Cosa Nostra News

"(Phil Rusty) Rastelli was someone you didn’t cross. The mob was not the romanticized, glorified guys in the movies. They are gangsters, thugs, murderers. There is no poetry about them." --Joe Pistone Philip (Rusty) Rastelli had been Bonanno underboss to Natale (Joe Diamond) Evola; he rose to the top when a group of capos elected him after Evola died in late August 1973. Philip (Rusty) Rastelli  Rastelli, who listed his occupation as a radio dispatcher for a taxi company, spent half his life in prison. During his 18-year reign as boss (from 1973 to 1991) he was a free man for only about three years. Then, thanks to two lengthy prison sentences—10 years for antitrust violations, and 12 years for directing a huge labor racketeering conspiracy—after 1976, he mostly ran the Bonanno family’s operations from behind bars. He was an unpopular boss, and he presided over the disintegration of the family. Described once as a tall, good-looking man, Rastelli was a fitness ...

This one was shot to death under the noonday sun last Wednesday. Roger Valiquette Jr.'s bullet-riddled body was discovered in the parking lot of a rotisserie restaurant in the Montreal suburb of Laval, near his Mercedes SUV. Valiquette was "well-known in the Mob underworld," according to published reports. He is believed to have been part of a rival faction that had vied for control of the Rizzuto family's rackets. Running this faction had been Joseph Di Maulo, the first to die once Vito Rizzuto returned home in October 2012; he had been taken into custody by U.S. authorities in 2004 for participating in the take-down of three capos who were considered to have been conspiring to take control of the Bonanno family from Philip "Rusty" Rastelli after the storied hit on Carmine Galante . Rizzuto's father and son, along with several other associates were murdered while he was behind bars.

Thomas (Tommy Karate) Pitera, made member of the Bonanno crime family, in his most recent effort to get out of prison, sought to use DNA evidence to shift blame for several murders on a former partner in crime. Moment of Truth: Tommy Karate, nose busted, comprehending  his career's end. Pitera's appeal was crushed (just like his nose when the DEA arrested him) by a dead judge, who while alive penned the legal documents that validated the denial. As Forbes reported: "A federal court of appeals yesterday denied a criminal defendant’s Motion To Compel Post-Conviction Relief in the form of DNA testing of six items related to the crimes at issue. "The defendant/appellant, Thomas Pitera, alleges that genetic testing of those items would exonerate him by showing that the guilty party was in fact Frank Gangi, whom the court determined to be his accomplice. In United States v. Pitera (2d Cir. Apr. 3, 2012), the Second Circuit determined after very careful a...