Cosa Nostra News

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has made its ruling, and the 100-year sentence will stand. Carmine Persico, 83, alleged boss of the Colombo crime family, will continue serving the long and unusually punishing prison sentence doled out to him in the historic Mafia Commission case . The Second Circuit Court of Appeals screwed Carmine Persico, 83. The court ignored all the evidence based on former Bonanno boss Joseph Massino's 302s, which supported the allegation that Carmine Galante was not slain as per the orders of the Mafia Commission (the murder was the Commission Case's centerpiece). The court also ignored all the evidence that showed the large, previously unknown extent of former Colombo captain/high-ranking snitch Gregory Scarpa's influence over the case. We have spoken to a few attorneys off the record, and can report here that it is a fact that the government hates the Mafia so much that they don't bother hiding their disdain for mobster...

COSA NOSTRA NEWS EXCLUSIVE First we need to give a shoutout to Jim "Jay" Cooley , who emailed us a copy of a new talk show he'd done with longtime gangland attorney Mathew Mari. ( Jim Cooley hosts The Last Roundup sports show  and recently debuted The Life,  an organized crime-focused show . Attorney  Mat Mari has a website and his own talk show , which can be viewed  here . ) Carmine Persico is now 83. Carmine Persico is 83 years old and has served more than 32 years of a 136-year prison sentence following his conviction in the "Mafia Commission Case." His attorneys are seeking to get him resentenced under the grounds that the FBI may have played some covert hanky-panky during the investigation prior to the high-profile trial of the so-called leadership of New York's Five Families.

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...

Jerry Capeci recently confirmed our story about Christopher "Christy Tick" Furnari getting out of prison last month--and even the storied mob scribe himself is puzzled over this one...(Yes, it does kill me to have to still write this kind of story.) Christy Tick Furnari  As we noted in a recent post: Christopher "Christie Tick" Furnari, Sr. walked out of prison last month without a peep. He'd been serving a 100-year stretch he'd been sentenced to back in 1986 as a defendant in the storied Commission Case. As Mr. Capeci wrote in his last column : "...The end result of the historic Commission case in 1987 was that seven old-school wiseguys were hammered with unprecedented 100 year prison terms, sentences intended to send a message to gangsters everywhere. Under their labor racketeering convictions, none of them were ever supposed to see the light of day outside of a federal prison. "But last month, with no official notice or pron...

Christopher "Christie Tick" Furnari, Sr. walked out of prison last month without a peep. He'd been serving a 100-year stretch he'd been sentenced to back in 1986 as a defendant in the storied  Commission Case. Christy Tick The legendary Luchese consiglieri was responsible for bringing two of the most violent mobsters in New York into the family,  Vittorio "Vic" Amuso and Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso , who assumed control after those convicted in the Commission Case were sent away for a century, Christy Tick among them. He's 90 and has been filing motions and appeals. According to one of the more recent documents we could find, Furnari had alleged that the "Parole Commission had based its denial of parole on an improper calculation of his offense severity rating and has failed to consider mitigating factors in his favor." Strange, we thought the sentence was 100 years without parole.... Who'd begrudge a 90-yea...

It is well known that Greg Scarpa Senior had been a turncoat since 1960 and that he provided law enforcement with all the dope he could muster on his enemies, rivals and even friends -- basically anyone but himself. Greg Scarpa did deep and lasting damage to most of the Five Families, as well as other crime families. We've written here, more than once, about his missions for the FBI, one of which involved him sallying south to help extinguish the Mississippi Burning problem . He went on other missions, too. Such complex duplicity requires a sharp mind and probably an intelligence level well above average.

Sal Avellino ran the Luchese family's  interests in carting on Long Island. He ordered a shameful double killing. Organized labor is no longer the cash cow it once was for organized crime.  That was the apparent thrust of a recent  WSJ.com report that noted the mob's infiltration of unions in the U.S. started to steadily weaken in the 1980s when then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani took aggressive measures, putting away many of the mob's legendary bosses, creating opportunities for a whole new generation of wiseguys to move up. As history shows, many weren't up to the task. But considering law  enforcement's evolution in terms of investigating organized crime, it may not have mattered who was in charge. The WSJ article offered two reasons for the cause of the Mafia's decline on the union front: the 1986 Commission Case, during which defendants were charged with membership in the  Concrete Club, followed in 1990 by the...

Gerry Lang was serving a 65-year sentence even before the Commission Case began. Gennaro Langella, a former high-ranking member of the Colombo family, died on Sunday at the US Medical Center for Prisons in Missouri. He was 74 and still serving the 100 years he was sentenced to at the conclusion of the historical Commission Case of 1986. In death, he joins legendary mob bosses Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo of the Lucheses and " Fat Tony" Salerno of the Genovese clan, also given draconian prison sentences. (Though Fat Tony was only a front man for Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, he himself towered in stature and was a Cosa Nostra legend as much as Gigante.) Langella was convicted of a grab bag of mob-related crimes, but foremost among them was that he'd been in the administration of a Mafia crime family: underboss of New York’s Colombo borgata, one of the most strife-ridden families in all of the Mafia. Many Colombo members are related by b...