private investigator who was retained by the Matouk Romain family. “Things are as muddy as I’ve ever seen. It can drive you insane.”

The following — based on thousands of pages of court records, deposition testimony and private investigation reports dozens of interviews and a collection of exclusive sources in government, law enforcement and the underworld — is an in-depth look at the Matouk Romain case, which though declared a suicidal drowning remains open to this day.

A troubled timeline

On a late, freezing-cold January night in 2010, Michelle Romain was at her mother’s home in Grosse Pointe Woods when, she recalls, there was a knock at the door from the police. An officer from the Grosse Pointe Farms Public Safety Department was there to inform her that her mother, JoAnn, had gone missing from their family’s church parking lot off Lakeshore Road.

It was 9:25 p.m., she says.

The police officer told the daughter that the 2008-model Lexus SUV her mother, Joann Matouk Romain, was driving was found abandoned in the St. Paul’s Church parking lot. He ran her license plate and ended up at her doorstep.

To Michelle Romain, something immediately felt amiss in the explanation. The Lexus was registered in Michelle Romain’s name, not her mother’s; so why weren’t they asking about her safety and whereabouts?

The official police report asserts an officer didn’t come across the car until 9:53 p.m., more than a half-hour after an officer, according to Michelle Romain, came looking for the wrong person. The license plate wasn’t put through the Michigan Department of Motor Vehicles database until 9:58 p.m., so the police wouldn’t have had an address to check out until a half-hour after the officer had arrived at Michelle Romain’s door, if the daughter’s timeline is correct.

Yet, according to time-stamped records Michelle Matouk obtained via the Freedom of information Act, the Coast Guard received a call at 9:30 p.m. requesting a water search for Matouk Romain. Coast Guard helicopters, divers and boats arrived on the scene before 10 p.m. and engaged in an all-hands-on-deck type search.

JoAnn Matouk Romain wasn’t found for another two months and eight days. Her body was finally discovered floating in another country in late March 2010.

The conflicting timeline was the first in a long line of factors in the circumstances surrounding the suspicious death of the 55-year-old devout Catholic and homemaker and mother that don’t make sense and have resulted in allegations of a wide-reaching conspiracy to cover up a crime that remains, dubiously yet officially, ruled a suicide.

“Things don’t add up and that hits anybody looking into this with an objective mind right off the bat, you don’t have to scratch deep here to see the injustice,” says Matouk Romain estate attorney Keith Altman. “It’s like the old Occam’s Razor theory, when faced with a situation, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Knowing everything we know about JoAnn and the situation that night, there’s no reason to believe she went into the water, that she ever would want to kill herself, but that’s the immediate conclusion that is made by police. That doesn’t pass the smell test; that’s not the logical conclusion to come to, and they came to it in the bat of an eyelid, the snap of a finger.”

U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker called the disputed facts in the Matouk Romain case “very disturbing” and certain aspects of the investigation “somewhat suspicious” in her 2018 opinion dismissing the family’s wrongful death lawsuit brought against a number of individuals, including officials at the highest levels of two Grosse Pointe public safety departments and a decorated detective for the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office under Kym Worthy.

Despite Parker’s reservations, she tossed the case. The higher court would go on to back her up. Still, Matouk Romain’s immediate family continues to fight for and demand answers.

Grosse Pointe Farms police declared Matouk Romain dead of a suicide the very same night she vanished by the water 10 1/2 years ago. Actually, according to the department itself, the case was determined a suicide within minutes of arriving on the scene, with nothing to go on but a car that was left parked at St. Paul’s.

Detectives theorized that Matouk Romain entered the icy water and drowned herself. They claim there were women’s shoe footprints leading from the parking lot to the water embankment; however the crime scene photos showed no such indentations in the snow. Her daughters and the private investigators retained to work the case for the family doubt 4-foot-10, 165-pound mother of three would have been able to navigate herself into the water on the jagged, rocky terrain, let alone wade or swim the approximately 400 yards of frigid Lake St. Clair to where the water would be over her head in order to drown.

There was no body for going on to three months, but the police in Grosse Pointe Farms insisted she killed herself by going into the water due to a mental illness she had no history of. Family members hounded the police to look for their mother throughout January, February and most of March 2010, but they were continually rebuffed. The case became a game of hot potato and moved from the Farms, where she went missing from, to Grosse Pointe Woods where she lived, to the Michigan State Police. The FBI took a cursory look at the case by interviewing Joann Matouk Romain’s daughters and an eyewitness. 

On March 20, 2010, Matouk Romain’s frozen body was found by Canadian fishermen. It was floating in the Detroit River on the Boblo Island side of the Detroit River. A Canadian autopsy found no evidence of foul play.

The story stood: It was a suicide. But was it?

A private autopsy conducted by a pathologist at the University of Michigan said otherwise and showed her death to be a “dry drowning,” a condition that occurs in 1-2 percent of drownings, according to WebMD, where vocal cords spasm,  close up and shut off the airways. There was no water in her lungs, which could also mean she was dead before she even hit the water.

Crime-scene expert Sal Rastrelli, hired by Matouk Romain’s family to analyze the case, disputes the notion that the currents in Lake St. Clair that winter at the location police claim she entered the water would have been strong enough to push her to Canada (where she was eventually found almost 11 weeks later). He also questions how her body was in such good condition.

“The water in that area was much shallower than usual that year, and there was no current at the time she’s alleged to have entered the water,” he said. “JoAnn could not have been on the bottom of the lake for three miles, traversed the Detroit River for another 23 miles, without damage to her clothes or body. There would have certainly been damage; her body would have been tumbling and bouncing off submerged objects.

“The fact that her body was frozen would have meant she stayed on the water’s bottom until the weather got much warmer. The lack of damage to the body indicates she didn’t travel very far, certainly not 30 miles. And it’s very unlikely that her body would have ended up near Boblo Island, considering the currents and the fact that she would have most likely gotten trapped on one of the aforementioned objects. I believe her body got into the water at a completely different site.”

Haunting questions

Who would want to do harm to the docile and devout JoAnn Matouk Romain, a housemaker known for mothering the whole neighborhood and frequently attending church services? According to some, it was members of her own family.

Members about whom she had voiced concerns to several people in the weeks leading up to her going missing. One family member who, if you believe an eyewitness account from the night Matouk Romain vanished, was spotted at the scene of her disappearance.

And what did her estranged husband, David Romain, who is currently married to his ex-wife’s best friend, know?

Why did the cops close the investigation, for all intents and purposes, before even opening it, declaring it a suicide immediately with no sign of a body or reason to think she was suicidal? Why didn’t the feds get involved, considering the circumstances or when the body wound up in a different country?  

These are the haunting and disturbing questions that still remain unanswered a decade later. And, from a law enforcement perspective, it doesn’t appear that there is any sense of urgency in finally getting to the bottom of things.

No search warrants were sought. No grand juries were convened. The frustration is palpable.

“The fact that we’re more than 10 years removed from JoAnn’s death and that its still officially ruled a suicide and there hasn’t been a full-blown local and federal investigations into what should have been viewed as a kidnapping and murder all along, is inconceivable to me,” Solomon Radner, another Matouk Romain estate attorney said. “I literally can’t believe it. It’s outrageous.”

Family feud

Woods Fine Wine & Spirits in Grosse Pointe Woods has been a staple for residents in the Pointes for more than a half-century. Located on Mack Avenue just north of Vernier, the quaint-looking liquor store was opened by William and Louise Matouk, in 1954 and became known as a friendly stop for any Pointers planning a party or hosting a family dinner.

The Matouks were Syrian and settled in Grosse Pointe Woods to raise a family. The couple produced five children: Bill, Rosemary, JoAnn, John and Kathy. The eldest siblings, Bill and Rosemary, followed their parents into the family business and went to work at the wine shop. The Matouks built a fortune in rare wine, selling and trading vintage bottles of cabernets, muscat and pinot noir to and with the Pointes’ elite — and purchasing real estate.

JoAnn Matouk married David Romain in 1980 after meeting him through her sister Rosemary Matouk-Hage’s husband. Romain co-owns Empire Foods, a wholesale food distributor company. His family was from Lebanon. The newlywed couple nested near JoAnn Matouk Romain’s parents in the Woods and had three children (two girls and a boy): Michelle, Kellie and Michael.

By all accounts, Matouk Romain looked after a calm, happy home. Trouble began brewing immediately following their parents being out of the picture.

William Matouk died in 1988. Louise Matouk passed away in 1994, leaving the store and an estimated $20 million estate to be divided amongst her five children, according to court documents.

Problems arose almost instantly.

A battle over the estate erupted. The early seeds of a nuclear meltdown in peace and civility were firmly planted within days, possibly even hours, after Louise Matouk’s death 26 years ago, per court records and interviews with the family. Distributing the assets from the will devolved into an all-out war, rife with animosity, allegations of theft, deceit, signs of sabotage and piles of contentious litigation.

Bill Matouk and Rosemary Matouk-Hage were given Woods Fine Wine & Spirits, and the eldest son, Bill, was made executor of the estate. According to civil court filings, JoAnn and John Matouk never received their fair share of the estate and accused Bill Matouk and Rosemary Matouk-Hage of stealing millions. JoAnn and John Matouk filed a 1998 lawsuit, and by the beginning of the 2000s had settled for $600,000 apiece in back payment.

Court records in the civil suit allege Bill Matouk and Rosemary Matouk-Hage forged JoAnn Matouk Romain’s signature on documents allowing her inheritance to be put into the stock market. Bill Matouk was removed as executor of the estate and replaced with attorney George Haddad, a family friend of William and Louise Matouk. JoAnn Matouk Romain declined to pursue criminal charges against her siblings.

The bitterness of the dispute lingered through the next decade, with icy tension marking relations between the siblings, some of which had been bubbling under the surface since childhood, according to people familiar with the Matouk family dynamics. John and Bill Matouk had been bickering rivals since their days as kids.

Some point to jealousy. 

“They never had a good relationship,” said one family friend. “The resentment that exists there was there long before their parents passed away and their sister ended up dead. It was jealousy and resentment from Day One.”

John Matouk’s attorney, Robert Davis, puts it more bluntly.

“John was a football star and Bill was shaped like a football, that’s about the only thing those two have ever had in common,” he said.

What is known for certain is that while Bill Matouk took over the store from his parents; John Matouk set off to make his own mark as an entrepreneur. And he encountered a tremendous amount success.

At least, early on.  

In the 1990s, John Matouk founded Remtech, an environmental clean-up company, and made a small fortune of his own from the contracts he secured as the nation’s economic welfare boomed. He was named to Crain’s Detroit Business magazine’s prestigious “40 under 40” list in 1995. But John Matouk had demons of his own that arose in the years after his initial successes.

A series of bad, ill-timed financial investments, several fallouts with business partners and friends and a severe downturn in the U.S. economy of the late 2000s, put him on the ropes. Rumors of unpaid gambling debts surfaced. He was indicted and convicted of a $25,000 check-kiting scam out of Wayne County Circuit Court.

“The tide turned quickly against John,” claims one mutual acquaintance of the brothers. “He was riding high for a bit, then a lot of dirty laundry got aired and bridges were burned.”

John Matouk blames his brother, Bill, and his cousin Tim Matouk, a longtime police officer in the area who has worked for multiple departments through the years, for his misfortune.

“All of my business problems have come by way of Bill and Tim Matouk,” he says today. “They poisoned the well, told lies, pulled strings and turned people against me.”

The spite continued to grow and manifest well after the dispute over the will had been settled.

JoAnn Matouk Romain and John Matouk claimed in their lawsuit related to the will and estate that Bill Matouk and Rosemary Matouk-Hage went to the family house and took bundles of cash their mother had kept hidden and put it in their pockets, neglecting to share the loose currency with the other three siblings. The fingers never stopped pointing after that.

Besides a trip to Florida, where the Romain and Matouk families vacationed separately, but met for a few meals in the winter of 2006, communications were, for all intents and purposes, broken off. Between 2007 and the end of 2009, Matouk Romain didn’t speak a single word to Bill Matouk or Rosemary Matouk-Hage.

That all changed approaching the end of 2009 when Matouk Romain called Bill Matouk and told him she wanted to speak to him about their cousin Tim Matouk. They met at the store on Dec. 30. Matouk Romain drove herself.

Bill and Tim Matouk, the latter at the time a Harper Woods police officer assigned to the COMET drug task force, were close. Tim Matouk and JoAnne Matouk Romain were not.

And it was pretty clear, at least by the conclusion of 2009, why. Maybe not the exact reason, but the distaste Matouk Romain held for Tim Matouk was intense and becoming more and more public. She was terrified of him and let people know. A line in the sand had been drawn and the cousins were on opposite sides.

