Cosa Nostra News

Luchese capo Carmine Avellino , 70, was let out on $1 million bail. He departed Brooklyn Federal Court even though Federal prosecutors first argued that the mobster should be detained, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Celia Cohen consented to his release after another Avellino daughter posted her $1 million home as bail, according to the New York Daily News. Salvatore 's brother, Carmine Avellino, last week had been held without bail after his arraignment in federal court in Brooklyn. Avellino hadn't had enough time to prepare a bail application, his defense attorney said, so Magistrate Judge Joan Azrack ordered him detained until a bail hearing yesterday. He faces a two-count indictment charging him with involvement in a scheme to extort repayment of a $100,000 loan from a victim in 2010.

Mob Boss: The Life of Little Al D'Arco, the Man Who Brought Down the Mafia includes an anecdote about the "testify down" strategy used in mob trials. In two recent cases in Brooklyn, the government used cooperating witnesses who were"big fish"—meaning they had admitted to more serious crimes than the charges faced by the people they were testifying against. D'Arco in only surveillance photograph. This is, generally speaking, the opposite of how cooperating witnesses are supposed work. Usually, legal experts said, the goal is to get those witnesses to admit to wrongdoing, cooperate with the government and to walk the investigation up the ladder, obtaining evidence against leaders or those potentially engaged in more serious crimes. In exchange, on the recommendation of prosecutors, cooperators typically end up serving reduced or no prison time. "If you can only punish big or small fish you obviously want to go after the big fish, th...

Carmine Avellino, Salvatore's brother. Newsday article by Anthony M. DeStefano : A reputed Luchese crime family captain who was once accused of taking part in the double murder of two Long Island carters in the 1980s pleaded not guilty Tuesday to federal extortion charges following his arrest Monday by the FBI. [ Salvatore' s brother]  Carmine Avellino , 70, of St. James was held without bail after his arraignment in federal court in Brooklyn on a two-count indictment. Avellino hadn't had enough time, his defense attorney said, to prepare a bail application, so Magistrate Judge Joan Azrack ordered him detained until a bail hearing Monday. The indictment accused Avellino of being part of a scheme to extort repayment of a $100,000 loan from a victim in 2010, according to a memorandum to court by prosecutors seeking Avellino's continued detention without bail. Avellino's brother Salvatore was once the driver for the late Luchese boss Anthony "Tony Ducks...

Sal Avellino ran the Luchese family's  interests in carting on Long Island. He ordered a shameful double killing. Organized labor is no longer the cash cow it once was for organized crime.  That was the apparent thrust of a recent  WSJ.com report that noted the mob's infiltration of unions in the U.S. started to steadily weaken in the 1980s when then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani took aggressive measures, putting away many of the mob's legendary bosses, creating opportunities for a whole new generation of wiseguys to move up. As history shows, many weren't up to the task. But considering law  enforcement's evolution in terms of investigating organized crime, it may not have mattered who was in charge. The WSJ article offered two reasons for the cause of the Mafia's decline on the union front: the 1986 Commission Case, during which defendants were charged with membership in the  Concrete Club, followed in 1990 by the...