Friends of ours: Junior Gotti, John Gotti
The Kansas City Royals added a new rightfielder yesterday – a 5-foot-8, 275 pound, 53-year old mob informant the federal witness protection placed with the team as a means to keep him out of public view.
Listed on the roster as "Jim Smith," the new Royal is reportedly Vinnie Macaluso, a construction foreman and Mafioso from New Jersey who is preparing to testify for the government in the trial of John A. Gotti, the son of late mob boss John Gotti.
No one from the Federal Witness Protection program would comment on record about "Smith," but an anonymous source within the department confirmed Macaluso was placed with the Royals. "We couldn't think of a place where a person is more likely to go unnoticed than with the Kansas City Royals," said the source. "By playing with them we can be assured no one will ever find him because his face will never be on television and because almost no one attends their games."
"Smith" reportedly has never played baseball in his life, something the Witness Protection program thinks works to their advantage. "Since he'll probably be striking out all the time and dropping fly balls and falling down and stuff, he'll fit in perfectly with the Royals and won't raise flags with anyone," said the source. "We heard he could actually play a little bit of football, so that's why we didn't place him with the Arizona Cardinals."
Thanks to the Sports Pickle
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Friday, April 28, 2006
Now on DVD: In the Mix
Singer Usher stars in this romantic comedy as a nightclub DJ who saves the life of a mob boss (Chazz Palminteri), then finds trouble when he falls for the don's daughter. The DVD has deleted scenes and a making-of featurette.
It's Splitsville!
Friends of ours: John "Dapper Don" Gotti
Friends of mine: Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa
Mafia cop Louis Eppolito and his mouthpiece Bruce Cutler are calling it quits. Less than a week after the convicted hit man for the mob complained to the Daily News that his lawyers "abandoned" him and former NYPD partner Stephen Caracappa at their trial, his defense lawyers had a message of their own.
"Counsel agree that Mr. Eppolito should have new counsel represent him," Cutler's co-counsel Bettina Schein informed the judge in a letter filed late Friday. "We respectfully request Mr. Eppolito be afforded sufficient time to find new counsel."
What amounted to a legal divorce filing came just days after an exclusive Daily News interview in which Eppolito blasted the colorful Cutler — best known as the lawyer for the late mob boss John (Dapper Don) Gotti.
"We were abandoned by the lawyers," Eppolito told The News. "They put up no defense for our lives. I believe you have to fight."
The legal bickering also came less than three weeks after Eppolito and Caracappa were convicted by a Brooklyn federal jury of eight gangland murders — including two killings they personally carried out for the Luchese crime family while they were NYPD detectives.
The duo faces life in prison without the possibility of parole when sentenced in one of the most notorious cases of police corruption in NYPD history.
Federal Judge Jack Weinstein ordered a hearing for today on Eppolito's comments — made to The News in a phone interview from the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he is being held in solitary confinement.
"I wanted to take the stand. I begged them," Eppolito, 57, told The News. "I said, 'Put me up there. This is my life I'm fighting for.'"
Eppolito's family members stepped up the blame in letters to the judge made public last week. "Lou and Steve had two very able attorneys that did not put on a defense," wrote Eppolito's sister Paula Guarneri. "There is so much the jury did not hear in their defense."
Cutler generated a lot of noise in court with his theatrics, but not much else, jurors told The News after the April 6 verdict. Schein mostly handled the legal paperwork.
The search for a new lawyer will likely delay sentencing currently scheduled for May 22. Eppolito's new lawyer must review the entire case and prepare a motion to set aside the verdict.
Caracappa, 64, has not publicly stated any opinion about his lawyer, Edward Hayes. "I think I'll stay with him until the sentencing," Hayes said. "I think he needs a fresh view for the appeal, but I will assist him in any way I can."
Thanks to John Marzulli
Friends of mine: Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa
Mafia cop Louis Eppolito and his mouthpiece Bruce Cutler are calling it quits. Less than a week after the convicted hit man for the mob complained to the Daily News that his lawyers "abandoned" him and former NYPD partner Stephen Caracappa at their trial, his defense lawyers had a message of their own.
