Mob Rat Says Montreal Most Powerful Mafia Group

The NationalPost.com is running a story in which a "former hit man" of LCN berates the U.S. mob, calling it basically second fiddle to its neighbors preparing for battle up north.

But the source is turncoat Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta, a former Colombo soldier who is probably making a decent living in WitPro by lending his views to American television documentaries about the mob.

The article describes him as "a veteran American Mafia soldier and former hit man" and quotes him as saying that "Montreal's mobsters are by far the most significant gangsters in the world -- outpacing the notorious Five Families of New York that became synonymous with sophisticated crime." [What about all the other crime rings based in Italy, Sal? You forget about them? I am referring to the Camorra, which is based in the Campania region around Naples; the 'Ndrangheta, based in Calabria; and the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot. Together they were estimated in 2009 to have had a turnover of 135 billion euros – almost 9% of Italy's gross domestic product.]

Sal became a bit more enterprising, taking his own initiative to catch others doing what he had done: lying. He became a jailhouse snitch.

"There is no contest," said ["Big Sal"], who is infamous for his role in a shooting that targeted the makers of the classic pornographic film Deep Throat but killed a former nun by mistake.

"You have the most sophisticated group, the most lethal, the most powerful group in the world," Miciotta said of the Montreal-based Mafia in an interview to be aired tomorrow on CBC Television.

"All the guys in Brooklyn are nickel-and-dime guys. In Montreal, you have guys [bringing in] 400 kilos, 500 kilos," Miciotta said, adding New York's mobsters have to work a decade to earn what the Montreal Mafia makes in just one year."

The article does not indicate that Miciotta is not known for being a paragon of honesty; he was an informant, and a bad one at that. A law enforcement source told us that Sal can never testify again because his reputation has been forever impugned because he was caught lying on the witness stand. [My source told me Sal's lying on the witness stand directly set free six mobsters then on trial -- and I found corroboration from Jerry Capeci, who runs GanglandNews.com, which is subscription only.]

Yanked from the program and facing 15 years in prison, he resorted to the lowest level of informing. Sal became a bit more enterprising, taking his own initiative to catch others doing what he had done: lying. He became a jailhouse snitch.


Philly mobster Phil Colletti confided to Sal his plans to state plain untruths on the stand -- a mistake. William Corolleo, a former Bonanno loanshark, also made the mistake of confiding in Sal, admitting to the wily mobster that the Feds didn't know about his bookmaking business. If you had bet that the Feds learned about it shortly after that discussion, you'd have won.

Perhaps Sal's masterpiece was served to him on a silver platter by psycho Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, who had been serving time with Sal. The former Lucchese underboss told Miciotta that he and a few other inmates were using an employee of the housing unit where they all lived to supply them with premium contraband, including narcotics, cigars and cellular phones. Upon learning of this from Miciotta, the Feds dropped Casso, too, leaving him to rot for life. [And to be fair, when Casso later tried to jump Big Sal -- Big Sal beat the ever-loving crap out of him; he may be a rat, but Sal obviously knows, or knew, how to use his hands.]

And so in the end, Big Sal managed to win his way back into the Feds' good graces. The ex-mobster got nine years whacked off his sentence for being such a good snoop, and he was able to begin his new life in 1999.


It would seem such a source would have a bit of an ax to grind in denigrating his former cohorts. 


The hit to Big Sal's credibility is something the producers of all those TV shows -- and editors of newspapers -- should make clear to their audience.

Here is more from the article:

"Miciotta said he once met Vito Rizzuto, the reputed head of the Montreal Mafia, at a restaurant in New York. [But obviously had nothing else to add -- you'd think we'd get an insight into Rizzuto or something here, but we don't; it remains difficult to know when Sal is telling the truth or not.] Miciotta was born in Brooklyn in the 1940s to a family from Sicily, the birthplace of the Mafia. He had an idealized view of the old-school mobsters.

"Inducted into the Colombo Family, one of the Five Families of the New York Mafia that among them once held significant sway over organized crime across the continent, Miciotta ended up doing a lot of the mob's heavy lifting.

"I was involved in five murders," he told CBC News Sunday in an on-camera interview with co-host Evan Solomon.

"Miciotta was in the thick of a deadly internal war among rival Colombo Family factions but is best known by New Yorkers for a 1982 shooting that targeted a father and son team of pornographers.

"Joseph Peraino Sr., and his son, Joseph Jr., had helped to finance and distribute the movie Deep Throat, which became hugely profitable when porn first went mainstream. A member of the Peraino family had mob ties and a dispute over the film's profits brought the Colombo Family into the fray, Miciotta said."

Comments

  1. There are four terms/words to describe Rat Boy's so called information: self-serving, gratuitous, ignorant, and bitchy. He's obviously got a handle on what went on in his little pond, and maybe some info about Montreal, but doesn't know shit from shinola about what's going on in the rest of the world. The problem is that those who listen to him know even less.

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