Cosa Nostra News

The following is the first in a series about the mob in New Haven, Connecticut… It started off originally as a story about William Grasso — but while researching him, we found ourselves spending more time on Grasso's mentor, and decided an even more worthwhile series would detail his exploits first... Ralph “Whitey” Tropiano. Connecticut had a peculiar relationship with organized crime. Located at about the midpoint between New York and Boston, it never had its own formally designated crime family. However, due to its proximity to New York and Boston, it always attracted attention and several crime families had interests in the state over the decades. The notoriously bad-tempered, yet supremely disciplined  William (The Wild Man) Grasso, who rose to become underboss of the Patriarca crime family under Raymond Junior, once reminisced with an associate about old times and noted how he’d gotten his big break. It arrived in the form of a 10-year prison sentence. “Best t...

Museum with empty frame awaits stolen painting's return. Note:   I checked with Philly mob expert George Anastasia for confirmation: there's no historical knowledge regarding a New England branch of a Philadelphia mafia family. Robert Gentile, "an aging, unremarkable wiseguy from Hartford [Connecticut]" grew from obscurity into infamy after the widowed wife of a dead longtime associate told the FBI that Gentile was linked to a half-billion-dollar heist that occurred some 25 years ago. He'd been an off-the-radar mobster with a criminal history stretching back to the 1950s when he was suddenly publicly identified as the FBI's chief suspect in one of the world's most perplexing crimes, the "officially unsolved" robbery of Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in March of 1990. Experts to this day puzzle over why the robbers took certain artworks and not other more-valuable pieces. The Hartford Courier ran a story breaking the news ...

Anthony “The Genius” Megale, who rose to be the underboss of the Gambino crime family, died at Stamford Hospital Tuesday night. Megale was dubbed “The Genius” on a federal wiretap by an upset and angry John Gotti, who apparently thought Megale was anything but a genius. Cause of death was not known as of yesterday, said an employee at the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Farmington. However, it was confirmed by two sources that Megale died of a heart attack at 9:30 p.m. on his 62nd birthday. He had only been released from a Pennsylvania federal prison in December having been indicted on 38 extortion charges in 2004.

In January 2010 a flurry of news reports wrote about a fire in the Middletown restaurant Enzo's. One of them read:  Faulty Fry-O-Later sparks restaurant fire : "A single-alarm fire started by a faulty Fry-O-Lator inflicted an estimated $250,000 worth of damages at Enzo's Restaurant & Lounge early Sunday morning. One person was injured in the blaze, fire officials said." The "one person" we now know was the co-owner of the restaurant; he was drunk and somehow got locked inside the place after the other owner started the fire at midnight, according to prosecutors. Earlier in the day, he'd sprayed cooking oil around the kitchen's deep fryer. A professional arsonist had advised the two men earlier that that was the best way to set Enzo's ablaze without getting caught. The arsonist was wrong, as it turns out.