Showing posts with label Bonanno. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bonanno. Show all posts

28 July 2021

FBI gives post-Brasco warning to 'Sonny Black'

On this date in 1981...

FBI Special Agents Doug Fencl, Jim Kinne and Jerry Loar visited Motion Lounge, a nightclub and Bonanno Crime Family headquarters at 420 Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in late July of 1981 (the specific date is in doubt).  They pulled Bonanno capodecina Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano aside and revealed that Special Agent Joseph D. Pistone had successfully infiltrated Napolitano's organization as part of the "Donnie Brasco" undercover operation.

FBI agents Loar, Kinne and Fencl (left to right)
leaving Motion Lounge.


According to Pistone's book, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, the encounter occurred on July 28. Pistone wrote that the agents showed Napolitano a photograph of Pistone in the company of several fellow federal agents. As the photograph was shown, the agents asked Napolitano, "Do you know this guy? He's an FBI agent. We just wanted to tell you."

Napolitano had known and confided in Pistone - believing him to be jewel thief Brasco - for months. But he remained poised in front of the other agents and replied, "I don't know him, but if I meet him, I'll know he's an FBI agent."

Pistone could only have heard of this encounter second-hand. Fencl, who was actually there, recalled it differently for his testimony in the 2004 trial of Bonanno boss Joseph Massino. He placed the encounter two days later, July 30.

Motion Lounge


"I asked [Napolitano] if he knew Donnie Brasco and Tony Rossi, and he said that he did, and I told him they were FBI agents," Fencl testified. "I told him I wanted to make sure of his safety and that he was going to have a potential problem with the Bonanno Crime Family"

Fencl offered Napolitano his business card, hoping that he would contact Fencl and agree to cooperate with law enforcement. Napolitano refused, saying, "You know better than anybody that I can't take that, but I know how to get a hold of you."

Napolitano
According to Fencl, he brought along a photograph of Pistone and several other agents just in case Napolitano needed proof that the man he knew as Brasco was actually an agent. In his testimony, Fencl did not indicate whether the photograph was actually used.

Despite the government warning, Napolitano made no effort to protect himself. After Fencl, Kinne and Loar left the lounge, he scrambled to inform Mafia higher-ups of the possible infiltration and to locate the man he knew as Brasco. Napolitano was soon murdered by his underworld colleagues - under orders from rapidly rising Bonanno leader Massino - for taking the undercover agent into his orbit as a crime family associate. Late in the year, Napolitano was called to a meeting with bosses. He did not return.

Picked up in Brooklyn by mobster Frank Lino, he was driven to a house in Staten Island and murdered in the cellar. According to later testimony, two gunmen were assigned to perform the killing. One fired a less-than-fatal shot, and the other's gun jammed. Before a fatal shot was fired, Napolitano was heard to say, "Hit me one more time, and make it good." In the summer of 1982, Napolitano's badly decomposed body, minus its hands, was found wrapped in a city mortuary bag in woods near a creek in western Staten Island. Identification of the remains took considerable time because of the decomposition. A medical examiner reporting to the scene of the body's discovery was unable even to determine its sex.

The Brasco operation began in 1976 as an effort to penetrate the "fences" who processed stolen goods for organized crime families in New York. Special Agent Pistone first encountered Bonanno members in front of a mob social club on Madison Street in lower Manhattan. He gained the trust of Manhattan-based Bonanno soldier Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero and his immediate superior Napolitano.

Pistone
During the operation, Pistone participated in underworld rackets - fencing of stolen goods, gambling, loansharking - and learned of gangland murders. When pressure was put on him to participate in a murder, the FBI ended the operation. Through his undercover work, the FBI gained information on a Bonanno Crime Family civil war that included the assassination of leader Carmine Galante and the later killings of three rebellious group leaders, Alphonse Indelicato, Philip Giaccone and Dominick Trinchera. The Bureau also learned of relationships between elements of the Bonanno organization and crime families as far off as Florida and Wisconsin.

Donnie Brasco's true identity was publicly revealed for the first time in the federal racketeering conspiracy trial of Ruggiero and four other defendants in the summer of 1982. Judge Robert W. Sweet refused a prosecution request to allow the agent to testify only under his code name, finding that doing so would hamper defendants' ability to cross examine the primary witness against them. Pistone took the witness stand on August 2, 1982. His testimony focused on four of the five defendants. All four were convicted on August 27. The fifth defendant - charged on the basis of informant testimony - was acquitted. Ruggiero, then fifty-six, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for racketeering conspiracy including three murders.

Sources:

  • DeStefano, Anthony M., "Hardened felon chokes up on stand," Newsday, May 27, 2004, p. 22.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "3 of 5 convicted of conspiracy in 'Bonanno Family' rackets," New York Times, Aug. 28, 1982, p. 1.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "6 get jail terms in rackets case tied to mobsters," New York Times, Nov. 16, 1982, p. B1.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "Defense assails agent's actions in Mob inquiry," New York Times, Aug. 6, 1982, p. B1.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "F.B.I. agent, dropping disguise, tells court of life inside the Mob," New York Times, Aug. 3, 1982, p. 1.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "F.B.I. infiltrator says Mob chief told of slayings," New York Times, Aug. 4, 1982, p. B1.
  • McPhee, Michele, "'Brasco's long wait," New York Daily News, Jan. 19, 2003, p. 10.
  • Pistone, Joseph D., with Richard Woodley, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, New York: NAL, 1987, pp. 363-368.
  • Schmetterer, Jerry, and Paul Meskil, with D.J. Saunders, "Victim was mobster who let fed agent in," New York Daily News, Nov. 16, 1982, p. 3.
  • Smith, Kati Cornell, "Brasco fiasco," New York Post, June 5, 2004.
  • Weiss, Murray, "Find body in a bag," New York Daily News, Aug. 13, 1982, p. 29.


