Cosa Nostra News

"There are two more members that are talking,"   from Joe Valachi's autobiography, as quoted by journalist Jack Anderson in an  article published in 1963 . Fat Andy and Tony Lee. Before Anthony Ruggiano (Senior, aka Fat Andy) could get made in 1953, his name had to go around to the other New York families to solicit any possible objections. There were objections--two, actually--one of which required then-boss Albert Anastasia to win a sitdown with the Genovese family (or the then-Luciano family). As noted, Fat Andy and partner Tony Lee met Carmine (Charley Wagons) Fatico after they robbed his card game, but Fatico decided to hire them rather than kill them. For this, the previous story, and the rest in this series, we are using information provided to us by Anthony Ruggiano Jr.  In the next installment Anthony will address your comments... Profaci family member John Sonny Franzese put in a claim over Fat Andy, who, Franzese argued, belonged to him. A...

Anthony Ruggiano Jr. "was on the verge of becoming a soldier" in the Gambino family , said Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian McCormick. Who’s the toughest guy you know? Well, we know a few tough guys... Relax. This isn’t going where you think... A hungover Fat Andy in 1980, when he and Tony Lee ran a gold store. Anthony here is about to turn 27. He was two weeks out of jail . Anthony Ruggiano was a Gambino family associate for many years. Too many, he'd tell you. He was supposed to get his button—then he was supposed to get it again, and then again. Was it Life that kept getting in the way? Fate? We wonder how best to describe it. Of course we could just say, the law certainly kept getting in the way. It kept arresting him. The State, the Feds, Kings and Queens County, they all nabbed him for things like policy and bookmaking (and murder). Just one of the daily hazards faced by guys who get out of bed in the morning, put their shoes on, and go out to rob pe...

Following is an episode of a1950s radio news program called "The Nation's Nightmare," which spotlights the Mafia's then-growing infiltration of the New York and New Jersey waterfronts. Narrated by veteran correspondent Bill Downs, one of the so-called (Edward R.) Morrow's Boys , he sounds the alarm about "the greatest concentration of Mafia power in the world." And he does it using that  tinny, clipped 1950s tone called Transatlantic speech , a specific speaking style taught to broadcasters in the mass media's early days in an attempt to offset America's thousands of rich regional dialects. Albert Anastasia, "Socks" Lanza, and just about every mobster of notoriety in the 1950s is mentioned in the broadcast, which also describes everything from the dockworker "shakeup" in the mornings to how various mobsters came to dominate certain sections of the ports, as well as related unions. This particular episod...

In the classic film On the Waterfront (which I haven't seen and don't intend to, unless someone tells me otherwise), the laborers who worked on New York's docks "were reluctant, even frightened, to talk to the authorities, whether a priest or a detective, because the mob controlled the waterfront," the New York Times noted recently. Longshoremen in 1940s New York REVISED : Most longshoremen were indeed conflicted during much of the 20th century about the notion of revealing what they knew regarding members of a certain secret criminal society. In Brooklyn, that meant informing on a man who had demonstrated he'd go all the way -- meaning, murder you, your wife and your entire family -- if he had even an inkling you were informing on him (or were planning to or were even thinking about the possibility). And considering the wide-scale corruption of police, union officials, politicians, basically all civilization's "managers," if you will, ...

Carlo Gambino's takeover of the crime family rechristened in his name was contested primarily by Aniello Dellacroce and Armand Rava, staunch Anastasia supporters. They had potential allies in men like Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio, the dead boss’s brother, a powerful mobster running Brooklyn’s docks, and Vincent James Squillante, a waste management kingpin, drug trafficker and experienced gunsel. Carlo, when he rose to power at the top of what was once called the Mangano crime family. If an attempt were made on Carlo’s life, the order would've originated from, and perhaps also carried out, by those very men. Yet no attempt was ever made. Gambino ascended to the top of the crime family not without firing a shot, but by firing far fewer shots than "Mafia logic" would seem to precipitate. Carlo Gambino was one of the most effective Mafia bosses in the American Cosa Nostra. The FBI routinely referred to Gambino in various documents as the ...

