Cosa Nostra News

Skinny Joey Merlino EXCLUSIVE:  Phil Narducci has been named boss of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra Family, according to several sources who requested anonymity. What is not known is whether he is the official boss or acting boss for Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino , who is serving a short stint down in Florida. Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi and Joseph "Chickie" Ciancaglini, Sr. are sharing the position of consiglieri. The underboss position is officially unfilled, though it is believed that South Philadelphia-based capos Stevie Mazzone and John "Johnny Chang" Ciancaglini may fill the void by serving as street bosses for the often-troubled Philly crime family .

"Carnesi was the one spreading the story that Junior was cooperating... Tell Carnesi to ask the FBI to tell him why he flew to Florida to see Danny Marino." -- John Alite in an exclusive interview John Alite When John Alite testified against John Gotti Junior, he was mauled by the media. Newspapers ran front-page stories and headlines calling him a rat and sought to portray him as everything from a junkie to a liar. But now that the news is out that John Junior gave the Feds a "proffer" -- the once-mighty newspapers are suddenly silent, Alite noted. "Newsday ran nothing to this point that I am aware of," he told us this morning. John Alite, today.  "It’s incredible; it’s a Long Island newspaper. If you check when my case was going on, Newsday wrote I was the most unbelievable of the witnesses based on what one of the jurors said. That is not even close to being true if you look at the jury pool on his charges." ...

John Alite talks to Cosa Nostra News on the record. I am working on the story now. Some of what he told us is in the interview above. We will try not to duplicate too much of the information. I am trying to reach a couple of people for comment; I doubt I'll get very far.

EXCLUSIVE:   Gotti's Rules : The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia  by George Anastasia, available tomorrow, will quote and include a five-page 302 that resulted from John Gotti Junior's "proffer session" with federal authorities. This is according to an emailed excerpt from the book. The book reveals for the first time the existence of a 302 transcript of John Gotti Junior's 2005 proffer session. The meeting occurred at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in lower Manhattan on January 18, 2005. The 302, never before revealed to the public, is solid evidence that, despite all Junior's denials, he and two of his defense attorneys met with federal prosecutors and FBI agents. As noted in the previous story , Jerry Capeci first broke news of Junior’s attempt to cooperate. But the 302s go even further in terms of the extent of information Junior gave up. One of the more shocking revelations to emerge from the memo is t...

Does John Gotti Junior, in his 500-plus-page book, tell the one about the former NYPD detective who gave the Gambino crime family confidential information about a 1983 murder that condemned a witness to death? Does he tell the one about the Gambino capo who allowed Gaspipe Casso to murder his own nephew, James Hydell, who'd been part of a team that had tried and failed to take out Gaspipe in a hail of bullets? You shoot a guy like Gaspipe and miss, you kill yourself because you're already a dead man.

Who ratted on Alite? In early March 2014, "60 Minutes Sports" on Showtime aired an interview with John Alite, marking the former gangster's first interview since finishing an eight-year prison sentence for racketeering two years ago. Alite was an associate of the Gambino crime family before deciding to flip and become the Fed's "star witness" against John Gotti Junior in a 2009 trial that ended with a hung jury. Alite had been keeping a low profile since getting out of prison. "60 Minutes" focused Alite's interview on sports betting, a hot political issue in New Jersey , but also included some of the highlights of his career on the street, limiting its scope to the turncoat's doings in the New York area, where he worked under the Gottis. But he also was quite active in the criminal underworld in Tampa, Fla., working under fellow New Yorker Ronald "Ronnie One Arm" Trucchio . The program features some intere...

EXCLUSIVE: Dominick Montiglio, for those not familiar, is the nephew of Anthony "Nino" Gaggi, a Paul Castellano loyalist and rising star within what Jerry Capeci has called the "white-collar wing" of the Gambino family during the reign of Big Paul.. Dominick Montiglio, former emissary to the murder machine... Gaggi died in 1988, never attaining the position of underboss he'd long sought when he was close to the Gambino boss before the spectacular 1985 coup by John Gotti. It's through Montiglio's eyes that much of Murder Machine  is told. Murder Machine relates the story of how, after Carlo Gambino died of natural causes in 1976, the ruling members of the Gambino Family met at Nino and Dominick's Brooklyn home ("the bunker") to name a new boss.  Roy DeMeo also hunted people. Gaggi expected the best but prepared for the worst. He taped a gun under the kitchen table and sent Dom upstairs to watch the front of the house from an...

It's just not as fun now that I revealed I was bluffing about the JDL...

Which Gotti really wanted Sinatra dead? We're not reading the book, but based on our devotion to our beat, we offer here one anecdote to emerge from John Gotti Junior's self-published ebook.  The story involves John Gotti threatening Frank Sinatra's life using Joseph "Joe the German" Watts, one of three guys Junior once discussed  privately. The issue we ponder is which Gotti really posed the greater threat and to whom: Senior in the form of Joe Watts or Junior in the form of his threats against mob scribe Jerry Capeci. The old-school newspaperman apparently read Junior's book, which includes the Sinatra incident,  and then gave Junior a pass. When he read about Sinatra, Jerry Capeci must've recalled the moment when the Feds advised him to be "a little more cautious than usual." The younger Gotti had hired a corrupt ex-NYPD detective to follow the journalist around to "dig up some dirt."

Click on the cover to purchase We'd like to give a shout out to the  Reading Ghost blogger  for crafting a review of  Inside the Last Great Mafia Empire  that highlights a key aspect of our approach to writing The Cicale Files series . Mob books such as  Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires  tend to provide detailed overviews of organized crime, focusing on a particular crime family, city, or period of time. Often an abundance of names, biographies, storylines, dates and other details swamp the reader.  And we have wondered how much most readers really take away from these books once they finish the last page... As bloggers writing about the subject, we of course love these books and we eagerly consume even the footnotes and details regarding source material. But in this case we refer to  the mainstream reader , not only the Mafia junkie.

This is my opinion.... published on January 19, 2015...  I nearly hit the purchase button, but I realized long ago that I buy too many ebooks and I have spent more money on Amazon than I'd ever care to admit. So I downloaded the sample first for In the Shadow of My Father, the new ebook available tonight on Amazon.com. John A. Gotti's first literary effort is for sale now. As I skimmed Peter Lance's Forward , most of which is an ongoing advertisement for his terrorism books, I read something that nearly blew my mind. I read it again to make sure I had read what I actually thought I had read. No, I thought. It can't be. Charles Carnesi can't be bragging about putting a journalist on the stand to get her to reveal her sources.... But there is simply no other way to say it. That's exactly what he was doing. "Some agent intimately involved in the case must have had a relationship with a New York Post reporter... she starts writ...