25 November 2019

Bringing Joe Valachi's memoirs to the Web

The 1000-plus page memoirs of Mafia turncoat Joseph Valachi are valuable source material for organized crime historians. The manuscript, entitled "The Real Thing - Second Government: The Expose and Inside Doings of Cosa Nostra," is one of just three authoritative inside sources on the Mafia during the period of the 1930-31 Castellammarese War (the others are published autobiographies, Vita di Capomafia by Nick Gentile and A Man of Honor by Joseph Bonanno). The Valachi memoirs were consulted and quoted by author Peter Maas for his 1968 book, The Valachi Papers, which grew into a 1972 Charles Bronson motion picture. Until now, these Joseph Valachi papers could only be accessed through the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. I have been working to change that.

I first published a couple hundred pages of the manuscript on the mafiahistory.us website some years ago. The pages were acquired through the assistance of another Mafia historian, who requested anonymity. In summer 2019, I visited the JFK Library to access the remaining thousand or so pages. Since that time, I have been processing and formatting the pages for the web in small batches. At this moment, visitors to mafiahistory.us can access the first 500-plus consecutive pages of The Real Thing and an additional 80-plus scattered pages of the rest of the manuscript.

Copyright of the Valachi memoirs has been a concern. While the papers have been in the custody of the United States government and accessible to the public for decades since their official 1980 donation, the JFK Library has provided no clear guidance on any possible copyright holder. Following my summer 2019 visit to the library, I submitted a Freedom of Information request for access to the internal library paperwork relating to the memoirs. After some initial hesitation, the National Archives agreed to publicly release the "Deed of Gift" and "Donor File" relating to the memoirs. Transcriptions of these documents also have been added to the mafiahistory.us website.

The documents establish that the papers were donated to the library by Peter Maas on Christmas Eve of 1980. Maas stated his wish that they "be made available for research as soon as possible, and to the fullest extent possible." A New Year's Eve, 1980, memorandum indicates that Valachi intended at one time to publish his manuscript. Instead, the memoirs were used as source material for Maas's book, and Valachi received a payment of $75,000 for his story. Following Valachi's death in 1971, his estate went through normal probate procedures. "According to Maas' attorney, no question from Valachi's heirs about the rights to the manuscript or copyright arose during the settlement of the estate," the memorandum states. "Maas, therefore, has had the manuscript and accompanying transcript since 1965 without anyone questioning his right to the material."

This history and Maas' donation appear to place ownership of the memoirs clearly in the hands of the National Archives and the American people. In doing the work of bringing the memoirs to the Web, it is my hope to achieve Maas' goal of making them available for research "to the fullest entent possible."

Visit the Entrance Page for "The Real Thing: The Autobiography of Joseph Valachi" on Mafiahistory.us.

19 November 2019

Eight guilty of serving on Mafia ruling council

On this date in 1986...

New York Times

A Manhattan federal jury on Nov. 19, 1986, convicted eight defendants of serving on a Mafia-commanding board of directors known as "the Commission." The convictions, reached on the sixth day of deliberations, concluded a ten-week racketeering trial.

The defendants included three men authorities identified as bosses of New York-area crime families: Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, 75, of the Genovese Crime Family; Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo, 73, of the Lucchese Crime Family; Carmine "Junior" Persico, 53, of the Colombo Crime Family. (It was later learned that Salerno was serving as a screen for the actual Genovese boss at that time, Vincent "The Chin" Gigante.)

Galante
The others convicted were Gennaro "Gerry Lang" Langella, 47, and Ralph Scopo, 58, of the Colombo Family; Salvatore "Tom Mix" Santoro, 72, and Christopher "Christie Tick" Furnari, 62, of the Lucchese Family; Anthony "Bruno" Indelicato, 38, of the Bonanno Family.

The jurors found the defendants guilty of racketeering and racketeering conspiracy. They found all but Indelicato guilty of extortion, extortion conspiracy and labor payoffs. They found Corallo and Santoro guilty of loansharking conspiracy and Indelicato guilty of participating in the Commission-authorized 1979 murder of Carmine Galante.

Two months later, Judge Richard Owen sentenced Indelicato to forty years in prison and sentenced each of the other defendants to a century behind bars.

The Commission Case began with arrests and arraignments back in February, 1985. Rudolph Giuliani, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said he was inspired to initiate the case after reading a discussion of the Commission in Joseph Bonanno's 1981 autobiography, A Man of Honor. He decided to apply the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act against the panel of organized crime leaders.

Dellacroce
The list of original defendants included Salerno, Corallo, Santoro, Furnari, Langella and Scopo, as well as Philip "Rusty" Rastelli, boss of the Bonanno Crime Family; Paul "Big Paul" Castellano, boss of the Gambino Crime Family; Gambino underboss Aniello "Neil" Dellacroce. A superseding indictment in June 1985 added Persico and Stefano Cannone to the case, bringing the number of defendants to eleven.

Dellacroce died of natural causes on Dec. 2, 1985. Castellano was murdered in Manhattan two weeks later. Cannone's death, reported in the press in January 1986, apparently occurred in September 1985.

When Rastelli, who was being tried in Brooklyn on a separate matter, was severed from the case, prosecutors added Indelicato to the list of defendants, as the sole representative of the Bonanno Family.

