ID: 'So Successful … It’s Criminal'

By Ed Scarpo
Investigation Discovery launches eight new true-crime series and renews 23 for the 2011-12 season, including "Nothing Personal," about murders caused by hitmen. Detail available here, on TV by the Numbers.

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See Trailer For Our Godfather -- Upcoming Documentary On Tomasso Buscetta, First Major Sicilian Mafioso To Flip

By Ed Scarpo
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Been a busy, crazy few weeks, but I have a slew of things in the works...


Following is a trailer for the upcoming OUR GODFATHER, a feature-length documentary about Tommaso Buscetta, the first high-ranking Italian mafioso to turn against Cosa Nostra and testify. It's due for a September release on Netflix... More information tk....


"...the money had gone to their heads. They couldn’t think of anything but buying, consuming, spending that mountain of money that each of them wanted to make even higher – all the way from the sea to the sanctuary of Santa Rosalia at the top of Montepellegrino.

(Buscetta said:) "It isn’t Cosa Nostra any more, Nino, it’s not ours. It belongs to petty thieves like Pippo Calò and Michele Greco – people U Curtu (nickname for Toto Riina) has connected to strings so that they’ll raise their heads or lower them at his command. Stefano Bontate told me that Michele never opens his mouth at Commission meetings. He just bobs his head up and down. He’s a co…
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Hoodwinked: Restaurateur on Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares Was a Mobster

By Ed Scarpo
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Peter (Peter Pasta) Pellegrino, formerly of the Babylon, New York restaurant Peter’s Italian Restaurant, really is -- or was -- a gangster.


The once-promising Bonanno crime family member who appeared in Kitchen Nightmares now calls himself a brokester. And the Bonanno crime family, with which he was once affiliated has disowned him.

So has the rest of New York's Cosa Nostra, according to FBI documents and Peter Pasta himself.

But before all that he appeared on an episode of Kitchen Nightmares in which he acted very much like the mobster he allegedly was trying to become around the time of filming. (See Peter's Italian Restaurant menu here.)






Back then Peter Pasta was an up-and-coming Bonanno associate who "earned" $15 grand a week from bookmaking.

At the time, he also owned two boats that he'd park in a pricey nearby Babylon harbor called Great South Bay.

Gang Land News's Jerry Capeci broke the news about Peter Pasta's mob status, reporting:

Today, like the…
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Luchese Boss Vic Amuso Almost Went Very Old School On Some Bronx Wiseguys

By Ed Scarpo
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The Luchese crime family apparently learned from its past mistakes -- and avoided repeating the stretch of murderous mayhem that happened back in the 1980s-1990s when over a dozen members were killed.



Consequently, Brooklyn-based Luchese mobster Michael (Big Mike) DeSantis bloodlessly succeeded Bronx-based (former) powerhouse Matthew (Matty) Madonna as acting boss, precisely as imprisoned-for-life boss Vittorio (Vic) Amuso had directed.




Amuso -- who alongside his top lieutenant, Anthony (Gaspipe) Casso, was responsible for that 1980s-90s bloodbath -- had sent a message (via coded letter) from his prison cell to underboss Steven (Stevie Wonder) Crea in 2017, as reported by Jerry Capeci on Gang Land News and the New York Post, noting that the news was based on testimony delivered during the racketeering trial of Eugene Boopsie Castelle.

(Amuso in turn was responding to a letter that had been sent to him by capos disgruntled about the family's seat of power shifting away from Brookly…
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OTHER SON DID IT, FEDS SAY: HUGE TWIST IN SALLY DAZ SHOOTING, LARRY MCSHANE OF DAILY NEWS REPORTS....

By Ed Scarpo
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BREAKING NEWS ...




 "Mob scion Anthony Zottola Sr. directed a true-life Mafia tale with a twist of “Godfather"-style betrayal: He arranged to murder his mobbed-up dad and schemed to gun down his older brother, federal officials charged Tuesday.

"Zottola, 41, of Larchmont, was busted with three other suspects accused of targeting his father Sylvester “Sally Daz” Zottola and his sibling Salvatore in separate attacks just three months apart last year...."
See story by Larry McShane....

Developing our take on the story now.....

READ OUR COVERAGE OF THE STORY...

Bloods Member Indicted For Conspiracy In Bonanno Associate's Murder Last Month

Was Bronx Shooting Retaliation for Sally Daz's Dad, a Luchese Associate?

Sylvester Zottola, Bronx-Based Bonanno Mobster, Shot Dead In "Mafia-Style Assassination"

Second Suspect, Gangsta Named "Taliban," Nabbed In McDonald's Murder Of Sally Daz, Associate Of Bonanno and Luchese Crime Families

Bonanno Mobster Sho…
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Mafia Uses Same Initiation Ceremony, As Per Luchese Defector Testimony

By Ed Scarpo
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The Mafia still makes 'em like it always did...


We're referring to the initiation ceremony -- the one that uses the gun, the knife, the picture of the saint, the pin...

John Pennisi, 49, a Luchese member who flipped last year, detailed on the witness stand his life in the New York Mafia, touching on his initiation ceremony and how members of the Brooklyn crew began moving to Staten Island, raising the existential question of whether Luchese wiseguys who live on Staten Island can still credibly call themselves the Brooklyn crew....

Pennisi was made in a 2013 secret initiation ceremony in the dark basement of a house on Staten Island. (In a refreshing twist, he was made on his wife’s birthday rather than his own birthday.)



Then-acting boss Matty Madonna, who was from the Bronx, presided.

“There was a gun, a knife, there was a picture of a saint, an ashtray, a lighter, and like a diabetic pin, needle to check your blood,” said Pennisi.

Madonna asked Pennisi which finger he used t…
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Was Bronx Shooting Retaliation for Sally Daz's Dad, a Luchese Associate?

By Ed Scarpo
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UPDATED
The Salvatore (Sally Daz) Zottola shooting may actually be the second attempted gangland hit caught on tape; the first, in March 1993, was the attempted murder of Joey Chang, then-34, early one morning in the coffee shop he owned, the Warfield Breakfast & Luncheon Express, in Philadelphia.
The FBI had mounted a surveillance camera on the telephone pole across from the diner. Chang was shot during the Merlino-Stanfa war. Joey Chang was seriously wounded but he too survived, though partially paralyzed and with nerve damage that caused him to retire from Cosa Nostra.

NYPD officials have labeled the July 11 attempted murder of Salvatore (Sally Daz) Zottola as a botched gangland hit. He was shot around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday morning in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx.
In a surveillance clip, below, a red Nissan can be seen driving past Zottola's vehicle and pulling to a hault. Zottola was on the driver's side of the car, not facing the video, and was either besidethe ca…
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Bath Avenue Crew Rose High, Fell Hard

By Ed Scarpo
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Members of the Bath Avenue Crew were as young as 8 years old and probably weren't even aware of what they were doing -- aligning themselves with the biggest, baddest gang in America: Cosa Nostra, specifically the Five Families.
Anthony Spero, former Bonanno consiglieri, was the man for whom they would one day carry out orders that cost some their lives, others, their freedom and all, their souls. At least that's what they said in testimony; it was powerful testimony, however, and it helped put Spero away in an unbelievably circumstantial trial.

At the same time they saw the wiseguys on the street, pulling up to the curbs in their big shiny Cadillacs, loafing around social clubs wearing pricey suits and sporting hundred-dollar haircuts and manicured fingernails.


But the guys presented more than just a cold, distant image to watch; Mafia members interacted with the kids, joked around with them and showed them there were other ways to make it through life. The wiseguys doled out …
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