Cosa Nostra News

"All the police cars had to do was patrol the roads. They had to come out sooner or later. You see a guy in a silk suit and a white fedora, you say, ‘He doesn't belong in the woods!’"  --  Trooper Vincent R. Vasisko, New York State Police, 1957 The luxury cars were a tipoff...  “A meeting of George Rafts." At the hilltop estate at noon on a humid, cloudy November day, dozens of men wearing lush camel hair coats over silk suits and white-on-white shirts stood in gleaming shoes around a barbecue where huge cuts of meat roasted on a roaring flame, and they renewed old acquaintances.  The seemingly convivial atmosphere prevented them from noticing the car with the two police officers and two U.S. Treasury agents as it rolled up the dirt road and then toward the open compound.... Apalachin is  finally coming to the big screen.... David Arquette is playing the role of State Police Bureau sergeant Edgar Croswell in the indie flick  Apalachin , ...

REVISED, EXPANDED This year marks the 60th anniversary of Apalachin,  which has always been of great interest to me.. .. Police in pursuit in Apalachin on the day. .... Apalachin, NY, the infamous location of the November 14, 1957, Mafia Summit , changed everything by finally bringing the full resources of the FBI onto the nation's crime families . That ill-fated meeting in upstate New York left two legacies in place: The enormous free reign with which the wiseguys operated for so long was coming to a close as the FBI launched a full-court investigative press against the mob that wouldn't let up -- ever.....(Law enforcement's mob investigations may have periodically waned, but the efforts were forever renewed....) And, never again could J. Edgar Hoover deny Cosa Nostra's existence without looking like a fool.

Vito Genovese may have single-handedly done more damage to the Mafia than any other mobster. Taking a cue from my good friend over at Friends of Ours , who did this on the appropriate date, I am posting, for posterity's sake, the New York Daily News's original 1957 article on Appalachin.  The Friends of Ours blogger , Philip Crawford Jr., has an excellent book available now: The Mafia and the Gays . It is an historical analysis of the Mafia's control of gay bars in major U.S. cities, including New York and Chicago. The unjust illegality of such establishments essentially green-lighted the Mafia to come in and cater to that demand.

Just curious if anyone would be interested in learning about what happened to the late mob boss of San Jose, California, who sued Life magazine in 1968, and likely regretted his actions for the next 10 years, until he died in 1978. Joseph Cerrito hit his stride as a Mafia chieftain by the 1960s. The obscure mob boss attended the Apalachin conference in 1957, although it is unclear if he'd officially been named boss of his borgata yet. Cerrito, largely a footnote in books on mob history, also played an important role within the mob by updating Cosa Nostra bosses in Sicily regarding Joseph Bonanno's failed attempt to overthrow three Commission bosses and assume control of New York, a scheme that ended in a rather humiliating way for the proud Sicilian Man of Honor, who was forced out out of town with his tail between his legs.

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the infamous trial resulting from the disastrous 1957 meeting in Apalachin, New York (humorously depicted at the start of Analyze This ). The resulting conspiracy trial,  United States v. Bufalino ultimately led to acquittals. Roadblocks stop mobsters fleeing from 1957's hastily called Apalachin summit. Prosecutors actually had won a jury's "guilty" verdict, but  an appellate court overturned it on an appeal .

About three weeks ago, we passed the 56th anniversary of the infamous meeting at Apalachin, when cops raided Joe Barbara's House. They didn't have the slightest inkling of what they were getting into -- and I refer here to the Mafia.... J. Edgar Hoover could no longer deny the existence of a national crime ring working in the U.S. He preferred chasing Communists and destroying people he didn't like. On Nov. 14, 1957, New York state police official Edgar D. Croswell noticed a suspicious number of expensive cars with out-of-state license plates converging in his small town of Apalachin.* He and his troopers began jotting down license plates. Croswell, owing to his knowledge of the mob (specifically, Carmine Galante who was in town that November day; Crosswell had arrested him previously and was well aware of who he was) knew something was up. (Croswell also had no illusions about Joseph (Joe the Barber) Barbara (a more appropriate nickname would've been J...