The trial began with jury selection on September 8, 1986.

11 January 2019

He did it, but they couldn't prove it

Carmine Galante of Bonanno clan
is regarded as Tresca's killer


On this date in 1943...

Tresca
Carlo Tresca, sixty-three-year-old editor of the Italian-language newspaper Il Martello (The Hammer), sat alone in his third floor Manhattan office after the close of business on Monday, January 11, 1943. He was preparing to host an eight-thirty meeting of a committee of the anti-Fascist Italian-American Mazzini Society.

Tresca, who embraced an anarchist (anarcho-syndicalist) philosophy and was arrested dozens of times for pro-labor mischief and other offenses over the years, had actively opposed Fascism since early in the rise of Benito Mussolini. His views on the Fascist movement, once dismissed as radical rabble-rousing, gained popularity upon U.S. entry into the Second World War near the end of 1941.

Committee member Giuseppe Calabi, of 415 Central Park West, arrived about fifteen minutes late to the office, above the Crawford clothing store at the corner of Fifth Avenue and West Fifteenth Street. None of the four other committee members showed up at all.

Tresca and Calabi waited for other members until after nine-thirty and then gave up. Tresca asked Calabi to accompany him for dinner. The editor had a favorite bar and grill, located about half a block away, on the east side of Fifth Avenue between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets. He often stopped there in the evening as he made his way from work to his Greenwich Village home, 52 West Twelfth Street. Calabi accepted the invitation. The office lights were turned out and the men exited the building onto the Fifth Avenue sidewalk.



Galante
On that same night, thirty-five-year-old Carmine Galante, of 876 Lots Avenue in Brooklyn, had an appointment in downtown Manhattan. Galante had been paroled a few years earlier from Sing Sing Prison after serving two-thirds of sentence for shooting at a police officer during a payroll holdup. There were months left on his parole, and he had been called to a meeting with the State Parole Board at 80 Centre Street.

Sidney Gross, in charge of the parole office, noted that Galante seemed nervous during the meeting. He grew concerned that Galante was slipping back into the old criminal associations that had repeatedly landed him behind bars since he was a teenager. Gross secretly assigned investigators Fred Berson and George Talianoff to follow Galante when he left the office.

The investigators positioned themselves near the building exit and waited for Galante. At shortly after eight o'clock, they were surprised by the speed with which their target rushed out onto the sidewalk and jumped into a waiting automobile.

With wartime rationing of gasoline and rubber, automobiles were generally reserved for only the most important travel, and they were entirely unavailable to Berson and Talianoff. They reasonably expected Galante to walk to the nearest subway station. As the dark sedan drove away, the investigators did the only thing they could do. They wrote down the sedan's license plate number: 1C-9272.



Tresca and Calabi took just a few strides on the dimly lit sidewalk, passing a man who was impatiently pacing back and forth, when that man stepped up behind them and fired a handgun at Tresca's back. The two men instinctively turned toward the sound of the gunshot. Tresca got a second bullet in the face. The gunman fired another wild shot or two before climbing into a dark sedan and heading off to the west on Fifteenth Street.

Police officers and an ambulance from St. Vincent's Hospital rushed to the scene. Tresca was dead before he reached the hospital. A postmortem examination found that either of the .32-caliber bullets that entered his body would have been sufficient to end his life - the first ripped through one of his lungs and the second lodged in his brain.
NY Daily News

Calabi could provide little identifying information about the gunman. He was about five-foot-five, wore dark clothes and had his hat pulled down low, leaving his face in shadow. Calabi estimated that the gunman was in his mid-thirties.

Investigators found no .32-caliber firearm at the scene. They did find a .38-caliber handgun, tucked behind an ash barrel around the corner near the Fifteenth Street exit of the office building. This suggested that preparations were in place to assassinate Tresca as he left the building, no matter which exit he chose. It also suggested that a second gunman may have been involved.

Some eyewitnesses told the police that, despite the darkness, they could tell that the gunman's vehicle was a 1938 or 1939 Ford. A matching car soon was found abandoned at a subway entrance one-half mile away at Seventh Avenue and West 18th Street. (Seventh Avenue was not yet a southbound one-way street in 1943, allowing the automobile to drive up northward from Fifteenth Street.) Its license plate number was 1C-9272.

Police learned that the vehicle was purchased as a used car from Confield Motors just eighteen days earlier. The purchaser paid for it with $300 in cash. It was registered to Charles Pappas, 82-07 Eighty-Second Street in Brooklyn. The authorities found that the name and address were fictional.

Detectives wondered about the Mazzini Society members who failed to show up for the meeting. Tracking down the members, they found that each had a different reason for failing to make it to Tresca's office that night. One recalled a prior engagement, one insisted he was never notified of the meeting, one knew about it but didn't feel it was important to attend and the last simply forgot about it.



The next day, parole board investigators heard of the Tresca murder and saw the familiar license plate number of the abandoned automobile. Sidney Gross called police with information about Galante. He then led officers through Galante's known hangouts and located him at a restaurant on Elizabeth Street. Police arrested Galante as he emerged from the restaurant.

Questioned about his movements after leaving the parole board office, Galante stated that he took a subway uptown, went to a movie theater and then spent time with a girlfriend. He knew little about the movie he supposedly watched, and he refused to divulge the name of the girlfriend.

Police had already caught the parolee in a lie. They revealed that witnesses saw Galante get into an automobile. Galante stubbornly stuck to his lie.

