Cosa Nostra News

While researching our "saga" on Frank Coppa, the first member of the Bonanno family to flip, we found some interesting information on Phil Rastelli, so we pieced the following biographical details together....




Bonanno wiseguy Natale (Joe Diamond) Evola's underboss, Philip (Rusty) Rastelli, won the support of a group of capos and was elected to the top after Evola died in late August 1973.

Rastelli, who listed his occupation as a radio dispatcher for a taxi company, spent half his life in prison. His lengthy reign as boss (he had an 18-year stretch at the top, from 1973 to 1991) included a total of about three years as a free man. Then, thanks to two lengthy prison sentences—10 years for antitrust violations, and 12 years for directing a huge labor racketeering conspiracy—after 1976, he mostly ran the Bonanno family’s operations from behind bars.

He was an unpopular boss, and he presided over the disintegration of the family.

Described once as a tall, good-looking man, Ra…

As noted in a previous story, as per recently released records, Felix Sater, a former associate of President Donald Trump, played a key role in helping the Feds pressure Frank Coppa, the first member of the Bonanno family to flip.


Others, including Richard Cantarella and Sal Vitale, brother-in-law to then-Bonanno boss Joseph Massino, quickly followed.
Massino, ever since getting out of prison in 1992, had taken measures to buffer the Bonanno family and himself from law enforcement. He closed social clubs, organized crews into separate cells, and focused on anti-surveillance efforts (including taking vacations outside the US with top aids and their wives to have discussions), among other things.

Despite Massino's extensive efforts to fortify the Massino family the Bonanno family, the defection of Coppa, a longtime member of Massino's inner circle, was as serious as heart failure: Coppa was among the select wiseguys who could put Massino away for centuries.

Massino reacted w…

BY GLEN LOWE
Do you want to get your record expunged?






Pardons can go a long way if you are up for the change. Speaking of which, following we are going to give a short guide that will help you speed up the pardon process. It can save your skin in the long run.

1. Stay Organized

If you have something unpleasant on your record and you want to get rid of it, you can do it by getting a pardon. If you are filing the pardon application on your own, then you better schedule an appointment. If you don’t make a routine, then your pardon might take years to complete.

If youwork with a respectable law firm, the team will take care of your documents. It will help you get through the Record Suspension procedure a lot quicker.

2. Follow-Ups

This is another problem most people face when trying to get their record cleared. The agencies stop responding to their requests after a set time. Most people don’t know when they filed their requests. Sometimes; they don’t have time to make follow up calls…

Felix Sater, a former associate of President Donald Trump, was instrumental in helping the Feds bring down capo Frank Coppa, the first member of the Bonanno crime family to flip and testify, ever, Cosa Nostra News has learned.




This was among the revelations that came to light in a 2009 sentencing transcript that was among a trove of documents unsealed on Monday for The Intercept on the order of U.S. District Judge Leo Glasser.

Coppa's decision to flip in 2002 after he was named in his third racketeering indictment in two years is historically regarded as a seminal moment in the Federal government's ongoing war against the Bonanno family and the New York Mafia.

Coppa's turnaround alone led to the arrests of dozens of wiseguys and induced many others in the Bonanno family to follow him, which helped the Feds to eventually take down Joseph Massino, then the Bonanno family's powerful boss, who would also flip and testify, becoming the first New York Mafia boss to do so.





Le…

More deep state background
In March, Anthony Comello, an aimless 24-year-old man who still lived with his parents on Staten Island, was arrested three days after the brutal murder of Gambino underboss Francesco (Franky Boy) Cali in his Todt Hill driveway in front of his family.



The Staten Island District Attorney’s Office had charged Comello with the murder.

That's roughly about where our personal interest in this story died and was buried.

From the moment of the shooting, sources alleged a weird connection to President Donald Trump (and Vice President Mike Pence) but also something about Comello falling in love with Cali’s niece, and being rejected by Frank.

Now his lawyer’s court filing claims Comello, who remains in protective custody, only wanted to arrest Frank Cali, not kill him by shooting him 10 times. They attribute this to his being deluded by internet conspiracy theories. And there’s no mention of the alleged relationship with the niece.

“He ardently believed that France…

Bonanno capo Joseph (Joe Valet) Sabella was slammed with double the amount of prison time his lawyer had sought: He was sentenced to seven years plus about three months in prison last Friday by U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein.



In February, Joe Valet pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, among other crimes. Then, the wiseguys he was supposed to go to trial with — Joe Cammarano and Porky Zancocchio — won acquittals. But then those two, and two others, were shelved by Bonanno boss Mickey Nose Mancuso who took offense at how the trial defense strategy depicted the consiglieri position, as Gang Land News reported.

What's it all mean for Joe Valet? The fck if I know.... But Gang Land noted last week that Sabella is "entitled to lots of second thoughts about the decision he made..."





Sabella was involved in a large-scale illegal dumping racket, he assaulted both a valet-parking business partner and a mob associate, and he participated in the long-term extortion of…

New York wiseguy Thomas Gambino, 47, Sicilian mobster Tomasso Inzerillo, 72, and three other men, all wearing bathing suits, converged on a dinghy in the bay of Palermo, Sicily last summer.




They met to discuss the divvying up of profits from the sale of some Caribbean property formerly owned by then-New York-based Gambino underboss Francesco (Franky Boy) Cali, who wouldn't be alive to experience another summer; he was shot and killed in March on Staten Island in an unrelated shooting (that nearly derailed the probe).

Of course that dinghy had been bugged ahead of time by Italian investigators working with the FBI.

Italian police have since said that the last summer meeting in Palermo of those five gangsters (the Daily Beast reported the dinghy details) was the first solid lead regarding the criminal connection between the American and Sicilian groups.

The discovery kicked the investigation into high gear, with central command for the Italian and US joint operation scrambling offic…

We've been doing this for a long time -- almost 10 years (and I hope to figure out what "this" is some day soon).


We occasionally flub it, too, and we always ask people to let us know when we do. So it's truly in the spirit of cooperation that we put this brief item together.

Because we expect to see many, many more stories about the Inzerillos and Frank Cali, etc., we thought we'd offer the following to those who might be interested.

Q.) What do you call the following?

"The ties between the Inzerillo and Gambino families run deep. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, reported crime boss for the Gambino organization, was born in Sicily and married into the Inzerillo family.Cali fled Italy after the early 1980s Mafia war with the rival Corleone clan, The New York Post reports. After alleged mob boss Salvatore "Toto" Riina died in prison in 2017 the Inzerillo family has reportedly attempted to make a comeback in the region." -- Philly Voice sto…