Cosa Nostra News

While the Feds have consolidated their focus on organized crime in New York City, the heart of America's Costra Nostra, law enforcement "across the pond" is taking a very different approach to the problem. An elite unit aimed at tackling organised crime, human trafficking and serious fraud has been officially opened -- in Scotland -- by the justice secretary, according to an article on the BBC News website . The Scottish Intelligence Co-ordination Unit (SICU) would gather information about top gangsters in a bid to "take them down." It is part of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA).The unit will be housed in Livingston until the new Scottish Crime Campus at Gartcosh, Lanarkshire, opens in 2012. "It was created to act as the "brain" of law enforcement in Scotland, bringing together intelligence and finance specialists. They will work closely with the country's eight police forces and co-ordinate and assess knowledge abo...

Fiumara, here, who died in 2010, used Depiro as acting capo on the Jersey waterfront. Stephen "Beach" Depiro, the man at the top of a New Jersey federal indictment that was part of the big January roundup of alleged Mafia members, will be released on bail, according to the My Central Jersey website . He'll be under home incarceration with electronic monitoring. A federal judge in Newark ruled Tuesday that Depiro is to be released on a $1.2 million bond secured by four properties. The 55-year-old Kenilworth resident has been described by prosecutors as a soldier in the Genovese crime family. He allegedly ran a racketeering enterprise connected to the waterfront that engaged in extortion and illegal bookmaking. Depiro has pleaded not guilty. According to published reports , since the 1990s,  Tino Fiumara 's influence in New Jersey was so strong that the Genovese family was considering him as a candidate for boss of the entire family. He controlled unions f...

A turncoat who informed on Joe Watts, one of the late John Gotti's most ruthless associates, was recently sentenced to time served for engineering a botched FedEx truck hijacking. John Gotti's social club in Queens, long gone. But Brian Greenwald, who's been in jail for 27 months -- the last seven in solitary confinement -- instead "begged the judge to stay in the slammer rather than risk retribution from a feared gangland gunslinger who was the alleged backup shooter at the 1985 murder of Gambino don Paul Castellano," the article said. "I testified against a certain individual who is life-threatening for me," a pasty-faced, gaunt Greenwald pleaded in court, referring to Joe "The German" Watts, the reputed assassin who allegedly notched 11 mob hits for Gotti's crew. " 'I've had to watch my back for organized-crime retaliation. I've learned recently they are trying to find out where I am. I've been in...

The FBI 'S New York bureau has downsized its organized-crime squads just two months after its massive gangster takedown, reported The New York Daily News , among others newspapers, though the news was first disclosed by Jerry Capeci on his pay-per-view website, ganglandnews.com . Heretofore each of the city's five families had its own squad of FBI agents investigating it. The reorganization involves the merger of the Bonanno and Colombo squads; the Lucchese squad teamed up with a unit investigating Eastern European crime crews.The Genovese and Gambino crime families each still have their own dedicated squads. As Capeci more bluntly explained it on his site : "Six weeks after the feds loudly proclaimed that they are still pursuing mobsters with a vengeance, the FBI has quietly cut the number of New York squads that investigate the notorious Five Families. There used to be five, one for each. That’s been cut to just three. It’s not just re-organizing either. The tota...