Aniello "Neil" Dellacroce was born on March 15, 1914, in New York City and died on Dec. 2, 1985, in New York City. He took to "the life" with vigor. First arrested at 16, Dellacroce swiftly went about establishing a solid criminal portfolio for himself, making it as diverse as he could. He was charged with a range of crimes and was in and out of prison most of his life. He'd served one-two year bids for assault, armed robbery, drug dealing. But Dellacroce, a work in progress, eventually specialized in murder. And for that, the Feds never really touched the longtime Gambino crime family underboss. Neil Dellacroce Serving as Carlo Gambino's underboss, then Paul Castellano's, Dellacroce lived a life of what can only be chronicled as unimaginable violence. As protégé to the " Lord High Executioner" himself, Albert Anastasia, Dellacroce was a Murder Inc. button man. He learned how to administer death by some of the best practitione...

"Dellacroce was one of the scariest individuals I've ever met in my life. Dellacroce's eyes were, like, he didn't have any eyes. Did you ever see Children of the Damned ? His eyes were so blue that they weren't even there. It was like looking right through him." The late New York mob-buster Joseph Coffey "Of all the gangsters that I've met personally, and I've met dozens of them in all of my years, there were only two who, when I looked them straight in the eye, I decided I wouldn't want them to be really personally mad at me. Aniello Dellacroce was one and Carmine Galante was the other. They had bad eyes, I mean, they had the eyes of killers. You looked at Dellacroce's eyes and you could see how frightening they were, the frigid glare of a killer." Ralph Salerno , NYPD officer, leading Mafia authority; author of The Crime Confederation "His eyes had no color... as if his soul (were) transparent," Newspaper reporter wri...

"I’m going to run all those fascist mobsters, all those American gangsters out of Cuba." Meyer Lansky supposedly was the first to realize the possibilities Cuba afforded the mob. Santo Trafficante Junior  was close behind him. The offshore tropical island was the perfect platform for smuggling, among other things. Cuba also made an excellent vacation destination, where a gambling industry to match Las Vegas could thrive -- minus the attention U.S. operators tended to attract from certain federal agencies, like the FBI. Unlike in Vegas, the mob could invest its gambling proceeds into entities like corporations and financial institutions, thus laundering it and profiteering from what wouldn't be classified as illicit earnings.

Frankie Yale Yes, the John Gotti movie is the big news of the day , which is why I bring you the following.... (but seriously I hope to have some interesting news later today / tonight about the film. What I'd previously heard included some scenes will be shot in New York (Queens and Manhattan) and that the film is focused on Gotti Senior -- it's called The Life and Death of John Gotti, note. Some newspapers have incorrectly reported that filming has begun. It hasn't. While John Travolta and real-life wife Kelly Preston were slated to play Gotti Senior and his real-life wife, Victoria, there's no word regarding rest of cast.) The following arrives here courtesy of Tony Sokol, who wrote this story originally as part of a package of Boardwalk Empire-related stories for Den of Geek ... Tony also writes for The Chiseler , KpopStarz.com , and hypnocloud.com . His stories also can be seen on Altvariety, Coed.com , Daily Offbeat, Dark Media Press, Wicked Mystic and ...

Click on image to see on Amazon Yes, Montagna part two and a lot of other things in the works -- just saw this, thought it might interest some of you. Good historical Mafia fiction is hard to find.... "War makes patriots of us all — even Mafia capos. Albert Anastasia, a big deal in Murder Inc., enlisted in the Army. Joseph (Socks) Lanza, who controlled the rackets at the Fulton Fish Market, let naval officers work undercover on his fleet. And Long Island mobsters were said to have helped capture saboteurs who came ashore from a German submarine. These and other real-life gangsters appear in THE LETTER WRITER (Knopf, $26.95), Dan Fesperman’s dynamic novel set in New York during World War II." The New York Times today includes a story about this fictional book that takes place during WW2 and includes real Mafia figures among its characters. Among them is Meyer Lansky, "who arranged for Mafia dons to coordinate their war efforts with Frank Hogan, the New York...

