Cosa Nostra News

Michael DiLeonardo, aka Mikie Scars, rose to capo in the Gambino family during the reign of John Gotti. He was close to the Gottis, and if John Gotti had not crashed and burned in the early 1990s courtesy of the FBI, Mikie Scars' rise likely would have continued, and daily life for him might be very different today.  Paulie Zac, DiLeonardo's mob mentor. But as fate had it, John Gotti was arrested, tried, convicted, and in 1992 was sent to a Federal prison for life. He was around 10 years into his sentence when he died on June 10, 2002 , at the Federal prison hospital at Springfield, Mo. He was 61. (The cause was cancer.) As  we detailed in 2015 , the Feds filmed Mikie Scars ("I was born on record") attending the Dapper Don's wake. Days later, Michael and others were arrested based on Craig DePalma's sealed Grand Jury testimony. While sitting in jail, DiLeonardo learned that Joseph (Jo Jo) Corozzo, consiglieri, speaking for Peter Gotti and Nicholas (Little Ni...

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...