Cosa Nostra News

On this day in 1985, four armed robbers made off with $7.8 million in cash from a Wells Fargo Co. terminal on Manhattan's Lower West Side, netting a larger haul than the crooks aligned with the Luchese family who in December 1978 robbed a Lufthansa cargo building of around $6 million ($5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry). In both robberies, much of the loot was never recovered. Beansie in middle. On April 29, 1985, four ski-masked bandits ambushed four employees of a Wells Fargo facility as they opened the firm's vault to prepare for the day's business. They made their escape in a bright red armored truck that they left abandoned in a parking lot beneath the Brooklyn Bridge approach on the Lower East Side. Wells Fargo offered a $350,000 reward for their arrest and conviction. According to police, the four robbers used drills and sledgehammers.to crack their way through two cinder-block walls to access first the Merrill Lynch depot, then the Wells Fargo t...

In November 2013, a low-profile Luchese associate was murdered in the Bronx -- and many stories in the media blitz that followed referenced the Purple Gang, an obscure 1970s street gang with reputed Mafia links. Police probe Meldish shooting in the Bronx in 2013. The  Purple Gang roamed the South Bronx and Harlem where members were involved in the large‐scale distribution of heroin. They also whacked people -- and in many cases, dismembered their victims, of which there reportedly were 17 by December 1977. (Many of the 17 had been active informants for law enforcement when slain.) Purple Gang members essentially cut their teeth as glorified coffee boys in decade-long apprenticeships.  They stepped up their game when the competition was wiped out -- meaning, they filled a huge niche after law enforcement cleared away many local narcotics trafficking rings, including the one known as the French Connection. The Purple Gang  entered the contract killing busines...

NYPD Detective Sgt. Joseph Coffey died this past Sunday. He was 77 and had suffered from cancer. The high-profile mob buster was known for his frequent media appearances, as well as an organized crime taskforce he led that solved more than 80 gangland hits. Coffey also personally arrested John Gotti three times, earning the deep animosity of  the feared former Gambino boss, who in the early 1990s ordered the beating of the then-retired detective. Joe Coffey, the mob buster who John Gotti wanted sent to the hospital. “He was one of the greatest detectives in the NYPD ever,” Jerry Schmetterer, a former Daily News police bureau chief who coauthored The Coffey Files: One Cop's War Against the Mob , told The Daily News. “He was a larger-than-life guy who always wanted to be involved in the biggest cases."