Cosa Nostra News

COSA NOSTRA NEWS EXCLUSIVE Former Colombo street boss Thomas (Tommy Shots) Gioeli , 67, is seeking to get out of prison about four years early because of the COVID-19 public health emergency, according to an email sent by the Victim-Witness Coordinator for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York, a copy of which was forwarded to Cosa Nostra News today. Tommy Shots arrested. Gioeli was sentenced to 18 years for a 2012 conviction for several racketeering and murder conspiracy charges, and is currently housed at Danbury FCI. His BOP-designated release date is May 2, 2024. (Gioeli had faced 20 years at sentencing, but the judge gave him a break that baffled many law enforcement officials.) The following email is from Lisa Foster, the Victim-Witness Coordinator for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York. We're publishing the full contents of the letter (because why not?) We deleted the phone number and access code. Anyone who wants t...

The FBI didn't exactly hit a home run when it opened a social club in Florida as part of Operation Coldwater, which ran from 1979 to 1981 and was an attempt to infiltrate Santo Trafficante's reach into Florida's Gulf Coast. The Portofino "social club" that opened in Brooklyn in the 1990s. While the book Donnie Brasco portrays it as a success that resulted in the 1986 indictment of Trafficant, the FBI's long-simmering effort ultimately came up short: the longtime Godfather of the Sunshine State was acquitted after Frank Ragano, the Mafioso's crafty lawyer, found a gap in the FBI's case. The Feds had better luck when they pulled a similar sting in New York in the 1990s. Code-named Second Gear, the elaborate four-year operation by the FBI's New York Hijacking Squad included a bona fide social club (secretly owned and operated -- and wired for audio -- by the FBI) and focused on disrupting the Gambino family's Northeast hijacking operat...

UPDATED The FBI surreptitiously recorded about 600 hours of discussions in the apartment above the Ravenite social club, six hours of which were entered into evidence during the 1992 murder and racketeering trial of John Gotti and his consiglieri Frank Locascio. John Gotti and Sammy (The Bull) Gravano circa 1990. We started this way back in February of this year, when we published The Ravenite Transcripts: John Gotti's Secret Meetings In Mrs. Cirelli's Apartment . See previous installment here ...all previous installments here ... As for "dry snitching" -- the notion that goes something like, John Gotti had to know there were wiretaps around so he deliberately talked to bury everyone, including himself presumably - may sound compelling to some; not us, to us it's ridiculous. We submit: it's a reverse-engineered fictional construct that ignores reality because the fact is: For organized crime to function, there must be organization. That means the...

The following is shared via The Colombo Crime Family Blog : As far as career paths go, joining the Mafia is a pretty risky one. There is no set wage, no 401k, as well as the looming threat of incarceration. And, as Colombo crime family associate Walter Samperi discovered the hard way, there's no health insurance either..... From: The Colombo Crime Family Blog The Italian-born Samperi stood at over two metres tall, making him a useful enforcer for powerful Colombo family figures like Teddy Persico Jr. and Tommy Gioeli. But for all his physical might, Samperi was powerless to retaliate when he was stabbed not once, but twice, in two separate incidents by a fellow Colombo associate and then, years later, by a Gambino. On neither occasion did Samperi get any sort of retribution, according to tape-recordings made in 2009 and 2010 by FBI informants. Samperi first came to the feds' attention in 2004, when he was spotted hanging around Colombo prince Theodore "Skin...

UPDATE 2 Gang Land News this week offered new details and corroboration for a story we first wrote more than five years ago when former Gambino associate John Alite spoke to us prior to the release of George Anastasia's Gotti Rule s. John Alite and John Junior As reported  then, in 2005, Alite told us, the Gambino family hierarchy got word to him -- while he was fighting extradition to the US from a Brazilian prison -- that John (Junior) Gotti was talking to the Feds. "John Gotti's son is a rat! That should be the biggest news in the world!" he said. When Alite learned of the 302  he'd been in the process, he told us , of helping former Gambino capo Ronnie (One-Arm) Trucchio, who was on trial, when Alite got the word via an illegal cellphone  that John Junior had proffered and that a 302 had been floated. Alite said that the 302 (the existence of which had been reported previously, but this blog published the actual document ) had been given to the Gamb...

On this day in 1985, four armed robbers made off with $7.8 million in cash from a Wells Fargo Co. terminal on Manhattan's Lower West Side, netting a larger haul than the crooks aligned with the Luchese family who in December 1978 robbed a Lufthansa cargo building of around $6 million ($5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewelry). In both robberies, much of the loot was never recovered. Beansie in middle. On April 29, 1985, four ski-masked bandits ambushed four employees of a Wells Fargo facility as they opened the firm's vault to prepare for the day's business. They made their escape in a bright red armored truck that they left abandoned in a parking lot beneath the Brooklyn Bridge approach on the Lower East Side. Wells Fargo offered a $350,000 reward for their arrest and conviction. According to police, the four robbers used drills and sledgehammers.to crack their way through two cinder-block walls to access first the Merrill Lynch depot, then the Wells Fargo t...