Cousin the cop

As Christmas approached in 2009, JoAnn Matouk Romain told her children and closest friends that she was in fear of her first cousin, Tim Matouk.

Matouk Romain’s children say that when they were growing up, their mom did her best to keep them away from Tim Matouk, calling him “sick” and “depraved.” In her deposition testimony, Tim Matouk’s, ex-wife Barbara admitted Tim Matouk had once threatened to kill her, and she believed he could.

According to interviews with a dozen people in Matouk Romain’s life, Matouk Romain informed them in the weeks leading up to her going missing that Tim Matouk had threatened her in a phone call that occurred in the latter part of 2009 where he allegedly told her he would “make her disappear” if she didn’t “stop accusing and asking questions.” What exact questions JoAnn was asking remains a mystery to this day.

However, what is certain is the fact that she worried about her personal safety. She expressed concerns to more than 10 different people and vocalizing the belief that she was being followed, her mail was being tampered with and her phone calls monitored.

Tim Matouk admits in deposition testimony to having a phone conversation with Matouk Romain in October 2009, but denies threatening her. He claims he confronted her about a rumor going around town in which he heard she was telling people that “all of John’s problems were because of him.” In that same deposition, he denied any role in trying to harm Matouk Romain. JoAnn’s daughter, Michelle Romain, who was present when the call took place, says the call occurred after Thanksgiving, “in the first part of December.”

Bill Matouk says in his deposition testimony that the phone call and subsequent meeting he had with his sister Matouk Romain on Dec. 30, 2009 — after having not spoken in two years — was related to his sister’s misgivings with their cousin. Matouk Romain told her brother to “stay away from Tim, he’s no good,” according to Bill Matouk’s recounting of the two conversations he had with JoAnn on the day before New Year’s Eve.

In the days right after New Year’s 2010, Matouk Romain felt compelled to go see her brother Bill Matouk at the store again. This time she was driven to the store by her daughter, Michelle, and popped in unannounced. Bill Matouk admits in his deposition to meeting his sister a second time, saying it was uneventful and merely a rehash of their previous in-person discussion regarding Tim Matouk days earlier.

Michelle says her mom returned to the car from the second meeting in a state of fear.

“She came out of that store looking like she had seen a ghost,” recollected Michelle Romain more than a decade later. “Whatever she saw, whatever she heard, whatever she was told in there, it spooked her to the core and, in her mind, confirmed her belief that she was in danger. When she got back in the car, she wanted me to take her immediately to church. She thought she could pray it away.”

That is one of the many reasons, Matouk Romain’s three children and brother John Matouk scoff at the notion she would ever even contemplate committing suicide, let alone actually kill herself.

“Whenever the subject of suicide came up with her, she’d always say, ‘Nothing’s ever that bad,’” her youngest daughter, Kelli Romain, recalled. “And as a devout Catholic, she believed if you committed suicide, you’d be condemned to hell.”

John Matouk and JoAnn Matouk Romain discussed Matouk Romain’s impromptu meeting with Bill and her phone call with Tim.

“My sister was scared to death; she wanted to protect her loved ones so she didn’t tell anyone exactly what she knew, but she saw or she knew something that made her think her life was in jeopardy,” John Matouk said. “She told me she had to go the cops, but she couldn’t go to the local cops because of Tim’s connections in law enforcement. JoAnn wanted to go to the FBI. She thought the federal government was her only refuge.”

A highly placed source inside the Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building in Detroit, says Matouk Romain met with “federal authorities” at a restaurant in the days prior to her disappearance. That source said he fears that news of that meeting might have leaked.

The FBI will neither confirm or deny a meeting with JoAnn Matouk Romain took place. JoAnn’s phone records show her calling private security firms in the first week of January 2010. Co-workers at the Dawood clothing boutique she worked at part time on Kerchival described a series of hushed phone calls JoAnn took in private at the boutique on January 7 and 8. They said the phone calls seemed to put her “out of sorts.” 

Tim Matouk began his law enforcement career in the 1980s with the Detroit Police Department, working as a young beat cop amid the crack epidemic and “Wild West” type violence in the drug world that were tearing apart the city. He was assigned to the Homicide Division from 1986-1990 and eventually went on to join the Harper Woods Police Department as a detective. While working in Harper Woods, he joined the COMET task force, an elite narcotics unit out of Macomb County operated in conjunction with the Michigan State Police with multiple jurisdictions in Metro Detroit under its purview.

At the end of 2009 and in the early months of 2010, Tim Matouk was readying to leave the Harper Woods P.D. and join the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office as a lead investigator. His career in Wayne County has been noteworthy, playing a big role in breaking several high-profile cases, including the 2012 Jane Bashara slaying in which her husband, Bob, and his hired hit man, Joe Gentz, were found guilty.

A retired member of law enforcement who worked in the same department with Tim Matouk depicts a police officer with a reputation for pushing boundaries.

“You ever see the movie “Training Day”? That’s what its like sometimes in police departments,” he said. “Tim is slick. He’s a wheeler dealer.”

(“Training Day” is a crime-thriller starring Denzel Washington as a rogue undercover police officer.)

The ‘eyewitness’

One lifelong Grosse Pointer says he saw Tim Matouk at the scene of Matouk Romain’s disappearance on Jan. 12, 2010. His name is Paul Hawk. He is a businessman in Grosse Pointe Woods and was a high school football star in the 1980s who went on to play in the backfield at Central Michigan University.

The 54-year old Hawk grew up in the same social circle as the Matouk boys and played sports with and against John Matouk all through his youth. He hadn’t seen the Matouks in quite some time and admits to originally identifying one of the men at the scene as resembling John Matouk, not Tim. He believed it was John who he saw that night for more than two years.

Hawk contends the police in Grosse Pointe, the Michigan State Police and the FBI have never taken him seriously. Both Hawk and Matouk Romain’s children believe the police investigating JoAnn Matouk Romain’s death buried his statement.

The existence of Hawk’s eyewitness account wasn’t discovered by the family until 2012 via a Freedom of Information Act request for investigative documents tied to the case that a Grosse Pointe Farms police report of Hawk’s account finally emerged amid a sea of paper.

Hawk says he was driving southbound on Lakeshore Road at around 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 12, 2010, returning home from the grocery store, when he saw a woman matching Matouk Romain’s description sitting on the breakwall by the water across from St. Paul Catholic Church accompanied by two men. He saw two cars, one was the Lexus Matouk Romain was driving, the other a dark-blue or black-colored Crown Victoria that he assumed was an unmarked police vehicle.

One of the men “waved him through” as he pulled over to the side of the road to ask if he could be of help, he says. The encounter, he estimates, lasted 10 to 15 seconds.

“The two men walk in front of my car; one of them motions his hand like ‘keep on moving, nothing to see here,’ and then gives me a look that says, ‘Just so you know I’m packing.’ I thought they were cops,” Hawk said.

On the morning of Jan. 19, 2010, exactly a week after JoAnn vanished, Hawk filed a report at the Grosse Pointe Farms Public Safety Department. The night before he had seen a television news report on a missing woman by the water and felt compelled to come forward. At the police station, he met with Detective Mike McCarthy and Grosse Pointe Farms police chief Dan Jensen and told them what he witnessed.

“Their jaws dropped to the floor,” Hawk remembers. “They weren’t expecting me to walk in the door. I could tell right off the bat something is not right. And they’re like, ‘Well, this isn’t even our case; she lived in the Woods; we’re the Farms.’ And, ‘If you see these guys again, let us know.’ That kind of stuff. Very dismissive.”

Hawk got visibly angry when recollecting the interaction.

“The last time I checked, she disappeared from the Farms; so it is their case. I don’t care what they say. If I went missing in New York and lived in Grosse Pointe Farms, who’s case is it? Come on, be real here. They just didn’t care and wanted me to go away. So at that point, my antennas are up, my intuition kicks in. I leave the police station that morning, and I don’t here boo from them ever again. I’m trying to give these people information on a murder case, and they’re treating it like it’s a parking ticket. Everything is upside down here.”

Hawk insisted he had seen a Matouk at the scene, those brothers and cousins he knew from back when he was a kid. At first, he believed one of the men he saw resembled John Matouk, the starting wide receiver for the Grosse Pointe North football team at the same time Hawk was playing for Grosse Pointe South in the early 1980s. However, after bumping into John Matouk at a bar in Birmingham in 2012, he realized he was confused.

Hawk’s visit to a sketch artist, at the family’s request, [JM1] resulted in an image more resembling John’s cousin, Tim Matouk, as one of the men he saw. He also identified Tim Matouk from a photo line-up presented to him by a private investigator and attorneys for Matouk Romain’s family. (Matouk Romain family attorneys would later be sanctioned in federal court for failing to preserve the lineup in connection with their wrongful death lawsuit for appeal purposes.)

From that point on, Paul Hawk was shuffled between law enforcement agencies while trying to get them to follow up on his tip. The Michigan State Police sent him to the FBI. The FBI interviewed him and then sent him to file a report at the Grosse Pointe Woods Police Department.

Detectives dismissed Hawk’s timeline because he said it was light or dusk, not dark, at the time of the identification and deemed him unreliable. The sun set at 5:22 on Jan. 12, 2010, as JoAnne Matouk Romain was in transit between the Wayne County courthouse and her lawyer’s office on Griswold and a good two hours prior to her disappearing. Hawk claims harassment from police and others, filing a police report for property damage in June 2012 when his car mirror was tarred in the shape of a hawk.

“Nobody wanted responsibility for the information I was providing; nobody wanted the truth, the truth is too messy,” a clearly exacerbated Hawk said. “I’ve been through the meat grinder for what I know and because I won’t shut up about it. People have told me I should keep my mouth closed, stop making waves. I’ve been harassed by the police. People call me crazy. I know what I saw, and I know what’s right. This is not right. This ambivalence, the apathy of duty, for whatever the reasons, isn’t right. This is a human life. Where’s the outrage?”

On the night of Jan. 12, 2010, at the time Matouk Romain disappeared from St. Paul’s Church, Tim Matouk was on a surveillance assignment for his COMET squad in Warren and assigned to drive a silver-color Dodge Caravan. The assignment ended at 9:30 p.m.

Although his fellow members of the COMET squad that day can verify his presence in the “rolling” surveillance — different members alternating on the subject throughout the surveillance period — none of them can account for Tim Matouk’s precise whereabouts in the timeframe surrounding Matouk Romain going missing, only that they were in radio contact with him. Tim Matouk has refused to take a polygraph. Retired FBI agent Bill Randall, hired by JoAnn’s family as a private investigator, says he deems Tim Matouk’s denial of wrongdoing credible and that his investigation into the case doesn’t lead him to believe that Tim has any responsibility for JoAnn’s death.

John Matouk volunteered to take a polygraph exam shortly after his sister vanished and passed. He was in financial debt and in a number of business and personal squabbles at the time of JoAnn’s death.

The scene of the crime

On the day she went missing, JoAnn Matouk Romain attended a civil trial in Wayne County Circuit Court that she was a plaintiff in. She was suing the builders of a home her family once lived in that was discovered to have black mold growing inside. After court ended for the day and she met with her attorneys at the offices of Blake Kirchner P.C. on Griswold Street in downtown Detroit, she dropped her son then 20-year old Michael off at their new home on Morningside Drive in Grosse Pointe Woods and then went to fill up her gas tank at a nearby Shell station on Mack Avenue[JM2] . Once she was done at the gas station, JoAnn headed to a quick church service at St. Paul’s that started at 7 p.m. It was part of her normal routine.

People present at the law firm that night describe Matouk Romain as being in good spirits as the case appeared to be shifting in the plaintiffs’ favor with over a million dollars in damages at stake. She was scheduled to testify the next day.

At around 7:20 p.m., at least three people, including the pastor who conducted the service, saw Matouk Romain leave toward the parking lot and the silver-colored 2008 model Lexus SUV she drove to the Tuesday night mass. Less than two minutes later, one eyewitness heard the panic alarm on the vehicle go off.

JoAnn Matouk Romain was never seen alive again.

Cobbling together the rest of the timeline from police and Coast Guard reports, court records and deposition testimony, it becomes abundantly clear that virtually nothing is clear about the near three-hour timeframe from when Matouk Romain left church to when the U.S. Coast Guard was deployed to the scene to look for a missing woman in the water.

“The timeline is totally out of whack,” said former television investigative reporter Scott Lewis, now a private investigator hired by the Romains, of those three hours.

