In size, wealth and influence, today's Cosa Nostra doesn't match the Mafia of days gone by, Mob historians Jerry Capeci and Selwyn Raab say. However, there's one area in which modern Mafiosi are upholding a proud tradition of organized crime tradition nicknames.
Here are a few recent examples of Mafia nicknames and the inspiration for them, according to Mob historians and federal court records:
"Mikey Y." — for Michael Yannotti, a convicted associate of the Gambino family. Easier than saying his last name.
"Mikey Scars" — for Michael DiLeonardo, an acknowledged Gambino family member and government witness. From scars he received in a childhood accident.
"Vinny Gorgeous" — for Vincent Basciano, an acknowledged Bonanno family member. He owned a hair salon in the Bronx, N.Y.
"Richie from the Bronx" — for Richard Martino, a convicted Gambino family member. Apparently used to distinguish him from the many other Richies involved with the Mob.
"Good Lookin' Sal" — for Salvatore Vitale, an acknowledged Bonanno family member and government witness. Court records indicate he came up with the name himself and urged underlings to use it.
"Louie Bagels" — for Louis Daidone, a convicted member of the Lucchese family. He owned a bagel shop in Queens, N.Y.
"Gaspipe" — for Anthony Casso, an acknowledged Lucchese member and government witness. Referred to his tool of choice for his work as a Mob enforcer.
"Tony Ducks" — for Anthony Corallo, convicted member of the Lucchese family. He was known for his ability to duck subpoena servers.
"Phil Lucky" — for Philip Giaccone, a convicted Gambino family member. The name was unintentionally ironic; he was assassinated by a rival.
"Kid Blast" — for Albert Gallo, a convicted member of the Gambino family. He was known for enjoying parties.
"Nicky Eye Glasses" — for Nicholas Marangello, a convicted member of the Bonanno family. His glasses were very thick.
"Jackie Nose" — for John D'Amico, a convicted Gambino family member. Self-explanatory.
"The Chin" — for Vincent Gigante, a convicted member of the Genovese family. From "Cinzini," the nickname his mother gave him.
"Patty the Pig" — for Patrick DeFilippo, accused in a federal indictment of being a member of the Bonanno family. This was the pre-diet nickname for a Bronx man who used to weigh roughly 300 pounds.
"Patty from the Bronx" — DeFilippo's post-diet nickname.
Sources: Mob historians Jerry Capeci of Ganglandnews, Selwyn Raab, author of Five Families; defense lawyer Richard Levitt; federal court papers
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Reputed Gambino leaders reject plea deal
Friends of ours: Gambino Crime Family, Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri, Anthony "The Genius" Megale, Alphonse Sisca
The reputed leaders of the Gambino crime family rejected a plea offer Wednesday that would have headed off a New York trial and the testimony of an FBI agent who prosecutors said infiltrated the Mafia family, an attorney said.
Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri, who allegedly served as Gambino boss, and Anthony "The Genius" Megale, who prosecutors said was the family's No. 2 man, were among dozens of people arrested in the New York mob sweep last year.
Federal prosecutors offered a plea deal that included a wide range of prison sentences of up to 15 years for nine defendants in the case, said Stephan Seeger, who represents Megale.
The defendants had until Wednesday to accept the offer and Seeger said it was rejected because all the defendants couldn't agree. He said he expects some defendants, including Megale, will continue negotiating before trial.
Squitieri's attorney, Gerald Shargel, had no comment on the negotiations and said he was preparing for the May 8 trial.
The U.S. attorney's office in New York had no comment Wednesday. Documents on file in New Haven, where Megale faces up to 6{ years in prison on a related case, also describe the negotiations.
Prosecutors say Squitieri, Megale and other defendants made millions of dollars through extortion, loan sharking, illegal gambling and other crimes during the past decade.
Megale, 52, of Stamford, was Connecticut's highest ranking gangster, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in October to racketeering conspiracy in Connecticut but denies being the Gambino underboss.
An FBI agent in the New York case posed as a mobster and helped make hundreds of secret recordings, authorities said. He was so convincing, the FBI said, he was considered for Mafia membership.
Attorney John L. Pollok, who represents reputed Mafia captain Alphonse Sisca, said Wednesday morning that plea negotiations have been difficult because prosecutors insisted all nine defendants take the deal.
Megale's attorneys are trying to negotiate a deal in which his sentence could run concurrently with whatever he receives in Connecticut.
Thanks to Matt Apuzzo
The reputed leaders of the Gambino crime family rejected a plea offer Wednesday that would have headed off a New York trial and the testimony of an FBI agent who prosecutors said infiltrated the Mafia family, an attorney said.
Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri, who allegedly served as Gambino boss, and Anthony "The Genius" Megale, who prosecutors said was the family's No. 2 man, were among dozens of people arrested in the New York mob sweep last year.
Federal prosecutors offered a plea deal that included a wide range of prison sentences of up to 15 years for nine defendants in the case, said Stephan Seeger, who represents Megale.
The defendants had until Wednesday to accept the offer and Seeger said it was rejected because all the defendants couldn't agree. He said he expects some defendants, including Megale, will continue negotiating before trial.
Squitieri's attorney, Gerald Shargel, had no comment on the negotiations and said he was preparing for the May 8 trial.
The U.S. attorney's office in New York had no comment Wednesday. Documents on file in New Haven, where Megale faces up to 6{ years in prison on a related case, also describe the negotiations.
Prosecutors say Squitieri, Megale and other defendants made millions of dollars through extortion, loan sharking, illegal gambling and other crimes during the past decade.
Megale, 52, of Stamford, was Connecticut's highest ranking gangster, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in October to racketeering conspiracy in Connecticut but denies being the Gambino underboss.
An FBI agent in the New York case posed as a mobster and helped make hundreds of secret recordings, authorities said. He was so convincing, the FBI said, he was considered for Mafia membership.
Attorney John L. Pollok, who represents reputed Mafia captain Alphonse Sisca, said Wednesday morning that plea negotiations have been difficult because prosecutors insisted all nine defendants take the deal.
Megale's attorneys are trying to negotiate a deal in which his sentence could run concurrently with whatever he receives in Connecticut.
Thanks to Matt Apuzzo
The Other Problem at the Port
Friends of ours: Gambino Crime family, Genovese Crime family, Anthony Anastasio
With all the recent talk about security vulnerabilities at the nation's ports, one subject goes virtually unmentioned. The men who actually control many of the nation's docks, especially on the Eastern seaboard, are in the hip pocket of the Mafia and have been for decades.
Regardless of whether or not a Dubai-owned company manages operations at these ports -- currently the source of much hand-wringing in Washington -- many of those with the most direct access to the billions of tons of cargo that move through those ports owe their jobs to the mob.
How can that be? It all has to do with the peculiar institution of the union hiring hall. No matter who owns or operates the ports, the union, not the employer, actually assigns workers to jobs. You can't work unless you carry a union card. And on East Coast and Gulf ports, the union card belongs to the International Longshoreman's Association (ILA), one of the most mobbed-up unions in the country.
In July 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against the ILA, which targets the entire 31-member ILA executive council, including the president, secretary-treasurer, executive vice president, general vice president and more than two dozen others.
In a press release accompanying the suit, the Justice Department notes, "For decades the waterfront has been the setting for corruption and violence stemming from organized crime's influence over labor unions operating there, including the ILA and its affiliated locals, as well as port-related businesses. Since the late 1950s, two organized crime families -- the Gambino family and the Genovese family -- have shared control of various ports, with the Gambino family primarily exercising its influence at commercial shipping terminals in Brooklyn and Staten Island, and the Genovese family primarily controlling those in Manhattan, New Jersey and the Port of Miami."
The Justice Department has already won convictions against more than a dozen high-level Gambino and Genovese mobsters who controlled docks on the East Coast and is also seeking convictions of several ILA officials. The government has charged these men with extorting money from waterfront businesses and terminal operators and extorting thousands of dollars from individuals seeking employment on the docks, among other crimes.
And this recent spate of ILA indictments is only the most recent example in the long history of organized crime control over the union. New York University law professor James B. Jacobs describes that history in his new book, "Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement." "Cosa Nostra became the primary power on the New York harbor waterfront in 1937, when Anthony Anastasio . . . took control of the six New York harbor locals," says Jacobs, and it has remained so ever since. In the 1970s, the federal government won convictions of more than 100 mobsters, including 20 ILA officials, among them ILA Vice President Anthony Scotto.
Yet despite this sordid history, few lawmakers who profess concern about port security seem in the slightest bit worried that the ILA's role on the docks may constitute a huge security risk. The ILA contributes millions of dollars each election cycle. In the 2004 election cycle, the ILA's political action committee (PAC) had over $7 million cash on hand to distribute to candidates.
Among the top recipients of ILA PAC money in the last few elections were Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ, Robert Menendez, D-NJ, Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, all of whom represent states with important ports. Some of these same senators are among the chief critics of the Dubai port deal, but they are noticeably silent when it comes to mob influence in the union that actually controls who works on these ports.
Union bosses who would rob their members of pensions and health benefits, extort money to secure jobs on the docks, and use the docks to run gambling, loan sharking and other illegal enterprises could just as easily facilitate terrorists hoping to slip agents or weapons into the country, perhaps unwittingly, for the right price. But few in Washington seem to have considered the risk. The Dubai deal is not the only port issue that deserves more congressional scrutiny; ILA corruption surely deserves a close look as well.
Thanks to Linda Chavez
With all the recent talk about security vulnerabilities at the nation's ports, one subject goes virtually unmentioned. The men who actually control many of the nation's docks, especially on the Eastern seaboard, are in the hip pocket of the Mafia and have been for decades.
Regardless of whether or not a Dubai-owned company manages operations at these ports -- currently the source of much hand-wringing in Washington -- many of those with the most direct access to the billions of tons of cargo that move through those ports owe their jobs to the mob.
How can that be? It all has to do with the peculiar institution of the union hiring hall. No matter who owns or operates the ports, the union, not the employer, actually assigns workers to jobs. You can't work unless you carry a union card. And on East Coast and Gulf ports, the union card belongs to the International Longshoreman's Association (ILA), one of the most mobbed-up unions in the country.
In July 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against the ILA, which targets the entire 31-member ILA executive council, including the president, secretary-treasurer, executive vice president, general vice president and more than two dozen others.
In a press release accompanying the suit, the Justice Department notes, "For decades the waterfront has been the setting for corruption and violence stemming from organized crime's influence over labor unions operating there, including the ILA and its affiliated locals, as well as port-related businesses. Since the late 1950s, two organized crime families -- the Gambino family and the Genovese family -- have shared control of various ports, with the Gambino family primarily exercising its influence at commercial shipping terminals in Brooklyn and Staten Island, and the Genovese family primarily controlling those in Manhattan, New Jersey and the Port of Miami."
The Justice Department has already won convictions against more than a dozen high-level Gambino and Genovese mobsters who controlled docks on the East Coast and is also seeking convictions of several ILA officials. The government has charged these men with extorting money from waterfront businesses and terminal operators and extorting thousands of dollars from individuals seeking employment on the docks, among other crimes.
And this recent spate of ILA indictments is only the most recent example in the long history of organized crime control over the union. New York University law professor James B. Jacobs describes that history in his new book, "Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement." "Cosa Nostra became the primary power on the New York harbor waterfront in 1937, when Anthony Anastasio . . . took control of the six New York harbor locals," says Jacobs, and it has remained so ever since. In the 1970s, the federal government won convictions of more than 100 mobsters, including 20 ILA officials, among them ILA Vice President Anthony Scotto.
Yet despite this sordid history, few lawmakers who profess concern about port security seem in the slightest bit worried that the ILA's role on the docks may constitute a huge security risk. The ILA contributes millions of dollars each election cycle. In the 2004 election cycle, the ILA's political action committee (PAC) had over $7 million cash on hand to distribute to candidates.
Among the top recipients of ILA PAC money in the last few elections were Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ, Robert Menendez, D-NJ, Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, all of whom represent states with important ports. Some of these same senators are among the chief critics of the Dubai port deal, but they are noticeably silent when it comes to mob influence in the union that actually controls who works on these ports.
Union bosses who would rob their members of pensions and health benefits, extort money to secure jobs on the docks, and use the docks to run gambling, loan sharking and other illegal enterprises could just as easily facilitate terrorists hoping to slip agents or weapons into the country, perhaps unwittingly, for the right price. But few in Washington seem to have considered the risk. The Dubai deal is not the only port issue that deserves more congressional scrutiny; ILA corruption surely deserves a close look as well.
Thanks to Linda Chavez
American Metaphor
Bada bing! 'The Sopranos' is back for its sixth and final season. But what does it say about family, about women, about the Italian-American identity? And how did it become the biggest phenomenon on television?
NEARLY two years since its last new episode aired on HBO in June of 2004, the dark, startling, multiaward-winning series The Sopranos will return to cable television this Sunday (March 12, 9pm) for what the show's creator and mainstay, David Chase, says will be its final season of 20 episodes. A dozen will air this spring, with a coda of eight more beginning in January of 2007.