"Counsel agree that Mr. Eppolito should have new counsel represent him," Cutler's co-counsel Bettina Schein informed the judge in a letter filed late Friday. "We respectfully request Mr. Eppolito be afforded sufficient time to find new counsel."
What amounted to a legal divorce filing came just days after an exclusive Daily News interview in which Eppolito blasted the colorful Cutler — best known as the lawyer for the late mob boss John (Dapper Don) Gotti.
"We were abandoned by the lawyers," Eppolito told The News. "They put up no defense for our lives. I believe you have to fight."
The legal bickering also came less than three weeks after Eppolito and Caracappa were convicted by a Brooklyn federal jury of eight gangland murders — including two killings they personally carried out for the Luchese crime family while they were NYPD detectives.
The duo faces life in prison without the possibility of parole when sentenced in one of the most notorious cases of police corruption in NYPD history.
Federal Judge Jack Weinstein ordered a hearing for today on Eppolito's comments — made to The News in a phone interview from the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he is being held in solitary confinement.
"I wanted to take the stand. I begged them," Eppolito, 57, told The News. "I said, 'Put me up there. This is my life I'm fighting for.'"
Eppolito's family members stepped up the blame in letters to the judge made public last week. "Lou and Steve had two very able attorneys that did not put on a defense," wrote Eppolito's sister Paula Guarneri. "There is so much the jury did not hear in their defense."
Cutler generated a lot of noise in court with his theatrics, but not much else, jurors told The News after the April 6 verdict. Schein mostly handled the legal paperwork.
The search for a new lawyer will likely delay sentencing currently scheduled for May 22. Eppolito's new lawyer must review the entire case and prepare a motion to set aside the verdict.
Caracappa, 64, has not publicly stated any opinion about his lawyer, Edward Hayes. "I think I'll stay with him until the sentencing," Hayes said. "I think he needs a fresh view for the appeal, but I will assist him in any way I can."
Thanks to John Marzulli
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Overheard: Longshoreman's Union
Homeland Security announced Tuesday all U.S. port workers will have to undergo background checks to look for any security threats. This administration doesn't know the Longshoreman's Union. There are no more patriotic Americans than the Mafia.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Mob Mentality
Death threats, shootings, strikes and bomb-scares ... John Patterson explains how - and why - the mafia tried to shut down the filming of The Godfather
Friends of ours: Joe Colombo Sr., Joey Gallo, Lucky Luciano, Johnny Rosselli, Meyer Lansky
Friends of mine: Frank Sinatra
On June 28, 1971, Francis Ford Coppola was putting certain finishing touches to his costly, controversial adaptation of Mario Puzo's million-seller The Godfather. That day Coppola was shooting parts of the film's famous climactic massacre, in which Michael Corleone takes power of the New York mob by executing his rivals in a blizzard of machine gun-fire and Eisensteinian cross-cutting.
As Joe Spinell, playing one of Michael's button-men, pumped six slugs into a fictional New York mob boss trapped in a midtown hotel's revolving door, a for-real, blood-on-his-hands New York mob boss called Joe Colombo Sr, was being gunned down at an Italian-American rally in Columbus Circle, not four blocks away from Coppola's location.
The hit was the opening salvo in a vicious gang war declared by a newly released mafia upstart and criminal visionary named Joey Gallo. But it was the end of the strange connection between Colombo (who lingered in a coma until his death in 1978) and The Godfather, a movie that couldn't have been made without Colombo's say-so.
As detailed in C4's documentary The Godfather And The Mob (which borrows heavily from Harlan Lebo's The Godfather Legacy), Colombo had insinuated himself between the producer of The Godfather, Al Ruddy, and his own home turf of Little Italy, promising that the mob would take tribute from the movie, or not a frame of celluloid would be shot. Knowing that the movie would lose all its authenticity if shot on studio backlots, Ruddy had no option but to acquiesce, and once the media got hold of the story - a sit-down, handshake deal with the devil - they flayed him with it for months.