Per an incident report and his own deposition testimony, Grosse Pointe Farms police officer Keith Colombo came across JoAnn’s Lexus SUV parked in the front space of the St. Paul’s Church at 9:53 p.m. and ran her license plate at 9:58. Matouk Romain’s daughters Michelle and Kelli Romain testified under oath at their depositions that the police arrived at their home informing them that their mother was missing at 9:25 p.m., five minutes before the Coast Guard received a call to search for a woman in the water and more than a half-hour before Colombo’s plate search was confirmed to be entered into the department’s database.

A Grosse Pointe Farms Police Department “Follow Up” report put into the case file the following day officially listed the start of the investigation at 9:30:53 p.m. Colombo testified to the investigation start-time being 23 minutes later at 9:53 when he noticed the Lexus SUV sitting all alone in the St. Paul’s parking lot. The officer who arrived at JoAnn’s house and encountered Michelle and Kelli Romain places the time at closer to 10:30.

The car’s license plate was in Michelle Romain’s name, not Matouk Romain’s, so Michelle Romain wondered why the police weren’t there looking for her instead.

“Nothing makes sense about anything that happened that night,” Michelle Romain says. “It would have been impossible to know what person you were looking for or what location you would have been looking for them at and this is according to their own timeline. There was no reason to presume she was missing at that point, and there was no reason to presume she jumped into the lake. It was like this narrative was created and then people set out to make things fit that narrative.”   

Grosse Pointe Woods policeman Darrell Fisher testified he arrived at the Matouk Romain home at 10:29, more than a hour after Michelle and Kelli Romain say they were visited by police and alerted something was amiss. John Matouk says his car’s clock read 10:07 when he and his two nieces showed up at the crime scene.

Colombo testified that he called his dispatcher at 10:49 to inform the police on the scene that the family was coming over to St. Paul’s despite him telling them to stay put at home. Giving credence to the Romain sisters’ timeline, cell phone records show 13 calls from Matouk Romain’s childrens’ phones made to their mother’s phone between 9:29 p.m. and 10:32 p.m., making it appear as if they were frantically trying to contact their mom well before Fisher says he arrived to tell them she was missing. Eight of those calls were made before 10 p.m.

Officer Fisher said in his deposition testimony he came to the Romain residence that night looking only for the owner of the Lexus registered to someone who lived at that particular address, not JoAnn Matouk Romain specifically. Fisher further claims JoAnn Matouk Romain’s name wasn’t mentioned in the conversation until Michelle Romain said her mom had possession of the vehicle.

Michelle Romain claims Fisher wasn’t the officer who arrived at her family home that evening, saying he doesn’t match the physical description of the officer she interacted with.

“The police officer who testified at the deposition that he came to our house that night wasn’t the officer who came with the news (of her mom’s disappearance) and asked about the car,” Michelle Romain says. “Two totally different people. The officer I spoke to was “taller, skinnier and had darker hair. It wasn’t Darrell Fisher.”

The incident report filed by Officer Colombo states he saw high-heeled women’s shoe footprints going from near the abandoned vehicle across Lakeshore Road and toward the water embankment leading into Lake St. Clair, an estimated distance of 75-to-100 feet. He changed his account in his deposition testimony saying the footprints began on the other side of Lakeshore Road, not near the car. The crime scene photos don’t show any woman’s footprints at all, just men’s boot tracks.

Another responding police officer recovered a scarf from the middle of the road, resting near the median. JoAnne’s children say the scarf didn’t belong to their mother, but a female churchgoer that night told private investigators that she saw a man wearing a scarf walking near the water around the time she left the St. Paul’s parking lot. Grosse Pointe Farms Police never did any DNA testing of the scarf or the Lexus SUV, eventually giving the scarf away to Goodwill in 2015, per police records.

One churchgoer at St. Paul’s says when she left the parking lot at 7:35, there were no cars remaining on the property. This account has had the Romain sisters and John Matouk speculate that JoAnn might have been kidnapped in her own car and the vehicle was returned to the parking lot after the crime was committed, in time for the police to come across it sometime in the 9:00 hour.

Despite the seemingly strong case to be made for foul play in this case, it became the belief of the Grosse Pointe Farms police that night and remains its belief to this day that JoAnn Matouk Romain decided to commit suicide by leaving St. Paul’s, walking across the road and jumping into Lake St. Clair to drown herself. Crime-scene experts like Sal Rastrelli and the Romain’s private investigator, Scott Lewis, believe it would have been nearly impossible for her to navigate the slippery, jagged pre-aquatic terrain from the breakwall to the water in order to get herself in the water, not to mention her having to wade or swim 400 yards of an ice-chipped lake before she would have reached a watermark of more than three feet deep to be submerged. All this while wearing 4-foot high black-leather lady-heeled boots.

Grosse Pointe Farms police officer Andy Rogers had been the first member of law enforcement to notice the Lexus SUV in the St. Paul’s parking lot and ran the plates originally at 9 p.m. before deciding to leave the situation alone. He was the officer that placed a call to the Coast Guard requesting help finding a missing woman in the water.

Like almost everything else in the timeline, when exactly that call was made is in heavy dispute.

Rogers says he placed the call around 10:30 p.m. Bruce Czako, the Coast Guard petty officer that received his call that night, backs Rogers’ account and wrote down the time as 10:33 p.m. in his notes.

The official Coast Guard timestamping device tells a different story though.

The call to the Coast Guard was logged at 9:30 p.m. in the USCG mainframe (known as “SITREP”: Coast Guard Situation Report). At 9:38, first responders were dispatched and at 9:51 p.m., a calvary of Coast Guard helicopters, boats and divers came roaring into the area of water near St. Paul’s, per SITREP timestamps.

While JoAnn’s three kids and brother John say they arrived on the scene at St. Paul’s between 10:00 and 10:10 p.m., the Grosse Pointe Farms Police say the family got to the church parking lot closer to 11 p.m. Two handwritten notes, a half-dozen pages of the Coast Guard Search and Rescue file and affidavits signed by a pair of Coast Guard officers taking calls that night support the latter timeline.

Petty officer Czako testified in a deposition that he believed the times were entered incorrectly into the SITREP system manually. David Smith, a former high-ranking member of the Coast Guard, testified in his deposition that the SITREP system is computer-generated and not manually operated.

Whenever they arrived at St. Paul’s, JoAnn’s family came upon a dramatic scene. Something straight out of the Fox television action drama “9.1.1.” or an old episode of “Law & Order.”

Only, Matouk Romain’s children and brother John Matouk theorize that it was all a giant, highly choreographed act.

“The whole thing felt staged,” John Matouk recalls. “You would have thought the Queen of England went missing. Helicopters are crisscrossing over the church like in the movie ‘The Fugitive.’ The Coast Guard boats are blaring. For what? My sister had left her car in that parking lot dozens of times after church and went to go get something to eat; why would you assume she was missing? Why would you assume she jumped in the water? Last time I checked, footprints don’t make indentations in the pavement on Lakeshore Drive. She never went in the water by St. Paul’s; someone or a group of someones wanted to make it look like that though.”

When police opened the Lexus in the St. Paul’s parking lot, they found Matouk Romain’s purse and wallet containing $1,500 dollars in cash. Her keys, cellphone and rosary beads were missing. Grosse Pointe Woods police told one of the family’s private investigators, ex G-man, Bill Randall, that the only fingerprints found in the Lexus were of close family members; yet members of her family were never printed, and none of them had a government job which would have required fingerprints on file.  

Quizzically, the call Andy Rogers placed to the Coast Guard (at either 9:30 or 10:30 depending on who you ask) was actually the second call regarding a missing woman in the water the Coast Guard logged that evening. Another identical call came in at 6 p.m., reporting a woman going into Lake St. Clair by St. Paul’s an hour earlier and her family in a frantic state looking for her.

This was 80 minutes before Matouk Romain went missing and while she was still in a meeting at the Blake Kirchner law office in downtown Detroit with her family’s attorney regarding the black mold civil suit she was involved in. There were no other reports of a missing woman or anybody else going into the water in that vicinity made to any of the Grosse Pointe police or St. Clair Shores police departments that night.

The Romains feel the first call is another sign of a cover-up.

“Someone jumped the gun, they called the Coast Guard too early, timestamps don’t lie,” Michelle Romain said.

The Body

Grosse Pointe Farms police took a hardline stance from the very first minutes of the investigation that JoAnn Matouk Romain committed suicide. In deposition testimony, Farms police chief Dan Jensen admitted that the timespan in which the department went from viewing it as a missing person’s case to officially declaring it suicide was “five minutes.” JoAnn Matouk Romain went into the water under her own volition, the responding officers concluded.

There was no body though. Not that night. And not for months.

During that time, Matouk Romain’s brother John Matouk and kids wanted the police to handle the situation as a missing person case, but were repeatedly rebuffed and shuffled from one police department to the other.

“We would go into the Farms and tell them we wanted them to do something, keep looking for her,” Michelle Romain says. “They basically told us we were crazy and pushed us off on to the Grosse Pointe Woods police department. Nobody wanted to do anything; nobody was listening to us.”

In early February 2010, Grosse Pointe Farms police returned Matouk Romain’s keychain, carrying a key to the Lexus SUV she was driving the night she went missing. According to the Matouk Romain family, it was the wrong one – her mom had a completely different set on her possession at the time of her disappearance. JoAnn’s kids say the keychain given to them by Grosse Pointe Farms police officer Frank Zielinski had been stolen during a real-estate showing of their family home around Thanksgiving, and the keys she was driving with that night were the spare set.

A second keychain would be found with Matouk Romain’s body. Zielinski’s report says he retrieved the set of keys the morning after the disappearance, January 13, 2010. However, he did not remember who had sent him retrieve them, where he retrieved them from or who he interacted with while retrieving them, per his deposition testimony six years later.

On March 20, 2010, two fishermen in Amherstburg, Ontario, came upon JoAnn Matouk Romain’s body floating in the waters of the Detroit River, some 30 miles away from where she had last been seen nine weeks previous. The body was identified by dental records two days later. Despite damage to her fingers from crab bites, her body was in practically pristine condition.

Even though the case at that point was officially assigned to the Grosse Pointe Woods Police, Grosse Pointe Farms Police Detectives Mike McCarthy and Richard Rosati went to see the body in Ontario. McCarthy told Canadian authorities, per the incident report made out police in Ontario, that Matouk Romain “suffered from mental health issues” and no foul play was suspected in her death. Per medical records her family retained from her doctors after her death, Matouk Romain was never treated for any mental fitness or emotional distress issues. At his 2016 deposition testimony, McCarthy denied telling detectives in Ontario that Matouk Romain had any mental health problems.

She did however express anxiety and unrest regarding her personal safety to many of those closest to her in the month preceding her death. Matouk Romain’s two daughters and brother John Matouk told Detective McCarthy that Matouk Romain was in fear for her life.

Beginning in December 2009, she confided in her daughters that she felt like her phone conversations were being listened in on, her mail was being tampered with and that people were following her. If anything happened to her, she told her family, to look at their cousin the cop, Tim Matouk, as the culprit.  

Eleven separate friends, confidants and family members told private investigators hired by the Matouks that Matouk Romain had expressed to them that she felt she was in imminent danger. Tim Matouk, currently a lead investigator for the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, denied playing any role in his cousin JoAnn’s disappearance or death in his deposition testimony.

An autopsy performed in Canada stated Matouk Romain had drowned, but could not determine when, how or where the body ended up in the water. Another autopsy was conducted by the coroner in Macomb County and determined it was a drowning, noting suicide was more likely than homicide due to lack of significant physical trauma to the body.

Matouk Romain’s family paid for a private autopsy done by pathologist Dr. Jeff Jentzen at the University of Michigan and Jentzen’s review of the body tells a different story. He determined it was a fresh water “dry drowning,” meaning there was no water in her lungs when she was found.

The body had a contusion on the left arm. That, along with Matouk Romain’s purse, which she would carry over her left shoulder, being ripped, led Matouk Romain’s family to believe there was a struggle before she was either subdued or killed.

“It’s blatantly obvious she didn’t commit suicide, and all the evidence you find points to murder,” private investigator Scott Lewis says. “The overreaction by police that night she vanished reeks of corrupt intent. They made a huge deal of everything, the helicopters, the boats, the dogs, the divers and then they just dropped it. After all that commotion, they had no interest in looking into anything anymore. There appeared no interest in doing any digging at all. That’s curious and begs examination.”

The Debt

In the hours and days after Matouk Romain went missing, the Matouk family gathered at Matouk Romain’s home on Morningside to try and make some sense of her disappearance and brainstorm possible circumstances that may have contributed to it. Friends and neighbors stopped by to show support and saw a family shaken to its core and ready to start pointing fingers.