Two of the many mourners who paid respects to the
late Carlo Tresca at the Manhattan Center.
Library of Congress

Police and prosecutors were certain that Galante was involved in the killing of Tresca. However, they did not have enough evidence to build a murder case against him. The authorities had to be satisfied with returning him to prison on a parole violation.



Garofalo
Galante today is widely regarded as the gunman who took Tresca's life. But the precise reason he did so remains unclear. Law enforcement sources have indicated that Galante was ordered to perform the hit by Frank Garofalo, underboss of the Bonanno Crime Family in New York. Some say this resulted from a personal dispute between Tresca and Garofalo. Others say it was a favor done by Garofalo for New York mobster Vito Genovese, who returned to Italy in the late 1930s and sought to improve his standing with Mussolini. (The Genovese theory seems unreasonably tangled.)

Still others believe there was an arrangement between Garofalo and newspaper publisher Generoso Pope. Pope, whose original surname, "Papa," was very close to the name used to purchase the Ford sedan, faced intense criticism from Tresca for his prewar support of Mussolini and Fascism. Following U.S. entry into the war, Pope made every effort to portray himself as a Mussolini critic and a key political ally of the Democratic Administration in Washington. Pope was influential in the Italian-American community, was well regarded by anti-Communist U.S. political leaders and included not only Garofalo but also Frank Costello (and possibly Tommy Lucchese) among his underworld friends.

Pope
(The Pope-Costello relationship continued into the next Pope generation. Multiple sources indicate that Generoso Pope, Jr., used no-interest loans from Costello to purchase the New York Enquirer tabloid and build it into the National Enquirer. The May 1957 assassination attempt against Costello occurred when he was returning home from a dinner with Generoso Pope, Jr., and other friends.)

Sources:

  • "Carlo Tresca slain on 5th Ave.," New York Daily News, Jan. 12, 1943, p. 1.
  • "Carlo Tresca shot dead," New York Daily News, Jan. 12, 1943, p. 2.
  • "Carmine Galante," FBI report, file no. 92-3025-8, 1958, p. 1.
  • "Costello is shot entering home; gunman escapes," New York Times, May 3, 1957, p. 1.
  • "Enemies of Tresca sought by police," New York Times, Jan. 15, 1943.
  • "Ex-convict seized in Tresca murder; chance gives clue," New York Times, Jan. 14, 1943, p. 1.
  • "FBI fears reprisals over Tresca slaying," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jan. 12, 1943, p. 3.
  • "Tresca biography," Anarchy Archives, dwardmac.pitzer.edu, accessed Jan. 10, 2019.
  • "VIII, Costello's influence in politics," Third Interim Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Report no. 307, Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1951.
  • Cummings, Judith, "Galante to give up to U.S. authorities," New York Times, Oct. 9, 1977.
  • FBI Director, "La Cosa Nostra AR - Conspiracy," FBI Airtel to SAC New York, file no 92-6054-2176, NARA no. 124-10289-10184, Nov. 16, 1967.
  • Feather, Bill, "Bonanno Family membership chart 1930-50's," Mafia Membership Charts, mafiamembershipcharts.blogspot.com.
  • Frasca, Dom, King of Crime, New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1959, p. 67.
  • Gallagher, Dorothy, All the Right Enemies - The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
  • Horgan, Richard, "The dubious beginnings of The National Enquirer," Adweek, adweek.com, June 13, 2013.
  • Martin, John, and James Tierney, "Grill hoodlum, linked to Tresca murder car," New York Daily News, Jan. 14, 1943, p. 2.
  • New York City Extracted Death Index, certificate no. 1306, Jan. 11, 1943.
  • SAC New York, "La Cosa Nostra AR - Conspiracy," FBI Airtel, file no. 92-6054-2194, NARA no. 124-10289-10202, Nov. 20, 1967, p. 3.

06 October 2018

Murdered at McD's

Sylvester "Sally Daz" Zottola, 71, was shot and killed Thursday, Oct. 4, 2018, while waiting at a McDonald's drive-thru lane in the Bronx. Zottola, a reputed associate of the Bonanno Crime Family and once a trusted friend of former Bonanno boss Vincent J. "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano, apparently had been targeted by rivals for the past year.

Zottola, alone in his SUV, visited the McDonald's restaurant drive-thru, on the 1600 Block of Webster Avenue near Belmont Street in the Claremont section of the Bronx, at about 4:45 p.m. and placed an order for a medium coffee. He was boxed in, a car in front of him and a car behind him, when a gunman in a dark hoodie stepped up to his vehicle and fired at him six times with a 9mm handgun. One slug struck Zottola in the head, three entered his chest, one hit him in the shoulder. Zottola was unarmed at the time.

The gunman approached through a hole in a fence along Clay Avenue behind the McDonald's property and walked down an embankment to the drive-thru lane. After the shooting, he went back up the embankment, through the fence and into a waiting gray sedan. The car sped away southward on Clay Avenue.

Zottola was pronounced dead at the scene, concluding a series of attempts on his life that date back at least to September 2017...

Read more at Mafiahistory.us.

08 September 2018

Jury selected as Mafia bosses head to trial

On this date in 1986...

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

Jury selection began September 8, 1986, in the federal trial of alleged Mafia Commission members in New York City.

Giuliani
The Commission Case was set in motion years earlier by Rudolph Giuliani, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He reportedly was inspired by a discussion of the Commission in A Man of Honor, the autobiography of longtime Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno. "If he could write about it," Giuliani reasoned, "we could prosecute it."

Giuliani was emboldened by recent successes in applying the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act against organized crime leaders.