All this was, of course, great grist for the movie's publicity mill, and some commentators like Carlos Clarens, in his landmark 1980 study Crime Movies, recalled certain time-tested publicity-agent gambits: "the filmed-under-threat routine had worked wonders back in the days of Doorway To Hell (1930: Jimmy Cagney's second movie)." If nothing else, Lebo's book and The Godfather And The Mob prove beyond a doubt that none of this strange tale was concocted by press agents.
The details are toothsome and delectable. The Godfather was written by Puzo, an Italian-American who grew up in Hell's Kitchen but who had never met a bona-fide mafiosi. Puzo learned his mob folklore mainly from croupiers in the golden age, 1960s Las Vegas of Moe Dalitz and the Rat Pack. That didn't prevent him from achieving such an impressive degree of authenticity that by the time the movie was a runaway hit, many real-life mafiosi had begun comporting themselves according to the rituals solemnised by Puzo and Coppola - the cheek-to-cheek kisses, the quasi-papal pledging of fealty to the Godfather's ring.
The total-immersion experience of the movie - achieved by the goldfish-bowl effect of keeping the audience emotionally intimate only with mobsters, by the subterranean browns and golds of its colour scheme, and by its period, ethnic and socioanthropological authenticity - traps us in 1945, and even now it is hard to imagine that a block away from the border of the set, it was 1971 and the real New York mob was undergoing the same upheavals as everyone else in those Martian times. Although The Godfather And The Mob hints at much of this, it has no real grasp of the richness and complexity of this period in mafia history.
Colombo was the head of what had earlier been the Profaci crime family, which he had inherited in the mid-1960s only because Joey Gallo was in prison for 10 years.
In Goodfellas' famous circularshot of teenage Henry Hill's "introduction to the world" in 1955, Hill's narration says, "It was a glorious time, before Appalachin and before Crazy Joe started a war with his boss ..." Appalachin referred to a famous FBI raid of the upstate New York estate of a leading crime boss in 1957. A mob summit was taking place and agents chased dozens of top mafiosi through the snow as they dumped guns, jewels and thousands of dollars in cash (the incident is alluded to in the final episode of season five of The Sopranos, as Tony escapes the Feds, but New York boss Johnny "Sack" Sacrimone does not).
Joey Gallo, meanwhile, saw drugs as the coming bonanza for organised crime and in the teeth of stiff opposition from the abstemious old "Moustache Petes" of the Corleone/Lucky Luciano generation, he had no compunction about forging distribution partnerships with black criminals in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant and shipping major product.
The war that ensued in the late 1950s (obliquely alluded to in Godfather II - "Not here, Carmine!"), tore the mob apart, grabbed headlines, and encouraged new Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to prosecute the mob unmercifully after 1960 - focusing on such figures as Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa, and the mafia bosses of Chicago, Tampa and New Orleans (who may later have helped assassinate his brother John). So it was an exhausted, much harried New York criminal fraternity that greeted Coppola and Ruddy in 1971.
It was also a community that had little taste for publicity. At the movies, the words "mafia" and "cosa nostra" were rarely ever heard before The Brotherhood in 1968 (which sank faster than Johnny Rosselli in his concrete-filled oil-drum). Even J Edgar Hoover downplayed the importance of the mafia throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s - while exaggerating the moribund red menace - probably because the mob's financial genius Meyer Lansky (Hyman Roth in Godfather II) had, presciently, blackmailed Hoover over his homosexuality as early as 1935.
Still, in an era highly conscious of matters racial and ethnic, Italians like Joe Colombo found a way to express their sense of ethnic grievance, too. Although the Italian community was well served by social groups like the Knights Of Columbus and the Order Of The Sons Of Italy, Colombo became involved in a new outfit, heavily mob-influenced and called, in the spirit of the times, the Italian-American Civil Rights League. And The Godfather's arrival in Manhattan gave the group a chance to raise its profile.