Frank Costello's mausoleum, with the front gate blown apart. "Lilo" heralding his return to the streets.... This is a revise of an old story that I've been sitting on entirely too long.... Italy has exported two global entities -- the Mafia and the Catholic Church. Ironic. Made men generally are Roman-Catholics. Still, not much has been generally written about Mafiosi making (or not making) peace with the New Testament God before shuffling off this mortal coil. At the same time, Sicilian or Italian mobsters are very dedicated to their faith. In fact, some of them study the bible.  "In Italy, there is not a single Mafioso who isn't religious," Padre Nino Fasullo, an anti-Mafia priest in Italy, once said. "For a phenomenon like the Mafia, which has no intellectual justification at all, religion may represent the only ideological apparatus to which it can refer . ... We're all in the church. Even the Mafia. Unfortunately. The church is e...

This first ran in late December of 2015... In North Jersey's Fort Lee sits a mansion for sale that was once owned by one of the most powerful and feared Cosa Nostra bosses in the American Mafia's history:  Albert Anastasia . Anastasia's home in Fort Lee includes a "strange tiled room." Described as a sprawling Mission-style estate, it's located at 75 Bluff Road and, according to a recent published report, it hasn't changed much since Anastasia had it built in 1947. The house was bigger than others in the area back then. In fact, the 25-room luxurious spread ruined the scenic view of Manhattan for at least one family, though they aren't known to have complained.

EXCLUSIVE INFORMATION: On this date in 1957, New York mob boss Albert Anastasia was shot to death in the Park Sheraton Hotel's barbershop. Born in Tropea, Calabria, Italy, on Feb. 26, 1902, "Don Umberto" was murdered in New York City after spending more than seven years as boss of one of the Five Families. And it wasn't the Gallo brothers or a crew affiliated with Raymond Patriarca or anyone else who killed one of the Mafia's most ruthless members, as has been speculated. According to Michael "Mikie Scars" DiLeonardo, Jerry Capeci was partially correct when he identified the shooters years ago in an exclusive story.

Abe "Kid Twist" Reles Abe "Kid Twist" Reles is doubtlessly remembered best for being the proverbial canary who couldn't fly (but did indeed sing). In November 1941 the mob may have gotten to Kid Twist while he was under police protection at a hotel in Coney Island, New York. We say "may have gotten" because no one knows for certain who orchestrated what may have been a hit. We repeat "may have been a hit" because there's also the chance that Reles did indeed fall to his doom (the more or less "official" opinion on the matter) while attempting to climb down a twisted roll of bed sheets to get out of the hotel, either to escape or play a practical joke of some sort on his alleged protectors.

We had to delete the pic because of Adsense violations... Initially, we included in our Cosa Nostra News logo the iconic 1979 photograph of Carmine Galante taken by the enterprising news photographer positioned atop a roof that overlooked the outside patio of Joe and Mary's Italian American Restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn. (The restaurant went out of business following the murder on a dreadfully hot New York summer day.) The well-known image. But one image we happened across today gave us lengthy pause. We immediately knew we'd never seen the black-and-white photo before. Yet a familiarity was indeed there, likely due to the barber chair beside which the lifeless, blood-spattered gangster had collapsed after his infamous lunge at the mirror. A fatally shot mob boss, his dying brain's synapses misfiring, had mistakenly perceived his assassins to be standing in front of him. He'd been deceived by a reflection. We knew we were looking at a photograph we'...

Anthony Scotto, left, lawyer James LaRossa. The son of TV news anchor ­Rosanna Scotto made news last week when he was arrested on charges of swiping an expensive designer purse. What garnered our interest was a note at the end of the New York Post Page Six story : [Rosanna] Scotto, 58, is co-anchor of WNYW/Channel 5’s “Good Day New York” ... [and] is co-owner of her family’s restaurant, Fresco by Scotto, on East 52nd Street. She is also the daughter of Anthony Scotto, a former boss in the Gambino crime family.... Scotto, while never the boss of the crime family, was a powerful figure in his own right. His story heralds an earlier era of America's Cosa Nostra, when mobsters were able to discreetly rise high in big business. Scotto is considered to have been the most powerful labor racketeer in the entire country in his heyday in the 1960s-70s. He earned two additional distinctions nearly unbelievable today: He once lectured at Harvard and was considered by...