And it wasn’t just at her cousin Tim Matouk.

According to people present at the Matouk Romain home during these gatherings, at first, all eyes turned to John Matouk, JoAnn’s baby brother who had fallen on tough times in recent years.

“They took out a legal pad and literally made a list of all the people who John Matouk owed money to and may have upset enough to want to do him harm by hurting someone close to him,” one attendee says. “Everybody was on edge. It was a very tense environment. The finger pointing started immediately.”

John Matouk admits to thinking early on that he might have had something indirectly to do with his sister’s disappearance.

“I just knew that the situation had gotten out of control,” he says. “I considered the possibility that someone took her to hurt me; there was nobody closer to me than my sister; losing her has brought me more pain than I could ever imagine.”

One of the names that made it on to the list was Anthony Pipia, a 52-year old Birmingham resident who grew up on the Eastside and at one time lived in Grosse Pointe. Pipia owns an MRI center and has no criminal record.

Per multiple sources, Pipia was a bookmaker at the time of Matouk Romain’s disappearance, and John Matouk owed him a substantial sports[JM1] -gambling debt. John puts the number at close to $100,000. Other sources place it at more than $200,000.

At least three sources paint Pipia’s bookmaking business back then as an offshoot of the one-time Allen “The General” Hilf gambling empire. A convicted felon and, per court records, a high-level adviser to Detroit mafia figures, Hilf was the most prolific bookie in Michigan for almost 40 years before he succumbed to a kidney disorder in January 2014.

Both Bill and Tim Matouk admit to being friendly with Pipia in deposition testimony. Pipia was present at some of the gatherings at the Matouk Romain residence in the days after Matouk Romain missing, according to people in attendance.

John Matouk claims he saw Bill, Tim Matouk and Anthony Pipia’s cars parked behind the wine store and the light on the second floor of the building the night after JoAnne Matouk Romain disappeared. In one of Michelle Romain’s interviews with police in Grosse Pointe Woods, she told detectives that Pipia told her that he met with her dad, Dave Romain and her uncle, Bill, at the wine store on Jan. 16, 2010, four days after her mom went missing, but didn’t tell her what they discussed.

Bill and Tim Matouk pointed the finger at John Matouk, if there was indeed foul play in JoAnn Matouk Romain’s disappearance and death, when interviewed by police and private investigators. Tim Matouk admitted to a private investigator that he called a tip line set up for intelligence gathering purposes and told authorities to look at John Matouk in the Matouk Romain case.

John Matouk took and passed a lie detector test. Tim Matouk has refused to take one. Bill Matouk and Tony Pipia have never been asked to undergo a polygraph examination by law enforcement in relation to the Matouk Romain case.

John Matouk admits to once being close friends with Pipia and says he loaned him a half-million dollars on one occasion. When his gambling debt began mounting, John wanted leeway, per those familiar with the situation, and Pipia wouldn’t give it.

There was property damage to John’s house in 2012 that John suspects might have come from someone sent by Pipia because of his anger about the debt. The animosity grew. Things eventually got physical.

On security camera video shot in 2013 and posted on YouTube, Tony Pipia is seen pushing John Matouk and sending him tumbling to the pavement in a car wash. John and Tim Matouk scuffled at a furniture store in 2015, resulting in Tim taking out a personal protection order on John.

Pipia was interviewed by Grosse Pointe Woods police in relation to JoAnn Matouk Romain’s disappearance on Feb 8, 2010. The detectives conducting the interview determined he had nothing of value to share, per their report.

Contacted at his office, Pipia declined to comment for this story.

“They should have killed me instead,” a somber John Matouk said in the summer of 2020. “I’ve basically been dead for the last 10 years,” John Matouk says. “It’s been a living hell, and all its done is sewn and hardened my resolve to find the truth.”

Passing the buck

Desperate for answers in their mother’s death, Matouk Romain’s loved ones hit roadblock after roadblock with law enforcement, encountering, at the very least, apathy, and if one believes her children, an illicit coverup to protect the killers. As her family pushed for action, Matouk Romain’s case pinballed between agencies.

Grosse Pointe Farms police gave the case to Grosse Pointe Woods police two days after her disappearance. Grosse Pointe Woods tried giving part of the investigation to the Michigan State Police. The Michigan State Police would pass people on to the FBI. The FBI did little.

Michelle Romain says she has met with the FBI’s organized crime and public corruption units on several occasions in the past decade. She’s come away with the feeling that agents were more concerned about pumping her for information on other mob-related items she might have knowledge of through childhood friendships rather than wanting to find out what really happened to her mother.

FBI agents placed picture books of reputed mobsters and mob associates in front of Romain and asked her for identifications, Romain says.

Pipia’s photo was in the picture books, she says.

“They’d take me in there, ask me about this guy, or that guy, people that I grew up with or I grew up around their kids in Grosse Pointe, what did I know about their businesses, their restaurants. It had very little, if anything, to do with figuring out who killed my mom and why,” Romain says. 

The Grosse Pointe Woods detective assigned to the case, Andrew Pazuchowski, reached out to the Michigan State Police early in his department’s inquiry because he saw potential conflicts of interest in the handling of Tim and Bill Matouk. Most in the Grosse Pointe Woods and Grosse Pointe Farms police departments knew Tim and Bill Matouk on a personal basis.

Michigan State Police investigator Twanda Powell said she met with Pazuchowski, and Pazuchowski asked for help from MSP in “clearing” Tim and Bill Matouk. The way the request was phrased caught her off guard and raised a red flag in her mind.

Powell told Pazuchowski that she doesn’t “clear” suspects, she “investigates them,” and reported the exchange to her superior. The MSP declined to get involved in that aspect of the probe, and Grosse Pointe Woods PD lists the case’s status as “open, but inactive.”

Pazuchowski questioned Michelle Romain regarding a large sum of cash ($250,000) she and her great aunt transferred into an account at a St. Clair Shores bank in February 2010, less than a month following JoAnn’s disappearance. The bank notified police of the money transfer.

Romain told Pazuchowski that the money was for a ransom demand if one was ever made and for a cash reward she was offering to the public for information leading to finding her then-missing mom. Pazuchowski declined comment for this story when reached by phone at his new job as Police Chief of Huntington Woods in Oakland County.

Attention naturally turned to Matouk Romain’s husband as well. Things had been soured for some time, per their children.

Dave Romain would go on to raise eyebrows when in 2012 he married Sandy Boehm, his widow’s best friend.

An employee of the Blake Kirchner law firm handling JoAnn’s civil case for the black mold outbreak at her former home, told Grosse Pointe Farms Police that Matouk Romain “feared trouble from her husband.”

Matouk Romain had been separated from Dave Romain for almost five years at the time. She suspected him of being unfaithful. Dave Romain was also a plaintiff in the black mold case and was in court with her and their children the day she went missing. The case had dragged on for seven years and was finally in front of a jury.

JoAnn and Dave Romain began having trouble in their marriage in the 1980s, according to their children. Dave Romain traveled for work and was gone for days at a time during the week. When he would return home on the weekends, he and Joann Matouk Romain fought frequently, their kids say, jokingly calling the three-day family reunions, “psycho Saturday and Sunday.”

Private investigators hired by Matouk Romain’s children have looked closely at Dave Romain as a person who might have either been involved or known about what they consider a conspiracy to kidnap and murder Matouk Romain. At the time, she disappeared, Dave Romain was at dinner with his two daughters at Andiamo Trattoria on Mack.

Romain’s polygraph results were “inconclusive” and “showed signs of deception,” but the examiner wrote on his report that he believed the signs of deception was related to his infidelity, not his playing any part in her death. Nonetheless, his shaky polygraph results combined with his relationship with Boehm and the fact that with JoAnn suddenly out of the picture he would be relieved of the financial stress that had been coming his way from what was certainly going to be a costly divorce, had investigators unwilling to eliminate him.

“Dave doesn’t look good in this,” private investigator Bill Randall said. 

Romain hung up when asked to comment on the case.

Dave Romain’s results were inconclusive and showed signs of deception, but related to his infidelity not her disappearance.

The Lawsuit

In June 2014, the JoAnn Matouk Romain estate filed a $100,000,000 wrongful death lawsuit in federal court in Detroit against the Grosse Pointe Farms and Grosse Pointe Woods Public Safety Departments, 16 different police officers spanning both police forces and Tim Matouk. The suit alleged the police departments knew Tim Matouk was going to kill JoAnn Matouk Romain and helped him cover it up.

The year before the suit was filed, John Matouk began hiring the planes to fly around Grosse Pointe with messages aimed at swaying public opinion and embarrassing his brother and cousin. The year before that, John was evicted from his own house when his brother, Bill, bought it. Planes with messages attacking Tim and Bill Matouk were flown in May and September of this year, continuing what is now a seven-year tradition of airing the family’s dirty laundry whenever the weather gets warm and people are outside.

U.S. District Judge Linda Parker dismissed the JoAnn Matouk Romain estate’s wrongful death lawsuit in March 2018. Despite rejecting the plaintiff’s argument, Parker appeared to be uncomfortable with the facts surrounding JoAnn Matouk Romain’s death and the investigation into. Her comments at the court hearing where she dismissed the case and granted defendants’ motion for summary judgment made that clear:

“There is no evidence that someone who wanted to kill Ms. Romain knew the police would cover it up. This court, however, acknowledges there are disputed facts in this matter that are very disturbing and remain unresolved. While the circumstances surrounding Ms. Romain’s disappearance and death remain a mystery, and in fact are somewhat suspicious, the fact is that the plaintiff fails to create a genuine issue of material fact to hold the police liable.”

Parker dismissed the case against Tim Matouk without prejudice, allowing the plaintiff an opportunity to refile the case if more evidence becomes available down the road. The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Parker’s ruling in August 2019.

“The case ended the way it should have ended, it was dismissed, end of story,” Grosse Pointe Farms Police Lt. Richard Rosati, who was named in the lawsuit told the Detroit Free Press at the time. “They couldn’t present any evidence of police collusion because it didn’t happen.”

Tim Matouk refused to talk on the record for this story.

He released the following statement:

“On a very tragic night, the night JoAnn went missing in January 2010, I was on duty working for a Michigan State Police narcotics task force in Warren. My location that night has been verified and confirmed by testimony of Michigan State police troopers and corroborated by cell phone records. After a lengthy 5-year lawsuit, not one, but two federal courts dismissed the case against me. Any allegations connecting me to the death of JoAnne are false.”  

Tie to Widlak case?

According to multiple sources, when Grosse Pointe banker David Widlak died of an “execution style” gunshot to the neck eight months after Matouk Romain’s disappearance, some in law enforcement came to the belief that Widlak’s murder was connected to the death of JoAnn Matouk Romain. Private investigators hired by the Widlak family came to the same conclusion. 

Widlak was found floating in Lake St. Clair, a bullet lodged in the back of his neck. The bullet was initially missed in the autopsy performed by Macomb County Coroner Daniel Spitz and originally ruled it a suicide. Spitz also performed Matouk Romain’s Macomb County autopsy and, according to the family’s University of Michigan Hospital pathology report, missed the fact that her death was a dry drowning.

Widlak, 62, president of the floundering Community Central Bank, disappeared in September 2010 from his office in Mount Clemens. Community Central was in financial peril. Widlak was calling back $40,000,000 in loan markers and floated worries about potential investors he was meeting with to loved ones.

Community Central Bank’s Grosse Pointe Woods branch was located across Mack Avenue, not far from Woods Fine Wine & Spirits. According to Community Central records, the store had done some banking there. Per those close to Widlak, he was asking questions about what happened to Matouk Romain in the months leading up to his own death. 

“These two cases are actually the same case,” said one Widlak relative. “Powerful people on both sides of the law keeping a lid on things; you start realizing that more and more as the years go on, and it’s a bitter pill to swallow.”

Lack of closure

Michelle Romain is disheartened by the lack of empathy and motivation by authorities in Metro Detroit in regards to her mother’s death and wanting to uncover the truth.

“I can understand what the Widlak family is going through because we’re going through the same exact thing,” she says. “People who are supposed to care, don’t care, and in our cases, a lot of those people are probably guilty themselves.”

Her attorney, Solomon Radner, views the whole situation as a modern day tragedy of epic proportions.

“This is tragic in so many ways: The victims are dumped like a bag of trash; nobody cares in the police or prosecutor’s office; silence is power; people intentionally turn blind eyes to grave injustice and loss of human life, and it’s accepted as par for the course,” he says. “That very fact that we’re here a decade later and nobody has made an effort to find out anything, it should chill people to the bone, scare them to the core. The good guys are the bad guys now. Everything is upside down, and people are OK with it.”

