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...

FINAL Sicilian and American wiseguys were busted Wednesday as part of coordinated takedown efforts by Italian police and the FBI, which served 19 arrest warrants in Palermo and in the United States, specifically in Staten Island and Philadelphia. The operation, dubbed "New Connection," was an attempt to disrupt efforts by a Sicilian Mafia faction (specifically, Inzerillo family members in Sicily and their New York allies in the Gambino crime family) to take over the leadership of organized crime in Italy. The Inzerillo and Gambino crime families, which have historical ties, were in the process of rebuilding their powerbase in Sicily. Members of slain Gambino crime boss Frank Cali's family were arrested in the takedown Wednesday, as per officials in Anthony DeStefano's Newsday story . Also arrested were Thomas Gambino, 47, of Staten Island; Salvatore Gambino, the mayor of a village outside Palermo; and Tommaso and Francesco Inzerillo, relatives of Salvator...

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....

Francesco (Frank) Cali was the kind of mobster who wasn't  supposed to exist anymore: Old school, shunning even the telephone; not prone to violence, meaning he wasn't buffered by the fear factor created by bosses like John Gotti. Francesco (Frank) Cali In fact, Cali reached capo at such a relatively young age (in his 30s) that it rankled some Gambino wiseguys, and caused at least one to refer to him derisively during a wiretapped phone call. On another wiretapped call, however, a gangster speaking in Italian seemed to pay Cali the ultimate complement by referring to him as " tutto quanto"  or "everything." The New York mobster with Sicilian blood had been arrested and convicted only once. Amazingly, he wasn't brought down after mistakenly allowing a confidential informant into his inner circle. Cali, a reputed leader of the Gambino crime family, was shot to death outside his house in Staten Island in a killing that echoed Mafia murders o...

REVISED, EXPANDED Around a dozen unsolved incidents of violence have occurred so far this year in Southern Ontario, a volley of gunfire, restaurant bombings, and outright murder. It's presumed by law enforcement in Canada that this is an ongoing mob war to fill a leadership vacuum created by the death of  "the Canadian John Gotti," as Gang Land News dubbed him. Vito Rizzuto was waging a war of annihilation against foes internal and external  once he returned home after serving a stint in an American prison for participating in a notorious triple homicide of Bonanno capos in 1981. Vito Rizzuto died allegedly of natural causes in December 2013. His death from cancer is the only thing that stopped him from killing more mobsters who either were against him or had shown disloyalty to him. Rizzuto's father and eldest son were slain by Ndrangheta members while he was in prison after Joseph Massino, the Bonanno crime family boss, flipped and gave testimony abou...

Mario Cuomo was one of the greatest orators in modern political history. He was formally a democrat, but his goals and accomplishments made him too complex a politician to be so easily defined by such a label. He's been back in the news recently due to reports that the Sicilian Mafia marked him for death to send a message to Americans calling for nothing less than the destruction of the witness protection program . (They also wanted to whack New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The brutish Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, allegedly planned the hit when Giuliani was a state prosecutor in the 1980s. The American mob told him not to even try such a caper; Giuliani would wipe them out.) Cuomo's  July 16, 1984 Keynote Address to the Democratic National Convention tops many lists as one of the 20th Century's most inspirational speeches. I'd delete the qualifier and say it's one of the most inspirational and powerful in American history. Listening to it again, it sounds even m...

"The Mafia is oppression, arrogance, greed, self-enrichment, power and hegemony above and against all others. It is not an abstract concept, or a state of mind, or a literary term... It is a criminal organization regulated by unwritten but iron and inexorable rules... The myth of a courageous and generous 'man of honor' must be destroyed, because a mafioso is just the opposite." -- Cesare Terranova , Italian Magistrate murdered in 197 9 Gaetano Riina, brother of Salvatore 'Toto' Riina, after he was arrested in Mazara del Vallo Photo: AP An interview with Professor John Dickie Cosa Nostra - rebranding the Mafia : "The mafia, in the strict sense of Cosa Nostra , the hierarchical criminal organization based in Sicily, does not ‘run Italy’ as you sometimes hear people rather glibly say,” explains John Dickie, senior lecturer in Italian at the University of London, and author of Cosa Nostra – a history of the Sicilian Mafia. 

Da Ciro, one of 23 restaurants seized by the police in Rome. "Buy everything." --An Italian mob boss caught on wiretap in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell; he was giving an order to a lieutenant who'd just been told to immediately go to East Germany. The International New York Times  reported that harsher laws in Italy have led criminal rings to seek new territory abroad. In this year alone, according to the report: "Italian officials seized € 51 million, or $70 million, in mob properties and other assets in Rome, providing a small glimpse of the legal business interests that southern clans control in the capital." The "mob economy" as Italian officials call it, "has rapidly expanded across Europe."