The league demanded consultation rights and got them from Ruddy in exchange for access to locations. Frank Sinatra - probably not pleased at Puzo's oblique references to the manner in which he secured his comeback role in From Here To Eternity - headlined a league fundraiser at Madison Square Garden, and local politicians attended the league's first rally in 1970, decrying anti-Italian prejudice (one hears the echo of Joe Pesci's plaintive wail in Goodfellas: "She's prejudiced against Italians. Imagine that - a Jew broad!").
They had a point - up to a point: Gangsters in the movies before 1970 were redolent of grotesque and venerable stereotypes about unwashed Italian immigrants pouring off Ellis Island. On the other hand - tell it to Sidney Poitier.
Or consider a contemporary figure like Anthony Imperiale, "the White Knight of Newark", namechecked by Tony Soprano in series four. Imperiale rose in the aftermath of the 1967 Newark riots as a streetcorner agitator exploiting Italian-American fears about black encroachment on hitherto white neighbourhoods - which he patrolled after dark with carloads of excitable, albeit unarmed young men.
Imperiale disavowed any racist intent, indeed he merrily hijacked the language of the real civil rights movement, despite talking of "Martin Luther Coon" and invoking a feral, spectral "them" whenever he mentioned blacks. You can breathe this toxic atmosphere of neighbourhood insularity and racism throughout Robert De Niro's A Bronx Tale, also set in those years.
A hunger for headlines and flashbulbs seemed to be part of Joe Colombo's motivation in entangling himself with the league and the Godfather shoot. It was to be his undoing. His secretive, camera-phobic criminal cohorts got fed up with him. Working in partnership with capo di tutti i capi Carlo Gambino, Joey Gallo, free again and no less crazy, had a black criminal associate, one Jerome Johnson, gun Colombo down at the Italian-American League's second annual rally at Columbus Circle.
A black triggerman in a mob hit was then unheard of, and totally alien to the mafia's modus operandi, but no one was fooled. Johnson was gunned down in seconds by an assailant who immediately vanished, but everyone suspected Gallo because of his Harlem connections.
By the time Gallo himself was killed a year later - gunned down in a Mulberry Street clam house while celebrating his 43rd birthday - he had acquired his own taste for publicity: he was feted by writers (he'd read Camus and Sartre in the can), and was pimping his own memoir, A-Block. After Joe Colombo's fatal experience with The Godfather, you'd think Gallo might have learned his lesson. As it turned out, he died the same way as Virgil "The Turk" Sollozo at the hands of newly-minted murderer Michael Corleone, in an explosion of blood and clam sauce - just like in the movies.
Thanks to The Guardian
Friends of ours: Joe Colombo Sr., Joey Gallo, Lucky Luciano, Johnny Rosselli, Meyer Lansky
Friends of mine: Frank Sinatra
On June 28, 1971, Francis Ford Coppola was putting certain finishing touches to his costly, controversial adaptation of Mario Puzo's million-seller The Godfather. That day Coppola was shooting parts of the film's famous climactic massacre, in which Michael Corleone takes power of the New York mob by executing his rivals in a blizzard of machine gun-fire and Eisensteinian cross-cutting.
As Joe Spinell, playing one of Michael's button-men, pumped six slugs into a fictional New York mob boss trapped in a midtown hotel's revolving door, a for-real, blood-on-his-hands New York mob boss called Joe Colombo Sr, was being gunned down at an Italian-American rally in Columbus Circle, not four blocks away from Coppola's location.
The hit was the opening salvo in a vicious gang war declared by a newly released mafia upstart and criminal visionary named Joey Gallo. But it was the end of the strange connection between Colombo (who lingered in a coma until his death in 1978) and The Godfather, a movie that couldn't have been made without Colombo's say-so.
