Watch John Alite Documentary: Andy Deliana's The Perfect Gangster

By Ed Scarpo


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The Mob's Underground Railroad: How Allie Boy Persico Survived On The Lam For Seven Years

By Ed Scarpo
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In 1987, reputed Colombo boss Carmine Persico knew that, short of his lawyers one day cooking up a miracle, he would in all likelihood be spending the rest of his life in prison. He had been convicted in  two separate trials: the Mafia Commission trial and a separate racketeering trial involving the Colombo family's operations. (Persico died in 2019 at age 85 after serving 32 years of that 136-year prison sentence following his two convictions.) Allie Boy Persico was on the run for seven years. The cases were separate, but overlapped, the common denominator being FBI surveillance recordings of Colombo soldier Ralph Scopo’s conversations, which alerted the Feds to the initial evidence that would help them build the Commission Case. Scopo was the bagman in a large-scale ongoing racket involving shaking down concrete contractors at major construction projects. As the president of the Cement and Concrete Workers District Council of the Laborers' International Union of North America
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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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Ex-Bath Ave Crew Member Meets Some Haters

By Ed Scarpo
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James "Jimmy" Calandra (pictured) who appeared on National Geographic's documentary about the New York Mafia was visiting his old stomping grounds in Bensonhurst this past June. Jimmy Calandra, formerly of Bath Avenue. He reportedly stepped into a Dunkin' Donuts on 18th Avenue. Two patrons -- a man and woman -- recognized him and asked for his autograph. Just kidding. They started harassing him.  The man, described as a local convicted hoodlum, shouted "rat" while the man's lady friend threw a cup of coffee at him. Lucky for Jimmy it was iced coffee. Not so lucky for her boyfriend, Jimmy can use his fists.  Afterward, Calandra immediately owned up to what he'd done and was charged with misdemeanor assault, menacing, and harassment. Interestingly enough, around the same time as Jimmy's Dunkin adventure, down in Florida Chris Paciello , the former nightclub hotshot and mob informant who once ran with a mob-tied crew that Calandra had al
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