Michelle Romain finds herself today more firm in her belief that there was a coverup involved in her mom’s death than ever before.

“This is an inside job, we can’t trust law enforcement anymore,” she said. “They’ve let us down. The legal system is flawed.”

Grosse Pointe Farms and Grosse Pointe Woods Public Safety Departments did not return phone calls to comment on the case.

A Metro Detroit native, Scott M. Burnstein is an author, investigative reporter and historian who has published six books on the subject of organized crime. He has his law degree from University of Illinois-Chicago and does frequent talks and national media appearances related to mob activity in North America.

Tips on the Matouk Romain case can be sent to burnsteinscott@gmail

The post The Pointes Of Contention: JoAnn Matouk Romain’s Suspicious Death Was Most Likely A Murder appeared first on The Gangster Report.

An Uncle’s Pride & Joy: Alleged Buffalo Mafia Don’s Nephew Pleads Out In Drug & Firearm Case

$
0
0

November 3, 2020 — Anthony Gerace, the nephew of reputed Buffalo mob boss, Joseph (Big Joe) Todaro, Jr., copped a plea in his federal drug and gun case from 2019 last week. The 40-year old Gerace pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm in furtherance of narcotics trafficking in front of U.S. District Court Judge John Sinatra on October 27.

A January 2019 raid of Gerace’s home revealed large amounts of cocaine, marijuana and pills as well as 14 guns and more than $100,000 in cash. The minimum punishment for the conviction is five years in prison. Gerace will be sentenced in February.

Gerace’s older brother, Pete Gerace, Jr., the 53-year old owner of the Cheektowaga, New York strip club, Pharaoh’s, has also recently found himself on the government’s radar. Homeland Security agents raided Pharaoh’s last December.

Gerace, Sr. is married to Big Joe Todaro’s sister. He once owned Pharaoh’s and was fined for shady hiring practices.

Retired Buffalo DEA agent Joe Bongiovanni was indicted in November 2019 for shaking down drug dealers he believed were connected to Italian organized crime in the Buffalo area. Peter Gerace, Jr. and Bongiovanni, 56, grew up together in the same neighborhood in Western New York and sources familiar with the investigation say the reference in the Bongiovanni indictment to a strip club owner phoning him and asking for help in dealing with an overdosed stripper is referring to Gerace, Jr. and Pharaoh’s. Bongiovanni has pleaded not guilty in the case and is awaiting trial.

According to the FBI, the Todaro family has run the Buffalo mafia since the 1980s. Big Joe’s dad, Joseph (Lead Pipe Joe) Todaro, Sr. reigned into the 2000s, before retiring, court documents claim, and handing the reins to Big Joe.

Todaro, Sr. died of heart failure in 2012 at 89. The Todaro family is just as prominent in the Western New York business sector as the government alleges it is in the world of the east coast mob. The Todaros pioneered the marketing of Buffalo wings to the rest of the country with their prolific La Nova pizza and wing empire, started by the father-son team back in the 1970s.

Although he has a clean criminal record, Big Joe Todaro has had his name surface in at least one murder plot and labor-racketeering investigations. Todaro, Jr. resigned his leadership post in Buffalo’s LIUNA Local 210 in 1990 because of what was determined as links to the local mob.

The post An Uncle’s Pride & Joy: Alleged Buffalo Mafia Don’s Nephew Pleads Out In Drug & Firearm Case appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Daddy’s Coming Home: Detroit MC Club Chief “Big Daddy” Moore Let Out Of Prison On Home Confinement

$
0
0

November 4, 2020 – The most powerful biker boss in Michigan has gotten a reprieve from a life prison sentence. He’s walking free this week.

Leonard (Big Daddy) Moore, the 72-year old “Godfather” of The Highwaymen Motorcycle Club, was granted a compassionate release due to preexisting conditions for COVID-19 by U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds in Detroit. Moore was the lead defendant in a 2006 drug and racketeering indictment and will serve the rest of his sentence on home confinement. Moore’s life sentence was reduced to 20 years via an appeal.

The Highwaymen are the biggest biker gang in Michigan. The club was founded in Detroit back in the 1950s and maintains chapters in seven other states besides Michigan, including Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee.

Big Daddy Moore’s roots are in Detroit’s Downriver area. In 1977, he was convicted of killing an innocent bystander in a bombing attack of a rival biker clubhouse. The Highwaymen and the more nationally-prominent Outlaws MC have been at odds in the Great Lakes region for decades.

Since its earliest days, The Highwaymen’s “mother ship” has been located in Southwest Detroit. The original Highwaymen clubhouse burned to the ground in 1999.

Moore has always favored ruling by proxy, per DEA documents, instead of being at the forefront of the club’s public image. Informants told DEA and ATF agents that Moore never wanted the title of club or national president, preferring using the positions as buffers and lightning rods for scrutiny he sought to avoid. Under Moore’s stewardship, The Highwaymen did business with all forms of like-minded criminal groups, spanning the Detroit Italian mafia to African-American and Hispanic street gangs and Eastern-European drug and gambling crews.

This past summer, the club experienced some unrest, as Highwaymen Thomas (Crazy Tom) Curry murdered Ron (Greedy) Davies, another member of the club, and two others and then set Davies house on fire to try and cover up the triple homicide. Curry, 38, committed suicide after a two-day standoff with authorities in September where he took two hostages and barricaded himself in a Northwest Detroit residence.

The post Daddy’s Coming Home: Detroit MC Club Chief “Big Daddy” Moore Let Out Of Prison On Home Confinement appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Casino Movie Murder Timeline: Tony The Ant’s Las Vegas Mob Hit List

$
0
0

November 4, 2020 – This month marks the 25th anniversary of the classic Martin Scorsese gangster flick Casino, telling the story of the Chicago mafia’s days ruling over the Las Vegas hotel and gaming industry. Casino was released on November 22, 1995 and although not as well received as Scorsese’s mob movie opus Goodfellas, still firmly established itself as an all-time true-crime classic in cinema history. Joe Pesci played Nicky Santoro, based on real-life Chicago-turned-Vegas mafia chief Tony (The Ant) Spilotro, and Robert DeNiro played Sam (Ace) Rothstein, a character inspired by Spilotro’s childhood pal from the Windy City, Jewish mega bookie Frank (Lefty) Rosenthal.

Spilotro’s reign was colorful and bloody. Many of the gangland murders depicted in the film happened exactly like you saw on screen. Other hits allegedly carried out by Spilotro’s crew of “desperados,” ended up on the cutting room floor. The murder rate in the state of Nevada as a whole went up ten-fold in the decade and a half Tony the Ant ruled the roost for the Chicago mob in the desert.

The Casino Hit List (1962-1997)

May 13 & 14 1962The M&M Murders: Spilotro kills Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia for an unsanctioned shooting at a mob-owned bar that ended up with three dead in Chicago. Spilotro put Miraglia’s head in a vise and popped his eye out of his head to get him to give up his partner McCarthy’s whereabouts before killing him by slitting his throat. McCarthy is murdered the next day and their bodies are stacked on top of each other and put in the back of Miraglia’s Cadillac. The hit boosts Tony the Ant’s reputation as a fast-riser in Chicago Outfit circles and puts him in line to get sent to Vegas in the subsequent years. The Miraglia murder is shown in Casino and is one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.

June 23, 1973 – Las Vegas bookie and loanshark William (Joey Red) Klimm is gunned down in the parking lot of the Churchill Downs Race Book. The Klimm murder was the first headline-grabbing hit of the Spilotro era in Vegas. Klimm was resisting shakedown efforts from Spilotro’s crew of misfits, ,many of whom traveled West with him from Illinois. The Ant was charged with the homicide, but had the case thrown out before trial.

May 12, 1975 – Mob associate and Caesars Palace casino pit boss Marty Buccieri is shot to death for demanding a finder’s fee for helping broker financing for casino executive Allen Glick’s Argent Corp. (owners of The Stardust, The Hacienda, The Fremont and The Marina) via contacts in the Chicago and Milwaukee mafia syndicates. Buccieri was a cousin of Chicago mafia capo Fiore (Fifi) Buccieri and his brother Frank (The Horse) Buccieri, the Outfit’s liaison to Milwaukee’s Balestrieri crime family.

November 9, 1975 – Casino investor Tamara Rand, one of Allen Glick’s partners who was threatening to sue him for blocking purchase of more shares in Argent, is killed inside her San Diego home. In Casino, the character based on Rand was called Anna Scott.

August 1, 1976 – Mob associate Jay Vandermark, the point man in charge of the skim operation on the floor of The Stardust, disappears upon being sought for questioning by the feds in a theft and hidden ownership probe. The FBI raided The Stardust in May 1976, the same month Vandermark bolted town for Arizona. Vandermark was the slot supervisor at The Stardust and last seen alive in Phoenix with members of the Spilotro’s Arizona crew. He’s believed to have been murdered in Mexico to prevent him from giving the mob up to save himself and his son. Vandermark’s name is changed to John Nance in the movie Casino and the location of his murder moved from Mexico to Costa Rica. Nance ending up in a swimming pool in the script was taken from a real mob hit committed by the Spilotro crew three years later.

October 8, 1976 – MGM Grand casino baccarat dealer Peter Bufala is slain in his driveway.

November 21, 1976 – Mob associate and bookie Gerald (Fat Jerry) Delman, who ran Saratoga Race & Sportsbook for Spilotro in Downtown Vegas, is murdered. Delman had worked for Spilotro back in Chicago and handled gambling affairs for The Ant in Indianapolis.

December 15, 1976 – Mob associate and drug dealer Rick Manzie is found shot to death inside the Las Vegas mansion he shared with his wife, singer and actress Barbara McNair. Manzie, a Chicago native, was close friends with Tony Spilotro and Spilotro is caught on an FBI wire in the months that followed vowing revenge on the killers. Others believe, it was all a ruse, and Spilotro killed Manzie himself.

April 23, 1977Jeff Vandermark, the drug junkie son of Jay Vandermark, is bludgeoned to death inside his Las Vegas apartment. The younger Vandermark’s addiction is referenced in the John Nance storyline in Casino.

February 24, 1977 – Las Vegas labor union leader and mob associate Al Bramlet is kidnapped and murdered by Tom Hanley and his son Gramby for refusing to pay them for bombings they did for him. Bramlet was president of Nevada’s AFL-CIO and the secretary-treasurer of the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union Local 226. He was taken from the airport at gunpoint and then killed execution style in the desert. Spilotro held influence with Bramlet.

July 24, 1977 – The Park Ridge Massacre: Chicago Outfit associates Joe LaRose, John Viache, Malcom Russell and Don Marchbanks are killed execution style in their offices in Park Ridge, Illinois. The four men were partners in a alarm company being used by the mob to wash Las Vegas skim money and suspected of trying to swindle some for themselves.

June 17, 1979 — West Coast sports promotor and agent Vic Weiss is found murdered in a North Hollywood hotel parking lot, hogtied, shot twice in the back of the head and stuffed in the trunk of his Rolls Royce. Weiss represented “outlaw” UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian and was a staple on the Las Vegas Strip in the 1970s, often running in the same circles as Spilotro. At the time of his death, Weiss was negotiating a contract that never came to fruition for Tarkanian to coach the L.A. Lakers. He left a meeting with Lakers ownership on the late afternoon of June 14 and was never seen alive again.

October 11, 1979 – Mob associate and con man Jerry Lisner is shot to death and dumped in his swimming pool by Tony Spilotro’s right-hand man Frank Cullota. Lisner was believed to have been testifying in front of a federal grand jury looking into Spilotro crew activity. Lisner’s murder is shown in Casino, but the character killed was, “John Nance,” based on Jay Vandermark.

June 10, 1980 – Mob associate Frank (Frankie Blue) Bluestein is killed by Las Vegas police during a routine traffic stop on his street in the Sunrise Villas subdivision he lived in when the cops shoot him dead for brandishing a gun while exiting the vehicle with a pizza. Bluestein, the son of labor union power “Stevie Blue” Bluestein, had just moved to town and was working at The Hacienda. Spilotro’s crew took Bluestein’s killing as an act of war and retaliated by shooting up the private residences of the two policemen that opened fire on Frankie Blue and placing murder contracts on their heads. FBI agents visited mob bosses in Chicago to let them know what was going on and how out of control the Spilotro contingent had gotten. Scorsese’s version of events in the film Casino leaves out the part of Frankie Blue having a gun and switches out the pizza for a submarine sandwich. In the movie, the character is called “Bernie Blue,” and was a composite of Bluestein and Spilotro’s bodyguard and boyhood buddy, Herbert (Fat Herbie) Blitzstein.