As detailed in C4's documentary The Godfather And The Mob (which borrows heavily from Harlan Lebo's The Godfather Legacy), Colombo had insinuated himself between the producer of The Godfather, Al Ruddy, and his own home turf of Little Italy, promising that the mob would take tribute from the movie, or not a frame of celluloid would be shot. Knowing that the movie would lose all its authenticity if shot on studio backlots, Ruddy had no option but to acquiesce, and once the media got hold of the story - a sit-down, handshake deal with the devil - they flayed him with it for months.
All this was, of course, great grist for the movie's publicity mill, and some commentators like Carlos Clarens, in his landmark 1980 study Crime Movies, recalled certain time-tested publicity-agent gambits: "the filmed-under-threat routine had worked wonders back in the days of Doorway To Hell (1930: Jimmy Cagney's second movie)." If nothing else, Lebo's book and The Godfather And The Mob prove beyond a doubt that none of this strange tale was concocted by press agents.
The details are toothsome and delectable. The Godfather was written by Puzo, an Italian-American who grew up in Hell's Kitchen but who had never met a bona-fide mafiosi. Puzo learned his mob folklore mainly from croupiers in the golden age, 1960s Las Vegas of Moe Dalitz and the Rat Pack. That didn't prevent him from achieving such an impressive degree of authenticity that by the time the movie was a runaway hit, many real-life mafiosi had begun comporting themselves according to the rituals solemnised by Puzo and Coppola - the cheek-to-cheek kisses, the quasi-papal pledging of fealty to the Godfather's ring.
The total-immersion experience of the movie - achieved by the goldfish-bowl effect of keeping the audience emotionally intimate only with mobsters, by the subterranean browns and golds of its colour scheme, and by its period, ethnic and socioanthropological authenticity - traps us in 1945, and even now it is hard to imagine that a block away from the border of the set, it was 1971 and the real New York mob was undergoing the same upheavals as everyone else in those Martian times. Although The Godfather And The Mob hints at much of this, it has no real grasp of the richness and complexity of this period in mafia history.
Colombo was the head of what had earlier been the Profaci crime family, which he had inherited in the mid-1960s only because Joey Gallo was in prison for 10 years.
In Goodfellas' famous circularshot of teenage Henry Hill's "introduction to the world" in 1955, Hill's narration says, "It was a glorious time, before Appalachin and before Crazy Joe started a war with his boss ..." Appalachin referred to a famous FBI raid of the upstate New York estate of a leading crime boss in 1957. A mob summit was taking place and agents chased dozens of top mafiosi through the snow as they dumped guns, jewels and thousands of dollars in cash (the incident is alluded to in the final episode of season five of The Sopranos, as Tony escapes the Feds, but New York boss Johnny "Sack" Sacrimone does not).
Joey Gallo, meanwhile, saw drugs as the coming bonanza for organised crime and in the teeth of stiff opposition from the abstemious old "Moustache Petes" of the Corleone/Lucky Luciano generation, he had no compunction about forging distribution partnerships with black criminals in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant and shipping major product.
The war that ensued in the late 1950s (obliquely alluded to in Godfather II - "Not here, Carmine!"), tore the mob apart, grabbed headlines, and encouraged new Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to prosecute the mob unmercifully after 1960 - focusing on such figures as Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa, and the mafia bosses of Chicago, Tampa and New Orleans (who may later have helped assassinate his brother John). So it was an exhausted, much harried New York criminal fraternity that greeted Coppola and Ruddy in 1971.
It was also a community that had little taste for publicity. At the movies, the words "mafia" and "cosa nostra" were rarely ever heard before The Brotherhood in 1968 (which sank faster than Johnny Rosselli in his concrete-filled oil-drum). Even J Edgar Hoover downplayed the importance of the mafia throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s - while exaggerating the moribund red menace - probably because the mob's financial genius Meyer Lansky (Hyman Roth in Godfather II) had, presciently, blackmailed Hoover over his homosexuality as early as 1935.
