Cosa Nostra News

In 1987, reputed Colombo boss Carmine Persico knew that, short of his lawyers one day cooking up a miracle, he would in all likelihood be spending the rest of his life in prison. He had been convicted in  two separate trials: the Mafia Commission trial and a separate racketeering trial involving the Colombo family's operations. (Persico died in 2019 at age 85 after serving 32 years of that 136-year prison sentence following his two convictions.) Allie Boy Persico was on the run for seven years. The cases were separate, but overlapped, the common denominator being FBI surveillance recordings of Colombo soldier Ralph Scopo’s conversations, which alerted the Feds to the initial evidence that would help them build the Commission Case. Scopo was the bagman in a large-scale ongoing racket involving shaking down concrete contractors at major construction projects. As the president of the Cement and Concrete Workers District Council of the Laborers' International Union of North Americ...

And another masterpiece graciously shared with us via the proprietor of  The Colombo Crime Family Blog ... “ I was busy even before and after I got (inducted into the Colombo family), sit-downs, everything, and nobody ever questioned. ‘Cos he’s a big deal now, he’s got his hands in everything. ”— John Cerbone, in mid-2014, referring to Amato's status in the Colombo family. Joey Amato (Source: Gang Land News). For the past decade now, Colombo family captain Joey Amato has been on thin ice in more ways than one. After fifteen years in the can, Amato, now 60, was released in 2009 and forced to rejoin a Mafia clan that had once marked him for death. Since then, he has delicately climbed the ranks of the Colombo family, becoming the captain of a crew and facilitating the inductions of his top men. Labeled by Jerry Capeci as the Colombo family's Staten Island boss, Amato has also been namedropped more than a few times by the feds, and it appears to be only a matter of tim...

Gregory Scarpa Senior, the longtime Colombo capo/FBI informant who stopped counting his murders at 50 (think about that), was done in not by a bullet, but by a little white pill. Larry Mazza He took too many aspirins.*  That caused stomach problems, which resulted in surgeries, then the blood transfusion from which he contracted the AIDS virus that wore him down to nothing and ended his life. So think about this: If Greg Scarpa had only taken Tylenol, then lots more people probably would've been robbed and murdered in New York City. "He was vicious and he corrupted people," Larry Mazza , Scarpa's protege, recently recalled. "He was cunning and wily -- he had all the street smarts." For Larry, life is less deadly today and much  better. He's written a memoir of mob life in New York,  The Life,  and was in the two-part A&E John Gotti documentary,  Godfather and Son . He scored a high-profile role in what will be the hottest Mafia m...