Cosa Nostra News

In 1987, reputed Colombo boss Carmine Persico knew that, short of his lawyers one day cooking up a miracle, he would in all likelihood be spending the rest of his life in prison. He had been convicted in  two separate trials: the Mafia Commission trial and a separate racketeering trial involving the Colombo family's operations. (Persico died in 2019 at age 85 after serving 32 years of that 136-year prison sentence following his two convictions.) Allie Boy Persico was on the run for seven years. The cases were separate, but overlapped, the common denominator being FBI surveillance recordings of Colombo soldier Ralph Scopo’s conversations, which alerted the Feds to the initial evidence that would help them build the Commission Case. Scopo was the bagman in a large-scale ongoing racket involving shaking down concrete contractors at major construction projects. As the president of the Cement and Concrete Workers District Council of the Laborers' International Union of North Americ...

Aging, physically ill, embittered, and alone, Ralph (Whitey) Tropiano finally reached the end of his rope at Leavenworth, then one of the toughest prisons in the country, and he played his final card: He sent a message to the FBI that he was, at long last, ready to talk... Not too many years earlier, in 1964, Whitey Tropiano had been at his pinnacle when he hit upon what he believed was the grand solution to all his pressing legal problems. He’d simply give the cops in New Haven, Connecticut, piles of cash and they'd leave him the hell alone. To protect his gambling operations in New Haven, Whitey offered to send payments of $150-$500 a week, in addition to a one-time upfront good faith payment of $2,000 each, to New Haven Detective Stephen Ahern and a West Hartford police official. Ahern and the West Hartford cop graciously accepted Whitey’s largess, thanked him profusely, and then went straight to their superiors to tell them all the details of what had transpired. In Feb...

The following is the first in a series about the mob in New Haven, Connecticut… It started off originally as a story about William Grasso — but while researching him, we found ourselves spending more time on Grasso's mentor, and decided an even more worthwhile series would detail his exploits first... Ralph “Whitey” Tropiano. Connecticut had a peculiar relationship with organized crime. Located at about the midpoint between New York and Boston, it never had its own formally designated crime family. However, due to its proximity to New York and Boston, it always attracted attention and several crime families had interests in the state over the decades. The notoriously bad-tempered, yet supremely disciplined  William (The Wild Man) Grasso, who rose to become underboss of the Patriarca crime family under Raymond Junior, once reminisced with an associate about old times and noted how he’d gotten his big break. It arrived in the form of a 10-year prison sentence. “Best t...

"Cadillac Frank" during 1995 arrest. UPDATED Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, a former top-level member of the New England Mafia  who flipped to testify against notorious Irish mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger , was yanked out of Witness Protection and arrested today, having been charged with murdering a witness. Salemme is to appear today at 3 p.m. before a Boston-based U.S. District Court, U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz’s office said. Salemme is charged with the May 10, 1993 murder of South Boston nightclub manager Steven A. DiSarro. Salemme and his son, who has since died, were long suspected of being behind the murder .