Search This Blog

By Ed Scarpo

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular This Week

Prelude To The Galante Murders

By Ed Scarpo
Image
The following, which is sketchy in terms of detail (it is based on a quick encounter between wiseguys and goodguys in a parking lot at night)  was cut from our series on Carmine Galante, which we're still finishing up. (After we publish the last remaining installment, we plan to republish the entire story as one single piece.) The Eternal Dance A t 9:30 in the evening of Tuesday, June 5, 1979, some five weeks before the murder of Carmine Galante, two undercover police officers in an unmarked Plymouth Valiant drove into the parking lot of the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream on Long Island. Green Acres Mall parking lot circa 1980 The purpose of the visit was to surveil one of Green Acres' restaurants, which was suspected of being a source of significant drug-dealing activity-- and happened to be run by a known Bonanno wiseguy Gerlando (George from Canada) Sciascia, a made member of the Bonanno crime family and also a top member of the Sicilian faction, ran the California Pizza
Read more

Hoodwinked: Restaurateur on Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares Was a Mobster

By Ed Scarpo
Image
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
Read more

Bath Avenue Crew Rose High, Fell Hard

By Ed Scarpo
Image
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
Read more

The End: Carmine Galante, Godfather Of Heroin Trafficking, Conclusion

By Ed Scarpo
Image
At about 12:45 p.m. on the stifling hot and humid afternoon of Thursday, July 12, 1979, Carmine Galante, 69, was driven by his nephew James to the Joe and Mary Italian-American Restaurant in Brooklyn’s Bushwick section. That part of Brooklyn was a fading Bonanno stronghold . Galante often visited the restaurant, which was owned by his cousin, Giuseppe Turano, 48. Turano had tickets for a Saturday flight to Italy to meet his family on vacation. Galante went to the restaurant that day to have a “bon voyage” luncheon with him. The two men liked to eat in the open air , so a table had been set up on the restaurant’s back patio amid grape vines and tomato plants, which lent a modest pastoral setting to that small patch of Brooklyn. The nondescript restaurant, which consisted of two interior dining rooms , had seen better days. Dingy yellow curtains hung from the windows, lemon-colored oilcloths were draped over the tables. A Frank Sinatra album cover was propped on the front counter. Ins
Read more

Skeletal Remains Found Along Receding Lake Near Las Vegas Apparently Belong To Victim of A Gangland Hit

By Ed Scarpo
Image
Thanks to an ongoing "megadrought" in that part of the USA, the skeleton found a week ago in a metal storage container along the receding shoreline of Lake Mead— the reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the Southwestern United States about 40 miles east of Las Vegas—is the remains of a victim of what appears to have been a mob hit, according to Las Vegas police. The remains belong to the victim of a gunshot wound several decades back. Source: Daily Mail The man (though some reports claim the sex has not been identified yet) died from a gunshot wound sometime in the mid-1970s or early 80s. The timeframe for the murder apparently is based on the sneakers found on the skeleton, which were sold and manufactured by Kmart in the mid to late '70s. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police released a statement confirming previous comments that the death of the man in the barrel is being investigated as a homicide "We're going to expand our time frame of the mu
Read more

Feds Bust Genovese Wiseguys For Scheming, Including In Florida

By Ed Scarpo
Image
Four members and two associates of the Genovese crime family, including a Boca Raton, Florida-based capo, were recently named in one of the vaguest indictments we've ever laid eyes upon. Reputed Genovese capo Ralph Balsamo was among the indicted.  The Superseding Indictment charges reputed capos Nicholas Calisi (who is in Boca Raton) and Ralph Balsamo, soldiers Michael Messina and John Campanella, and associates Michael Poli and Thomas Poli with racketeering conspiracy involving illegal gambling and extortion. The crimes were allegedly committed between 2011 and 2022. Everyone faces up to 20 years in prison. Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Letitia James, New York State Attorney General, and Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn District Attorney, announced the unsealing of the Superseding Indictment containing the charges. See the indictment here (PDF). MESSINA was arrested and presented before U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang on April 12, 2022
Read more