Sicilian Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro (born 26 April 1962) is probably one of the only mobsters whose nickname was derived from an Italian comic book series, called Diabolik. In news touted around the world recently, Italian police said they have received new information from a reliable informant, which apparently marks the first time in nearly four years that investigators were able to update the mobster's computer simulated portrait (known as an "identikit"). Add caption He is considered to be one of the new leaders of Cosa Nostra since the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano in April 2006. He didn't rise to prominence until April 2001, when the magazine L'Espresso put him on the cover with the headline: Ecco il nuovo capo della mafia (" Here is the new boss of the Mafia "). He has been a fugitive since 1993. According to Forbes magazine he is among the 10 most wanted criminals in the world The 52-year-old is said to have a recedi...

Silvio Berlusconi Mobster informant points to Berlusconi, Dell'Utri - ANSA English - ANSA.it : "A mobster-turned-informant told prosecutors in a deposition Thursday that three-time premier Silvio Berlusconi and former Senator Marcello Dell'Utri were credited with "putting the country in the hands" of the Mafia by a notorious Sicilian boss. From a jail in Rome, Gaspare Spatuzza recalled a conversation in 1994 with Cosa Nostra boss Giuseppe Graviano. "He said, 'I told you that things would turn out all right'. Then he said the name Berlusconi, and added that our paesano Dell'Ultri was also involved, and thanks to them we had the country in our hands". Dell'Utri is appealing to the supreme Court of Cassation a seven-year sentence imposed in March by a Palermo court that convicted him of Mafia association."

Riina, the jailed head of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra of Corleone. From ABC News : "An Italian newspaper report says the remote control to detonate the bomb that killed anti-Mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino in 1992 was hidden inside the intercom at his mother's Palermo residence. La Repubblica said on its website Wednesday that jailed Mafia boss Salvatore "Toto" Riina revealed the whereabouts of the remote control, long a mystery, to another inmate in a monitored jail yard chat. "The newspaper says it isn't clear whether Borsellino activated the bomb himself by buzzing his mother's home, or if someone else did. Borsellino and his bodyguards were killed in the blast from a car packed with more than 160 pounds (70 kilograms) of plastic explosives outside his mother's house. It came just two months after another anti-Mafia prosecutor was killed. Riina ordered the back-to-back slayings."

The Sicilian mafia ordered the assassination of former mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani , a court in Palermo has heard, according to the UK's  Mail Online . (Another surprising revelation from a separate trial in January unearthed a plot to blow up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.) So know we actually have, in the form of Italian court records,  corroboration for a claim Giuliani has been making for years . (More recently, we learned the Sicilian Cosa Nostra also had plans to whack former New York Governor Mario Cuomo , until they learned the extent of his security detail.) Giovanni Falcone fearlessly hunted the Sicilian Mafia. As we reported, Giuliani claimed that the Mafia in Sicily put an $800,000 contract on his head; He said this repeatedly as we note in the above linked story. He also repeated this as a guest on Oprah Winfrey's OWN cable-channel show, "Oprah: Where Are They Now." A the Mail reported, which jibes with our take: "the oneti...

Rudy Giuliani  sounded wistful, maybe a bit maudlin, as if he was getting sentimental about the old days of New York, when organized crime held sway over the city and was a major focal point of law enforcement's efforts, as opposed to the Islamic terrorists who have stolen the limelight in the past two decades. The mob put contracts on Rudy Giuliani. He claimed that the Mafia in Sicily put an $800,000 contract on his head while he was New York City's Mayor. Speaking as a guest on Oprah Winfrey's OWN cable-channel show, "Oprah: Where Are They Now," the onetime prosecutor seemed to relish that he was once important enough to be a target for organize crime. Giuliani was U.S. Attorney before becoming the mayor, from 1994-2001. "Certainly, no one sent them to prison for the lengthy periods of time that I did," he said of American mobsters, adding that the mob had paper on him within his first year in office as mayor. (Still, don't the judge...

Here is a little story -- a conversation between two Sicilians circa late-19th century. What these two are discussing, is one question, but the more important one is: why. It is an example of why there is in existence one of the Mafia "rules" by which members live their lives. (Googling any of the names will not help you! Don't Google any of this -- try to use your mind, those of you who think you know Cosa Nostra, that is.) Man A: Man, does my tooth hurt! Man B: Mine too. A: When did the pain start? B. On Our Lady of Ascension day.