A federal indictment was unsealed February 26, 1985, charging representatives of all five New York City Mafia families with conspiring in the management of the underworld. As the fifteen-count indictment was announced, Giuliani commented, "This is a bad day, probably the worst ever, for the Mafia." Much of the case was based on electronic surveillance.

Initial Defendants:

Bonanno Crime Family
Philip "Rusty" Rastelli

Colombo Crime Family
Gennaro "Gerry Lang" Langella
Ralph Scopo

Gambino Crime Family
Paul "Big Paul" Castellano
Aniello "Neil" Dellacroce

Genovese Crime Family
Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno

Lucchese Crime Family
Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo
Salvatore "Tom Mix" Santoro
Christopher "Christy Tick" Furnari

Corallo
The government labeled Rastelli, Langella, Castellano, Salerno and Corallo the bosses of their crime families. Dellacroce and Santoro were said to be underbosses of the Gambino Family and Lucchese Family, respectively.

Most of the defendants were arraigned in Manhattan Federal District Court on February 28. Corallo, Dellacroce and Scopo were not present, as they had been hospitalized. All defendants pleaded not guilty (A defense attorney entered the pleas for his clients Dellacroce and Scopo), except Corallo. Corallo attorney Albert Gaudelli stated that his client refused to waive the right to plead in person. Rastelli collapsed during the arraignment and was taken to the hospital for treatment and evaluation.

A superseding indictment in June 1985 added two more defendants, Carmine Persico and Stefano Cannone, along with additional charges related to a concrete industry extortion scheme. The government charged Persico with being the reigning boss of the Colombo Crime Family (reducing Langella to Persico's underboss or acting boss).

Persico
Several defendants died before the trial began. Aniello Dellacroce died of natural causes December 2 in a Queens hospital. Two weeks later, boss Paul Castellano was shot to death in front of a Manhattan restaurant. The death of Stefano Cannone was reported January 12, 1986, (NY Daily News) as a "recent death from natural causes." Cannone's death appears to have occurred months earlier in September of 1985.

Philip Rastelli was severed from the case because he was being tried on a separate matter in Brooklyn. Prosecutors added Anthony "Bruno" Indelicato, as a representative of the Bonanno clan.

As a trial date for the Commission Case approached, Mafia leaders reportedly considered but ultimately decided against the assassination of Giuliani. (This was not revealed until the fall of 2007.) John Gotti, new boss of the Gambino Family, and Persico reportedly were in favor of murdering the U.S. attorney. The Lucchese, Bonanno and Genovese bosses rejected the notion.

At jury selection before Judge Richard Owen, the names of prospective jurors were kept confidential to ensure that they would not be influenced by threats or bribery. During the selection process, prospective jurors were asked questions about their knowledge of American Mafia history, such as whether they had ever heard of Al Capone.

Prosecuting attorneys in the case were Michael Chertoff, John Savarese and John Childers. One defendant, Carmine Persico, elected to serve as his own defense counsel.

Trial Defendants:

Bonanno Crime Family
Anthony "Bruno" Indelicato, 38

Colombo Crime Family
Carmine "Junior" Persico, 53
Gennaro "Gerry Lang" Langella, 47
Ralph Scopo, 58

Genovese Crime Family
Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, 75

Lucchese Crime Family
Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo, 73
Salvatore "Tom Mix" Santoro, 72
Christopher "Christy Tick" Furnari , 62

The trial lasted a month and a half. It included surprising defense admissions that the Mafia and a ruling Commission existed in New York and prosecution testimony from turncoat Cleveland Mafioso Angelo Lonardo (part of his testimony dealt with the 1927 Mafia murder of his father) and undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone. An effort was made to gain the testimony of Joseph Bonanno, retired in Tucson Arizona. But the 80-year-old Bonanno instead accepted a stay in jail for contempt of court.

Salerno
The jury deliberated for five days. The verdict was returned to a crowded courtroom at 12:20 p.m. on Wednesday, November 19: All defendants were found guilty on all the charges brought against them.

Persico, Salerno and Corallo were convicted as the bosses of the Colombo, Genovese and Lucchese Crime Families. (Sometime later it was learned that Salerno was not the real chief of the Genovese clan but was fronting for boss Vincent "Chin" Gigante.) The case established Langella as Colombo acting boss or underboss, Santoro as Lucchese underboss and Furnari as Lucchese consigliere.

All the defendants were convicted of racketeering and racketeering conspiracy. Indelicato was convicted of participating in the 1979 Commission-authorized murder of Carmine Galante. All the defendants but Indelicato were convicted of extortion, extortion conspiracy and labor payoffs. Corallo and Santoro also were convicted of loansharking conspiracy.
 
Judge Owen sentenced the defendants on January 13, 1987. Persico, Salerno, Corallo, Langella, Santoro, Furnari and Scopo were sentenced to a century in prison. Indelicato was sentenced to forty years.


More on this subject:
Hunt, Thomas, and Michael A. Tona, DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime - Vol. II.  

