Cosa Nostra News

Richard Cantarella, aka Shellackhead, recently contacted me on Facebook. Or at least I think it was him. In this online world of ours, one can never be too certain. He asked if I could help put him in contact with Sal Vitale.   I'm going to work my sources, but if Good Lookin Sal  were to contact me , it'd be somewhat easier and I guarantee confidentiality. Richard Cantarella. Pre-Shellackhead Moving right along, I am sharing here part of a chapter from the short-format ebook I wrote with former  Bonanno capo Dominick Cicale, Inside the Last Great Mafia Empire. The chapter, of course, has to do with Cantarella.

There's a busload of former Bonanno wiseguys somewhere out there in America these days. Ya all know what one of them ( Dom Cicale ) has been up to -- and now we can catch up with one of Dom's ex-cohorts.... We love the way Oxygen  wrote up the news release, though all things considered, we're not sure how Richard "Shellackhead" Cantarella's old pals will feel about this reality television series. One old-school Bonanno wiseguy told us: " That scumbag! " when we told him about the show. (He refrained from further comment). Anyhoo, we decided, hey, we'll post the frigging thing as is: Going from a life of crime to life in the suburbs proves to be the ultimate challenge in Oxygen Media's quirky new half-hour docu-comedy series UNPROTECTED , premiering Tuesday, April 11 at 9pm ET/PT. (See trailer below.) Richard "Shellackhead" Cantarella then.... The series follows the Cantarellas , a boisterous, old-school family that...

Frank Coppa was sentenced today. He earned quite a distinction in the Mafia: Coppa was the first member of the Bonanno family ever, since its formation in the 1930s, to break his oath; the other four families had all had defectors prior (the Bonannos alone for a period of time bragged that they had not produced a single defector -- until Coppa). Fat and Fatter: Massino, left, Coppa But as if to compensate for that, the former Bonanno capo's decision to flip set off a chain reaction that culminated in mass defections that took down the so-called Last Don, Joseph Massino . Coppa was  sentenced to time served . At age 73, he spent only two years in prison, then was out on bail about 10 years ago.