Cosa Nostra News

Making Toto Catalano say the rosary probably wasn't a good idea... On May 21, 1999, a young woman made a frantic call to a police dispatcher saying that her father, Giovanni Ligammari, 60, and brother, Pietro, 37, had hanged themselves and were dead. Ligammari, second from right, leaves Capri Motel with Joseph (Big Joey) Massino, far right; Vito Rizzuto, second from left; and Sicilian Bonanno capo Gerlando (George from Canada) Sciascia. The father and son were found hanging face to face via separate nooses (made from nylon packing cord) from the basement rafters of the older man's two-family home in an affluent Bergen County suburb. Giovanni Ligammari, a New Jersey contractor as well as a Sicilian member of the Bonanno family (his son also became a Bonanno soldier), was captured on May 6,1981, the day after the murders of three Bonanno capos, in photographs by the FBI, which had set up surveillance on the Capri Motel at 555 Hutchinson River Parkway in the Bronx.  The FBI had sn...

THE WITNESS: I grew up in my country for 26 years almost, and all the people--I would say 99 percent, they never go to the law because the law was too slow, and the law make no justice for what they have done. They prefer Don Tomas, Don Nicolas, Don Ciccio, whatever they call them.... After Joseph (Joe Cago) Valachi and before Sammy (The Bull) Gravano, one of the most important New York mob turncoats was Luigi Ronsisvalle, a "diabolically funny mob hit man." Ronsisvalle left (credit:  Old School) Ronsisvalle was born and was raised in Sicily, where he followed Mafia developments "like an American kid follows baseball." He moved to the United States in 1966 when he was 25. He ″knew almost nothing″ about America's Cosa Nostra when he arrived here. ″In Sicily you could whistle and in two minutes, you’d have 200 guys behind you with a shotgun.″ Ronsisvalle said that while he was growing up in Sicily, he always wanted to be ″a man of honor....