Cosa Nostra News

UPDATED " To be honest with you, we just barely let the Gambino family in ...." Anthony (Gaspipe) Casso, referring to the stunningly profitable gasoline tax scam in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee In May 1996, for the first and only time, Luchese underboss Anthony (Gaspipe) Casso testified—before the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was examining the emergence of Russian immigrant crime groups and their ties to New York's Five Families, among other crime groups. Underboss to underboss: Sammy the Bull and Gaspipe Casso walk-talk. He spoke during the brief period that was the length of his cooperation . Gaspipe, who flipped in March 1994, was booted from the program in July 1998, when Judge Frederic Block of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn found that he had breached his cooperation deal with prosecutors. Block authorized the Government to rescind the plea agreement on the grounds that Casso had bribed prison guards to smuggle co...

Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, the underboss who helped John Gotti run the Gambino family, before he helped the FBI take it apart, was sitting in a brown leather chair in his dimly lit social club-type podcast studio preparing to launch into his latest—only this podcast, something very different was about to come out of his mouth. Worked up (about something): Michael Franzese, Patrick Bet-David,  Sammy Gravano. Instead of another riff about this or that gangland hit, Sammy the Bull was pitching a mental-health services platform that connects people with psychotherapists. "Is there something bothering you and giving you anxiety, preventing you from achieving your goal?" the Bull intones in unhurried gruff Brooklynese. (The same voice Gravano used to describe how, one night at Sparks, “shots rang out in the night air" with "people running, screaming, falling, scrambling all over to get away.") "When I got out of prison," the Bull's pitch contin...

If certain words are music to a street guy's ears ("Yes, I got your money"—"Do you know why you're here?"), then others are most definitely not. "I gotta throw you under the bus ." You don't even have to be in the mob to hear that one and not like it. Former Luchese wiseguy John Pennisi on one of many podcasts you can see him in. Anthony (Little Anthony) Caponigro, a Bonanno associate at the time, told John Pennisi, a former Luchese wiseguy, that he had to throw him under the bus after Caponigro talked out of school and backed himself into a corner. Or that is how John tells it in one of his SitdownNews podcasts.  That's right, star wiseguy witness John Pennisi, who testified at three major trials and about whom we've written a multi-part series , has launched a podcast that leverages his SitdownNews blog, where he offers a steady stream of peeks behind the curtain at goings-on in the Luchese family—as well as other crime families. Penn...

" B efore there was John Gotti, there was Sonny Franzese," someone once said, and we concur. Former Colombo capo Michael Franzese said he was made on Oct. 31, 1975. On Long Island—especially the Long Island of the 1960s, decades before Amy Fisher shot Mary Joe at Joe Buttofuoco's Massapequa home, making all us Long Island natives (aka Long Islanders) look like jerks—and especially after  Ernest (Ernie the Hawk) Rupolo's stabbed and bullet-riddled body was recovered  from the beach at Jamaica Bay, Queens in August 1964 (his feet had been weighted down with cement blocks, the proverbial concrete shoes), most Long Islanders generally believed that  John Sonny Franzese was the major Mafia power  in the Northeast United States.  Never mind that Sonny most likely had nothing whatsoever to do with Rupolo and wasn't found guilty for it at the conclusion of the 1967 trial. Nevertheless, Rupolo's murder prefaced an unprecedented legal onslaught against Franzese, wi...