Although getting information on the upcoming season has been almost as difficult as locating bin Laden (though, unlike HBO, at least bin Laden sends out preview tapes), rumors and sources close to the show (I communicated with someone who has seen the opening four episodes) indicate that a major "hit" takes place in the season opener and that bloodshed between one of New York's major five mob families and the rogue northern Jersey-based Sopranos gang flows freely during the new first four installments.
All of the series' major surviving characters are back for the final run—at least at the beginning: the show's lead and center of gravity, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), his enabling wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), his nephew and heir apparent, Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli), Tony's psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), and his aging albeit sly uncle, Corrado "Junior" Soprano (Dominic Chianese).
Tony's two kids are back, too, of course: his ever-blooming daughter, Meadow, (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and his sullen, petulant son, Anthony Jr., or "A.J." (Robert Iler). Their respective passages through adolescence over the past seven years have been truly something to behold—both painful and enchanting at the same time—and their simple biological transformation has added an element of veritas to the show that no story line ever could.
Rounding out la famiglia Soprano, both through blood and by oath, in the final run are Tony's consiglieri Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt), capo Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri (Tony Sirico), the dignified New York crime boss, Johnny "Sack" Sacramoni (Vincent Curatola), now sitting in an orange jumpsuit in the federal pen, and his volatile underling, Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent), filling in for him with a vengeance on the mean streets of the Eastern seaboard.
It takes more than a scorecard to follow the action on the Sopranos (there have been 65 episodes to date over the past five seasons, going back to 1999), and for the newly initiated or just casual observer who wants to get into the swing of things, HBO provides plenty of background information on both character relationships and plotline at HBO.com. And all five seasons are now available in DVD.
Season 5 culminated in a vortex of violence, with Tony whacking his cousin Tony Blundetto (played brilliantly by Steve Buscemi), and Silvio brutally taking out Christopher's girlfriend Adriana (played with equal brilliance by Drea de Matteo in an extremely limiting role), who had been turned over by the feds.
That's not to mention an escalating series of murders between the New York and Jersey families, with Leotardo seeking revenge against Tony. That conflict promises to be central to the new season and at the heart of the show's epilogue. The inside word I got is that Paulie Walnuts and Tony's son, A.J, are at the center of this early drama.
Growing Up Soprano: Tony Soprano, as played by James Gandolfini, combines the fathering genius of Homer Simpson with the insane anger issues of Ralph Kramden. Is this the American father?
The new season begins just about a year after we last saw the family, with Tony escaping the feds and Johnny Sack on his way to prison. Tony and Carmela are apparently reconciled, though the terms of their cease-fire are cloudy at best.
Unlike in past series openings, however, there's not a new antagonist brought in to serve as Tony's season-long foil. The plotline turns inward. There's been plenty of shit left on the table during the first five seasons, and the characters go at each other trying to put it all back neatly in place. Murder becomes the mode de jour for finding order amid the social entropy.
There's also every indication that Chase is taking the show's physical violence—of which there has always been plenty—to astonishing new heights, while at the same time focusing more on the individuality of the show's major characters separate from their respective broods.
I also have learned that the theme of the concluding season is drawn from a prose fragment by the late junkie Beat writer William S. Burroughs, about the Egyptian belief that we have seven souls. A passage from the fragment, set to music, serves as an epigram to the first episode: "Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives ..."
So no one seems to be quite happy with their plight at the beginning of Season 6 (welcome to the new millennium, baby); indeed, everybody in the show—and I do mean everybody—has an acute case of agita, nearly all of whom blame Tony for their fate in la vita.
Except, of course, the anxiety-riddled Tony himself, who blames everyone else. There are rivers of underlying psychological themes to The Sopranos, and three of them are denial, rationalization and projection of responsibility.
I, for one, have never taken the show's often gratuitous violence too seriously; there's a slightly cartoonish quality to it all (and to some of the made guys for that matter, most notably Paulie and Silvio, with the dolled-up hairdos).
I'm sorry, but the talking-fish scene after Tony and his boys bump off longtime pal and confidant "Big" Pussy Bompensiero (played by the much missed Vincent Pastore) in Season 2 took away the edge—and tragic horror—of Pussy's hit. This was dark dramatic comedy at its best.
If The Sopranos gets back to the complexities of its characters in Season 6 rather than focusing on the free-flowing sausa marinella across the screen, it will be all for the better.
After the series gained force in its opening season with its precise focus on character development, particularly around Tony and the complex relationships with the women in his life (most notably his mother, his wife, his shrink and his mistress), it lost its way during the second season by getting sucked into its own stereotypes, only to find its way again, if in bits and spurts, during the last three seasons.
Chase, a Stanford film school grad from the '70s who was raised in an Italian-American family in New Jersey (his family's real name is DeCesare), wrote and directed many of the initial episodes (while, amazingly, executive-producing all the way through) and has continued to guide the writing and the overall arc of the plotline to its conclusion.
Chase admittedly has been captivated by mob movies since his childhood. "The Mob provides an essential set of contradictions in Tony Soprano's character," Chase said in a 2001 interview. "It also gives you the possibility of danger and then hours of non-danger. And it gives you a world that is something allegedly private and secret."
In the end, Chase, like Tony, will be the point guy responsible for the show's concluding triumph or failure.
With such an evaluation in mind, I think that it is fair to claim that no American television show—not even All in the Family in the 1970s—has captured the American consciousness and mind-set for such a sustained period as has The Sopranos. And make no mistake about it, The Sopranos is rooted, and rooted deeply, in television's half-century portrayal of the dysfunctional American family.
Contrary to the perception of most American television critics, who have attributed much of the show's artistic success to its cinematic lineage, there is, in fact, a good deal of The Honeymooners, The Flintstones and, perhaps even more, The Simpsons ingrained in Chase's portrait of the American family than there is of the Godfather trilogy or other great American mob films. It's a soap opera writ large.
Certainly, the character of Tony—so often henpecked and repeatedly challenged by his kids and underlings, while confused and irritated by life's minutiae—resembles Ralph Kramden or Fred Flintstone far more than he does Vito, Sonny or Michael Corleone.
Tony is bumbling, clumsy and, at times, inarticulate. And he kills lots of people. He is the ultimate anti-hero. He makes silly, even stupid, jokes that he laughs at, gets cute with his therapist and even awkwardly tries to seduce her.
He is vulnerable in ways that no mob boss has ever been portrayed in American dramatic film, and it's there, in that vulnerability, that the audience can actually identify with Tony and even like his character, relate to it and embrace it, in ways that we never could with other filmic dons. He is an American everyman—good and evil wrapped into one.
I should confess at this point that I have had conflicted feelings, over the past seven years, toward the show. I was raised, through my mother's side, in a fourth-generation Italian-American fishing family on the West Coast, one with loose connections to crime families in both Chicago and New York (and later Los Angeles and San Francisco) that stretch back to the rum-running days of Prohibition. I grew up knowing how the mob worked and to respect it from a distance.
Even with that background context, I have been offended at times, as have some of my family members, by the ways in which Americans of Italian descent have been portrayed in gangster films in general, dating back to the early '30s (with the likes of Little Caesar and Scarface) on through to the present-day Sopranos.
Celebrated author and cultural critic Camille Paglia recently skewered The Sopranos on these very grounds. "They all act like Joey Buttafuoco. It's a travesty," she declared. "It is a debased characterization of Italians." But as I recently explained to a very close cousin of mine who doesn't watch The Sopranos because of such feelings, one of the reasons I'm attracted to the show is because I miss (and miss desperately at that) so much of the Italian-based culture that is portrayed in the show.
From the food to the music (I love those little dabs of Sinatra and Dean Martin, and even more, Bob Dylan imitating Dean Martin) to Roman Catholic ritual to men publicly embracing each other to the bonds that are demanded in a close-knit family structure—that which constitutes stereotypical Italian-American behavior in so much of cinema and television—is exactly what I loved and cherished during the early decades of my life. And long for so much today.
That said, there can be no doubt that Italianess—that which is perceived to have Italian roots, both good and bad, in American culture—is what attracts so many Americans (along with audiences worldwide) to such depictions. And this is even more true with The Sopranos, where so many of the portrayals are over-the-top.
Italians, in this cultural vernacular, are spontaneous, romantic, sensual, impulsive—all traits that have been suppressed by modern Wonder Bread American culture. To be Italian is liberating, if only vicariously, through the silver screen or, now, the plasma. Italians have yet to be incorporated into cultural sensibilities of "whiteness;" they remain on the margins of the mainstream, ethnic and unassimilated.
That said, I understand why the Italian-American Defamation League has been so strongly critical of The Sopranos, and they are absolutely correct that no such series would ever be allowed to wallow in such vicious and archaic stereotypes against another American ethnic group (save African Americans, of course, who are traditionally depicted as criminals and welfare schleps, including, I should note despicably, in The Sopranos.)
Both the best and worst of these Italian-American depictions take place in a beautiful yet emotionally chilling and artistically disturbing scene at the climax of Season 3, during the wake of Jackie Aprile Jr., (the son of Tony's former boss and the ex-lover of his daughter, Meadow).
Tony's uncle Junior, ever edging toward the outskirts of senility, breaks into a beautiful rendition of the Italian ballad "Curore Ingrata" ("Ungrateful Heart") amid the food and wine and trivial conversation in a corner of the room. He is encouraged by those assembled to embrace center stage, and they break into tears as he continues the song. As did I. But not Meadow, nor her younger sibling and cousins now four-generations removed from immigration and well stirred into the melting pot. They all giggle snidely as an inebriated Meadow, angered by the fate of being a mobster's daughter (though loving the perks) and sensing (accurately) that her father might have had something to do with Jackie's death, begins pelting her great uncle with bread from the table.
When Tony realizes that his daughter is the perpetrator of the assault, he goes to confront her, only to be further disrespected by his daughter, singing the banal words of Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again," her Ivy League pretensions and postures oozing from her smirk. But she knows trouble is coming and she dashes out the door.
This I can tell you. If one my siblings or cousins had ever disrespected an elder of ours like that in such a situation, there would have been a close-fisted response to the males, and an open-handed slap to the females. I can envision no other scenario. But that was two generations ago. Tony follows Meadow to the sidewalk, where she yells at him, "This is such bullshit," and stumbles across the street, nearly getting hit by a car in her escape.
Tony can only watch. Despite his power and his position, his agency is severely limited, and the chasm at that moment between Tony and his daughter, and between Tony and the generation that will succeed him, cannot be bridged.
It is a devastating realization for Tony.
The Feminine Mystique: 'The Sopranos' has often been accused of misogyny, especially in the third season, which featured extreme violence against women, including the rape of a central character.
No small amount of ink has been spilled assessing the portrayal of women in the show. And much of it focused on the first two seasons' relationship between Tony and his cold-hearted and poisonous mother, Livia, played to the freezing point by the late Nancy Marchand.
My family was full of Italian matriarchs, and I was raised by women from the first three generations (my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunts and mother), and I never encountered that level of bitterness or evil in any of them. Nor did I during the time I spent in exile, living in my family's hometown in Italy, where, in a social phenomenon called mamismo, something like 60 percent of the Italian male population live within three miles of their mothers.
As such, Livia's portrayal seemed exceedingly foreign to me, a ravaging exception to my personal experience of the Italian-American matriarchy.
That is not to say I haven't seen such behavior; I have. But to me it was so antithetical to the norm that I found its centrality in The Sopranos' opening two seasons patently offensive: We're talking the deep spaces of the cold storage unit here, beyond where they freeze the pork.
Chase has publicly acknowledged in several interviews that the portrayal of Livia was based on his own mother. "My mother was so downbeat, so relentlessly pessimistic," he noted, "and that, in Livia, all [came] from her."
In the pilot for the series (Episode 1), Tony declares: "My dad was tough, he ran his own crew. A guy like that, ... and my mother wore him down to a little nub. He was a squeakin' gerbil when he died."
Chase was obviously working out some dark family issues with that dialogue.
So be it. The relationship apparently fascinated much of America; it didn't me. In fact, it was one of the early turn-offs to the show.
Of course, in the absence of his mother (Marchand was ill for much of the first two seasons with lung cancer and died after filming the second), Tony's relationship with his wife, Carmela, assumed center stage. Once again, while many writers have viewed the growth and transition of Carmela in feminist terms, I find her character often weak and enabling, and astonishingly hypocritical. Most importantly, unlike Tony, she has little agency of her own.
Carmela, too, visited a shrink, and he told her candidly to leave Tony and his criminal ways. "One thing you can never say," he implored her coldly, "is that you haven't been told."
When she throws Tony out at the end of Season 4, she seems, finally, to be taking her destiny into her own hands. But when push comes to shove—when she has to decide between the material pleasures and safeguards provided by Tony and the mob vs. the unknown of life on her own—she chooses the former, in what is nothing less than a quid pro quid arrangement. If that's liberating, then we're all in trouble. Carmela is the ultimate Material Girl.
And then there is Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played brilliantly by the veteran New York actress Lorraine Bracco, who would seem to be the show's most independent woman. She is bright, intelligent, thoughtful and sensitive, but when it comes to Tony, she is duplicitous about her own attractions to him and, ultimately, cannot let him go as a patient.
