Cosa Nostra News

Frank "Punchy" Illiano, above, a Brooklyn capo with the Genovese crime family, died Monday, January 6, at age 86 of natural causes in New York. Cosa Nostra News learned this directly from a personal friend of the elderly gangster, who noted that Punchy was "very well-respected." We have since learned that Illiano had been ill for the past two years of his life, and had been suffering nerve damage ever since he had been shot by a sniper in 1974 during the second of the two Gallo wars.

Charlie Lucky was the inspiration for The Godfather? Small World News Service is running a review of a book about Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, "Lucky Luciano: Mafia Murderer and Secret Agent," by Tim Newark (though the title seems to have been changed to "Lucky Luciano: The Real and the Fake Gangster," which at least sounds less silly than the first title, though it is still pretty damn silly nevertheless). The book describes him as being "heralded ... as the model for legendary mafia boss Don Vito Corleone," from The Godfather, novel by Mario Puzo , and the film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola , screenplay by both men [as well as the screenplays for the two sequels]. "He was widely credited for running New York’s notorious underworld, and linked to multimillion dollar extortion rackets, revenge beatings and gangland murders," the review adds, quoting the book or a release about the book.

July 2018: Robert Donofrio is the current boss of the  Colombo family, we hear ... The Colombo’s are the youngest of the Five Families. Formerly known as the Profaci crime family, for its original boss, it only became the Colombo family in the 1960s when family member Joseph Colombo went to the Commission to spill the beans on plans made by Profaci's short-term sucessor in cahoots with Joseph Bonanno of the Bonanno crime family. Carmine Persico was named "The Snake" by the Gallo brothers. Boss Profaci was involved in the crime family's first war, against the upstart Gallo brothers who felt the upper-echelon bosses were taking more than their fair share from the soldiers.