January 20, 1983 – Mob associate Allen Dorfman, the head of the Teamsters pension fund responsible for building much of Las Vegas via hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, is gunned down in the parking lot of the Lincolnwood Hyatt leaving a lunch meeting. Dorfman was on his way to prison and the Chicago Outfit bosses feared he would flip because he was Jewish, not Italian. The Dorfman character’s name is changed to Andy Stone for the movie Casino and his murder is recreated for the film.

January 31, 1986 – Gambler and real estate agent Bobby Ellis is found shot to death in his living room. He was last seen leaving The Palace Station casino two days earlier.

February 20, 1986 – Mob associate and high-roller William (Willie the Watch) Rooney vanishes on a trip to New York City after he took out $40,000 from his gambling account at The Stardust.

June 10, 1986 – Mob associate Emil (Little Mal) Vaci is kidnapped from the parking lot of the Ernesto’s Backstreet bistro he worked at in Phoenix, Arizona, shot to death and dumped in a ditch on the East Side of the city. Vaci was a member of Spilotro’s Arizona crew at the time of his slaying and had once been a part of The Ant’s Las Vegas crew, working as a pit boss at The Stardust and helping Jay Vandermark operate the Skim.

June 14, 1986 – Mob crew boss Tony (The Ant) Spilotro, the Chicago Outfit’s man in Las Vegas, and his little brother Mickey Spilotro are stomped and strangled to death inside a Chicago basement for insubordination. Their bodies are discovered a week later in a Northwest Indiana cornfield. The movie Casino shows the gruesome double murder taking place in a cornfield, not in a mobster’s basement. The power hungry Spilotro had been openly discussing killing his way to the top of The Outfit.

September 14, 1986 – Chicago mob enforcer Giovanni (Big John) Fecoratta is slain for botching the Spilotro brothers’ burial, shot in the back of the head in the vestibule of W. Belmont Avenue bingo hall. The crew Fecoratta used to dispose of the Spilotros bodies got spooked and lost in the Indiana cornfields they were getting rid of the bodies in, leaving a half-dug grave which was quickly discovered.

January 6, 1997 – Mob associate Herbert (Fat Herbie) Blitzstein is gunned down in his Las Vegas home in a hostile takeover of his rackets by the L.A. and Buffalo mobs. Blitzstein was Spilotro’s boyhood pal from Chicago and bodyguard in Vegas during his reign of terror. Blitzstein was portrayed in the movie Casino as the composite character “Bernie Blue,” based on him and Frank (Frankie Blue) Bluestein.

The post The Casino Movie Murder Timeline: Tony The Ant’s Las Vegas Mob Hit List appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Bobby The Cigar Blows Past Prison Gates, Fmr. N.E. Mafia Capo Rides Lucky Court Streak To Freedom

$
0
0

November 5, 2020 – Smoke’em if you got’em. A victory cigar would be appropriate.

Turncoat mobster Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca, formerly of the Patriarca crime family in New England, was granted a compassionate release from prison in a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston this week. Bobby the Cigar is on a roll with the Robes.

DeLuca, 75, was serving a six-year sentence for obstruction connected to a 1993 gangland homicide. Last month, he was given time served by Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Brian Stern for his role in a 1992 mob hit in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood. Judge Casper decided to let DeLuca out of prison 13 months early in his fed case because she deemed his age and underlining health issues makes him more susceptible to attaining the COVID-19 virus.

Bobby the Cigar ran Rhode Island for the Patriarcas in the first half of the 1990s and after serving a federal prison term for racketeering, returned to the Providence area as a capo. He flipped in 2006, wore a wire and entered the Witness Protection Program five years later.

Living in Florida under an assumed identity, DeLuca was back in hot water with the feds in the spring of 2016 when the body of mob associate Stevie DiSarro was dug up back home in Providence under a building owned by one of Bobby the Cigar’s former crew members. DiSarro, a 43-year old nightclub owner and real estate developer, was strangled to death in the kitchen of then-New England mob boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme’s house in a quiet Boston suburb in May 1993. His body was given to DeLuca’s crew to get rid of in Rhode Island.

DeLuca lied to FBI agents in the 2000s about his lack of knowledge of the DiSarro murder. Salemme did too when he became a witness for the government in late 1999.

DiSarro and Salemme were partners in a South Boston rock club turned topless bar. Cadillac Frank and his hot-tempered son feared an increasingly desponden DiSarro was about to become an FBI cooperator. At the time of his murder, DiSarro was facing a looming federal bank fraud indictment tied to a series of shady real estate deals. Cadillac Frank’s long-deceased progeny “Frankie Boy” Salemme, Jr. choked DiSarro to death as his father watched on the morning of May 10, 1993.

Salemme, 87, was found guilty of ordering the DiSarro homicide at a highly-publicized 2018 trial and sentenced to life in prison. Bobby the Cigar was the prosecution’s star witness. Prior to the unearthing of DiSarro’s remains in March 2016, Cadillac Frank was living in the Witness Protection Program in Atlanta.

As part of the deal DeLuca cut with the feds for the DiSarro case, he also agreed to spill the beans on the plot to murder Kevin Hanrahan, which occurred in Providence eight months before DiSarro was killed in Sharon, Massachusetts. The tough, scrappy Hanrahan was an Irish collector and enforcer for the Patriarca crime family who was alleged to be planning a palace coup.

Informants told the FBI Hanrahan intended to knock-off Cadillac Frank and his entire administration and had support from Italian mob figures behind bars. According to court records. DeLuca acted as a go-between for Salemme and the two shooters in the Hanrahan hit.

On the night of September 18, 1992, Hanrahan was gunned down leaving a dinner at The Arch, a popular Federal Hill steakhouse. Per sources familiar with DeLuca’s deal, Bobby the Cigar named Edward (Little Eddie) Lato and Rocco (Shaky) Argenti as the triggermen in the Hanrahan slaying and said Argenti aided him in coordinating the details of the hit. DeLuca and Lato were seen meeting at a local tavern on “The Hill” 20 minutes after Hanrahan was slain

Argenti died of cancer in 2002 after ascending to the New England mob’s consigliere post. Lato, 73, is alleged to be a capo in the Providence wing of the Patriarca crime family today.

Sources in the federal government confirm a grand jury has been convened listening to testimony in the Hanrahan case for the last three-plus years. Little Eddie Lato got out of a federal prison term for extortion courtesy of DeLuca’s cooperation in 2019.

The post Bobby The Cigar Blows Past Prison Gates, Fmr. N.E. Mafia Capo Rides Lucky Court Streak To Freedom appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Twice-Bitten “Frank The Shark” Comes Home From Prison Early, Western Mass. Wiseguy Back On The Scene

$
0
0

November 8, 2020 – Springfield mob figure Frank (The Shark) Depergola walked out of prison four months early on a compassionate release issued by U.S. District Court Timothy Hillman out of Worcester, Massachusetts last week. Hillman believed Depergola had age and health issues that placed him at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19.

The 64-year old Depergola was scheduled to be released from his four-year sentence as a result of a 2017 racketeering conviction in March. He did federal prison time in the 2000s on an extortion case.

Depergola, a longtime bookie and loanshark in the Western Massachusetts’ underworld, was close to slain Springfield mob boss Adolfo (Big Al) Bruno and was acting as Bruno’s driver the nigh he was gunned down in November 2003 at the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Society Social Club in the city’s South End. Bruno had been feuding with subordinates in his crew and mob leaders in New York City.

Several of Bruno’s former men have ascended to the higher ranks of the Springfield mob crew, a decades-old faction of New York’s Genovese crime family, in the years after his assassination. The social club remains the epicenter of the city’s mob crew, per sources.

The post Twice-Bitten “Frank The Shark” Comes Home From Prison Early, Western Mass. Wiseguy Back On The Scene appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Picture-Perfect Ending: Canadian Underworld Chief “Picasso” Woolley Walks Free From Prison

$
0
0

November 11, 2020 — You could not have painted a better picture for one of Canada’s most notorious criminals. Montreal gangland leader Greg (Picasso) Woolley was paroled early from his drug case with strict conditions this week, walking out of prison eight months before he was scheduled to be because of the COVID-19 pandemic. On Tuesday, he checked into a Quebec halfway house.

The 49-year old Woolley is affiliated with both the Italian mafia and the Hells Angels biker gang in Quebec. He was arrested as part of a narcotics-conspiracy case in 2015 and sentenced to eight years behind bars — awaiting trial in the case, he was nailed for smuggling cocaine and crystal meth into his detention facility. His previous attempt to shake loose from behind bars on a COVID-19 related motion failed back in the spring.

This was Woolley’s third prison term. One of the stints in the can was connected to a series of attempted murders tied to the Quebec Biker War.

In the 1990s, Woolley was closely aligned with legendary Hells Angels boss Maurice (Mom) Boucher and given leadership of a Hells Angels support club called, “The Rockers.” Woolley fought on the frontlines of the Quebec Biker War that engulfed the Canadian underworld between 1994 and 2002 and resulted in dozens of casualties. The war pitted the Hells Angels against the Rock Machine and the Banditos for drug and extortion turf in Montreal. Today, Boucher is serving a life prison sentence for ordering the contract slayings of two prison guards.

While in prison in the early 2000s, Woolley built a friendship with vaunted Montreal mob don Vito Rizzuto. When Rizzuto’s mafia empire came under siege in 2009, Woolley brokered an alliance with the Hells Angels to aid the Rizzuto organization in fending off the insurrection. Mom Boucher put a hit out on Rizzuto’s former right-hand man turned rival Raynald Desjardins upon Desjardines being locked up.

Rizzuto had helped mediate the end of the Quebec Biker War years earlier. Woolley set up a meeting between the Rizzuto clan and Hells Angels bosses in a cemetery chapel at a 2012 funeral, per court records, to cement backing in the Rizzutos war.

The regal and resolute Rizzuto died suddenly of cancer in 2013 at 67, allegedly turning over power in the crime family to his son, Leonardo. The war for control of the Rizzuto mob kingdom continues to be fought today, with a series of recent flareups in Hamilton, Ontario.

A police-wiretapped conversation between the 50-year old Leonardo Rizzuto and Woolley in the summer of 2015, showed Rizzuto fawning over the influence Woolley wielded across multiple gangland factions in Canada. Where he stands in terms of the ongoing strife in the Rizzuto organization is unknown.

Woolley is of Haitian descent. He headed the Master B Gang, a Haitian street crew, as a teenager in the late 1980s.

The post Picture-Perfect Ending: Canadian Underworld Chief “Picasso” Woolley Walks Free From Prison appeared first on The Gangster Report.


Ninety-Nine Restaurant & Pub Massacre: “Four On The Floor” Murders Brought Salemme Era To An End In N.E. Mafia

$
0
0

November 11, 2020 – Twenty-five years ago this week the Ninety-Nine Restaurant & Pub Massacre in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood marked the end of the bloody Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme regime in the New England mafia. After the “four on the floor” slayings in the bank-heist capital of Beantown in late 1995, long-simmering tensions in the Patriarca crime family began to calm as the vengeance-thirsty, Cadillac Frank lost his power from behind bars.

On the afternoon of November 6, 1995, Salemme soldier Robert (Bobby the Blade) Luisi, his son Roman, his nephew Tony Sarro and his bodyguard Anthony (Sonny) Pelosi were murdered as they ate lunch in a booth at the Ninety-Nine Restaurant & Pub by rivals in the drug game, possibly dispatched by Boston mobster Joseph (Joe Black) LaMattina, per FBI records. Tony Sarro’s brother, Ricky Sarro, survived the attack when the gunmen ran out of bullets.

Joe Black and Cadillac Frank were on opposite sides of a war that had raged throughout most of the charismatic and politically-savvy Salemme’s time atop the Patriarca crime family in the first half of the 1990s and ripped the syndicate apart at the seams. Salemme was in prison awaiting trial on a racketeering case at the time of the Ninety-Nine Restaurant & Pub Massacre, taken into custody in August 1995.

LaMattina had feuded with Salemme’s son, Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr. over drug-rip off scams the younger Salemme was running years earlier. The Salemmes’ allies in the city’s Irish mob, known as the “Winter Hill Gang,” stepped in and prevented LaMattina from killing Frankie Boy Salemme, according to federal intelligence-gathering documents. Salemme, Jr. died of cancer brought on by a bout with the AIDS virus in the months before the Ninety-Nine Restaurant & Pub Massacre at age 38 and under indictment for racketeering.  

