Cosa Nostra News for Week of May 24

By Ed Scarpo
With Bloodletters & Badmen....

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  1. AnonymousMay 27, 2014, 8:06:00 AM

    Great! I love the recap. Please keep them coming.

    ReplyDelete

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1992 Testimony of Gambino Underboss Salvatore (Sammy The Bull) Gravano Part 6: The Hits

By Ed Scarpo
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Why did John Gotti kill Paul Castellano?   Because he could. Specifically, Castellano was killed because he stood in John Gotti's way.  The laundry list of grievances—Big Paul sold out the family, allowed Chin to whack a made Gambino member, had splintered the family with craven demands for transcripts he didn't need, possibly to test his underboss's loyalty, among other things—may have consisted of independent truths, but together they served largely as pretext. Sammy the Bull lays it all out in  Underboss . (Even if you don't want to believe Gravano, in this case, he earned no clear benefit making any of this up.) "I don't think John gave a fuck about Angelo (Ruggiero) or the tapes," Gravano noted. "I think he was looking to create a situation to capitalize on our other grievances about Paul." And while there were some very real simmering tensions between the Dellacroce and Castellano factions, Frank DeCicco, one of the only figures in this
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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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John Pappa Failed at Shooting His Way into the Mafia

By Ed Scarpo
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 John Pappa, a wannabe wiseguy with the tough Colombo family, was convicted of racketeering, drug dealing, and four murders, one of which was the 12th and final killing of the Colombo family war . John Pappa looking to be in the pink of health. The other three make this a horror story. They each met their end for getting between the vicious Pappa and what he believed was his rightful street credit -- which he'd been counting on to get him his button. He got slammed with prison instead. The judge sentenced the would-be wiseguy to life in prison -- and due to Pappa's young age, he has the dubious distinction of potentially serving one of the longest sentences in U.S. criminal history. Pappa, at the ripe old age of 22, was nabbed at a wedding rehearsal on Staten Island in 1997. (He had murdered the brother of the man getting married, along with two others.) Pappa believed the trio had been seeking to steal "street cred" for killing one of the Colombo crime
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1992 Testimony of Gambino Underboss Salvatore (Sammy The Bull) Gravano Part 5: Choosing The Hit Team

By Ed Scarpo
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A tweak in the daily duties at our day job coupled with a vast improvement in our love life leaves us these days with much less blogging time on our hands. Nevertheless, we're planning to play catchup toward the end of this week (possibly with the publication [at long last] of that Carmine Galante story we've been referencing ad nauseam )... Meanwhile, there's this... John Gotti, left, Frank DeCicco. See previous installments in this series: 1992 Testimony of Gambino Underboss Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, Part 1 1992 Testimony of Salvatore (Sammy The Bull) Gravano Part 2: Gambino Ceremony, Meeting John Gotti 1992 Testimony of Gambino Underboss Salvatore (Sammy The Bull) Gravano Part 3: Murders 1992 Testimony of Salvatore (Sammy The Bull) Gravano Part 4: Plotting To Kill A Boss The following continues with Sammy the Bull still under direct questioning by John Gleeson, the then Assistant United States Attorney. GLEESON: Was there a meeting to plan the murder?  GRAVAN
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