Cosa Nostra News

'' Gene Gotti's dead." -- Bobby Manna (as per FBI transcripts) '' We're gonna be paying for this, you know, for the rest of our lives." -- J ames (Jimmy Nap) Napoli  Louis (Bobby) Manna— the Genovese family's former number three man who in the 1980s was poised to shoot it out with the Gotti regime of the Gambino family to protect Genovese family interests in the Garden State—was released from prison last month and is now under the care of court-approved custodians, as per reports. Manna and his crew were rounded up in June 1988. Manna was recorded plotting to kill both John Gotti and his older brother Gene, among others. Manna, 95, served more than 36 years of an 80-year Federal racketeering sentence. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Kirsch granted the petition for “compassionate release” –which detailed Manna’s deteriorating health – on April 16. Manna reportedly is bed-ridden and suffers from chronic kidney disease, lung cancer, bacterial infecti...

"He's asking Frankie, what do we do? Do we just let Sammy run wild and take everything? There's other people here, other captains here...  Nobody could eat. Sammy, in John's mind, is out of control and he's having people killed, and John feels like a clown, like he has been led around by the master of ceremonies..." —Mikie Scars on the Ravenite Transcripts  We finally had a chance to mosey on over to Patreon to check out the No Excuses podcast featuring Michael (Mikie Scars) DiLeonardo and RJ Rogers, who have been focusing on the transcripts of the FBI recordings of Gambino boss John Gotti holding forth in an apartment above the Ravenite social club. The Ravenite social club was a valuable piece of New York history that should've been preserved. (You don't have to join Patreon, and fork over $9.99 a month, to watch part one of the Gotti Tapes , which was posted on YouTube recently. To access the podcast for free, skip on down to the end of this....) In...

Michael DiLeonardo, aka Mikie Scars, rose to capo in the Gambino family during the reign of John Gotti. He was close to the Gottis, and if John Gotti had not crashed and burned in the early 1990s courtesy of the FBI, Mikie Scars' rise likely would have continued, and daily life for him might be very different today.  Paulie Zac, DiLeonardo's mob mentor. But as fate had it, John Gotti was arrested, tried, convicted, and in 1992 was sent to a Federal prison for life. He was around 10 years into his sentence when he died on June 10, 2002 , at the Federal prison hospital at Springfield, Mo. He was 61. (The cause was cancer.) As  we detailed in 2015 , the Feds filmed Mikie Scars ("I was born on record") attending the Dapper Don's wake. Days later, Michael and others were arrested based on Craig DePalma's sealed Grand Jury testimony. While sitting in jail, DiLeonardo learned that Joseph (Jo Jo) Corozzo, consiglieri, speaking for Peter Gotti and Nicholas (Little Ni...

The year 1987 was slightly more than a week old when FBI agents nabbed Nicodemo (Little Nicky) Scarfo as he emerged from a plane at the Atlantic City airport.  None of Chin's plots touched Gambino boss John Gotti. The violent, mercurial Philadelphia boss—he was John Gotti's more murderous precursor—and his girlfriend were returning from Fort Lauderdale, where they had spent the New Year’s holiday. Scarfo, sporting a deep winter tan and perfectly coiffed hair and dressed to the nines in an impeccable suit, looked like a million bucks, almost like an old-school Hollywood star showing up at the Oscars. He smiled and nodded as the agents handcuffed him and walked him to the vehicle that would drive him to his well-deserved fate. The Feds had indicted Scarfo and three others earlier that day on charges of conspiracy to commit extortion in the shakedown of Penn’s Landing, an area along the Delaware River that had been targeted for redevelopment. Penn's Landing was named after th...

The final installment touches on how James (Jimmy Brown) Failla (pronounced FYE-yal-lah) provided the first inkling that John Gotti and the rest of the Gambino family administration were seriously screwed after the Gambino capo told them how, when he went before a grand jury, he was asked if he had ever visited an apartment above the Ravenite. From left: Joe Butch, John Gotti, Jimmy Brown (in June 1984). Jimmy Brown, who died in 1999, was a senior statesman in the Gambino crime family , a powerful capo who for more than 30 years helmed the Association of Trade Waste Removers of Greater New York, the largest private garbage-haulers' trade group in New York City. Law enforcement first noticed the Brooklyn born Failla when he became driver and bodyguard for Carlo Gambino after Gambino took over the crime family following his orchestration of the 1957 murder of his predecessor, Albert Anastasia. Gambino put Failla in charge of the Gambino family's garbage-industry interests, and F...

Frank (Frankie Loc ) Locascio, the former Gambino consigliere serving life in prison for a 1992 murder racketeering conviction, died on October 1, 2021, at age 89, as per the BOP inmate locator website. Frank (Frankie Loc ) Locascio, left, and John Gotti.   Locascio, for more than three decades, had been serving a life sentence following his 1992 conviction for the slaying of Gambino wiseguy Louis DiBono, who was shot three times in the head in October 1990 in an underground parking garage at the World Trade Center.  DiBono earned Gotti’s wrath by ignoring his orders to come in. Some wiseguys were appalled that Gotti put a hit on DiBono for missing meetings, saying that the former guy, Paul Castellano, never would've whacked someone for simply missed some meetings. The DiBono murder was one of five pinned on the Dapper Don by the jury. Locascio, who was on trial alongside Gotti, was found guilty of the DiBono murder and conspiracy to murder Gaetano Vastola, a DeCavalcante...