Cosa Nostra News

I will toast Salvatore (Sammy Meatballs) Aparo this weekend, probably tonight. The 87-year-old Genovese mobster died last month, as per this week's Gang Land News. Sammy Meatballs Sammy Meatballs, for many years, provided me with an important talisman of sorts, a representation of the physical embodiment of what the Mafia is, a relic I never tire of looking at. I'm referring, of course, to his face.... The ghastly countenance, I believe, captures the moral absurdity of Mafia life -- the contradictions, the subterfuge, the muscled toughness, and gift of gab, the subtle absurd menace..... I glimpse it all in that enigmatic visage, its heavily lidded eyeballs swallowed by liverish sacks, the full, fleshy Boris Karloffian, thickly lined face. But it's that smile, that hideously genuine smile that faintly illuminates the eyes, as if the cop with the camera had shouted "Say cheese!!" Aparo was of the age and disposition to mentor young wiseguys. Unfort...

One evening in November 1994, mob associate Michael (Cookie) Durso  stopped by the San Giuseppe Social Club in Brooklyn's Williamsburg -- and quite literally all hell broke loose. A ticking time bomb also was set in motion that night , and while the detonation wasn't as deadly, the reverberations were extensive enough to knock down more than 70 Genovese wiseguys, and for the first time, substantially wound the crime family's boss. The San Guiseppe, which no longer stands, previously may have been Sonny Black's Motion Lounge. ( Source ) The San Giuseppe, located on Graham Ave., was frequented by Genovese crime family members, associates and knock-around guys. ( The San Giuseppe seems to have been located where the Motion Lounge once stood. The Motion Lounge was formerly owned by Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano, a Bonanno crime family capo killed decades ago over the Donnie Brasco case .)

Mob associate Michael (Cookie) Durso flipped against the Genovese crime family and wore a wire hidden within a $3,000 Rolex wristwatch for three years -- all the while recording thousands of hours of "privileged" conversations among high-ranking members of the Genovese crime family. Farby Serpico, former Genovese  acting boss In the end he rode off into the sunset of the Witness Protection Program with wife Vanessa. Financially, the couple was not hurting, either; they were able to bring millions of dollars with them, as  Gangland News  reported  on February 21, 2002. Durso had been meeting with prosecutors to discuss flipping -- due to his longstanding beef over the murder of his cousin, a Genovese crime family loanshark. Durso was to meet with Mark Feldman, the head of the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Organized Crime unit, and Paul Weinstein, a chief prosecutor, for a third time on June 17, 1998. He couldn't make that meeting, though, as he was ar...