Cosa Nostra News

Making Toto Catalano say the rosary probably wasn't a good idea... On May 21, 1999, a young woman made a frantic call to a police dispatcher saying that her father, Giovanni Ligammari, 60, and brother, Pietro, 37, had hanged themselves and were dead. Ligammari, second from right, leaves Capri Motel with Joseph (Big Joey) Massino, far right; Vito Rizzuto, second from left; and Sicilian Bonanno capo Gerlando (George from Canada) Sciascia. The father and son were found hanging face to face via separate nooses (made from nylon packing cord) from the basement rafters of the older man's two-family home in an affluent Bergen County suburb. Giovanni Ligammari, a New Jersey contractor as well as a Sicilian member of the Bonanno family (his son also became a Bonanno soldier), was captured on May 6,1981, the day after the murders of three Bonanno capos, in photographs by the FBI, which had set up surveillance on the Capri Motel at 555 Hutchinson River Parkway in the Bronx.  The FBI had sn...

 "The mob was not the romanticized, glorified guys in the movies. They are gangsters, thugs, murderers. There is no poetry about them." -- Joe Pistone.... Joe Massino made Mafia history when he became the first Mafia boss of a New York family to flip, in 2004, when he also wore a wire; then, in 2011, he took the stand and testified against his own acting boss, Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano . ( You can listen to about an hour of his testimony and read along thanks to a recently posted video on YouTube, which you can view, below. ) Joe Massino Massino, above, also fingered Basciano in the killing of crime family associate Randy Pizzolo. When asked if there was anyone in the room who was a fellow member of his crime family, the turncoat boss pointed directly at Basciano. “That man in the gray suit sitting there,” he said. As acting boss, Massino said, "You are calling all the shots, you are making captains, you are breaking captains." As for w...

"(Phil Rusty) Rastelli was someone you didn’t cross. The mob was not the romanticized, glorified guys in the movies. They are gangsters, thugs, murderers. There is no poetry about them." --Joe Pistone Philip (Rusty) Rastelli had been Bonanno underboss to Natale (Joe Diamond) Evola; he rose to the top when a group of capos elected him after Evola died in late August 1973. Philip (Rusty) Rastelli  Rastelli, who listed his occupation as a radio dispatcher for a taxi company, spent half his life in prison. During his 18-year reign as boss (from 1973 to 1991) he was a free man for only about three years. Then, thanks to two lengthy prison sentences—10 years for antitrust violations, and 12 years for directing a huge labor racketeering conspiracy—after 1976, he mostly ran the Bonanno family’s operations from behind bars. He was an unpopular boss, and he presided over the disintegration of the family. Described once as a tall, good-looking man, Rastelli was a fitness ...

Felix Sater, a former associate of President Donald Trump, was instrumental in helping the Feds bring down capo Frank Coppa, the first member of the Bonanno crime family to flip and testify, ever, Cosa Nostra News has learned. Felix Sater was a longtime Trump associate. This was among the revelations that came to light in a 2009 sentencing transcript that was among a trove of documents unsealed on Monday for The Intercept on the order of U.S. District Judge Leo Glasser. Coppa's decision to flip in 2002 after he was named in his third racketeering indictment in two years is historically regarded as a seminal moment in the Federal government's ongoing war against the Bonanno family and the New York Mafia. Coppa's turnaround alone led to the arrests of dozens of wiseguys and induced many others in the Bonanno family to follow him, which helped the Feds to eventually take down Joseph Massino, then the Bonanno family's powerful boss, who would also flip and t...

I answered the phone this morning to:  "You didn't fucking tell me you were gonna write about Bobby!" No clue what he was talking about. "Bobby at the Post never lived in Knickerbocker Village. Sally killed him because he found out he was a cop." Ahhh.... okay, I knew.... I said, "I heard Vitale was a cop too." Sal Vitale ordered Perrino's murder. The skeletal remains weren't found until Vitale himself flipped. "Exactly. One cop killed the other. In the Mob. Take that shit down. I'm gonna tell you what really happened because you obviously don't know what the fuck happened." He started with:  "Baldo was scared shitless that night. You know how fucking hard it is to dig a hole in February?" Read this while you can. (This was solidly sourced, too, five years ago .... but I wouldn't have it any other way. And remember the truth is always stranger....) A Mafia associate/New York Post sup...