True Mob Wife Tina Franzese Dies at 77

By Ed Scarpo

Tina Franzese, wife of infamous Colombo mobster John "Sonny" Franzese, died on Easter Sunday. She was 77.

I knew Mrs. Franzese, had hours-long conversations with her when I did a story on Sonny.

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Will Skinny Teddy Call The Shots for the Colombos? Or Joe Waverly?

By Ed Scarpo
To have been a fly on the wall at the downtown Brooklyn halfway house where the leading contenders for the slot of Colombo family boss, Theodore (Skinny Teddy) Persico Jr. and Joel (Joe Waverly) Cacace, both cooled their heels for months....


Unless the COVID-19 pandemic changed anything, Joe Waverly departed the Brooklyn Residential Reentry facility last Friday, May 22. Skinny Teddy still has a few more days to go before his slated May 29 release.

For now, Andrew (Mush) Russo is once again acting Colombo family boss.

Skinny Teddy Persico, 56, has been the presumed heir apparent since cousin Alphonse (Allie Boy) Persico, went away for life after his 2008 conviction for the 1999 murder of William (Wild Bill) Cutolo. Skinny Teddy's father, who died in 2017, was a brother of Carmine (Junior) Persico, the legendary and unpredictable boss of the Colombo crime family who died last year at the age of 85 while serving a 139-year sentence.

Teddy Persico has the lineage and street experience to…
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The Good Old Days? (And How The Gambinos Kicked Someone Out; That's Right, Out, Of The Family)

By Ed Scarpo
It's always the end of the world.... It always seems like today everything is going to hell in a handbasket.


Exhibit A: when was the following written?

"The old images seem like a caricature now: the shadowy world of secret rituals, the aging dons behind high-walled estates, the passion for vengeance and power over other men. For years, the Mafia was the stuff of novels and movies and whispers on Mulberry Street.... "

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Also in March 1987, the Pizza Connection Case ended with the former boss of Sicily's Mafia and 16 other men convicted in Manhattan of running an international ring that distributed tons of heroin, with a street value that Federal authorities estimated at $1.6 billion, using pizza parlors to disguise drug meetings and money-laundering.

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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.)






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Today, like the…
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