USDOJ: Indictments from the 'Big LCN Bust' Last January

By Ed Scarpo
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Prelude To The Galante Murders

By Ed Scarpo
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The following, which is admittedly sketchy in terms of detail (it is based on a quick encounter between wiseguys and goodguys in a parking lot at night), was cut from our series on Carmine Galante, which we're still finishing up. (After we publish the last remaining installment, we plan to republish the entire story as one single piece.) The Eternal Dance A t 9:30 in the evening of Tuesday, June 5, 1979, some five weeks before the murder of Carmine Galante, two undercover police officers in an unmarked Plymouth Valiant drove into the parking lot of the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream on Long Island. Green Acres Mall parking lot circa 1980 The purpose of the visit was to surveil one of Green Acres' restaurants, which was suspected of being a source of significant drug-dealing activity. The place also was known to belong to Bonanno wiseguy Gerlando (George from Canada) Sciascia, a made member of the Bonanno crime family and also a top member of the Sicilian faction. Sciascia, w
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Ex Bonanno Chief Joe Massino Detailed His Role In Galante Hit (And It Wasn't What You Think)

By Ed Scarpo
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When Joe Massino met Rusty Rastelli for the first time in  the early 1970s, Rastelli asked him if he knew anything about a recent off-the-record killing, seemingly indicating he believed Massino may have had some involvement. Rusty then told him that when he found out who the perpetrator was, he already had approval from the Commission to kill  him...  What's a Commission, Massino wondered... Joe Massino came from a working-class Maspeth background, the second of three sons of a second-generation Italian-American couple. He survived and thrived in a longtime career in the American Mafia, rising to the epitome when he became boss of the Bonanno crime family. For a while, when other bosses were incarcerated, Massino was the most powerful Mafioso on the street. Goombata: Gene Gotti, left, and Joe Massino walk talk While luck, as usual, probably played a role in his rise, Massino also brought to the table strong qualities that doubtlessly helped. His formal education may have ended dur
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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. Gordon gives a pep talk. Peter is ready for action..... 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 Je
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Bath Avenue Crew Rose High, Fell Hard

By Ed Scarpo
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This story from 2014 is one of the most popular on this site—and we didn't even know it until very recently (for reasons stemming from the fallibility of generalized analytics data.) Members of the Bath Avenue Crew were as young as 8 years old when they began to align themselves with the biggest, baddest gang in America: Cosa Nostra, specifically the Five Families. Bath Avenue Crew founding members. 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 twenty-dollar bills like they were nothing. The wiseguys patted them on the back, told them they were "good kids," and maybe asked them to watch the cars
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The End: Carmine Galante, Godfather Of Heroin Trafficking, Conclusion

By Ed Scarpo
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At about 12:45 p.m. on the stifling hot and humid afternoon of Thursday, July 12, 1979, Carmine Galante, 69, was driven by his nephew James to the Joe and Mary Italian-American Restaurant in Brooklyn’s Bushwick section. That part of Brooklyn was a fading Bonanno stronghold . Galante often visited the restaurant, which was owned by his cousin, Giuseppe Turano, 48. Turano had tickets for a Saturday flight to Italy to meet his family on vacation. Galante went to the restaurant that day to have a “bon voyage” luncheon with him. The two men liked to eat in the open air , so a table had been set up on the restaurant’s back patio amid grape vines and tomato plants, which lent a modest pastoral setting to that small patch of Brooklyn. The nondescript restaurant, which consisted of two interior dining rooms , had seen better days. Dingy yellow curtains hung from the windows, lemon-colored oilcloths were draped over the tables. A Frank Sinatra album cover was propped on the front counter. Ins
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Skeletal Remains Found Along Receding Lake Near Las Vegas Apparently Belong To Victim of A Gangland Hit

By Ed Scarpo
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Thanks to an ongoing "megadrought" in that part of the USA, the skeleton found a week ago in a metal storage container along the receding shoreline of Lake Mead— the reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the Southwestern United States about 40 miles east of Las Vegas—is the remains of a victim of what appears to have been a mob hit, according to Las Vegas police. The remains belong to the victim of a gunshot wound several decades back. Source: Daily Mail The man (though some reports claim the sex has not been identified yet) died from a gunshot wound sometime in the mid-1970s or early 80s. The timeframe for the murder apparently is based on the sneakers found on the skeleton, which were sold and manufactured by Kmart in the mid to late '70s. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police released a statement confirming previous comments that the death of the man in the barrel is being investigated as a homicide "We're going to expand our time frame of the mu
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