She wears short skirts that she's constantly tugging at during her sessions with Tony, showing off her legs in a manner cinematically reminiscent of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct or Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. At a base level, Melfi understands the power and attraction of Tony's life in the mob, and she is drawn to it like a moth to a flame.
I know many women who like The Sopranos—my wife included—but come a long way, baby, we have not.
In an interesting essay for Salon titled "Is The Sopranos a Chick Show?", Rebecca Traister conceded the show's feminist and "empowering" limitations, but pointed out that many of the issues addressed in the show, most often through Carmela, are those avoided by popular drama: "the trade-offs between fidelity and cold cash, Catholic guilt over divorce, stifled professional and sexual desires, a biting jealousy that threatens to overtake her happiness for her daughter on the brink of a much happier life than she will ever know."
That's all true. And The Sopranos has dealt with these and other issues of modern-day family life on an exceptionally high and rigorously nuanced plane. The series is, in Traister's words, "engrossing, and confusing, and genuine." With that I concur.
Yet when Carmela confronts Tony on his continuing indiscretions, Tony sends back a zinger that has no answers; it pierces the facade of the unstated trade-off in their marriage: "Yeah, 'cause what you really want is a little Hyundai and a simple gold heart on the chain."
It's the most devastating hit he delivers in the entire series.
In the end, portrayals of violence, family, organized crime, Italian-Americans, New Age parenting, the educational system, navigating adolescence, designer drugs, gender roles, Xanax and Prozac, et al., are not what ultimately captivates us about The Sopranos. They are all wrapped up under the larger rubric of American culture—and the American polity—as we stagger into the New Millennium.
Chase's vision is on a scale that is grand and epic. He is casting about for the American character, the American way of life, on a level comparable to that of Alexis de Tocqueville in his marvelous 19th-century study, Democracy in America. The Sopranos is as big as that.
It's a long way from the Jersey Shore to San Jose, but there are many ways in which The Sopranos resonates with the boom-and-bust years of the Silicon Valley economy. And local politics as well.
I couldn't help but think of Tony—who lines the pockets of politicians up and down the Jersey shore—when the whole garbage deal scandal oozed out of City Hall last year. Remember, Tony's listed occupation is as a "waste management consultant." But it goes farther than that. Virtually every character in The Sopranos is after the quick and easy buck. Everyone wants to be a millionaire, but no one wants to put in the time. Even Tony's newly emigrated Russian housekeeper steals from him—cutlery and gourmet capers from the pantry. "They have so much," she rationalizes.
The Sopranos is about greed and avarice and materialism and gluttony and unbridled ambition, all with no moral compass but the id. The Enron and Savings & Loan scandals and the hit on the World Trade Center and the war in Iraq are all backdrop plots to The Sopranos.
The Sopranos is about the American Dream turned inside out. And, of course, that's what did in the real Mafia. During the 1950s and '60s, the major mob families moved into drugs, particularly heroin, with their high profit margins and low overhead, and when busted, the lower end mobsters chose to squeal rather than doing the 10 to 15 years that came with a federal drug rap. And squeal they did, to the point where the Five Families of New York and the unsanctioned gangs of New Jersey have been essentially decimated.
The Sopranos are loosely based on a couple of Northern Jersey families, the DeCalvacantes and the Boiardos. They are not unknown to me. During the initial season of The Sopranos, in 1999, the feds actually wiretapped the real mobsters speaking about the TV show.
"Hey, what's this fucking thing Sopranos?," one of them asks. "What are they? ... Is this supposed to be us?"
In the end, the DeValcantes and the Boiardos and what was left of the families who weren't dead or in prison were left to petty crimes, like hustling cigarettes and running Viagra and or turning out fake "vintage" comic books. It has not been a pretty, or particularly fabled, denouement.
"Lately, I'm gettin' the feelin' that I came in at the end," Tony lamented in Season 1 about this era of mob history. "The best is over."
We'll see if the same holds true about the remarkable television series that bears his family's name.
Thanks to Geoffrey Dunn
NEARLY two years since its last new episode aired on HBO in June of 2004, the dark, startling, multiaward-winning series The Sopranos will return to cable television this Sunday (March 12, 9pm) for what the show's creator and mainstay, David Chase, says will be its final season of 20 episodes. A dozen will air this spring, with a coda of eight more beginning in January of 2007.
Although getting information on the upcoming season has been almost as difficult as locating bin Laden (though, unlike HBO, at least bin Laden sends out preview tapes), rumors and sources close to the show (I communicated with someone who has seen the opening four episodes) indicate that a major "hit" takes place in the season opener and that bloodshed between one of New York's major five mob families and the rogue northern Jersey-based Sopranos gang flows freely during the new first four installments.
All of the series' major surviving characters are back for the final run—at least at the beginning: the show's lead and center of gravity, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), his enabling wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), his nephew and heir apparent, Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli), Tony's psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), and his aging albeit sly uncle, Corrado "Junior" Soprano (Dominic Chianese).
Tony's two kids are back, too, of course: his ever-blooming daughter, Meadow, (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and his sullen, petulant son, Anthony Jr., or "A.J." (Robert Iler). Their respective passages through adolescence over the past seven years have been truly something to behold—both painful and enchanting at the same time—and their simple biological transformation has added an element of veritas to the show that no story line ever could.
Rounding out la famiglia Soprano, both through blood and by oath, in the final run are Tony's consiglieri Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt), capo Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri (Tony Sirico), the dignified New York crime boss, Johnny "Sack" Sacramoni (Vincent Curatola), now sitting in an orange jumpsuit in the federal pen, and his volatile underling, Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent), filling in for him with a vengeance on the mean streets of the Eastern seaboard.
It takes more than a scorecard to follow the action on the Sopranos (there have been 65 episodes to date over the past five seasons, going back to 1999), and for the newly initiated or just casual observer who wants to get into the swing of things, HBO provides plenty of background information on both character relationships and plotline at HBO.com. And all five seasons are now available in DVD.
Season 5 culminated in a vortex of violence, with Tony whacking his cousin Tony Blundetto (played brilliantly by Steve Buscemi), and Silvio brutally taking out Christopher's girlfriend Adriana (played with equal brilliance by Drea de Matteo in an extremely limiting role), who had been turned over by the feds.
That's not to mention an escalating series of murders between the New York and Jersey families, with Leotardo seeking revenge against Tony. That conflict promises to be central to the new season and at the heart of the show's epilogue. The inside word I got is that Paulie Walnuts and Tony's son, A.J, are at the center of this early drama.
Growing Up Soprano: Tony Soprano, as played by James Gandolfini, combines the fathering genius of Homer Simpson with the insane anger issues of Ralph Kramden. Is this the American father?
The new season begins just about a year after we last saw the family, with Tony escaping the feds and Johnny Sack on his way to prison. Tony and Carmela are apparently reconciled, though the terms of their cease-fire are cloudy at best.
Unlike in past series openings, however, there's not a new antagonist brought in to serve as Tony's season-long foil. The plotline turns inward. There's been plenty of shit left on the table during the first five seasons, and the characters go at each other trying to put it all back neatly in place. Murder becomes the mode de jour for finding order amid the social entropy.
There's also every indication that Chase is taking the show's physical violence—of which there has always been plenty—to astonishing new heights, while at the same time focusing more on the individuality of the show's major characters separate from their respective broods.
I also have learned that the theme of the concluding season is drawn from a prose fragment by the late junkie Beat writer William S. Burroughs, about the Egyptian belief that we have seven souls. A passage from the fragment, set to music, serves as an epigram to the first episode: "Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives ..."
So no one seems to be quite happy with their plight at the beginning of Season 6 (welcome to the new millennium, baby); indeed, everybody in the show—and I do mean everybody—has an acute case of agita, nearly all of whom blame Tony for their fate in la vita.
Except, of course, the anxiety-riddled Tony himself, who blames everyone else. There are rivers of underlying psychological themes to The Sopranos, and three of them are denial, rationalization and projection of responsibility.
I, for one, have never taken the show's often gratuitous violence too seriously; there's a slightly cartoonish quality to it all (and to some of the made guys for that matter, most notably Paulie and Silvio, with the dolled-up hairdos).
I'm sorry, but the talking-fish scene after Tony and his boys bump off longtime pal and confidant "Big" Pussy Bompensiero (played by the much missed Vincent Pastore) in Season 2 took away the edge—and tragic horror—of Pussy's hit. This was dark dramatic comedy at its best.
If The Sopranos gets back to the complexities of its characters in Season 6 rather than focusing on the free-flowing sausa marinella across the screen, it will be all for the better.
After the series gained force in its opening season with its precise focus on character development, particularly around Tony and the complex relationships with the women in his life (most notably his mother, his wife, his shrink and his mistress), it lost its way during the second season by getting sucked into its own stereotypes, only to find its way again, if in bits and spurts, during the last three seasons.
Chase, a Stanford film school grad from the '70s who was raised in an Italian-American family in New Jersey (his family's real name is DeCesare), wrote and directed many of the initial episodes (while, amazingly, executive-producing all the way through) and has continued to guide the writing and the overall arc of the plotline to its conclusion.
Chase admittedly has been captivated by mob movies since his childhood. "The Mob provides an essential set of contradictions in Tony Soprano's character," Chase said in a 2001 interview. "It also gives you the possibility of danger and then hours of non-danger. And it gives you a world that is something allegedly private and secret."
In the end, Chase, like Tony, will be the point guy responsible for the show's concluding triumph or failure.
With such an evaluation in mind, I think that it is fair to claim that no American television show—not even All in the Family in the 1970s—has captured the American consciousness and mind-set for such a sustained period as has The Sopranos. And make no mistake about it, The Sopranos is rooted, and rooted deeply, in television's half-century portrayal of the dysfunctional American family.
Contrary to the perception of most American television critics, who have attributed much of the show's artistic success to its cinematic lineage, there is, in fact, a good deal of The Honeymooners, The Flintstones and, perhaps even more, The Simpsons ingrained in Chase's portrait of the American family than there is of the Godfather trilogy or other great American mob films. It's a soap opera writ large.
Certainly, the character of Tony—so often henpecked and repeatedly challenged by his kids and underlings, while confused and irritated by life's minutiae—resembles Ralph Kramden or Fred Flintstone far more than he does Vito, Sonny or Michael Corleone.
Tony is bumbling, clumsy and, at times, inarticulate. And he kills lots of people. He is the ultimate anti-hero. He makes silly, even stupid, jokes that he laughs at, gets cute with his therapist and even awkwardly tries to seduce her.
He is vulnerable in ways that no mob boss has ever been portrayed in American dramatic film, and it's there, in that vulnerability, that the audience can actually identify with Tony and even like his character, relate to it and embrace it, in ways that we never could with other filmic dons. He is an American everyman—good and evil wrapped into one.
I should confess at this point that I have had conflicted feelings, over the past seven years, toward the show. I was raised, through my mother's side, in a fourth-generation Italian-American fishing family on the West Coast, one with loose connections to crime families in both Chicago and New York (and later Los Angeles and San Francisco) that stretch back to the rum-running days of Prohibition. I grew up knowing how the mob worked and to respect it from a distance.
Even with that background context, I have been offended at times, as have some of my family members, by the ways in which Americans of Italian descent have been portrayed in gangster films in general, dating back to the early '30s (with the likes of Little Caesar and Scarface) on through to the present-day Sopranos.
Celebrated author and cultural critic Camille Paglia recently skewered The Sopranos on these very grounds. "They all act like Joey Buttafuoco. It's a travesty," she declared. "It is a debased characterization of Italians." But as I recently explained to a very close cousin of mine who doesn't watch The Sopranos because of such feelings, one of the reasons I'm attracted to the show is because I miss (and miss desperately at that) so much of the Italian-based culture that is portrayed in the show.
From the food to the music (I love those little dabs of Sinatra and Dean Martin, and even more, Bob Dylan imitating Dean Martin) to Roman Catholic ritual to men publicly embracing each other to the bonds that are demanded in a close-knit family structure—that which constitutes stereotypical Italian-American behavior in so much of cinema and television—is exactly what I loved and cherished during the early decades of my life. And long for so much today.
That said, there can be no doubt that Italianess—that which is perceived to have Italian roots, both good and bad, in American culture—is what attracts so many Americans (along with audiences worldwide) to such depictions. And this is even more true with The Sopranos, where so many of the portrayals are over-the-top.
Italians, in this cultural vernacular, are spontaneous, romantic, sensual, impulsive—all traits that have been suppressed by modern Wonder Bread American culture. To be Italian is liberating, if only vicariously, through the silver screen or, now, the plasma. Italians have yet to be incorporated into cultural sensibilities of "whiteness;" they remain on the margins of the mainstream, ethnic and unassimilated.
That said, I understand why the Italian-American Defamation League has been so strongly critical of The Sopranos, and they are absolutely correct that no such series would ever be allowed to wallow in such vicious and archaic stereotypes against another American ethnic group (save African Americans, of course, who are traditionally depicted as criminals and welfare schleps, including, I should note despicably, in The Sopranos.)
Both the best and worst of these Italian-American depictions take place in a beautiful yet emotionally chilling and artistically disturbing scene at the climax of Season 3, during the wake of Jackie Aprile Jr., (the son of Tony's former boss and the ex-lover of his daughter, Meadow).
