Cosa Nostra News

" He no like drugs. He say: no, no no [to heroin] on Knickerbocker Avenue. They say, ‘Okay.’ Then they kill him .” —Luigi Ronsisvalle on Pietro Licata, longtime Bonanno power in Brooklyn. Got it in 1976. (Licata, that is.) Just in time to add to your Christmas shopping list : Former Brooklyn prosecutor Michael F. Vecchione’s third true crime book tells the story of Luigi Ronsisvalle, the “diabolically funny” mob hit man who arrived in New York from Sicily in 1966 to make his mark in the American underworld. He eventually landed in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn on Knickerbocker Avenue as it was evolving into ground zero for the Bonanno's international heroin trafficking business. Ronsisvalle, left, and Ivan Fisher, Sal Catalano's Pizza Connection attorney, when Luigi was recanting. Or attempting to. Homicide Is My Business: Luigi the Zip―A Hitman’s Quest for Honor  is available now. Jerry Schmetterer is co-writer. Ronsisvalle achieved limited success in gangland (none ac...

EXPANDED The relationship between Gambino wiseguys in New York and members of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra is healthier than ever, Italian investigators announced earlier this week following a series of raids in the Sicilian hinterland that netted 11 Mafia members, who allegedly had been working very closely with the New York-based Gambino family. A joint Italian-FBI operation in 2019 focused on the Inzerillos and the Gambinos. “The connection is very much alive — the New York Mafia still takes pride in its cultural roots in Sicily while ties to the US are a strong point for the Sicilians,” General Arturo Guarino, the Palermo Carabinieri commander, said. Members of the Gambino family and members of the Sicilian Inzerillo clan, which was nearly exterminated in the 1980s during a bloody Mafia war , have had longtime historical ties. This week's arrests centered on Mafia members based in the town of Torretta, which is outside Palermo . Italian police have not released much by way of detai...

Around 11 p.m. on March 29, 1973, in Palermo, Sicily, a lifelong member of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, for no earthly reason, walked into a police station and spilled everything. Leonardo Vitale had been a capo in the Altarello di Baida family. Leonardo Vitale, then age 32 and a capodecina in the Altarello di Baida family of the Sicilian Mafia, explained to the  officers of the Palermo Flying Squad that he was undergoing a religious conversion and wanted to begin a new life. The officers were dumbfounded as their visitor copped to committing: two murders*, attempted murders, kidnapping, and a range of lesser crimes, a bizarre number of which involved Sicily's citrus fruits industry. In addition, he named men who he said had committed homicides (many of them the police already had on the books as murder suspects). He also discussed how a Mafia family was organized and identified by name members of his Altarello di Baida family. Nothing was off limits....

Ne wspapers  overseas  report that John Gotti, the former Gambino boss who rose to power following the midtown Manhattan execution of his predecessor in December 1985, played a role in the brutal bombing murders of two Sicilian judges. A Sicilian turncoat pointed the finger at Gotti for ordering a made member of the Gambino crime family -- who was an explosives expert -- to train Sicilian mobsters to use the bombs that killed anti-mafia crusaders Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The turncoat -- Maurizio Avola, 56, a convicted murderer who flipped in 1994 -- told prosecutors in Caltanissetta, Sicily, that John Gotti had sent the American mobster/explosives expert, who Avola described as “about 40 years old" with brown hair and dark eyes, about six feet tall, with a strong build, and he "dressed very elegantly." Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo, and three police officers/bodyguards were killed in Palermo in May 1992 with a bomb comprised of ...

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....

" It is absolutely out of the question that a Sicilian man of honor could become a made member of the American Cosa Nostra  ..."  --Tommaso Buscetta, aka the "boss of two worlds" Tall Pete Inzerillo and Frank Cali Frank Cali, the reputed leader of the Gambino crime family who was shot to death outside his house in Staten Island, allegedly was made acting boss in 2015. Strong factors leading to his ascension were his strong ties to both the Sicilian Mafia and the Calabrian Ndrangheta. His rise also was part of an attempt by the Gambinos to lower the crime family’s profile after John Gotti shot his way to the top in December 1985, according to law enforcement officials. The Brooklyn-born Cali was related by blood to, and married into, Palermo's Inzerillo family and had cultivated close ties with members of the Ndrangheta's Siderno Group, a global drug trafficking network based in the southern Italian town of Siderno in Calabria. In the 1950s, ...

"When I was in New York for a mission, I got to know, personally, John and Joseph Gambino, both of them as initiates of the American Cosa Nostra. So, I came to know their secret joints, their way of thinking and the slang communication of the Sicilian Mafia. Usually, they communicate with just a look, something that is the norm for us in Palermo who grew up with the warning of “muto devi stare”–you need to shut up. In fact, using this system of communication we could hold a meeting even in silence–using just a look and body language passed down by our ancestors. This preferred way of communication by mafiosi, made it possible for me to figure out their messages ahead of time on occasion, some even intercepted from New York." -- Pippo Giordano, A Policeman’s Reflections on Mafia Organizations That Rule in Southern Italy John Gambino flew to Sicily and met Toto Riina face to face in 1983. After John Gotti became the boss of the Gambino crime family in 1986 after the m...