Still, in an era highly conscious of matters racial and ethnic, Italians like Joe Colombo found a way to express their sense of ethnic grievance, too. Although the Italian community was well served by social groups like the Knights Of Columbus and the Order Of The Sons Of Italy, Colombo became involved in a new outfit, heavily mob-influenced and called, in the spirit of the times, the Italian-American Civil Rights League. And The Godfather's arrival in Manhattan gave the group a chance to raise its profile.
The league demanded consultation rights and got them from Ruddy in exchange for access to locations. Frank Sinatra - probably not pleased at Puzo's oblique references to the manner in which he secured his comeback role in From Here To Eternity - headlined a league fundraiser at Madison Square Garden, and local politicians attended the league's first rally in 1970, decrying anti-Italian prejudice (one hears the echo of Joe Pesci's plaintive wail in Goodfellas: "She's prejudiced against Italians. Imagine that - a Jew broad!").
They had a point - up to a point: Gangsters in the movies before 1970 were redolent of grotesque and venerable stereotypes about unwashed Italian immigrants pouring off Ellis Island. On the other hand - tell it to Sidney Poitier.
Or consider a contemporary figure like Anthony Imperiale, "the White Knight of Newark", namechecked by Tony Soprano in series four. Imperiale rose in the aftermath of the 1967 Newark riots as a streetcorner agitator exploiting Italian-American fears about black encroachment on hitherto white neighbourhoods - which he patrolled after dark with carloads of excitable, albeit unarmed young men.
Imperiale disavowed any racist intent, indeed he merrily hijacked the language of the real civil rights movement, despite talking of "Martin Luther Coon" and invoking a feral, spectral "them" whenever he mentioned blacks. You can breathe this toxic atmosphere of neighbourhood insularity and racism throughout Robert De Niro's A Bronx Tale, also set in those years.
A hunger for headlines and flashbulbs seemed to be part of Joe Colombo's motivation in entangling himself with the league and the Godfather shoot. It was to be his undoing. His secretive, camera-phobic criminal cohorts got fed up with him. Working in partnership with capo di tutti i capi Carlo Gambino, Joey Gallo, free again and no less crazy, had a black criminal associate, one Jerome Johnson, gun Colombo down at the Italian-American League's second annual rally at Columbus Circle.
A black triggerman in a mob hit was then unheard of, and totally alien to the mafia's modus operandi, but no one was fooled. Johnson was gunned down in seconds by an assailant who immediately vanished, but everyone suspected Gallo because of his Harlem connections.
By the time Gallo himself was killed a year later - gunned down in a Mulberry Street clam house while celebrating his 43rd birthday - he had acquired his own taste for publicity: he was feted by writers (he'd read Camus and Sartre in the can), and was pimping his own memoir, A-Block. After Joe Colombo's fatal experience with The Godfather, you'd think Gallo might have learned his lesson. As it turned out, he died the same way as Virgil "The Turk" Sollozo at the hands of newly-minted murderer Michael Corleone, in an explosion of blood and clam sauce - just like in the movies.
Thanks to The Guardian
Mob Cop's Daughter Begs Judge: Free Dad
Friends of mine: Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa
Daddy's dearest is coming to the rescue again.
The daughter of convicted Mafia cop Louis Eppolito has fired off an emotional letter to Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein, attacking the government's case, dissing her father's lawyers and begging the judge to set aside his conviction. In short, the dark-haired beauty launched the kind of defense her father claims he didn't get at his trial.
"There were so many things that I thought would have come out in trial, so many pieces of information and evidence that would have shown reasonable doubt and let the jury know that my father and Steve Caracappa are innocent," Andrea Eppolito said in a four-page missive made public yesterday.
"I don't know why the lawyers didn't do certain things, ask certain questions, or take a more aggressive defense. Your Honor, please do not punish my father and our family for those mistakes," she added.
A year ago today, Eppolito made front-page news when she unexpectedly waltzed in front of a bevy of microphones and delivered an impassioned defense of her father after a routine courthouse appearance.
This time around, Eppolito, a 29-year-old marketing specialist from Las Vegas, wrote Weinstein she was appealing to him "on behalf of my father, my family, and in the name of justice."
