Cosa Nostra News

"(Phil Rusty) Rastelli was someone you didn’t cross. The mob was not the romanticized, glorified guys in the movies. They are gangsters, thugs, murderers. There is no poetry about them." --Joe Pistone Philip (Rusty) Rastelli had been Bonanno underboss to Natale (Joe Diamond) Evola; he rose to the top when a group of capos elected him after Evola died in late August 1973. Philip (Rusty) Rastelli  Rastelli, who listed his occupation as a radio dispatcher for a taxi company, spent half his life in prison. During his 18-year reign as boss (from 1973 to 1991) he was a free man for only about three years. 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, Rastelli was a fitness

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. Not Before and After: Frank Coppa, left, Joe Massino when still Bonannos. 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

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 mak

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. Felix Sater was a longtime Trump associate. 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 t

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 F rancesco (Franky Boy) Cali in his Todt Hill driveway in front of his family. Anthony Comello charged with murder. 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 relation

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. Joe Sabella was promoted to capo during the time of the alleged crimes. 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 vale

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. Frank Cali, left. 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 was bugged 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 report ed 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 sc

We've been doing this for a long time -- almost 10 years (and I hope to figure out what "this" is some day soon). Rosario Gambino arrested last week in Palermo, Sicily. 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 report

The son of late Genovese boss Vincent (Chin) Gigante was sentenced to two years in prison yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.  Chin's son was arrested in January 2018. He was living in Chin's $12 million Upper East Side townhouse. Vincent Esposito copped to one count of racketeering  on April 10 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn for conspiring to commit racketeering offenses with members and associates of the Genovese family. The agreed-upon sentencing range was 24 to 30 months in prison. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero handed down the 24-month sentence yesterday (Friday, July 19) at 9 a.m., imposing a term from the lower end of the range. Cosa Nostra News has learned that the Fed's handed the judge a letter that highlighted what the FBI seized from the Esposito townhouse when Esposito was nabbed in January 2018: they found brass knuckles, a gun, a knife, and lotsa cash. (More on those "weapons,&q

FINAL Sicilian and American wiseguys were busted Wednesday as part of coordinated takedown efforts by Italian police and the FBI, which served 19 arrest warrants in Palermo and in the United States, specifically in Staten Island and Philadelphia. The operation, dubbed "New Connection," was an attempt to disrupt efforts by a Sicilian Mafia faction (specifically, Inzerillo family members in Sicily and their New York allies in the Gambino crime family) to take over the leadership of organized crime in Italy. The Inzerillo and Gambino crime families, which have historical ties, were in the process of rebuilding their powerbase in Sicily. Members of slain Gambino crime boss Frank Cali's family were arrested in the takedown Wednesday, as per officials in Anthony DeStefano's Newsday story . Also arrested were Thomas Gambino, 47, of Staten Island; Salvatore Gambino, the mayor of a village outside Palermo; and Tommaso and Francesco Inzerillo, relatives of Salvator