Tony's uncle Junior, ever edging toward the outskirts of senility, breaks into a beautiful rendition of the Italian ballad "Curore Ingrata" ("Ungrateful Heart") amid the food and wine and trivial conversation in a corner of the room. He is encouraged by those assembled to embrace center stage, and they break into tears as he continues the song. As did I. But not Meadow, nor her younger sibling and cousins now four-generations removed from immigration and well stirred into the melting pot. They all giggle snidely as an inebriated Meadow, angered by the fate of being a mobster's daughter (though loving the perks) and sensing (accurately) that her father might have had something to do with Jackie's death, begins pelting her great uncle with bread from the table.
When Tony realizes that his daughter is the perpetrator of the assault, he goes to confront her, only to be further disrespected by his daughter, singing the banal words of Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again," her Ivy League pretensions and postures oozing from her smirk. But she knows trouble is coming and she dashes out the door.
This I can tell you. If one my siblings or cousins had ever disrespected an elder of ours like that in such a situation, there would have been a close-fisted response to the males, and an open-handed slap to the females. I can envision no other scenario. But that was two generations ago. Tony follows Meadow to the sidewalk, where she yells at him, "This is such bullshit," and stumbles across the street, nearly getting hit by a car in her escape.
Tony can only watch. Despite his power and his position, his agency is severely limited, and the chasm at that moment between Tony and his daughter, and between Tony and the generation that will succeed him, cannot be bridged.
It is a devastating realization for Tony.
The Feminine Mystique: 'The Sopranos' has often been accused of misogyny, especially in the third season, which featured extreme violence against women, including the rape of a central character.
No small amount of ink has been spilled assessing the portrayal of women in the show. And much of it focused on the first two seasons' relationship between Tony and his cold-hearted and poisonous mother, Livia, played to the freezing point by the late Nancy Marchand.
My family was full of Italian matriarchs, and I was raised by women from the first three generations (my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunts and mother), and I never encountered that level of bitterness or evil in any of them. Nor did I during the time I spent in exile, living in my family's hometown in Italy, where, in a social phenomenon called mamismo, something like 60 percent of the Italian male population live within three miles of their mothers.
As such, Livia's portrayal seemed exceedingly foreign to me, a ravaging exception to my personal experience of the Italian-American matriarchy.
That is not to say I haven't seen such behavior; I have. But to me it was so antithetical to the norm that I found its centrality in The Sopranos' opening two seasons patently offensive: We're talking the deep spaces of the cold storage unit here, beyond where they freeze the pork.
Chase has publicly acknowledged in several interviews that the portrayal of Livia was based on his own mother. "My mother was so downbeat, so relentlessly pessimistic," he noted, "and that, in Livia, all [came] from her."
In the pilot for the series (Episode 1), Tony declares: "My dad was tough, he ran his own crew. A guy like that, ... and my mother wore him down to a little nub. He was a squeakin' gerbil when he died."
Chase was obviously working out some dark family issues with that dialogue.
So be it. The relationship apparently fascinated much of America; it didn't me. In fact, it was one of the early turn-offs to the show.
Of course, in the absence of his mother (Marchand was ill for much of the first two seasons with lung cancer and died after filming the second), Tony's relationship with his wife, Carmela, assumed center stage. Once again, while many writers have viewed the growth and transition of Carmela in feminist terms, I find her character often weak and enabling, and astonishingly hypocritical. Most importantly, unlike Tony, she has little agency of her own.
Carmela, too, visited a shrink, and he told her candidly to leave Tony and his criminal ways. "One thing you can never say," he implored her coldly, "is that you haven't been told."
When she throws Tony out at the end of Season 4, she seems, finally, to be taking her destiny into her own hands. But when push comes to shove—when she has to decide between the material pleasures and safeguards provided by Tony and the mob vs. the unknown of life on her own—she chooses the former, in what is nothing less than a quid pro quid arrangement. If that's liberating, then we're all in trouble. Carmela is the ultimate Material Girl.
And then there is Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played brilliantly by the veteran New York actress Lorraine Bracco, who would seem to be the show's most independent woman. She is bright, intelligent, thoughtful and sensitive, but when it comes to Tony, she is duplicitous about her own attractions to him and, ultimately, cannot let him go as a patient.
She wears short skirts that she's constantly tugging at during her sessions with Tony, showing off her legs in a manner cinematically reminiscent of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct or Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. At a base level, Melfi understands the power and attraction of Tony's life in the mob, and she is drawn to it like a moth to a flame.
I know many women who like The Sopranos—my wife included—but come a long way, baby, we have not.
In an interesting essay for Salon titled "Is The Sopranos a Chick Show?", Rebecca Traister conceded the show's feminist and "empowering" limitations, but pointed out that many of the issues addressed in the show, most often through Carmela, are those avoided by popular drama: "the trade-offs between fidelity and cold cash, Catholic guilt over divorce, stifled professional and sexual desires, a biting jealousy that threatens to overtake her happiness for her daughter on the brink of a much happier life than she will ever know."
That's all true. And The Sopranos has dealt with these and other issues of modern-day family life on an exceptionally high and rigorously nuanced plane. The series is, in Traister's words, "engrossing, and confusing, and genuine." With that I concur.
Yet when Carmela confronts Tony on his continuing indiscretions, Tony sends back a zinger that has no answers; it pierces the facade of the unstated trade-off in their marriage: "Yeah, 'cause what you really want is a little Hyundai and a simple gold heart on the chain."
It's the most devastating hit he delivers in the entire series.
In the end, portrayals of violence, family, organized crime, Italian-Americans, New Age parenting, the educational system, navigating adolescence, designer drugs, gender roles, Xanax and Prozac, et al., are not what ultimately captivates us about The Sopranos. They are all wrapped up under the larger rubric of American culture—and the American polity—as we stagger into the New Millennium.
Chase's vision is on a scale that is grand and epic. He is casting about for the American character, the American way of life, on a level comparable to that of Alexis de Tocqueville in his marvelous 19th-century study, Democracy in America. The Sopranos is as big as that.
It's a long way from the Jersey Shore to San Jose, but there are many ways in which The Sopranos resonates with the boom-and-bust years of the Silicon Valley economy. And local politics as well.
I couldn't help but think of Tony—who lines the pockets of politicians up and down the Jersey shore—when the whole garbage deal scandal oozed out of City Hall last year. Remember, Tony's listed occupation is as a "waste management consultant." But it goes farther than that. Virtually every character in The Sopranos is after the quick and easy buck. Everyone wants to be a millionaire, but no one wants to put in the time. Even Tony's newly emigrated Russian housekeeper steals from him—cutlery and gourmet capers from the pantry. "They have so much," she rationalizes.
The Sopranos is about greed and avarice and materialism and gluttony and unbridled ambition, all with no moral compass but the id. The Enron and Savings & Loan scandals and the hit on the World Trade Center and the war in Iraq are all backdrop plots to The Sopranos.
The Sopranos is about the American Dream turned inside out. And, of course, that's what did in the real Mafia. During the 1950s and '60s, the major mob families moved into drugs, particularly heroin, with their high profit margins and low overhead, and when busted, the lower end mobsters chose to squeal rather than doing the 10 to 15 years that came with a federal drug rap. And squeal they did, to the point where the Five Families of New York and the unsanctioned gangs of New Jersey have been essentially decimated.
The Sopranos are loosely based on a couple of Northern Jersey families, the DeCalvacantes and the Boiardos. They are not unknown to me. During the initial season of The Sopranos, in 1999, the feds actually wiretapped the real mobsters speaking about the TV show.
"Hey, what's this fucking thing Sopranos?," one of them asks. "What are they? ... Is this supposed to be us?"
In the end, the DeValcantes and the Boiardos and what was left of the families who weren't dead or in prison were left to petty crimes, like hustling cigarettes and running Viagra and or turning out fake "vintage" comic books. It has not been a pretty, or particularly fabled, denouement.
"Lately, I'm gettin' the feelin' that I came in at the end," Tony lamented in Season 1 about this era of mob history. "The best is over."
We'll see if the same holds true about the remarkable television series that bears his family's name.
Thanks to Geoffrey Dunn
Glen Ellyn man nabbed in FBI gambling bust
Friends of ours: Dominic Corrado, Peter Tocco, Jack Tocco
The ABC7 I-Team has learned that more than 100 FBI agents in Michigan and Illinois have busted a major organized crime gambling ring. The operation was headquartered in Detroit, but one of the 15 men charged lives in west suburban Glen Ellyn.
It is no coincidence that the feds have busted this mob sports betting business just as we head into the March madness of college basketball. Organized crime intelligence has long held that this is one of the most frenzied wagering periods of the year. But this operation has intrigued mob watchers. It was run by the Detroit mafia, but Dominic Corrado, one of the accused enforcers, lives within the boundaries of the Chicago outfit.
The 35-year-old Dominic Corrado lives on a pleasant street in the village of Glen Ellyn. Friday morning, FBI agents used the pre-dawn element of surprise, rousting Corrado from him from his sleep. "One of the things we also have to take into account is the potential for violence, the potential for fleeing," said Dan Roberts, Detroit FBI.
Corrado is one of 15 people charged in this indictment with operating an illegal sports betting business. Several of these arrestees are close relatives of notorious Detroit mafia leaders, hoodlums named Giacolone, Messina and Tocco.
Investigators say, even though Corrado lives in Glen Ellyn, his bloodline traces to several Detroit crime syndicate bosses the past 75 years, including relatives nicknamed Fats, Sparky and The Enforcer.
In this indictment, the current Corrado is accused of being an enforcer, prying payment from losing gamblers. "Various individuals owed money and would be told they had to pay. References were made to threats of violence," said Stephen Murphy, US attorney in Detroit.
Federal agents say that Corrado and the others charged laundered sports betting proceeds through this Detroit auto auction by buying and selling used cars. They allege that Peter Dominic Tocco worked with Corrado in the racketeering venture and that Tocco directed Corrado to muscle money from busted out gamblers. "We're talking about substantial amounts of money," said Murphy.
Tens of millions of dollars over several years, according to federal agents, who say that Corrado stood in front of a federal magistrate at the Dirksen Courthouse Monday and is now free on an unsecured bond. His next court appearance will be in Detroit.
Federal sources say much of their evidence against Corrado and the others was obtained during court-authorized wiretaps on telephone calls.
The I-Team left a message at Corrado's suburban Chicago home Monday afternoon but he has not responded. His alleged counterpart in the gambling operation, Peter D. Tocco, is the nephew of convicted Detroit mob boss Jack Tocco, and mobologists say the Tocco and Corrado families have long, rich histories in Detroit.
Thanks to Chuck Goudie
The ABC7 I-Team has learned that more than 100 FBI agents in Michigan and Illinois have busted a major organized crime gambling ring. The operation was headquartered in Detroit, but one of the 15 men charged lives in west suburban Glen Ellyn.
It is no coincidence that the feds have busted this mob sports betting business just as we head into the March madness of college basketball. Organized crime intelligence has long held that this is one of the most frenzied wagering periods of the year. But this operation has intrigued mob watchers. It was run by the Detroit mafia, but Dominic Corrado, one of the accused enforcers, lives within the boundaries of the Chicago outfit.
The 35-year-old Dominic Corrado lives on a pleasant street in the village of Glen Ellyn. Friday morning, FBI agents used the pre-dawn element of surprise, rousting Corrado from him from his sleep. "One of the things we also have to take into account is the potential for violence, the potential for fleeing," said Dan Roberts, Detroit FBI.
Corrado is one of 15 people charged in this indictment with operating an illegal sports betting business. Several of these arrestees are close relatives of notorious Detroit mafia leaders, hoodlums named Giacolone, Messina and Tocco.
Investigators say, even though Corrado lives in Glen Ellyn, his bloodline traces to several Detroit crime syndicate bosses the past 75 years, including relatives nicknamed Fats, Sparky and The Enforcer.
In this indictment, the current Corrado is accused of being an enforcer, prying payment from losing gamblers. "Various individuals owed money and would be told they had to pay. References were made to threats of violence," said Stephen Murphy, US attorney in Detroit.
Federal agents say that Corrado and the others charged laundered sports betting proceeds through this Detroit auto auction by buying and selling used cars. They allege that Peter Dominic Tocco worked with Corrado in the racketeering venture and that Tocco directed Corrado to muscle money from busted out gamblers. "We're talking about substantial amounts of money," said Murphy.
Tens of millions of dollars over several years, according to federal agents, who say that Corrado stood in front of a federal magistrate at the Dirksen Courthouse Monday and is now free on an unsecured bond. His next court appearance will be in Detroit.
Federal sources say much of their evidence against Corrado and the others was obtained during court-authorized wiretaps on telephone calls.
The I-Team left a message at Corrado's suburban Chicago home Monday afternoon but he has not responded. His alleged counterpart in the gambling operation, Peter D. Tocco, is the nephew of convicted Detroit mob boss Jack Tocco, and mobologists say the Tocco and Corrado families have long, rich histories in Detroit.
Thanks to Chuck Goudie
"Iceman" Dies
Friends of ours: Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski
Richard Kuklinski, a notorious Mafia hitman known as "The Iceman" who claimed to have killed more than 100 people and was the subject of several books and two cable television documentaries, has died.