Sources:
  • "11 plead not guilty to ruling organized crime in New York," New York Times, July 2, 1985.
  • "In brief: Mafia bosses are sentenced to centuries," New York Times, Jan. 18, 1987.
  • "Crime families facing trial for 'Mafia' acts," Binghamton NY Evening Press, June 27, 1985, p. 3E.
  • "Prosecutor: Indictments could help break up the mob," Ithaca NY Journal, Feb. 27, 1985, p. 2.
  • "Rhinebeck man charged as mob boss," Poughkeepsie NY Journal, Feb. 27, 1985, p. 1.
  • Blumenthal, Ralph, "Aniello Dellacroce dies at 71; reputed crime-group figure," New York Times, Dec. 4, 1985.
  • Bonanno, Joseph, with Sergio Lalli, A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983, p. 141, 159-160.
  • Doyle, John M., "Eight mobsters convicted of all counts in Mafia Commission trial," AP News Archive, Nov. 19, 1986.
  • Elkin, Larry, "Government launches case against 'Mob Commission,'" AP News Archive, Sept. 18, 1986.
  • Hornblower, Margot, "Mafia 'Commission' trial begins in New York," Washington Post, Sept. 19, 1986.
  • Irwin, Victoria, "Mafia goes on trial," Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 10, 1986.
  • Irwin, Victoria, "New York arrests launch major Mafia sweep," Christian Science Monitor, March 1, 1985.
  • Jacobs, James B., with Christopher Panarella and Jay Worthington, Busting the Mob: United States v. Cosa Nostra, New York: New York University Press, 1994, p. 79-87.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "Bonanno jailed after refusing to be witness," New York Times, Sept. 6, 1985.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "Judge requires that Bonanno gives testimony," New York Times, Sept. 5, 1985.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "Judge sentences 8 Mafia leaders to prison terms," New York Times, Jan. 14, 1987.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "Jury strips 2 concrete racketeers of their assets," New York Times, May 13, 1988.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "Reputed crime bosses arraigned," New York Times, March 1, 1985.
  • Lubasch, Arnold H., "U.S. jury convicts eight as members of mob Commission," New York Times, Nov. 20, 1986, p. 1.
  • Magnuson, Ed, "Hitting the Mafia," TIME, Sept. 29, 1986.
  • McFadden, Robert D., "Organized-crime chief shot dead stepping from car on E.46th St.," New York Times, Dec. 17, 1985.
  • Meskil, Paul, "Mob figure makes bail," New York Daily News, Jan. 12, 1986, p. 17.
  • O'Shaughnessy, Patrice, and Joseph McNamara, "Round 1 of feds v. 'iron fist,'" New York Daily News, Sept. 19, 1986, p. 7.
  • Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Vincent Cafaro testimony, Organized Crime: 25 Years After Valachi, Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate, 100th Congress, 2d Session, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988, p. 232, 868-870.
  • Shifrel, Scott, and Helen Kennedy, "Court told mob bosses voted on whacking Giuliani in '86," New York Daily News, Oct. 25, 2007.
  • Winerip, Michael, "High-profile prosecutor," New York Times, June 9, 1985.
  • U.S. Social Security Death Index, ancestry.com.

17 January 2018

Historian reveals identities of Mafia informants

The FBI makes every effort to hide the identities of its confidential underworld informants. Unlike the famous Joe Valachi and other Bureau cooperating witnesses, who exchange public testimony for government protection, confidential informants continue in their dangerous underworld roles during their furtive feeding of information to investigators. So, the FBI's secrecy regarding informants is vital... to a point.

For some reason, the Bureau insists on keeping informants' identities confidential even long after the informants have passed away, through natural or "unnatural" causes.

In reports, the FBI refers to its informants only by code numbers. Before any reports are made available to the public, revealing details about the informants are deleted. But subtle clues to their identities may remain within the text.

http://mafiahistory.us/rattrap/rattrap-idx.html
For years, Toronto-based crime historian Edmond Valin has been combing through publicly available information, including declassified files of the FBI, for these clues. He has shown a remarkable ability to discover the identities of some of the most important and most secret Mafia turncoats by comparing seemingly insignificant details from different documents.

Valin has consented to allow the American Mafia history website to publish a collection of his ground-breaking articles online. These articles, grouped under the heading of "Rat Trap," deal with informants from major U.S. Mafia organizations, including the Chicago Outfit, the Philly Mob, the Bonanno Crime Family and the Gambino Crime Family. Six articles are in the collection at this time, and more are on the way.

Valin's often shocking conclusions are painstakingly defended through document citations (many of the related documents can be accessed online through links provided in the articles' endnotes).

Visit Edmond Valin's Rat Trap articles.

14 November 2017

Apalachin party-crashers expose Mafia network


[Following is an excerpt from DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime - Vol. II.]

On November 14, 1957, Sergeant Edgar Croswell of the New York State Police, aided by troopers from the Vestal barracks and agents of the Treasury Department, broke up a convention of American mobsters at the rural Apalachin home of regional crime chieftain Joseph Barbara Sr. Scores of Mafiosi from around the country were rounded up and identified. 

With known criminal figures from every region of the country in attendance, the crashed party at tiny Apalachin triggered years of investigations and compelled reluctant federal law enforcement officials to acknowledge the existence of a highly organized, interstate network of racketeers.

Joe Barbara
Croswell learned a day earlier that Joseph Barbara's son made a number of room reservations at the Parkway Motel on Route 17 in Vestal. Knowing of Barbara's underworld connections, the police sergeant and Trooper Vincent Vasisko investigated. They drove up to the Barbara residence, a large stone house surrounded by fifty-three wooded acres on dead end McFall Road in Apalachin. They noted the license plates of the few cars they saw parked on the grounds. One was registered in New Jersey. The officers went back to the Parkway Motel later in the evening of November 13 and found an Ohio-registered Cadillac. When Croswell learned that several men had checked into one of the rooms reserved by the younger Barbara, he asked motel proprietor Warren Schroeder to have the occupants sign registration cards. The men refused to give their names.

