Cosa Nostra News

In the classic film On the Waterfront (which I haven't seen and don't intend to, unless someone tells me otherwise), the laborers who worked on New York's docks "were reluctant, even frightened, to talk to the authorities, whether a priest or a detective, because the mob controlled the waterfront," the New York Times noted recently. Longshoremen in 1940s New York REVISED : Most longshoremen were indeed conflicted during much of the 20th century about the notion of revealing what they knew regarding members of a certain secret criminal society. In Brooklyn, that meant informing on a man who had demonstrated he'd go all the way -- meaning, murder you, your wife and your entire family -- if he had even an inkling you were informing on him (or were planning to or were even thinking about the possibility). And considering the wide-scale corruption of police, union officials, politicians, basically all civilization's "managers," if you will, ...

Anthony Scotto, left, lawyer James LaRossa. The son of TV news anchor ­Rosanna Scotto made news last week when he was arrested on charges of swiping an expensive designer purse. What garnered our interest was a note at the end of the New York Post Page Six story : [Rosanna] Scotto, 58, is co-anchor of WNYW/Channel 5’s “Good Day New York” ... [and] is co-owner of her family’s restaurant, Fresco by Scotto, on East 52nd Street. She is also the daughter of Anthony Scotto, a former boss in the Gambino crime family.... Scotto, while never the boss of the crime family, was a powerful figure in his own right. His story heralds an earlier era of America's Cosa Nostra, when mobsters were able to discreetly rise high in big business. Scotto is considered to have been the most powerful labor racketeer in the entire country in his heyday in the 1960s-70s. He earned two additional distinctions nearly unbelievable today: He once lectured at Harvard and was considered by...

The week before Christmas 2014, three North New Jersey-based Genovese crime family mobsters pleaded guilty to waterfront racketeering in a case going on for years -- since January 2011's Mafia Takedown Day . The guy who owned the “Godfather’s Garden.” But the Genovese family's control of the New Jersey waterfront goes back decades and includes many storied mobsters of the past who killed and were killed for control of the lucrative waterfront rackets of the Garden State. The Genovese family even ran its own hit squad, which focused on murdering FBI informants, among others. The bloodless indictment by comparison likely will end with three men serving three-year prison sentences. The key count in the indictment is conspiracy to extort members of the International Longshoremen’s Association for Christmastime tribute payments, according to New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman and Eastern District of New York U.S. Attorney Loretta E. Lynch . Genovese s...