Cosa Nostra News

Why did the Lanza family execute DeJohn? The American Mafia lost a few members in 1947, some well known, some not so well known. Among that year's deceased were Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, a New York-based labor racketeer who worked with Louis " Lepke " Buchalter (executed in 1944); Al Capone  and Benjamin " Bugsy " Siegel. (On the other side of the legal fence,  Fiorello La Guardia , the Mayor of New York who very publicly targeted New York's Mafia, died in 1947.) Nicholas DeJohn died that year. Ever hear of him? He was a mobster who came up in the Outfit then hauled ass for San Francisco , where he found a role in the local organized crime landscape. He died brutally in 1947; he was strangled to death, in fact. His body fermented in a trunk of a car for two days before it was discovered. The murder was never solved -- but a piece of evidence showed up in a certain pawn shop that puts an interesting twist on DeJohn's story....A hint -- G...

"Reds" Cohan, a bookmaker of a bygone era. I am proud and pleased to present this excerpt from Hillary Cohan's published memoir, titled " Growing Up Jewish in the Mob ." [This is a revised version of a story originally posted prior to the book's publication.] Hillary's father was Nathan "Reds" Cohan, a top mob bookie who operated in the Washington, D.C., area for much of Hillary's early life. Reds passed away on December 2, 1988, in Savannah, Georgia. Hillary does not "name names" in her book, admitting her father was connected to one of New York's five families as a top bookie. He was of the Jewish faith; many don't understand the extent of the contribution made by the "Jewish mafia" to the establishment of Cosa Nostra; before the Italians, Jews and other ethnic groups had together formed an outfit called "The Combination," which developed and implemented many of the racketeers that the Mafi...

The swath of marshland beside the Belt Parkway along Jamaica Bay's northern edge is a wasteland, a place I have driven through my whole life. I remember staring at those drab-colored reeds as a child, sitting in the backseat on the way to or from my grandparents' house for Sunday dinner. I refer here to the moldering woods stretching for miles along Jamaica Bay’s northern edges, near where Brooklyn dissolves into Queens. It is a place well out of sight for most New Yorkers, and therefore out of mind. A law enforcement officer walks throug h  an old mob dumping ground. Having the imagination that I have, that desolate expanse sparked all kinds of dark fantasies in my brain, most of which centered on monsters rising up out of the tall reeds while dead bodies decomposed beneath them. I was right about the bodies being there (not to mention a mere letter "b" away from actually hitting the nail on the head). Mobsters, for decades, left the victims of count...