Cosa Nostra News

"90 percent of [The Sopranos] is made up (and the rest is) patterned after this [crime family]..." -- David Chase If you’ve ever wondered w here David Chase got all those fantastical ideas  for “ The Sopranos ,” maybe he, like the feds, had his own mob informants. Or maybe the feds were his informants. Tonight’s special episode of “ American Greed ,” titled “ Mob Money ,” is the story of the rise and fall of  New Jersey’s DeCavalcante crime family , New Jersey gangsters who bear more than a passing resemblance to “The Sops.”  The DeCavalcantes were always, by mob standards anyway, minor players in the estimated $50 to 90-billion-a-year, ah (what the hell do you call it?), industry. In fact, the five families of New York called them “the farmers” and thought of them as country bumpkins..... The Sopranos is based on New Jersey's DeCavalcante crime family  has been written so many times, most viewers would probably agree. We've written things like: "Many crime fa...

Ex-Boss Vinny "Ocean" Palermo in the good ol' days.... Vincent Palermo, former acting boss of New Jersey's only homegrown crime family , was a major Cosa Nostra player. The field was wide open for him at his ascension. He and many  DeCavalcante  members and associates were eventually done in by the Fed's for the murder of a Staten Island businessman. ( What Vinny's been up to  is exactly what I hoped to discover, only this interview never reached fruition.) When last we heard about him, Vinny was set up in Texas rather nicely. He continued in one longtime business of his, running the Penthouse Club. In 2011 newspapers were making hay out of a particular court  case involving Vinny Palermo, a former resident of Island Park in Nassau County, one town over from where I live, in the five-towns enclave. He arrived in Houston while in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Allegedly, the model for the fictional Tony Soprano character...

Frank Colacurcio Sr. The Seattle Times  reports that a vacant building on Aurora Ave.in Shoreline that was "the cornerstone of a criminal enterprise" is now a church some five years after the indictment of its former criminal owners. "Formerly Sugar’s nightclub, the building was once a strip club, a haven for prostitution and the front of a racketeering operation owned by the notorious Colacurcio family," the report notes. But this "organized crime" group seems relatively benign, focusing on gambling and strip clubs that offered TLC on the side (prostitution).

If anyone missed the recent news about what turncoat Vincent "Vinnie Ocean" Palermo, former acting boss of the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante crime family, has been up to, here is a detailed, full-blown account from a website called  Courthouse News Service , a nationwide news service for lawyers and the news media, based in Pasadena, Calif.: A former New Jersey mob boss who came to Houston in the Federal Witness Protection Program - and who allegedly was an inspiration for the fictional Tony Soprano - defaulted on payments on a $1.3 million promissory note issued to buy out a partner's share in a strip club, the partner claims. Lisa Hansegard sued James Cabella, his wife Debra Cabella and son James Jr., and Hereweareagain Inc., in Harris County Court. Hansegard says she had no idea that James Cabella, owner of the strip club across the street from a strip club she acquired from the estate of her child's late father, was actually Vincent Palermo, a former a...