Cosa Nostra News

"Uncle Joe" Ligambi could be facing trial number three... The jury in the racketeering conspiracy retrial of old-school Philly mob boss Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi and his nephew, George Borgesi, has reached a partial verdict, but it won't be made public until Tuesday (Monday is a holiday). Before recessing on Friday, the jury sent the judge a note saying it had reached a verdict on two of the five counts, but remained hung on the other three. The note highlighted that there was a "firm difference of opinion" over the remaining charges. Ligambi, 74, is charged with racketeering conspiracy, two counts of illegal gambling and one count of witness tampering. The case against him includes secretly recorded conversations, most of which involve other mobsters as well as cooperators. Borgesi, 50, faces a single count of racketeering conspiracy that is built primarily on informants' testimony; the consensus of court watchers says that ...

"Black Bill" Tocco, founder of the Detroit mob. Four major busts in six months and all of the investigations involve customary mafia locales: New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Providence and Newark. One of the traditional mob hotbeds absent from the recent slew of arrests and convictions was Detroit, a longstanding picture of stability and efficiency in an underworld landscape littered with defectors, dissidents and dim-bulb thugs.... The Detroit mafia lives in the shadows. It always has, now, more than ever. “They don’t chase the news cameras like in other cities and a lot of them have been very adept of veiling themselves in legitimacy,” said former federal prosecutor and organized crime task force member Keith Corbett, of the area’s ruling mob powers. “In relative terms, it’s been a recipe for success, in that most of them have avoided long, if any, prison sentences and, for the most part, very few people have any idea who they are.”