Cosa Nostra News

UPDATED/APRIL 8: See below... ( Roy Cohn had a different version of events about Trump Tower. Check back for more information...) Despite his polarizing nature, a new Netflix series, Trump: An American Dream , which is available now, reportedly provides a neutral look at Donald Trump, leveraging interviews with those who either love or hate him. Trump with New York City Mayor Ed Koch, and Roy Cohn Filmed and produced by Britain’s Channel 4, Trump: An American Dream focuses on Trump’s life from his 1980s rise to his more recent political aspirations. The series is comprised of four hour-long episodes. (I'm watching episode one, and I find the show quite compelling actually. The 1970-80s news clips alone are dredging up long forgotten memories. Trump has been a years-long research "project" of mine and this series is bringing many things into sharp focus.) It may not do the kind of deep dives into topics as is commonly done in digital journalism, but it...

REVISED A decade ago, an impetuous real estate mogul was compelled to answer a series of questions under oath, a result of his own legal maneuverings. He had filed a libel lawsuit against a writer for authoring a biography of the mogul. And the wealthy developer who's been part of Manhattan's landscape longer than I have been alive is of course today's President of the United States. The book he filed the lawsuit over was  TrumpNation . Trump lost the case in 2011 -- free speech and all makes winning frivolous libel suits rather cumbersome -- but the deposition remains -- a relic of a dead legal case. Contained within it is an acknowledgment that, in more than 30 instances, Tump lied  extensively and proficiently on a range of issues.

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...