Cosa Nostra News

Greg Scarpa Junior For assisting the FBI's anti-terrorism efforts, a Brooklyn federal judge deleted 10 years from the 40-year sentence that Gregory Scarpa Jr. , 64, was given in 1999, though Scarpa will most likely die before his release date. According to reports, the Daily News and Post stories highlighted only the iceberg's tip in terms of the degree to which Scarpa Junior cooperated as well as the amount and ramifications of the information he provided.  Scarpa -- today given a 2025 release date -- has nasopharyngeal squamous cell cancer, which gives him a lifespan of possibly five years. The cancer "will probably kill him within the next five years" before he will ever benefit from the ruling, Justice Edward Korman noted in his decision. Scarpa Junior, a former Colombo soldier, tipped off the FBI about a hidden stash of explosives, which the FBI initially had missed following a 1995 search of Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols's basement.

In a story posted here on August 24, 2015, What's Going on with Greg Scarpa Jr?  we noted: Gregory Scarpa Junior, sentenced to 40 years to life for assorted mob mayhem (a law enforcement source told us he's been linked to 24 homicides alone), has been transferred from the same Supermax that Vinny Basciano was in.  Only Scarpa Junior has been moved -- we're not sure when -- to something called a Residential Reentry Management Field Office based in Kansas City, Kansas.  Greg Scarpa Jr., left, Senior, right.... "He's never getting out," the source told us. "They might have moved him to make him more comfortable now that everything has settled down." But still -- a a Residential Reentry Management Field Office?

A recent  WSJ.com  report noted that, despite stronger federal laws and the long parade of mob turncoats waiting to testify in court, New York's five Cosa Nostra families have managed to hold on, regroup and rebuild. They have survived, law enforcement officials and mob experts said, because of their "persistence and ability to adapt," the article noted. In fact, the New York Mafia "has quietly staged a comeback and is now more powerful than it has been in years," Richard Frankel, special agent in charge of the Criminal Division for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York office, told the WSJ. The Mafia's obituary seem to be written about every few years. The king of all examples: In an uncharacteristic blunder, noted mob author Nicholas Pileggi wrote an article for New York magazine titled "The Decline and Fall of the Mafia" -- in 1970! The fact is, the American Cosa Nostra was organized specifically to perpetuate its...