Charlestown is an Irish neighborhood in Boston viewed as the Mecca of the bank robbery-bandit game. At the time of the Ninety-Nine Restaurant & Pub Massacre, the area was under the purview of the Winter Hill Gang. Cadillac Frank Salemme was half-Irish and partnered with James (Whitey) Bulger’s Winter Hill Irish mob in rackets as soon as he took the reins as boss in 1990 amid a power struggle with the North End crew Joe Black LaMattina belonged to.

Informants told the FBI that with Salemme off the street in jail and his son dead, LaMattina felt empowered to seek retribution on Cadillac Frank’s man in the North End, Bobby “the Blade” Luisi, for a prior physical altercation. Luisi had sent LaMattina to the hospital after splitting his head open with a tire iron in a dispute over territory in October 1995. Three different informants told the feds that Joe Black used Bobby the Blade’s bitter rival, drug crew boss, Anthony Clemente, to do the job. Others said Clemente and his son, Damian, acted alone without authorization or contracting.

The Clementes and Luisis had been fighting over drug and gambling turf in the North End for more than a year. The night before the murders, Damian attacked a nephew of Luisi’s at a North End espresso bar and left him bruised and battered in an alley.

Damian Clemente and his driver Vinnie Perez bumped into the Luisi crew at the Ninety-Nine Restaurant & Pub in the early afternoon of November 6 and called for Damian’s father, Anthony, to come to the establishment for a confrontation. Per eye-witness testimony, Anthony arrived at Ninety-Nine Restaurant & Pub at 1:30 p.m., went over to the Luisi table and after a brief argument, pulled out his gun and started blasting away. He shot Bobby the Blade, Roman Luisi, Tony Sarro and Sonny Pelosi all in the head at point-blank range. Richie Sarro was wounded in the shoulder, but was saved from execution when Clemente’s gun ran out of bullets as he went in for the kill-shot.

Damian Clemente and Perez were arrested at the scene by off-duty police officers eating at a nearby table. Anthony Clemente was taken into custody at his son and Perez’s arraignment the next day. They were all found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Salemme was convicted in his racketeering case as well and flipped in 1999, entering the Witness Protection Program and let out of prison early by helping the government prove an illicit relationship between Whitey Bulger and a pair of rogue FBI agents. In 2016, he was arrested again, this time under an assumed name living in Atlanta for a 1993 murder he ordered and neglected to tell the feds about when he cut his deal.

Cadillac Frank and an accomplice were found guilty at a 2018 trial of the slaying of a former Salemme business partner named Stevie DiSarro, which took place in Salemme’s family residence in the Boston suburb of Sharon, Massachusetts. Frankie Boy Salemme, Jr. strangled DiSarro to death on May 10, 1993 in the kitchen of the Sharon residence with his dad watching on and his mom upstairs asleep. The Salemmes and DiSarro co-owned a failing South Boston strip club together and the Salemmes worried DiSarro was going to turn on them to get out of legal problems of his own.

The 87-year old Salemme will live out the rest of his years in federal custody. Bulger was murdered in a West Virginia federal penitentiary two years ago.

Bobby the Blade’s surviving son, Robert (Boston Bobby) Luisi, Jr. wound up joining the Philadelphia mob in the wake of his dad, brother and cousin’s murders. Luisi, Jr. started the Philly mafia’s New England wing, looking after the Bruno-Scarfo crime family’s interests in the Northeast from 1997 until his bust in 2000. He eventually became a cooperator. Today, Luisi, Jr. is a pastor in Tennessee living under the name Alfonso Esposito.

The post Ninety-Nine Restaurant & Pub Massacre: “Four On The Floor” Murders Brought Salemme Era To An End In N.E. Mafia appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Latin Kings No. 2 Man Out East, “King G” Rodriguez, Gets 18-Year Prison Bid For Drugs & Racketeering

$
0
0

November 12, 2020 — United States District Court Judge Rya Zobel sentenced the Latin Kings’ east coast “underboss,” Jorge (King G) Rodriguez, to 18 years in prison last week. Rodriguez, 32, was the No. 2 defendant in 2019’s Operation Throne Down, a case filed out of Boston and responsible for the arrests of more than 60 Latin Kings and associates up and down the eastern seaboard. King G copped a plea back in the summer.

According to court records, Rodriguez was the region’s “Inca” or second-in-command and reported directly to the Latin Kings reputed east coast boss, Michael (King Merlin) Cecchetelli. Rodriguez ran the New Bedford, Massachusetts chapter of the Latin Kings. DEA agents snapped a photo of Rodriguez stirring a pot of cocaine base and baking soda. Cecchetelli, 41, is behind bars awaiting trial, having pleaded not guilty and denied bond.

Per the indictment, Rodriguez counseled Cecchetelli to go to war in New Bedford with the Gangster Disciples gang over drug turf. Cecchetelli, who is of Italian descent despite holding such a high-ranking spot in a mostly Hispanic organization, has ties to the Genovese crime family in his hometown of Springfield.

The Genovese syndicate in New York uses Springfield as its Western Massachusetts hub. The Latin Kings national headquarters resides in Chicago. DEA agents followed Cecchetelli and Rodriguez on multiple trips from Massachusetts to Illinois to meet with Latin Kings leadership.

At least two high-level meetings of Latin Kings administrators on the east coast, called by Cecchetelli and Rodriguez, were held at the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Society Social Club in Springfield’s South End. The club has been home base for the Genovese family in the area dating back to Prohibition. Both meetings were recorded by the FBI.

The post Latin Kings No. 2 Man Out East, “King G” Rodriguez, Gets 18-Year Prison Bid For Drugs & Racketeering appeared first on The Gangster Report.

U.S. Rap Murder Index: MCs from Chicago, Dallas Gunned Down, Death-By-Gun Totals In Rap Game Still Rising

$
0
0

November 13, 2020 — The music world lost two more rappers this week to street violence, as Chicago’s King Von and Texas’ Mo3 were both gunned down in separate incidents five days apart.

Sadly, the hip-hop industry in general has been plagued with violent and untimely deaths of rising and established young stars of the rap game for decades. Here’s a breakdown of the murders.

The Hip-Hop Murder Timeline (1987-2020)

August 27, 1987 – New York DJ and early-hip hop music impresario Scott (La Rock) Sterling

*Co-founder of the influential east coast rap contingent Boogie Down Productions is shot to death behind the wheel of his jeep in the Bronx projects

August 8, 1990 – New York rapper Brandon (B-Doggs) Mitchell

*Founding member of the Motown Records rap group Wreckx-n-Effect from Harlem is killed in argument over a girl at picnic in the wake of the group’s first album hitting shelves months earlier

October 6, 1990 – Texas rapper Daniel (D-Boy) Rodriguez

*The Puerto Rican rapper is killed in carjacking in Dallas

December 16, 1993 – West Coast rapper Charles (Charizma) Hicks

*Shot and killed in Palo Alto, California

April 18, 1994 – Louisiana rapper Edgar (Pimp Daddy) Givens

*The Cash Money Records artist is killed in a New Orleans housing project in an alleged domestic dispute

November 30, 1995 – New York rapper Randy (Stretch) Walker

*Live Squad member and Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. affiliate is killed in Queens on the one-year anniversary of the famous Quad Studio shooting-and-robbery attack survived by him and Shakur, which served as the seminal event in the notorious East Coast-West Coast Rap War

January 1, 1996 – San Francisco rapper Kyle (Mister Cee) Church

*Co-founder of the RBL Posse

July 31, 1996 – Bay Area rapper Seagram (aka Seagram Miller)

*The Rap-A-Lot label artist is killed in East Oakland

September 13, 1996 – Historic West Coast rap superstar Tupac Shakur

*Killed in a Las Vegas drive-by following attending a Mike Tyson boxing match (succumbs to wounds a week after the attack)

November 10, 1996 – Tupac Shakur affiliate and Outlawz rap group member Yafeu (Kadafi) Fula

*The lone witness to the Shakur slaying is killed inside a New Jersey housing project

January 15, 1997 – New Orleans rapper and Cash Money Records affiliate Robert (Kilo-G) Johnson

March 9, 1997 – East Coast rap icon Christopher (Notorious B.I.G.) Wallace

*Murdered in a drive by on a promotional tour of Los Angeles after leaving a party

April 5, 1997 – New Orleans rapper and Cash Money Records artist Albert (Yella Boy) Thomas

*Founding member of the rap group UNLV

February 3, 1998 – Houston rapper Patrick (Fat Pat) Hawkins

January 11, 1999 – Texas rapper Steven (Granpappy Mafioso) Eduok

*Gunned down in the parking lot of a Houston nightclub and recording studio by an assailant toting a AK-47

February 15, 1999 – New York rapper Lamont (Big L) Coleman

*On the verge of a Roc-A-Fella contract, killed in a Harlem drive-by

March 28, 1999 – New York rapper Raymond (Freaky Tah) Rogers

*Founding member of the Lost Boyz rap group, killed outside a Sheraton Hotel in Queens

May 21, 1999 – Detroit rapper Karnail (Bugz) Pitts

*Founding member of D-12 and Eminem affiliate is killed in a fight at BBQ in the weeks after Eminem rocketed to international superstardom

May 2, 2000 – Elektra Records artist and east coast rapper Raeneal (Q-Don) Quann

*Founding member of the NAAM Brigade rap group, killed in a Philadelphia

July 4, 2000 – DJ Quick protégé Jonny (Mausberg) Burns

*Murdered in a Compton, California drive-by

July 26, 2001 – New York rapper Eric (E Moneybags) Smith

*His murder was ordered by legendary east coast drug kingpin Kenny (Supreme) McGriff, who had aligned with the music label Murder, Inc.

October 30, 2002 – Rap pioneer and DJ legend Jason (Jam Master Jay) Mizell

*Killed in a recording studio in Queens

October 31, 2002 – New Orleans rapper and Cash Money Records artist Derrick (Bulletproof) Williams

*Nephew to Cash Money Records founder Ronald (Slim) Williams and Bryan (Baby) Williams

February 2, 2003 – San Francisco rapper Ricky (Hitman) Herd

*Member of the popular Bay Area rap group RBL Posse

May 19, 2003 – Georgia rapper Jason (Camoflauge) Johnson

*Killed in his hometown of Savannah leaving PurePain Recording Studios

October 24, 2003 – East coast rapper and SPICE 1 and Kool G Rap affiliate Jasun (Half a Mill) Wardlaw

*Killed in a Brooklyn housing project

November 26, 2003 – New Orleans rapper and No Limit Records artist James (Soulja Slim) Tapp

*Killed inside his mother’s house

September 18, 2004 – Detroit rapper Antonio (Wipeout) Cadell

*Killed in a feud with fellow Motor City rapper Blade Icewood

November 1, 2004 – Bay Area rapper Andre (Mac Dre) Hicks

*Killed in Kansas City, Missouri drive by shooting

April 19, 2005 – Detroit rapper Darnell (Blade Icewood) Lindsay

May 24, 2005 – Kansas City rapper Anthony (Fat Tone) Watkins

*Killed in Las Vegas

April 11, 2006 – Detroit rapper and D12 founding member DeShaun (Proof) Holton

*Killed in a shooting at an after-hours club on Motown’s far north eastside

May 1, 2006 – Houston rapper James (Big Hawk) Hawkins

June 11, 2007 – East coast rapper, Byrd Gang co-founder and Jim Jones affiliate Rayquon (Stacks Bundles) Eliot

*Killed in Queens, New York

March 25, 2008 – New York rapper Leval (Cavlar) Lyde

*Killed outside a Brooklyn seafood restaurant after an argument with fellow patrons in a parking lot turns violent

April 20, 2008 – New Orleans rapper and Hot Boys affiliate Michael (VL Mike) Allen

January 4, 2009 – New York white rapper Joe (29-E) Ryan

*Killed in Seattle after a recent move to the Pacific Northwest

March 18, 2009 – Akon protégé Roderick (Dolla) Burton

*Killed in Los Angeles over beef starting in his hometown of Atlanta

October 30, 2009 –Felon-turned-rapper Mike Beck killed in Brooklyn

*Affiliated with iconic east coast hip hop figures Rakim and Fat Joe

December 10, 2010 – Cash Money Records female rapper Renetta (Magnolia Shorty) Lowe

*Killed in New Orleans behind the wheel of her Mercedes Benz

May 15, 2011 – West Coast rapper Montae (M-Bone) Talbert

*Killed in a drive by in Inglewood, California

November 10, 2011 – San Francisco rapper Markeise (Killa Keise) Henry

December 4, 2011 – East coast rapper John (Tommy Hill) Wilson

*Founding member of the R.A.M. Squad rap group, killed in front of club in Philadelphia after having testified against a set of Philly drug dealers months earlier

December 16, 2011 – Atlanta rapper and Gucci Mane affiliate Mario (Slim Dunkin) Hamilton

*Killed in Atlanta by fellow rapper Vinson (Young Vito) Hardimon . Slim Dunkin was a member of Gucci’s “Brick Squad.”