Barbara had a record as a bootlegger, so Croswell contacted the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Unit. Agents of the unit arrived in Vestal on the morning of November 14. The troopers and agents drove over to the Barbara estate. They observed a half dozen, expensive, new cars in a parking lot. Many more vehicles could be seen parked behind the home’s detached garage.

The Barbaras apparently were hosting a large gathering. Croswell called the barracks for additional help and advised Inspector Robert E. Denman of the state police headquarters in Sidney, New York.

With no warrant for Barbara’s home and no official justification for setting foot on his property, the troopers recorded the license plate numbers of visible automobiles and then set up a roadblock on the nearest state road, Old Route 17. They monitored traffic passing through toward McFall Road and stopped every vehicle leaving the area, demanding identification from drivers and their passengers.

Word of the police presence outside the estate reached Barbara’s guests by early afternoon, and dozens of men suddenly poured from the home. Many attempted to leave by automobile but were halted at the law enforcement roadblock.

Elmira NY Star-Gazette, Nov. 15, 1957.

At twenty minutes after one, a car carrying Barbara’s longtime friend Emanuele Zicari and Dominick Alaimo of Pittston, Pennsylvania, was the first to reach the roadblock.

Troopers next stopped a black, 1957 Chrysler Imperial registered to William Medico of Pennsylvania. Inside they found New York-New Jersey Mafia leaders Vito Genovese, Gerardo Catena, Joseph Ida and Dominick Oliveto, along with Rosario “Russell” Bufalino of Pennsylvania. A 1957 Cadillac contained Cleveland Mafia boss John Scalish; John DeMarco of Shaker Heights, Ohio; James LaDuca of Lewiston, New York; and Roy Carlisi of Buffalo. Brooklyn underworld figures Carlo Gambino, Armand Rava and Paul Castellano were stopped in a borrowed car chauffeured by Castellano. In another vehicle police found Pittsburgh Mafiosi Michael Genovese and Gabriel “Kelly” Mannarino, traveling with Pittston, Pennsylvania, gangsters James Osticco and Angelo Sciandra.

Some of Barbara’s guests, either lacking automobiles or deciding that escape by road was impossible, ran off into the hilly woods and open fields surrounding the Barbara estate. Observing that suspicious behavior, police pursued them.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Nov. 16, 1957
Antonino Magaddino, brother of western New York Mafia boss Stefano Magaddino, was apprehended at McFadden Road to the east of the estate. John C. Montana of Buffalo and Brooklyn underworld leaders Joseph Bonanno and John Bonventre were found in a cornfield nearby. When police reached him, Montana was tangled in a barbed wire fence. James Colletti of Pueblo, Colorado, and Simone Scozzari of San Gabriel, California, slid down a brushy hill to the west of Barbara’s home and were gathered up by police on the avenue leading to the Pennsylvania state line. Santo Trafficante, the crime boss of Tampa, Florida, and the representative of a growing number of Mafia investors in Cuban gambling casinos, was extracted from a wooded area near Barbara’s home.

The law enforcement operation in Apalachin ultimately collected almost sixty underworld figures. Two more – Nick Civella and Joseph Filardo of Kansas City – were picked up fifteen miles away at the Binghamton train station as they attempted to arrange transport home. All the captured men were brought to the Vestal barracks to be identified and questioned.

None provided a reasonable explanation for the gathering at the Barbara home; most insisted that they had all coincidentally dropped in to visit their ailing friend Joseph Barbara Sr., who recently had suffered a heart attack. Genovese, Ida, Catena and Oliveto refused to answer any questions. The authorities were convinced that the gathering had been prearranged for a far more sinister purpose. (Some suggested the meeting was held in order to establish a uniform policy with regard to narcotics trafficking. Others felt it was to divide up the rackets of the recently murdered Albert Anastasia or to settle succession issues in his Mafia organization, later known as the Carlo Gambino Family. Still others speculated that the purpose was to endorse the takeover of Lucky Luciano's former crime family by Vito Genovese.) However, with no legal grounds for holding the men, police had to turn them loose.