He was 70. He died Sunday at St. Francis Hospital in Trenton, Corrections spokeswoman Deirdre Fedkenheuer said Monday. She did not disclose the cause of death, but said it was not suspicious. Kuklinski was serving life prison sentences at New Jersey State Prison for two murders.
He claimed to have been a killer-for-hire for the mob. Just five years ago, he confessed to two murders on an HBO special, "The Iceman Confesses: Secrets of a Mafia Hit Man." Kuklinski earned the nickname "The Iceman" because he kept some victims' bodies in a North Bergen freezer.
Richard Kuklinski, a notorious Mafia hitman known as "The Iceman" who claimed to have killed more than 100 people and was the subject of several books and two cable television documentaries, has died.
He claimed to have been a killer-for-hire for the mob. Just five years ago, he confessed to two murders on an HBO special, "The Iceman Confesses: Secrets of a Mafia Hit Man." Kuklinski earned the nickname "The Iceman" because he kept some victims' bodies in a North Bergen freezer.
Friday, March 10, 2006
2nd Mistrial for Junior Gotti
Friends of ours: Junior Gotti, Gambino Crime Family
A judge declared a mistrial in the case of alleged Mafia boss John "Junior" Gotti on Friday, the second time in six months jurors were unable to reach a verdict on racketeering and other charges against him.
Prosecutors immediately said they would seek a third trial for Gotti, whose late father was one of New York's most notorious crime bosses. A judge was due to set a date for a third trial on Monday, indicating the charges would not be dropped.
Gotti, whose defense focused on the claim that he had given up mob life, hugged his lawyers upon hearing of the mistrial and left the courthouse surrounded by a gaggle of reporters. "I want to raise my children," he said. "That's all I wanted in life."
Gotti, 42, was accused of leading the Gambino crime family, extorting construction companies, loan-sharking and ordering a brutal attack on Curtis Sliwa, the founder of New York's Guardian Angels anti-crime patrol, because of his critical comments about the Gotti family on his radio show.
A federal judge dismissed the jury because it failed to reach a verdict after deliberating since Wednesday. A previous trial also resulted in a deadlocked jury, forcing the retrial.
The second trial revealed new details of Gotti's love life and accounts of bloody shootings and secret mob codes, as well as rekindling New York's obsession with Mafia trials and Gotti's infamous father.
Prosecutors had accused Gotti of becoming the street boss of the Gambino crime family, one of New York's "five families," after his father, John "The Dapper Don" Gotti, went to prison in 1992, where he died 10 years later.
Gotti's lawyers said he withdrew from the Mafia upon pleading guilty to separate racketeering charges in 1999. They argued that excerpts they played from a videotape of a 1999 prison conversation between Gotti and his father proved the younger Gotti wanted to leave the mob.
A few months later Gotti pleaded guilty to separate racketeering charges and spent five years in jail. He was indicted on the latest charges just before he was due to be released from prison.
Gotti remained in jail throughout the previous trial but was freed on bail following the last mistrial.
A judge declared a mistrial in the case of alleged Mafia boss John "Junior" Gotti on Friday, the second time in six months jurors were unable to reach a verdict on racketeering and other charges against him.
Prosecutors immediately said they would seek a third trial for Gotti, whose late father was one of New York's most notorious crime bosses. A judge was due to set a date for a third trial on Monday, indicating the charges would not be dropped.
Gotti, whose defense focused on the claim that he had given up mob life, hugged his lawyers upon hearing of the mistrial and left the courthouse surrounded by a gaggle of reporters. "I want to raise my children," he said. "That's all I wanted in life."
Gotti, 42, was accused of leading the Gambino crime family, extorting construction companies, loan-sharking and ordering a brutal attack on Curtis Sliwa, the founder of New York's Guardian Angels anti-crime patrol, because of his critical comments about the Gotti family on his radio show.
A federal judge dismissed the jury because it failed to reach a verdict after deliberating since Wednesday. A previous trial also resulted in a deadlocked jury, forcing the retrial.
The second trial revealed new details of Gotti's love life and accounts of bloody shootings and secret mob codes, as well as rekindling New York's obsession with Mafia trials and Gotti's infamous father.
Prosecutors had accused Gotti of becoming the street boss of the Gambino crime family, one of New York's "five families," after his father, John "The Dapper Don" Gotti, went to prison in 1992, where he died 10 years later.
Gotti's lawyers said he withdrew from the Mafia upon pleading guilty to separate racketeering charges in 1999. They argued that excerpts they played from a videotape of a 1999 prison conversation between Gotti and his father proved the younger Gotti wanted to leave the mob.
A few months later Gotti pleaded guilty to separate racketeering charges and spent five years in jail. He was indicted on the latest charges just before he was due to be released from prison.
Gotti remained in jail throughout the previous trial but was freed on bail following the last mistrial.
Trial Begins of NY Cops Charged as Mafia Hit Men
Friends of ours: Luchese Crime Family, Gambino Crime Family, John Gotti
Friends of mine: Stephen Caracappa, Louis Eppolito
Jury selection began on Monday in the federal trial of two former New York detectives accused of having been hit men for the mob in a case the judge predicts will captivate the jurors.
Defendants Stephen Caracappa, 64, and Louis Eppolito, 57, were charged early last year with secretly working for the Luchese crime family while employed as police officers and involvement in 11 murders or attempted murders.
The charges, which also include kidnapping and other crimes, set the stage for a colorful and closely watched trial. Both defendants had served on the force more than 20 years.
Brooklyn U.S. District Court Judge Jack Weinstein set opening arguments for March 13 and assured hundreds of potential jurors assembled in his courtroom the case "will be one of the most interesting experiences of your life." Twelve jurors and six alternates will be selected.
When Eppolito showed up in court 75 minutes late, Weinstein ordered that he be rearrested and that his $5 million bail be revoked until a good explanation was provided.
Weinstein, an 85-year-old former Columbia Law School professor known for toughness, set Eppolito free again after defense lawyer Bruce Cutler explained that his client had been seriously delayed by a "trailer accident" on the highway.
In the courtroom, the tall and overweight defendant seemed at ease, embracing Cutler and trading smiles and pleasantries with Caracappa and his co-defendant's high-profile lawyer, Edward Hayes.
Cutler, best known for his successful defense of the late Gambino crime family boss John Gotti in several trials, said it will be tougher to defend Eppolito because federal prosecutors plan to have at least four Mafia informants and turncoats testify against him. "The federal government is making sweetheart deals with all kinds of people -- including (crime family) acting bosses -- that will say what the government wants to hear," Cutler said in a telephone interview.
After retiring, Eppolito played a bit role as "Fat Andy" in the mob movie "Goodfellas" and played character roles in several other Hollywood productions.
Thanks to Ransdell Pierson
Friends of mine: Stephen Caracappa, Louis Eppolito
Jury selection began on Monday in the federal trial of two former New York detectives accused of having been hit men for the mob in a case the judge predicts will captivate the jurors.
Defendants Stephen Caracappa, 64, and Louis Eppolito, 57, were charged early last year with secretly working for the Luchese crime family while employed as police officers and involvement in 11 murders or attempted murders.
The charges, which also include kidnapping and other crimes, set the stage for a colorful and closely watched trial. Both defendants had served on the force more than 20 years.
Brooklyn U.S. District Court Judge Jack Weinstein set opening arguments for March 13 and assured hundreds of potential jurors assembled in his courtroom the case "will be one of the most interesting experiences of your life." Twelve jurors and six alternates will be selected.
When Eppolito showed up in court 75 minutes late, Weinstein ordered that he be rearrested and that his $5 million bail be revoked until a good explanation was provided.
Weinstein, an 85-year-old former Columbia Law School professor known for toughness, set Eppolito free again after defense lawyer Bruce Cutler explained that his client had been seriously delayed by a "trailer accident" on the highway.
In the courtroom, the tall and overweight defendant seemed at ease, embracing Cutler and trading smiles and pleasantries with Caracappa and his co-defendant's high-profile lawyer, Edward Hayes.
Cutler, best known for his successful defense of the late Gambino crime family boss John Gotti in several trials, said it will be tougher to defend Eppolito because federal prosecutors plan to have at least four Mafia informants and turncoats testify against him. "The federal government is making sweetheart deals with all kinds of people -- including (crime family) acting bosses -- that will say what the government wants to hear," Cutler said in a telephone interview.
After retiring, Eppolito played a bit role as "Fat Andy" in the mob movie "Goodfellas" and played character roles in several other Hollywood productions.
Thanks to Ransdell Pierson
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Long Before the Mafia, There Was the Irish Mob - PADDY WHACKED on The History Channel
Once called the "National Scourge," "The Shame of the Cities" and "The White Man's Burden," the Irish Mob rose from hellish beginnings to establish itself as the first crime syndicate in the United States. From "Old Smoke" Morrissey to "Whitey" Bulger, a parade of characters used ruthlessness, guile, and the diabolical power trio of "Gangster, Politician, and Lawman" to rise to power in the underworld. Their 150-year legacy of corruption is chronicled in the new special from The History Channel, PADDY WHACKED, a world premiere Friday, March 17 at 8 pm ET/PT on The History Channel.
After the devastating mid 19th century potato famine killed nearly a third of Ireland's population, the Irish looked across the ocean to America for salvation and opportunity. They arrived in New York City in droves, starving, destitute, determined ... and loathed by native New Yorkers. Gang wars soon enveloped the streets, and from the chaos rose the first mob boss, James "Old Smoke" Morrissey, as proprietor of gambling joints, saloons, and whore houses who aligned himself with the corrupt power corridors of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed. Soon, the Irish carried the dubious distinction of dominating the lower rungs of the immigrant ladder. For the next century-and-a-half, they rose and found power and glory in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Hollywood, before being done in by Italian foes, infighting, and eventually the law. PADDY WHACKED is the story of a long rise to power and a violent and bloody collapse, with a steady drumbeat of unforgettable characters along the way.
Highlights of PADDY WHACKED include:
* Re-creations of the early New York City gang wars made famous in
Martin Scorsese's film Gangs of New York.
* "King" Mike McDonald's efforts to establish the Irish Mob in Chicago,
under the philosophy of "There's a sucker born every minute" and
"Never steal anything big, the small stuff is safer," and the
portrayal of the mobster as "the man behind the man."
* The rise of bootlegging as a primary source of income for the Irish
Mob during Prohibition, an effort led by Dean O'Banion in Chicago and
Owney Madden in New York.
* The first glorification of the Irish mobster in Hollywood films
starring James Cagney.
* The arrival of ruthless foes like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer
Lansky, who wipe out Irish bosses by the dozen as the mafia rises to
power, while government foes such as FDR and Thomas E. Dewey doggedly
struggle to end corruption in the United States.
* The legitimization of the Irish in the upper levels of American
society crests in the 1950s and 1960s as Irish gangsters begin to take
over legitimate businesses. The son of upper-crust Irishman Joseph
Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, is elected President of the United States
after a multitude of back-channel dealing seals his Democratic Party
nomination.
* The JFK assassination signals the beginning of a murderous era of
bloodshed that leads to Wild West-style shootouts in Boston between
the Mullin Gang, the Winter Hill Gang, and the Charlestown Boys.
* James "Whitey" Bulger's rise as the last great Irish Boss is fueled by
protection from his state-senator brother and his best friend in the
FBI ... a shining example of the "Gangster, Politician, Lawman"
triumvirate that was so hard to crack. But even the untouchable Bulger
can't hide from the government's most powerful weapon, RICO.
Executive Producer for The History Channel is Carl H. Lindahl. PADDY WHACKED is produced for The History Channel by Joe Bink Films Inc.
After the devastating mid 19th century potato famine killed nearly a third of Ireland's population, the Irish looked across the ocean to America for salvation and opportunity. They arrived in New York City in droves, starving, destitute, determined ... and loathed by native New Yorkers. Gang wars soon enveloped the streets, and from the chaos rose the first mob boss, James "Old Smoke" Morrissey, as proprietor of gambling joints, saloons, and whore houses who aligned himself with the corrupt power corridors of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed. Soon, the Irish carried the dubious distinction of dominating the lower rungs of the immigrant ladder. For the next century-and-a-half, they rose and found power and glory in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Hollywood, before being done in by Italian foes, infighting, and eventually the law. PADDY WHACKED is the story of a long rise to power and a violent and bloody collapse, with a steady drumbeat of unforgettable characters along the way.
Highlights of PADDY WHACKED include:
* Re-creations of the early New York City gang wars made famous in
Martin Scorsese's film Gangs of New York.
* "King" Mike McDonald's efforts to establish the Irish Mob in Chicago,
under the philosophy of "There's a sucker born every minute" and
"Never steal anything big, the small stuff is safer," and the
portrayal of the mobster as "the man behind the man."
* The rise of bootlegging as a primary source of income for the Irish
Mob during Prohibition, an effort led by Dean O'Banion in Chicago and
Owney Madden in New York.
* The first glorification of the Irish mobster in Hollywood films
starring James Cagney.
* The arrival of ruthless foes like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer
Lansky, who wipe out Irish bosses by the dozen as the mafia rises to
power, while government foes such as FDR and Thomas E. Dewey doggedly
struggle to end corruption in the United States.
