Cosa Nostra News

Unless you've been lost on a deserted island the past week, you probably know that Netflix dropped a trailer for Fear City , the streaming platform's three-part docu-series on the New York Mafia that will premiere in a couple of days on July 22 ( SEE TRAILER BELOW ). Paul Castellano, Carmine (Junior) Persico, Phil (Rusty) Rastelli, Anthony (Tony Ducks) Corallo, Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno. Fear City (a riff on New York's "Fun City" nickname—though Fun City itself was meant to be sarcastic ) focuses on the Mafia Commission Case (aka, United States v. Anthony Salerno, et al, a 22-count Manhattan-based indictment that was handed down in February 1985), which was the Feds attempt to destroy the New York Mafia by taking out its "brain trust," in one fell swoop. (They were successful to an extent.)  Fear City is produced by RAW, the company behind Don’t F**K With Cats (an excellent documentary on Netlix right now: watch it immediately),  and Brillste...

We occasionally run quotes and little anecdotes in the sidebar, but decided to move these items here and call them "Wiseguy Wisdom," as part of an ongoing series.  We did away with the "Wiseguy Wisdom" part... And apropos of nothing: Why is it that encyclopedias are acceptable sources of information (yes, I know the Encyclopedia is now called "Google" but I am old enough to have a bookcase full of them) in nearly every field except when it comes to Mafia research? Fat Tony “They are really much better for you, Mr. Salerno. Better than all that chocolate," an FBI agent told Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno during the Commission Trial, offering the elderly gangster a nutritious granola bar. “Who the fuck cares. I’m gonna die in the fucking can anyway,” Salerno replied. He did, on July 27, 1992. Salerno had a hell of a run. During the 1980s , he ostensibly became boss of the Genovese family. He had reached the pinnacle of his power-...

Genovese boss Frank "Funzi" Tieri was powerful enough to run the Commission during tumultuous times. The historical problem with writing about the Mafia is the basic fact that, since it is a secret society, it doesn't keep records regarding quarterly revenues. The CEO doesn't writer a letter to the board, informing them of any upcoming plans to "grow" the crime family, etc. So where do facts used in a given work come from? What is the source of the source? Usually law enforcement documents, such as 302s; trial transcripts of testimony -- then there are congressional  committees; enterprising journalists/historians who find information no one else has either through contemporary sources or by digging through musty old files. Then there are memoirs, such as Joseph Bonanno's Man of Honor and the one written by Nicola Gentile.

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...