Further investigation led authorities to assemble a list of more than 70 underworld-connected Apalachin convention attendees from twenty-five U.S. regions:
  • Apalachin, Binghamton, Endicott, New York – Joseph Barbara Sr., Joseph Barbara Jr., Ignatius Cannone, Anthony Guarnieri, Bartolo Guccia, Pasquale Turrigiano, Emanuele Zicari.
  • Auburn, New York – Sam Monachino, Patsy Monachino, Patsy Sciortino.
  • Boston, Massachusetts – Frank Cucchiara.
  • Buffalo, Niagara Falls, New York – Roy Carlisi, Domenick D’Agostino, James V. LaDuca, Sam Lagattuta, Antonino Magaddino, John C. Montana, Charles Montana, Stefano Magaddino.
  • Chicago, Illinois – Salvatore “Sam” Giancana, Anthony Accardo.
  • Cleveland, Ohio – John DeMarco, John Scalish.
  • Dallas, Texas – Joseph Civello.
  • Elizabeth, New Jersey – Joseph Ida, Louis Larasso, Frank Majuri.
  • Essex-Bergen Counties, New Jersey – Salvatore Chiri, Anthony Riela.
  • Kansas City, Missouri – Nick Civella, Joseph Filardo.
  • Los Angeles, California – Frank DeSimone, Simone Scozzari.
  • Miami, Florida – Bartolo Frank Failla.
  • New York, New York (Bonanno) – Joseph Bonanno, John Bonventre, Natale Evola, Carmine Galante.
  • New York, New York (Gambino) – Paul Castellano, Carlo Gambino, Carmine Lombardozzi, Armand Rava, Joseph Riccobono.
  • New York, New York (Genovese) – Gerardo Catena, Vito Genovese, Michele Miranda.
  • New York, New York (Lucchese) – Americo Migliore, Aniello Migliore, John Ormento, Vincent Rao, Joseph Rosato, Peter Valenti.
  • New York, New York (Profaci) – Joseph Magliocco, Joseph Profaci, Salvatore Tornabe.
  • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – Dominick Oliveto.
  • Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – Michael Genovese, Gabriel Mannarino, John Sebastian LaRocca.
  • Pittston, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania – Dominick Alaimo, Rosario Bufalino, William Medico, James Osticco, Angelo Sciandra.
  • Pueblo, Colorado – James Colletti.
  • Rochester, New York – Frank Valenti, Costenze Valenti.
  • San Francisco, California – Joseph Cerrito, James Lanza.
  • Springfield, Illinois – Frank Zito.
  • Tampa, Florida, and Havana, Cuba – Santo Trafficante, Joseph Silesi.
  • Utica, New York – Joseph Falcone, Salvatore Falcone, Rosario Mancuso.
News of the roundup of national crime figures in tiny Apalachin shook the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. Despite the earlier discoveries of the Kefauver Committee and other investigators, Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover had insisted that criminal rackets were organized on no more than local or regional levels. The Apalachin incident revealed that known hoodlums from across the country were closely acquainted with each other. Many of the attendees were connected by business and/or family links.

In the wake of Apalachin, the withering attention of media and law enforcement was focused on American Mafiosi from coast to coast. Investigations into the gathering and its attendees were launched by state and federal legislative committees, including the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Government Operations and the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field (McClellan Committee), as well as a federal grand jury in Albany and Hoover's greatly embarrassed Federal Bureau of Investigation.

See also:

Additional information on the Apalachin meeting, its attendees and its impact on organized crime can be found in:

DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime - Vol. II
by Thomas Hunt and Michael A. Tona.


Article sources:

  • Fitchette, Woodie, and Steve Hambalek, "Top U.S. hoods are run out of area after 'sick call' on Barbara," Binghamton NY Press, Nov. 15, 1957, p. 1.
  • “65 hoodlums seized in raid and run out of upstate village,” New York Times, Nov. 15, 1957, p. 1
  • "Cops spoil mobster Apalachin reunion," Elmira NY Star-Gazette, Nov. 15, 1957, p. 1.
  • “How hoodlum rally went haywire,” Syracuse Herald Journal, Nov. 16, 1957, p. 1.
  • "Cops probe convention of gangland," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 16, 1957, p. 1.
  • Feinberg, Alexander, “U.S. taking steps to deport aliens at gang meeting,” New York Times, Nov. 24, 1957, p. 1.

12 July 2017

Bonanno boss shot down in Bushwick eatery

On this date in 1979, several masked men with shotguns and automatic firearms murdered Bonanno Crime Family bigshot Carmine "Lilo" Galante, 69, his bodyguard Leonardo Coppola, 40, and restaurateur Giuseppe Turano, 48, at a patio table in Joe & Mary's Italian-American Restaurant, 205 Knickerbocker Avenue in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Turano's son John, 17, suffered serious but not fatal bullet wounds to his back. 

Police immediately began searching for longtime Galante friend Angelo Prisinzano, 73, who reportedly left the restaurant just before the shooting started, as well as Baldassare "Baldo" Amato and Cesare Bonventre, both 28, who were present at the time of the shooting but quickly fled - apparently unharmed - following it. Authorities later concluded that Prisinzano was also targeted in the attack but narrowly escaped. 

(Angelo Prisinzano died of natural causes about one week after the assassination of Galante. Cesare Bonventre was reported missing in early April of 1984. His mutilated remains were reportedly found soaking in drums of acid a month later. Baldassare Amato became an important figure in the Bonanno Crime Family. He was sentenced in October 2006 to life in prison following a federal conviction on racketeering and murder charges.)

Binghamton NY Evening Press

New York Times

Rochester NY Democrat and Chronicle

The sentencing of Baldassare Amato was covered in the December 2006 issue of MobNews Digest.



07 February 2017

Future Buffalo mob boss arrives in NYC

On this date in 1909: Seventeen-year-old Stefano Magaddino of Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, arrived in New York City aboard the S.S. San Giorgio

Magaddino's immediate destination was the home of his brother Gaspare, on Brooklyn's North Fifth Street near Roebling Street. The area was already a fair-sized colony of immigrants from Castellammare del Golfo. (It would later become the base of power of the Bonanno Crime Family.)

Magaddino frequently traveled around the U.S. His 1913 marriage in Brooklyn did not settle him down. Within a few years, he moved his family to South Philadelphia but continued to spend considerable time in New York City. He also traveled to Buffalo, Chicago and possibly Detroit.

Shortly after the start of Prohibition, Magaddino relocated to the Buffalo area. Almost immediately, he was selected boss of the western New York Mafia (previous boss Giuseppe DiCarlo died July 9, 1922). Magaddino remained the chief of the underworld in western New York and nearby Canada for more than fifty years.

Stefano Magaddino appears on Line 15 of this page
of the S.S. San Giorgio passenger manifest.

Read more about Magaddino and the Mafia of Western New York in 
DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime by Thomas Hunt and Michael A. Tona.

Preview DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime, Vol. I, to 1937 on Amazon.com.