* The legitimization of the Irish in the upper levels of American
society crests in the 1950s and 1960s as Irish gangsters begin to take
over legitimate businesses. The son of upper-crust Irishman Joseph
Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, is elected President of the United States
after a multitude of back-channel dealing seals his Democratic Party
nomination.
* The JFK assassination signals the beginning of a murderous era of
bloodshed that leads to Wild West-style shootouts in Boston between
the Mullin Gang, the Winter Hill Gang, and the Charlestown Boys.
* James "Whitey" Bulger's rise as the last great Irish Boss is fueled by
protection from his state-senator brother and his best friend in the
FBI ... a shining example of the "Gangster, Politician, Lawman"
triumvirate that was so hard to crack. But even the untouchable Bulger
can't hide from the government's most powerful weapon, RICO.
Executive Producer for The History Channel is Carl H. Lindahl. PADDY WHACKED is produced for The History Channel by Joe Bink Films Inc.
In Break From Code, Gotti Women Soak Up Trial Spotlight
Friends of ours: Junior Gotti, John Gotti, Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, Joseph D'Angelo, Gambino Crime Family
Friends of mine: Toni Marie Ricci
Call it the Soprano effect. To spectators at John A. Gotti's racketeering trial, it often seems as if life were imitating television, and that the airing of every intimate detail of the fictional mobster Tony Soprano's life has broken down a social code that once prevented real-life mobsters from exposing their private lives and peccadilloes, from girlfriends to illegitimate children, in public.
One of the prosecutors, Joon Kim, has led two turncoat mobsters, Michael DiLeonardo and Joseph D'Angelo, through recitations of their lives from blood oath to murder, with the calm, hypnotic manner of a psychoanalyst interrogating a patient. But it is probably the assertive presence of the Gotti women in United States District Court in Manhattan that has marked the biggest departure from Mafia tradition. "Women have always been considered an inferior element in the Mafia," says Selwyn Raab, a retired New York Times reporter who chronicled the lives of the Gottis in his book "Five Families: The Rise, Decline and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires." "They are not supposed to intrude, not supposed to be involved in any way. One: to protect them. And two: that's the culture; that's the code."
Mr. Gotti's mother, Victoria, has attended every day of her son's trial since it began two weeks ago, and offered a window into the changing social mores of the mob.
Fifty, even 20 years ago, in the era depicted by the classic Godfather movies, Mafia wives and daughters were to be neither seen nor heard. But Mr. Gotti's trial has become more of a soap opera than the soaps, in which the Gotti women — led by Mr. Gotti's mother, but also joined by his sisters, Victoria and Angel, a niece named Victoria after her grandmother, and even the ex-wife of a Gambino captain — have played a central role.
Though the presence of Mafia wives at trials has not been unheard of in recent years, Mr. Raab said, Mrs. Gotti — the widow of John J. Gotti, celebrated as the Dapper Don and the Teflon Don before spending the last years of his life locked up in a maximum security penitentiary — never attended any of her husband's major trials. "He had four trials after he became boss, and she was never there," Mr. Raab said. Partly, he noted, that was because "they were on the outs," and she did not visit him in prison, either.
In this trial, however, which enters its third week today, the Gotti women have waged a public relations war for Mr. Gotti, speaking on his behalf outside of court, while he has focused on what goes on in the courtroom.
Every day, his mother and sister Angel have occupied center aisle seats in the second row, which is reserved for family members (both conventional relatives and the Cosa Nostra kind). Mr. Gotti's more flamboyant sister, Victoria, has appeared most days in the afternoon, drawing stares from tourists both because she resembles Donatella Versace, with hip-length blond tresses and flashy clothes, and because she is recognized as a novelist and hostess of the reality-TV show "Growing Up Gotti." (Mr. Gotti's wife, Kim, who is pregnant with their sixth child, has not attended.)
Lawyers said that in a trial that is something of a morality play, even Mr. Gotti's churchgoing could have an impact on the perception of the jury, since this jury includes several observant Catholics: On Ash Wednesday, five of the 16 jurors, including alternates, arrived in court for the morning session with their foreheads marked with black smudges. Mr. Gotti returned from lunch with ashes on his forehead.
On a recent day, a federal prosecutor led an F.B.I. agent through the list of people who visited Mr. Gotti while he was in prison. As the prosecutor ticked off the names, one by one, the agent identified them each as an "associate" of the Gambino crime family, qualifying a couple by adding "and lifelong friend."
The judge called a break, and Mr. Gotti's mother called to his lawyer, Charles Carnesi: "Hey, Charles. Did you tell them that I am an associate, and my daughter, too, and my granddaughter?"
It was a typically acerbic reaction for Mrs. Gotti, whose comments are not always appreciated. "Mom, please, I got this under control," Mr. Gotti protested another time.
The racketeering charges against Mr. Gotti are so diffuse that much of the court battle has focused not on the charges but on his private life. Besides, the charges against him — loan-sharking, extortion and kidnapping — are not nearly as serious as the murder charges that the two star prosecution witnesses have confessed to as part of their cooperation agreement with the government. In his defense, Mr. Gotti says he left the mob life years ago, when he realized how much it could hurt his wife and children.
The Gotti family has been particularly angered by testimony from Mr. DiLeonardo, the turncoat Gambino captain who said that Mr. Gotti dated a woman named Mindy during his marriage and that his father had a secret second family and a daughter out of wedlock.
Three days after Mr. DiLeonardo's testimony, the Gotti family called in reinforcements. John J. Gotti's oldest granddaughter, Victoria Gotti Albano, 18, arrived at the courthouse, saying, "We always stick together." Wearing a large necklace spelling out the word "princess," which she said her grandfather had given her, she sat between her mother, Angel, and grandmother for the rest of the week. Ms. Albano, a freshman at U.C.L.A., said she wanted to become a lawyer to avenge the wrongs she said the government had inflicted on her family. Her grandmother volunteered that the teenager's role model was Ron Kuby, a civil rights lawyer. Mrs. Gotti, who is, in the traditional mold, a Queens homemaker, is supportive of her granddaughter's career goals, even confiding in the hallway outside the courtroom that the idea of being called "Ms." Gotti appealed to her. "She's liberated," Mr. Raab said, not sounding 100 percent convinced.
The more traditional "Married to the Mob" role in this courtroom drama has been played by Mr. DiLeonardo's ex-wife, Toni Marie Ricci, who appeared as a defense witness to testify on the distress that her husband's infidelity caused her and their teenage son, Michael. Asked by prosecutors last week whether she knew that her ex-husband, her father, brother, uncle and cousin were all associated with the Gambino crime family, she replied that she was "just a housewife and mother" who did not concern herself with such things.
If Mrs. Gotti doesn't always adhere to type, Mr. Raab said, that may be because her ancestry is Russian on her mother's side. Her mixed antecedents were a problem when it came time for her son to be inducted into the Mafia, Mr. Raab said, because Mafia rules required both parents of a "made" member to be of Italian descent. The senior Gotti solved the problem by changing the rule to require patrilineal descent only, Mr. Raab said.
Mrs. Gotti seemed more outraged by what she saw as the prosecution's sanctimonious attitude than by the suggestion that her husband had had affairs, a rumor that, after all, had been alluded to in books and whispered by government agents. If the government was going to prosecute womanizers, she said, "we should hang all our presidents."
It was another remark worthy of a Soprano, although Mrs. Gotti was coy when asked whether she ever watched the show. "I really would love to because I think it's an entertaining program," she said. "But if there's a really good movie on, or "20-20," or something on the Discovery Channel, I would rather watch that."
Thanks to Anemona Hartocollis
Friends of mine: Toni Marie Ricci
Call it the Soprano effect. To spectators at John A. Gotti's racketeering trial, it often seems as if life were imitating television, and that the airing of every intimate detail of the fictional mobster Tony Soprano's life has broken down a social code that once prevented real-life mobsters from exposing their private lives and peccadilloes, from girlfriends to illegitimate children, in public.
One of the prosecutors, Joon Kim, has led two turncoat mobsters, Michael DiLeonardo and Joseph D'Angelo, through recitations of their lives from blood oath to murder, with the calm, hypnotic manner of a psychoanalyst interrogating a patient. But it is probably the assertive presence of the Gotti women in United States District Court in Manhattan that has marked the biggest departure from Mafia tradition. "Women have always been considered an inferior element in the Mafia," says Selwyn Raab, a retired New York Times reporter who chronicled the lives of the Gottis in his book "Five Families: The Rise, Decline and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires." "They are not supposed to intrude, not supposed to be involved in any way. One: to protect them. And two: that's the culture; that's the code."
Mr. Gotti's mother, Victoria, has attended every day of her son's trial since it began two weeks ago, and offered a window into the changing social mores of the mob.
Fifty, even 20 years ago, in the era depicted by the classic Godfather movies, Mafia wives and daughters were to be neither seen nor heard. But Mr. Gotti's trial has become more of a soap opera than the soaps, in which the Gotti women — led by Mr. Gotti's mother, but also joined by his sisters, Victoria and Angel, a niece named Victoria after her grandmother, and even the ex-wife of a Gambino captain — have played a central role.
Though the presence of Mafia wives at trials has not been unheard of in recent years, Mr. Raab said, Mrs. Gotti — the widow of John J. Gotti, celebrated as the Dapper Don and the Teflon Don before spending the last years of his life locked up in a maximum security penitentiary — never attended any of her husband's major trials. "He had four trials after he became boss, and she was never there," Mr. Raab said. Partly, he noted, that was because "they were on the outs," and she did not visit him in prison, either.
In this trial, however, which enters its third week today, the Gotti women have waged a public relations war for Mr. Gotti, speaking on his behalf outside of court, while he has focused on what goes on in the courtroom.
Every day, his mother and sister Angel have occupied center aisle seats in the second row, which is reserved for family members (both conventional relatives and the Cosa Nostra kind). Mr. Gotti's more flamboyant sister, Victoria, has appeared most days in the afternoon, drawing stares from tourists both because she resembles Donatella Versace, with hip-length blond tresses and flashy clothes, and because she is recognized as a novelist and hostess of the reality-TV show "Growing Up Gotti." (Mr. Gotti's wife, Kim, who is pregnant with their sixth child, has not attended.)
Lawyers said that in a trial that is something of a morality play, even Mr. Gotti's churchgoing could have an impact on the perception of the jury, since this jury includes several observant Catholics: On Ash Wednesday, five of the 16 jurors, including alternates, arrived in court for the morning session with their foreheads marked with black smudges. Mr. Gotti returned from lunch with ashes on his forehead.
On a recent day, a federal prosecutor led an F.B.I. agent through the list of people who visited Mr. Gotti while he was in prison. As the prosecutor ticked off the names, one by one, the agent identified them each as an "associate" of the Gambino crime family, qualifying a couple by adding "and lifelong friend."
The judge called a break, and Mr. Gotti's mother called to his lawyer, Charles Carnesi: "Hey, Charles. Did you tell them that I am an associate, and my daughter, too, and my granddaughter?"
It was a typically acerbic reaction for Mrs. Gotti, whose comments are not always appreciated. "Mom, please, I got this under control," Mr. Gotti protested another time.
The racketeering charges against Mr. Gotti are so diffuse that much of the court battle has focused not on the charges but on his private life. Besides, the charges against him — loan-sharking, extortion and kidnapping — are not nearly as serious as the murder charges that the two star prosecution witnesses have confessed to as part of their cooperation agreement with the government. In his defense, Mr. Gotti says he left the mob life years ago, when he realized how much it could hurt his wife and children.
The Gotti family has been particularly angered by testimony from Mr. DiLeonardo, the turncoat Gambino captain who said that Mr. Gotti dated a woman named Mindy during his marriage and that his father had a secret second family and a daughter out of wedlock.
Three days after Mr. DiLeonardo's testimony, the Gotti family called in reinforcements. John J. Gotti's oldest granddaughter, Victoria Gotti Albano, 18, arrived at the courthouse, saying, "We always stick together." Wearing a large necklace spelling out the word "princess," which she said her grandfather had given her, she sat between her mother, Angel, and grandmother for the rest of the week. Ms. Albano, a freshman at U.C.L.A., said she wanted to become a lawyer to avenge the wrongs she said the government had inflicted on her family. Her grandmother volunteered that the teenager's role model was Ron Kuby, a civil rights lawyer. Mrs. Gotti, who is, in the traditional mold, a Queens homemaker, is supportive of her granddaughter's career goals, even confiding in the hallway outside the courtroom that the idea of being called "Ms." Gotti appealed to her. "She's liberated," Mr. Raab said, not sounding 100 percent convinced.
The more traditional "Married to the Mob" role in this courtroom drama has been played by Mr. DiLeonardo's ex-wife, Toni Marie Ricci, who appeared as a defense witness to testify on the distress that her husband's infidelity caused her and their teenage son, Michael. Asked by prosecutors last week whether she knew that her ex-husband, her father, brother, uncle and cousin were all associated with the Gambino crime family, she replied that she was "just a housewife and mother" who did not concern herself with such things.
