Cosa Nostra News

Ten members of the Luchese crime family in the Bronx and Westchester County were arrested by the New York Attorney General's Office tonight (March 27) on charges stemming from a gambling-loan sharking operation that had nearly 50 "clients." Clients dropped off cash at McKiernan’s Lawton Street Tavern in New Rochelle, N.Y. The investigation was dubbed "Operation The Vig Is Up." Loanshark victims were required to make weekly, high interest “vig” payments, either by directly paying individual defendants, or by dropping off cash payments at two businesses: McKiernan's Lawton Street Tavern or smoke shop The Glass Room. Both storefronts are located in New Rochelle, New York. Dominick Capelli, a "made member" of the Luchese family, allegedly ran the loan-sharking operation. Investigators used wiretaps, search warrants, undercover police officers, and hidden cameras to build up enough evidence and identify more than 47 distinct loan...

Sal Avellino ran the Luchese family's  interests in carting on Long Island. He ordered a shameful double killing. Organized labor is no longer the cash cow it once was for organized crime.  That was the apparent thrust of a recent  WSJ.com report that noted the mob's infiltration of unions in the U.S. started to steadily weaken in the 1980s when then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani took aggressive measures, putting away many of the mob's legendary bosses, creating opportunities for a whole new generation of wiseguys to move up. As history shows, many weren't up to the task. But considering law  enforcement's evolution in terms of investigating organized crime, it may not have mattered who was in charge. The WSJ article offered two reasons for the cause of the Mafia's decline on the union front: the 1986 Commission Case, during which defendants were charged with membership in the  Concrete Club, followed in 1990 by the...

And you thought getting up this morning for work was tough...just imagine if your alarm clock was beaten by a few hours by the pounding fists of cops and FBI agents ready to pounce on you and drag you out of your life and into jail? In a pre-dawn sweep this morning, more than 100 mobsters and associates were rounded up -- crusty eyed, probably wearing their PJs and itching for a caffeine fix, though the adrenaline rush from all the flashing badges and guns may have sufficed. All they got were a pair of bracelets and a shove into a backseat. (Boy, those mob lawyers must have been pirouetting through their plush offices in utter glee.) Charged with such crimes as murder, racketeering and extortion, based on 16 unrelated indictments handed up in federal courts in four jurisdictions, the targets included small-time bookmakers, associates and six "reputed" senior mob figures from three crime families, including the entire leadership of the Colombo crime family. But also ta...