June 7, 2012 – Baton Rouge, Louisiana rapper Melvin (Lil’ Phat) Vernell III

*The Trill Entertainment label dynasty scion is killed in the parking lot of Georgia hospital while awaiting the birth of a child

September 4, 2012 – Chicago rapper Joseph (Lil’ JoJo) Coleman

January 2, 2013 – Atlanta rapper Justin (Yung Teddy) Mitchell

April 26, 2013 – Atlanta rap label owner James (OG Double D) Lewel

*Killed cruising in his Maybach in a drive-by on the I-20 Expressway

June 20, 2013 – Louisiana rapper and Meek Mill-signee Addarren (Lil’ Snupe) Ross

*Killed in fight over video game

June 21, 2013 – Philadelphia rapper James (Jimmie Wallstreet) Davis

*Killed on the porch of his mother’s house

September 1, 2013 – Texas rapper Jeremy (Jit) Hill

*Killed outside a Houston strip club

September 23, 2013 – West coast rapper Kevin (Flipside) White

*Founding member of the OFTB Gang rap group

September 26, 2013 – Midwest rapper Louis (L.A. Capone) Anderson

*Killed leaving a recording studio in Chicago

December 28, 2013 – T.I. protégé Glenn (Doe B) Thomas

*Killed in his hometown of Montgomery, Alabama

January 3, 2014 – G-Unit and 50 Cent affiliate Jamal (Mazaradi Fox) Green

April 9, 2014 – Chicago rapper and Interscope Records artist Mario (Blood Money) Hess

*Rapper and Kanye West-affiliate Chief Keef’s cousin

May 31, 2014 – Chicago rapper McArthur (OTF NuNu) Swindle

*Killed in a Southside Chicago shopping mall parking lot

February 2, 2015 – Bay Area rapper Dominic (The Jacka) Newton

*Killed in East Oakland

May 17, 2015 – New York rapper Lionel (Chinx Drugz) Pickens

*Killed in Queens

May 29, 2015 – Chicago rapper Shoquon (Young Pappy) Thomas

June 23, 2015 – Bow Entertainment founder and Louisiana rapper Shannon (Young Ready) Hudson

July 11, 2015 – Chicago rapper, Glo Gang member and Chief Keef affiliate Marvin (Capo) Carr

*Killed in a drive-by shooting in Chicago

September 7, 2015 – Detroit rapper Bryon (Dex Osama) Cox

September 23, 2015 – Chief Keef affiliate and Glo Gang member Marquese (Wolf Da Boss) Tann

*Killed in a Los Angeles marijuana dispensary robbery-homicide

March 4, 2016 – Georgia rapper Trentavious (Bankroll Fresh) White

*The 2Chainz and Gucci Mane affiliate is shot inside a Atlanta recording studio allegedly by fellow rapper “No Plug”

June 25, 2016 – Baltimore rapper Tyriece (La Scoota) Watson

*His manager was killed days later

November 10, 2016 — Houston rapper Chris (3-2) Barriero

*Part of H-Town’s iconic Rap-A-Lot Records regime

January 26, 2017 — Jacksonville rapper Maurice (Ramboe Slice) Hobbs

April 29, 2017 – New Orleans rapper and Cash Money/Rich Gang member Desmone (BTY YoungN) Jerome

May 2, 2017 — Chicago rapper Ulysses (Bando Bandz) Pole

June 8, 2017 — Alabama rapper Paul (Bam Bam) Carter

August 6, 2017 –Atlanta rapper Jibril (Yung Mazi) Abdur-Rahman

*Kevin Gage disciple

September 6, 2017 — Washington D.C. rapper Theodore (30 Glizzy) Pigford

*He was the third member of the Shy Glizzy crew to be murdered in less than 18 months

September 9, 2017 — Louisiana rapper Garrett (Da Real Gee Money) Burton

October 9, 2017 — Detroit rapper Rodney (Doughboy Roc) Yeargin of the CTE-signed Dopeboyz Cashout crew

*Young Jeezy’s disciple

October 21, 2017 — California rapper Roberto (Blackie Fontana) Diaz

June 18, 2018 — Fast-rising Florida rapper Jahseh (XXXTentacion) Onfroy

June 18, 2018 — Pittsburgh rapper Travon (Jimmy Wopo) Smart

*Wiz Khalifa disciple

June 30, 2018 — Toronto rapper Jahvante (Smoke Dawg) Smart

*Opening act for Canada’s favorite son in the rap game Drake

October 29, 2018 — Texas by way of the Big Easy rapper Theodore (Young Greatness) Jones

*The Quality Control Music label rapper was shot to death in the parking lot of a New Orleans Waffle House

March 31, 2019 — L.A. rapper and Atlantic Records artist Ermias (Nipsey Hussle) Asghedom

*The Crips affiliated wordsmith is gunned down outside his Marathon Clothing shop in South Central just a year removed from a Grammy nod for his debut studio album Victory Lap releases on his own All Money In Atlantic Records imprint in 2018.

February 19, 2020 – New York rapper Bashar (Pop Smoke) Jackson

*The Brooklyn drill music king is murdered in home invasion at his Hollywood Hills home in L.A.

June 25, 2020 – St. Louis rapper Lawrence (Huey) Franks

*The former Jive Records artist is shot in front of his Missouri residence

November 6, 2020 – Chicago rapper Dayvon (King Von) Bennett

*Killed in a fight in an Atlanta nightclub with an associate of rival rapper Quando Rondo. Bennett was signed to Lil’ Durk’s label.

November 11, 2020 – Texas rapper Melvin (Mo3) Noble.

*Boosie Badazz protege is killed in a shootout on a Dallas expressway.

The post U.S. Rap Murder Index: MCs from Chicago, Dallas Gunned Down, Death-By-Gun Totals In Rap Game Still Rising appeared first on The Gangster Report.

The Ralphie Question: Where Does Younger Santaniello Stand In Springfield (MA) Mob Regime?

$
0
0

November 12, 2020 – Springfield (MA) mobster Ralphie Santaniello was let off house arrest last week, per MassLive resident mobologist Stephanie Barry, who broke the news of Santaniello’s ability to now roam free in a story back on Thursday about the early prison-release of Springfield wiseguy Frank (The Shark) Depergola via a motion for COVID-19-related relief.

Santaniello’s standing in the local underworld is a hot-button topic these days, according to sources in Western Massachusetts. His dad’s too.

The 52-year old Santaniello and the 64-year old Depergola are longtime members of the Springfield mob crew and went down in the same 2016 racketeering and extortion bust. Santaniello slapped around a shakedown victim wearing a wire who refused to pay protection to the mob for his tow-truck company.

When he was locked up four years ago, Santaniello was a shot-caller in the crew, either No. 1 or No. 2 in power, per sources. While behind bars, he allegedly “lost his stripes” after his father, Springfield mob elder stateman Amedeo Santaniello fell out of favor with crime family brass in 2017 for snapping a chummy photo with a known informant.

Depergola took his first pinch for extortion in the 2000s as a collector and driver for then crew skipper Adolfo (Big Al) Bruno. Frank the Shark was driving for Bruno the night he was killed in cold blood in the city’s South End in November 2003 for angering bosses in New York.

The Springfield mob crew has always been an offshoot of New York City’s Genovese crime family. Amedeo Santaniello, 81, was Big Al’s former right-hand man until he was put on the “pay no mind list” in the late 1990s and retreated to Florida. Following Bruno’s assassination, Amedeo returned to Massachusetts and back into the fold under Bruno’s successor, Anthony (Bingy) Arillotta, a friend of his son, Ralphie’s.

Arillotta’s cooperation decimated the Genovese crime family’s leadership in New York and reflected poorly on the entire Springfield regime, resulting in the city’s “capo” duties being pulled from anyone in Western Mass and placed in the hands of a Genovese administrator in Connecticut. Upon Arillotta turning government informant in 2010, Ralphie Santaniello and his first-cousin Albert (The Animal) Calvanese, assumed command of the Springfield mob crew on a day-to-day basis on the ground in Massachusetts (despite not holding official captain status and deferring to Genovese superiors out of the commonwealth), with Amedeo acting as their top adviser, per sources.

The elder Santaniello and the elusive Calvanese escaped entanglement in the 2016 legal onslaught. Calvanese, 57, remains in the FBI’s crosshairs, per sources,, having previously worked as a collector and enforcer for both Bruno and Arillotta and known around town today as the reputed head honcho of the local mafia.

When it came to Amedeo, his real problem, which may also be Ralphie’s problem, didn’t arise until a year after his son went down when he bumped into former Springfield mob soldier Felix Tranghese, who had joined Arillotta on the witness stand at the Genovese trial as a star witness, and allowed a photo to be taken of the two standing next to each other and smiling. The photo soon made its way onto social media, went “gangland viral,” and set the underworld in Western Mass ablaze with chatter. New York was none too pleased.

Tranghese, 68, along with Arillotta, were tasked with organizing the conspiracy to bump off Bruno. Shortly after Bruno’s murder, Arillotta put Tranghese on the sidelines, shelving him with a construction-site beating delivered by two of his henchmen. They reunited for Team America in 2011 to put Genovese acting boss Arthur (Little Artie) Nigro away behind bars for the rest of his life.

Little Artie Nigro, according to sources, was livid after hearing of the image showing Amedeo Santaniello buddying up with Tranghese was circulating and ordered Amedeo and his son Ralphie shelved as punishment for the transgression. Amedeo had been at odds with his nephew, Calvanese, at the time as well and that added to the decision, per sources.

The 74-year old Nigro died of natural causes in prison in April 2019. Some sources say Ralphie Santaniello, who had been locked up with Nigro, smoothed things out for himself and got an “un-shelving” in the months before Little Artie kicked the bucket.    

Ralphie Santaniello was released from federal prison in the spring. Sources say he is eager to “get his button,” now that he is free. FBI wiretaps in his 2016 case picked up talk of Santaniello being proposed for membership in the Genovese crime family.

The post The Ralphie Question: Where Does Younger Santaniello Stand In Springfield (MA) Mob Regime? appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Low Winter Sun: Former Boston Irish Mafia Don Howie Winter Dies Of Natural Causes

$
0
0

November 14, 2020 – One-time Boston Irish mob boss Howie Winter died of old age this week at 91, in his own bed, a free man. If you know the math for guys who reach the highest levels of the underworld in their careers, you’ll agree, ole’ Howie boy did quite well for himself.

In the Disco era, Howie Winter was the kingfish of Irish organized crime in Massachusetts. Winter led the Winter Hill Gang out of Somerville and South Boston in the 1970s and his arrest for racketeering and horse-race fixing in 1979 laid the groundwork for the ascent of notoriously-psychopathic Irish crime lord James (Whitey) Bulger.

When Bulger took over, he littered the streets with bodies under the protection of the FBI. More recently, he was played on the big screen by the likes of Johnny Depp and Jack Nicholson. The crusty 89-year old Bulger was beaten to death in a West Virginia federal correctional facility in October 2018.

Winter came up in the Boston underworld as a right-hand man to Somerville gangland boss James (Buddy) McLean more than a half-century ago. McClean was slain in the Irish Mob Wars of the 1960s. The McClean crew eventually evolved into the Winter Hill Gang.

At his height of power, Winter was known to a man about town and appeared to enjoy the limelight. He was hired as a consultant on the 1973 Peter Yates’ classic mob-film The Friends of Eddie Coyle, starring an aging Hollywood bad boy Robert Mitchum in a career-highlight performance.

Whitey Bulger acted as muscle for both McLean and Winter before rising to the top of the heap himself in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s with a considerable amount of help from Uncle Sam. Bulger was a valued confidential informant in the Boston FBI office and gave information on a multitude of Beantown gangsters, including Winter and the horse-racing scheme that many in the Winter Hill crew, including him, were nailed and went to prison for.

Winter quietly returned to the Winter Hill under Bulger’s leadership in 1987 and was soon pinched for selling cocaine and put back behind bars. His last run-in with the law was a 2012 bust for extortion. Reports in the wake of his passing show he was working with authorities in the last years of his life trying to solve the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist, an Italian-mob sanctioned rip-off of a half-billion dollars in precious artwork from the private museum in downtown Boston in the early morning hours of St. Patrick’s Day 1990.

The post Low Winter Sun: Former Boston Irish Mafia Don Howie Winter Dies Of Natural Causes appeared first on The Gangster Report.

Viewing all 2774 articles
Browse latest View live