The Must-Have Mob App for Mob Buffs

With the Mafia Maps app, you can visit many of the mob's most famous haunts in New York City.

For .99 cents, it's a hell of a deal...

You can find the exact place this wiseguy got the hard goodbye.
Among the sites Mafia Maps will help you find: the place where Don Umberto (Albert Anastasia) was brutally slain -- the hit forever linked the Mafia and barbershops, as well as the steakhouse in front of which Gambino boss "Big Paul" Castellano was gunned down, along with his driver and underboss, Tommy Bilotti. They were killed in front of Sparks and died in the street, Big Paul splayed out on the sidewalk, eyes wide open in death. Bilotti was supine, in the street on top of a huge puddle of his own blood.




You can also find locations intimately tied to figures like "Crazy Joe" Gallo, Jimmy "The Gent" Burke and Johnny Boy, the orchestrator of the Castellano hit. It was a brilliant hit -- whatever else you think of Gotti, you have to give him that. And he had balls of steel to whack a boss without approval. (He and the conspirators must've been ready to take on the other four families; there had to have been a contingency plan, although I have never heard what it was.)

John Hughes, a Manhattan resident and longtime true crime buff, invented the app, which provides recent photos of various historic Mafia hot spots, info on places where 70 mob "events" happened, as well as a GPS.

"That's the thing for me," Hughes told the New York Daily News, regarding visiting crime scenes.

"What you don't get from a book narrative is that moment to linger at the scene, to consider the reality of what happened there."

The app serves up placed in all five New York boroughs: Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

While focused on Cosa Nostra, the app also highlights places near and dear to other crime groups, such as the notorious Westies, from the westside of Manhattan, otherwise known, back in the day, as Hell's Kitchen. Today, it's called Clinton, I believe.

Even the NYPD is represented, thanks to the Mafia cops, lowlife cowards Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito.

Hughes app's mob history dates back decades, from the days of the Castellammarese Wars in the 1930s through the new millennium. He spent 18 months readying the app

"I did it all," says the 41-year-old former MTV employee. "I did all the photography, the research, the writing. It's just simple storytelling."

As the News related in its story:

Hughes is the kind of guy who gets excited about visiting the basement of a Queens restaurant - because it was once the site of Robert's Lounge, hangout of Henry Hill and the mobsters of "GoodFellas."

"That's where they put Spider!" he says enthusiastically - a reference to the purported burial of a hit victim beneath the long-shuttered saloon. 
The app is available on iTunes. Hughes continues updating it, according to the News report.





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