If Mrs. Gotti doesn't always adhere to type, Mr. Raab said, that may be because her ancestry is Russian on her mother's side. Her mixed antecedents were a problem when it came time for her son to be inducted into the Mafia, Mr. Raab said, because Mafia rules required both parents of a "made" member to be of Italian descent. The senior Gotti solved the problem by changing the rule to require patrilineal descent only, Mr. Raab said.
Mrs. Gotti seemed more outraged by what she saw as the prosecution's sanctimonious attitude than by the suggestion that her husband had had affairs, a rumor that, after all, had been alluded to in books and whispered by government agents. If the government was going to prosecute womanizers, she said, "we should hang all our presidents."
It was another remark worthy of a Soprano, although Mrs. Gotti was coy when asked whether she ever watched the show. "I really would love to because I think it's an entertaining program," she said. "But if there's a really good movie on, or "20-20," or something on the Discovery Channel, I would rather watch that."
Thanks to Anemona Hartocollis
Lucchese Crime Family
| Bosses | Friends of Ours | Friends of Mine |
|---|---|---|
Alphonse "Little Al" D'Arco | Al Visconti Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo Bruno Facciolo |
Gambino Crime Family
| Bosses | Friends of Ours | Friends of Mine |
|---|---|---|
Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri | Anthony "the Genius" Megale | Ernesto Grillo |
Colombo Crime Family
| Bosses | Friends of Ours | Friends of Mine |
|---|---|---|
Friends of Mine: |
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Canaries Get Tweet Salvation
Friends of ours: Junior Gotti, Bonanno Crime Family, Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano, Patrick DeFilippo, Vito DeFilippo, Gambino Crime Family, Salvatore LoCascio, Genovese Crime Family, Joseph Ida, John Gotti, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo
Today's rats escape sleepin' with fishes
The stampede of Mafia turncoats joining Team U.S.A. is radically changing the way gangsters try to beat the rap. Faced with damning testimony from high-ranking rats, wiseguys are wising up to the fact that it's futile to deny they're in the mob.
It was once a violation punishable by death to publicly acknowledge one's membership in a crime family. But John A. (Junior) Gotti has done it. So too has a gaggle of gangsters in the hope the wiseguys can neutralize the government's weapons.
"He's in the Bonanno family," declared defense lawyer Barry Levin last week at the trial of Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano, once the clan's acting boss. "We don't care. So if you spend three weeks listening to the Bonanno family, you've heard it here. You can take a nap."
Levin's strategy so infuriated prosecutors they asked the judge to instruct the jury that it was out of bounds. The lawyer for Basciano's co-defendant Patrick DeFilippo was also up front with jurors about his client's mob lineage. "His father Vito was a member ... and it was as natural for him at that time a long time ago to join as it was, say, for me to become a lawyer," said attorney Richard Levitt.
Recently, lawyers for Gambino capo Salvatore LoCascio and Genovese soldier Joseph Ida admitted their clients were made men, but insisted each had decided to quit the Mafia.
It's a long way from the bold denials John Gotti's mouthpiece Bruce Cutler was making in 1990 when he said: "There is absolutely no evidence of what prosecutors call an Italian-American Mafia in America."
Mafia historian Thomas Reppetto recalled that Chicago gangster Joey (The Clown) Lombardo even took out an ad in a newspaper in 1992 to proclaim he wasn't in the Mafia anymore. Lombardo was indicted last year on a raft of charges.
For years wiseguys and their lawyers nervously tiptoed around naming the criminal enterprise when pleading guilty to racketeering. Has omerta - the Mafia's code of silence - been revised? "Apparently so," said former federal prosecutor Edward MacDonald. "There's no point in contesting membership anymore. The evidence is so overwhelming. You might as well concede the obvious."
Thanks to John Marzulli
Today's rats escape sleepin' with fishes
The stampede of Mafia turncoats joining Team U.S.A. is radically changing the way gangsters try to beat the rap. Faced with damning testimony from high-ranking rats, wiseguys are wising up to the fact that it's futile to deny they're in the mob.
It was once a violation punishable by death to publicly acknowledge one's membership in a crime family. But John A. (Junior) Gotti has done it. So too has a gaggle of gangsters in the hope the wiseguys can neutralize the government's weapons.
"He's in the Bonanno family," declared defense lawyer Barry Levin last week at the trial of Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano, once the clan's acting boss. "We don't care. So if you spend three weeks listening to the Bonanno family, you've heard it here. You can take a nap."
Levin's strategy so infuriated prosecutors they asked the judge to instruct the jury that it was out of bounds. The lawyer for Basciano's co-defendant Patrick DeFilippo was also up front with jurors about his client's mob lineage. "His father Vito was a member ... and it was as natural for him at that time a long time ago to join as it was, say, for me to become a lawyer," said attorney Richard Levitt.
Recently, lawyers for Gambino capo Salvatore LoCascio and Genovese soldier Joseph Ida admitted their clients were made men, but insisted each had decided to quit the Mafia.
It's a long way from the bold denials John Gotti's mouthpiece Bruce Cutler was making in 1990 when he said: "There is absolutely no evidence of what prosecutors call an Italian-American Mafia in America."
Mafia historian Thomas Reppetto recalled that Chicago gangster Joey (The Clown) Lombardo even took out an ad in a newspaper in 1992 to proclaim he wasn't in the Mafia anymore. Lombardo was indicted last year on a raft of charges.
For years wiseguys and their lawyers nervously tiptoed around naming the criminal enterprise when pleading guilty to racketeering. Has omerta - the Mafia's code of silence - been revised? "Apparently so," said former federal prosecutor Edward MacDonald. "There's no point in contesting membership anymore. The evidence is so overwhelming. You might as well concede the obvious."
Thanks to John Marzulli
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Sliwa says radio partner 'Judas'
Friends of ours: Junior Gotti, John Gotti
"The Curtis & Kuby Show" played on the radio - and in court - yesterday as Curtis Sliwa called his on-air partner Ron Kuby a "Judas" for testifying on behalf of John A. (Junior) Gotti. Kuby, a lawyer, bolstered Gotti's defense against claims the mobster sent two thugs to beat Sliwa for his on-air attacks against the Dapper Don John Gotti in 1992. Gotti contends that he left the mob in 1998.
"He told me he was sick of this life," Kuby testified. "He wanted this to be over. He wanted to rejoin his family and be done with this." Kuby said the spring 1998 chat occurred while Gotti and dozens of others were under indictment for a loansharking and extortion scheme that involved the Manhattan strip club Scores.
"John Gotti . . . specifically asked me if I would do him a favor," Kuby testified. Gotti, 42, wanted Kuby, then representing co-defendant Stephen Sergio, to approach federal prosecutors and discuss a plea deal for everyone involved.
Outside court, Kuby said he didn't question Gotti further about ending his mob life. "I was functioning as a lawyer, not a priest," he said. "He did not elaborate. I did not ask."
Kuby gave a preview of his testimony on his morning WABC radio show yesterday - prompting Sliwa to call his decade-long radio partner "Judas."
"Curtis, you should have nothing to fear from the truth," Kuby said.
Sliwa was shot near his East Village apartment after he hailed a cab carrying two men prosecutors say were sent by Gotti.
The issue of Gotti's pre-1999 withdrawal from the mob is key because prosecutors must show at least one crime in the long-running conspiracy case occurred within five years of his 2004 indictment.
Gotti's attorneys want to play for jurors a recording of a prison visit with his father that they say will feature the Mafia scion using coded language to say he wants out of the mob.
Thanks to Thomas Zambito
"The Curtis & Kuby Show" played on the radio - and in court - yesterday as Curtis Sliwa called his on-air partner Ron Kuby a "Judas" for testifying on behalf of John A. (Junior) Gotti. Kuby, a lawyer, bolstered Gotti's defense against claims the mobster sent two thugs to beat Sliwa for his on-air attacks against the Dapper Don John Gotti in 1992. Gotti contends that he left the mob in 1998.
"He told me he was sick of this life," Kuby testified. "He wanted this to be over. He wanted to rejoin his family and be done with this." Kuby said the spring 1998 chat occurred while Gotti and dozens of others were under indictment for a loansharking and extortion scheme that involved the Manhattan strip club Scores.
"John Gotti . . . specifically asked me if I would do him a favor," Kuby testified. Gotti, 42, wanted Kuby, then representing co-defendant Stephen Sergio, to approach federal prosecutors and discuss a plea deal for everyone involved.
Outside court, Kuby said he didn't question Gotti further about ending his mob life. "I was functioning as a lawyer, not a priest," he said. "He did not elaborate. I did not ask."
Kuby gave a preview of his testimony on his morning WABC radio show yesterday - prompting Sliwa to call his decade-long radio partner "Judas."
"Curtis, you should have nothing to fear from the truth," Kuby said.
Sliwa was shot near his East Village apartment after he hailed a cab carrying two men prosecutors say were sent by Gotti.
The issue of Gotti's pre-1999 withdrawal from the mob is key because prosecutors must show at least one crime in the long-running conspiracy case occurred within five years of his 2004 indictment.
Gotti's attorneys want to play for jurors a recording of a prison visit with his father that they say will feature the Mafia scion using coded language to say he wants out of the mob.
Thanks to Thomas Zambito
Gotti Hottie Right Out of 'Sopranos'
Friends of ours: John "Junior" Gotti, John "Dapper Don" Gotti
Friends of mine: Soprano Crime Family
The Gotti glamour club debuted its newest member last week - and she's almost a double of Tony Soprano's daughter, Meadow. Forget the Dapper Don's grandsons, who set female hearts aflutter in the reality show "Growing Up Gotti."
The newest Gotti hottie jetted in from Southern California to support her uncle, John A. (Junior) Gotti, in his racketeering trial - and stole the show. Like Meadow Soprano, Victoria Gotti Albano - whose mother, Angel, is the daughter of the late John (Dapper Don) Gotti - has both beauty and brains.
The 18-year-old coed, who proudly wore a diamond "princess" necklace to court, attends a college in California and dreams of tangling with the legal system - though not in the same way as her grandpa. "She's going to be a lawyer," her grandmother, Victoria, said last week as they walked into Manhattan federal court.
The legal aspirations, good looks and mob upbringing raise strikingly similarities between the Gotti gal and the fictional Soprano daughter. Also a dark-haired beauty, Meadow Soprano studies at a prestigious college, Columbia University, and dreams of becoming a lawyer. Despite strained relations with her parents, the character shares a strong sense of family loyalty with her real-life Gotti counterpart.
The teen Gotti, who sources said wore a pendant with her grandfather's face while attending Stella Maris High School in Queens, is far from ashamed of the dead mob boss. In fact, her "princess" necklace was a gift from the Don.
"I think [John Gotti] was the greatest man who ever lived," she told reporters.
Thanks to Adam Nichols
Friends of mine: Soprano Crime Family
The Gotti glamour club debuted its newest member last week - and she's almost a double of Tony Soprano's daughter, Meadow. Forget the Dapper Don's grandsons, who set female hearts aflutter in the reality show "Growing Up Gotti."
The newest Gotti hottie jetted in from Southern California to support her uncle, John A. (Junior) Gotti, in his racketeering trial - and stole the show. Like Meadow Soprano, Victoria Gotti Albano - whose mother, Angel, is the daughter of the late John (Dapper Don) Gotti - has both beauty and brains.
The 18-year-old coed, who proudly wore a diamond "princess" necklace to court, attends a college in California and dreams of tangling with the legal system - though not in the same way as her grandpa. "She's going to be a lawyer," her grandmother, Victoria, said last week as they walked into Manhattan federal court.
The legal aspirations, good looks and mob upbringing raise strikingly similarities between the Gotti gal and the fictional Soprano daughter. Also a dark-haired beauty, Meadow Soprano studies at a prestigious college, Columbia University, and dreams of becoming a lawyer. Despite strained relations with her parents, the character shares a strong sense of family loyalty with her real-life Gotti counterpart.
The teen Gotti, who sources said wore a pendant with her grandfather's face while attending Stella Maris High School in Queens, is far from ashamed of the dead mob boss. In fact, her "princess" necklace was a gift from the Don.
"I think [John Gotti] was the greatest man who ever lived," she told reporters.
Thanks to Adam Nichols
Real Dons Steal Sopranos Limelight
Friends of ours: John "Junior" Gotti, Vinny "Gorgeous" Basciano, Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, Bonanno Crime Family, Lucchese Crime Family, John "Dapper Don" Gotti, Joseph Massino
Friends of mine: Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa, Soprano Crime Family
While the acclaimed TV series bows out, New Yorkers are gripped by the drama of three real-life Mafia-linked trials
The final series of The Sopranos will go out on American TV a week today, beginning the last chapter of its epic chronicle of the lives, loves and murders of the nation's most famous Mob family. But one part of America does not have to wait with bated breath: New York. After all, who needs Tony Soprano and his fictional travails when real mafiosi such as John 'Junior' Gotti, Vinny 'Gorgeous' Basciano and Mikey 'Scars' DiLeonardo stalk the front pages.
In a throwback to the Mob's long-lost heyday, New York has gone Mafia-mad in the past week. No fewer than three high-profile trials are dominating the tabloid press and local TV stations, uncovering a mobster world of hitmen, assassinations and police corruption that even Tony Soprano's scriptwriters would have hesitated to invent.
Top of the heap is the dramatic trial of Gotti, alleged head of the Gambino crime family, whose father was known as the Dapper Don for his sharp suits and high profile on the social scene. Now the junior Gotti faces racketeering charges, including the kidnapping and attempted murder of Curtis Sliwa, a radio host and founder of the Guardian Angels crime-fighting volunteers. Another case involves Basciano, charged with killing one Mob associate and plotting the death of two others. He is alleged to be acting head of the Bonanno crime family. The third prosecution, set to start within weeks, has been called the 'Mafia cops' trial. It involves allegations that two top policemen, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, worked as hitmen for the Lucchese crime family.
But it is the Gotti trial - with its mix of Mob glamour and death - that has grabbed attention. 'They can still draw a crowd,' said Jerry Capeci, who has written six books on the Mafia. Given the alleged crimes, that is no surprise. In one gripping piece of recent testimony Sliwa told how a gang killer tried to 'whack' him by shooting him in a taxi with its windows and doors rigged so they would not open. As he was travelling to work in Greenwich Village, a man suddenly popped up in the front seat, said 'Take this' and began shooting at him. Sliwa, bleeding from gunshot wounds that left him in hospital for two weeks, escaped by climbing through a broken car window as the taxi zig-zagged down the street.
In another of the trial's 'highlights', one witness, DiLeonardo, revealed that the late Dapper Don had fathered a child by a woman living on Staten Island. That triggered the sort of tabloid frenzy among gossip writers and paparazzi usually associated with Hollywood stars. The child was found to be a 19-year-old dental student. 'I feel bad for my daughter. It's 2006. We want to move on,' said her mother, Shannon Connelly.
The Gotti trial has been so highly publicised that tourists have been flocking to the Manhattan court for a dose of the real Sopranos. But all the court cases have exposed crimes that are hard to romanticise. Prosecutors say Basciano blasted one rival with a 12-gauge shotgun. The attack on Sliwa left him needing a colostomy bag after one bullet went through his intestines. There are drug rings, extortion, bribery and cold, hard killings: all revealed in sordid detail.
Yet the real story is that these cases have all been brought simultaneously, dealing what remains of the Mafia in New York a potentially fatal blow. The FBI and police have so successfully infiltrated the gangs over the past two decades that the Mob is a shadow of its former self. Many of the witnesses are turncoats from the highest levels of an organisation once thought impenetrable. The main evidence against Basciano comes from conversations taped by former don Joseph Massino, the first head of a Mafia family to wear a wire and betray his associates. Gotti's lawyer has used this as a defence, saying his client was born into the Mob family but wanted to leave due to the huge degree of betrayal. 'He saw a life where his father went to jail for the rest of his life, died locked away from his family, based on the testimony of a serial killer who was supposed to be his closest associate. He saw the treachery first hand,' said Charles Carnesi.
When it comes to the old values of silence and loyalty, it is other ethnic gangs in New York, such as the Russians and the Chinese Triads, who are far more of a criminal threat. Neighbourhoods dominated by Russians and Chinese are full of new immigrants vulnerable to gangs; meanwhile the Italians have moved to Long Island or New Jersey.
Yet despite the decline in the Mafia's power, it still dominates the headlines more than any other form of organised crime. That is far more to do with the media and Hollywood than reality. For the American love affair with the Mafia is one based on the entertainment industry.
Before the Gotti trial began last month the once-feared family's name had been best known recently for a tawdry reality TV show starring Gotti Junior's sister, Victoria, called Growing Up Gotti. It has been a steady decline from the Oscar-winning art of the Godfather movies to the high-class soap opera of The Sopranos and finally to reality television.
Tony Soprano would recognise that as a rule of the fictional gangsters: No one lives forever, everyone gets whacked in the end. Even, perhaps, the Mafia itself.
Thanks to Paul Harris
Friends of mine: Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa, Soprano Crime Family
While the acclaimed TV series bows out, New Yorkers are gripped by the drama of three real-life Mafia-linked trials
The final series of The Sopranos will go out on American TV a week today, beginning the last chapter of its epic chronicle of the lives, loves and murders of the nation's most famous Mob family. But one part of America does not have to wait with bated breath: New York. After all, who needs Tony Soprano and his fictional travails when real mafiosi such as John 'Junior' Gotti, Vinny 'Gorgeous' Basciano and Mikey 'Scars' DiLeonardo stalk the front pages.
In a throwback to the Mob's long-lost heyday, New York has gone Mafia-mad in the past week. No fewer than three high-profile trials are dominating the tabloid press and local TV stations, uncovering a mobster world of hitmen, assassinations and police corruption that even Tony Soprano's scriptwriters would have hesitated to invent.
Top of the heap is the dramatic trial of Gotti, alleged head of the Gambino crime family, whose father was known as the Dapper Don for his sharp suits and high profile on the social scene. Now the junior Gotti faces racketeering charges, including the kidnapping and attempted murder of Curtis Sliwa, a radio host and founder of the Guardian Angels crime-fighting volunteers. Another case involves Basciano, charged with killing one Mob associate and plotting the death of two others. He is alleged to be acting head of the Bonanno crime family. The third prosecution, set to start within weeks, has been called the 'Mafia cops' trial. It involves allegations that two top policemen, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, worked as hitmen for the Lucchese crime family.
But it is the Gotti trial - with its mix of Mob glamour and death - that has grabbed attention. 'They can still draw a crowd,' said Jerry Capeci, who has written six books on the Mafia. Given the alleged crimes, that is no surprise. In one gripping piece of recent testimony Sliwa told how a gang killer tried to 'whack' him by shooting him in a taxi with its windows and doors rigged so they would not open. As he was travelling to work in Greenwich Village, a man suddenly popped up in the front seat, said 'Take this' and began shooting at him. Sliwa, bleeding from gunshot wounds that left him in hospital for two weeks, escaped by climbing through a broken car window as the taxi zig-zagged down the street.
In another of the trial's 'highlights', one witness, DiLeonardo, revealed that the late Dapper Don had fathered a child by a woman living on Staten Island. That triggered the sort of tabloid frenzy among gossip writers and paparazzi usually associated with Hollywood stars. The child was found to be a 19-year-old dental student. 'I feel bad for my daughter. It's 2006. We want to move on,' said her mother, Shannon Connelly.
The Gotti trial has been so highly publicised that tourists have been flocking to the Manhattan court for a dose of the real Sopranos. But all the court cases have exposed crimes that are hard to romanticise. Prosecutors say Basciano blasted one rival with a 12-gauge shotgun. The attack on Sliwa left him needing a colostomy bag after one bullet went through his intestines. There are drug rings, extortion, bribery and cold, hard killings: all revealed in sordid detail.
Yet the real story is that these cases have all been brought simultaneously, dealing what remains of the Mafia in New York a potentially fatal blow. The FBI and police have so successfully infiltrated the gangs over the past two decades that the Mob is a shadow of its former self. Many of the witnesses are turncoats from the highest levels of an organisation once thought impenetrable. The main evidence against Basciano comes from conversations taped by former don Joseph Massino, the first head of a Mafia family to wear a wire and betray his associates. Gotti's lawyer has used this as a defence, saying his client was born into the Mob family but wanted to leave due to the huge degree of betrayal. 'He saw a life where his father went to jail for the rest of his life, died locked away from his family, based on the testimony of a serial killer who was supposed to be his closest associate. He saw the treachery first hand,' said Charles Carnesi.
When it comes to the old values of silence and loyalty, it is other ethnic gangs in New York, such as the Russians and the Chinese Triads, who are far more of a criminal threat. Neighbourhoods dominated by Russians and Chinese are full of new immigrants vulnerable to gangs; meanwhile the Italians have moved to Long Island or New Jersey.
Yet despite the decline in the Mafia's power, it still dominates the headlines more than any other form of organised crime. That is far more to do with the media and Hollywood than reality. For the American love affair with the Mafia is one based on the entertainment industry.
Before the Gotti trial began last month the once-feared family's name had been best known recently for a tawdry reality TV show starring Gotti Junior's sister, Victoria, called Growing Up Gotti. It has been a steady decline from the Oscar-winning art of the Godfather movies to the high-class soap opera of The Sopranos and finally to reality television.
Tony Soprano would recognise that as a rule of the fictional gangsters: No one lives forever, everyone gets whacked in the end. Even, perhaps, the Mafia itself.
Thanks to Paul Harris
Monday, March 06, 2006
Kuby an Out for Junior?
Friends of ours: John "Junior" Gotti, John "Dapper Don" Gotti, Sammy "The Bull"Gravano, Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo
On-air rivals Curtis Sliwa & Ron Kuby will be on different sides in court, too. Now it's Curtis versus Kuby. Pony-tailed civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby has been called to testify for the defense in the trial of John A. (Junior) Gotti - the mob scion accused of ordering two thugs to attack Curtis Sliwa, Kuby's radio show partner.
"Usually I try to stay as far away from the witness stand as I can, unless I'm handing a witness a sheaf of papers," Kuby said yesterday. Kuby said his testimony likely will not involve snitching on his longtime partner but will focus on his past representation of mobsters. He joked that he doubted Gotti attorney Charles Carnesi would ask, "Well, Ron, is it true you wanted to kill him, too?"
For a decade, Kuby has played the liberal foil to Sliwa's conservative lock-up-the-bad-guys views on their WABC-AM talk show, "Curtis and Kuby in the Morning." In recent weeks, Kuby has counseled Sliwa to come across as more likable to jurors at Gotti's retrial so they won't leave the courtroom thinking "it's not a bad thing that you got shot." The result was a less-confrontational Sliwa in court.
The Guardian Angels founder told jurors this week how he leaped out the passenger side window of a cab as he was being fired on by a masked gunman who had popped out next to the driver from under the dashboard. Prosecutors say Gotti, 42, ordered the 1992 ambush to silence Sliwa's unrelenting rants against the Gotti family following the late Dapper Don John Gotti's federal murder conviction.
Kuby has represented Junior Gotti's former brother-in-law, Carmine Agnello, the ex-husband of Victoria Gotti, as well as other alleged low-level mobsters. His late mentor, William Kunstler, once represented the Dapper Don. Kuby was named as the target of a mob hit plan hatched by Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, according to the 2000 testimony of a Gravano associate arrested on drug charges in Arizona.
Gravano was upset with Kuby for representing the families of some of Gravano's 19 murder victims in a civil lawsuit. He planned to lure the lawyer to Texas where he would be gunned down, according to the testimony. After Kuby learned last weekend he might be called as a witness for Gotti, he said he purposely stayed away from the trial.
Prosecutors wrapped up Thursday. Much of their case rests on the testimony of mob snitch Michael (Mikey Scars) DiLeonardo, who has linked Gotti to the Sliwa kidnapping as well as to more than $1 million in construction extortion payoffs.
Gotti's first trial ended in a hung jury.
On-air rivals Curtis Sliwa & Ron Kuby will be on different sides in court, too. Now it's Curtis versus Kuby. Pony-tailed civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby has been called to testify for the defense in the trial of John A. (Junior) Gotti - the mob scion accused of ordering two thugs to attack Curtis Sliwa, Kuby's radio show partner.
"Usually I try to stay as far away from the witness stand as I can, unless I'm handing a witness a sheaf of papers," Kuby said yesterday. Kuby said his testimony likely will not involve snitching on his longtime partner but will focus on his past representation of mobsters. He joked that he doubted Gotti attorney Charles Carnesi would ask, "Well, Ron, is it true you wanted to kill him, too?"
For a decade, Kuby has played the liberal foil to Sliwa's conservative lock-up-the-bad-guys views on their WABC-AM talk show, "Curtis and Kuby in the Morning." In recent weeks, Kuby has counseled Sliwa to come across as more likable to jurors at Gotti's retrial so they won't leave the courtroom thinking "it's not a bad thing that you got shot." The result was a less-confrontational Sliwa in court.
The Guardian Angels founder told jurors this week how he leaped out the passenger side window of a cab as he was being fired on by a masked gunman who had popped out next to the driver from under the dashboard. Prosecutors say Gotti, 42, ordered the 1992 ambush to silence Sliwa's unrelenting rants against the Gotti family following the late Dapper Don John Gotti's federal murder conviction.
Kuby has represented Junior Gotti's former brother-in-law, Carmine Agnello, the ex-husband of Victoria Gotti, as well as other alleged low-level mobsters. His late mentor, William Kunstler, once represented the Dapper Don. Kuby was named as the target of a mob hit plan hatched by Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, according to the 2000 testimony of a Gravano associate arrested on drug charges in Arizona.
Gravano was upset with Kuby for representing the families of some of Gravano's 19 murder victims in a civil lawsuit. He planned to lure the lawyer to Texas where he would be gunned down, according to the testimony. After Kuby learned last weekend he might be called as a witness for Gotti, he said he purposely stayed away from the trial.
Prosecutors wrapped up Thursday. Much of their case rests on the testimony of mob snitch Michael (Mikey Scars) DiLeonardo, who has linked Gotti to the Sliwa kidnapping as well as to more than $1 million in construction extortion payoffs.
Gotti's first trial ended in a hung jury.
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