She implored the judge to set aside the April 6 verdict in which her dad and Caracappa, his former NYPD partner, were convicted of being linked to eight mob murders.
The disgraced ex-detective also ripped defense lawyers Bruce Cutler and Bettina Schein for not allowing him to testify and not aggressively defending him. Weinstein will hold a hearing Monday to determine whether Eppolito needs new counsel.
In her missive, Andrea says her dad's 1992 biography, "Mafia Cop," in which Eppolito admits his father, uncle and cousin were in the Mafia, revealed a family history that was largely kept secret from her as a child.
"My father walked away from a life of crime that was filled with easy money, easy hours, lies, deceit, coercion, murder and many other degrading acts, to wake up early, put on a uniform or suit and carry a badge.
"Please do not condemn him, do not force him to pay for the sins of his father and the family that came before him."
Thanks to John Marzulli
Daddy's dearest is coming to the rescue again.
The daughter of convicted Mafia cop Louis Eppolito has fired off an emotional letter to Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein, attacking the government's case, dissing her father's lawyers and begging the judge to set aside his conviction. In short, the dark-haired beauty launched the kind of defense her father claims he didn't get at his trial.
"There were so many things that I thought would have come out in trial, so many pieces of information and evidence that would have shown reasonable doubt and let the jury know that my father and Steve Caracappa are innocent," Andrea Eppolito said in a four-page missive made public yesterday.
"I don't know why the lawyers didn't do certain things, ask certain questions, or take a more aggressive defense. Your Honor, please do not punish my father and our family for those mistakes," she added.
A year ago today, Eppolito made front-page news when she unexpectedly waltzed in front of a bevy of microphones and delivered an impassioned defense of her father after a routine courthouse appearance.
This time around, Eppolito, a 29-year-old marketing specialist from Las Vegas, wrote Weinstein she was appealing to him "on behalf of my father, my family, and in the name of justice."
She implored the judge to set aside the April 6 verdict in which her dad and Caracappa, his former NYPD partner, were convicted of being linked to eight mob murders.
The disgraced ex-detective also ripped defense lawyers Bruce Cutler and Bettina Schein for not allowing him to testify and not aggressively defending him. Weinstein will hold a hearing Monday to determine whether Eppolito needs new counsel.
In her missive, Andrea says her dad's 1992 biography, "Mafia Cop," in which Eppolito admits his father, uncle and cousin were in the Mafia, revealed a family history that was largely kept secret from her as a child.
"My father walked away from a life of crime that was filled with easy money, easy hours, lies, deceit, coercion, murder and many other degrading acts, to wake up early, put on a uniform or suit and carry a badge.
"Please do not condemn him, do not force him to pay for the sins of his father and the family that came before him."
Thanks to John Marzulli
Four-Year Gotti Offer
Friends of ours: Junior Gotti, John Gotti, Gambino Crime Family
The feds have made John "Junior" Gotti an offer he likely can't refuse.
Gotti is secretly weighing whether to accept a new plea deal that would put him behind bars for less than four years in exchange for pleading guilty to racketeering charges, two sources familiar with the negotiations told The Post.
While Gotti, 42, has yet to sign off on the deal, he is seriously considering it and could plead guilty as soon as next week, one of the sources said.
The offer includes a five-year prison sentence that would likely be whittled down to 31/2 years behind bars with credit for time he's already served - roughly one-tenth of the 30-year sentence he could face if a jury convicts him.
The new terms mirror those sought by Gotti last November, but prosecutors then refused to go below a 10-year sentence. The feds sweetened the deal after a jury failed to reach a verdict in his case last month - Gotti's second mistrial. A third trial is scheduled to begin July 5.
The son of John "Dapper Don" Gotti would also have to fork over $500,000 in cash under the proposed deal - a measly sum compared to the $25 million in forfeitures now hanging over his head.
Once released, the father of five would be forced to move from his Oyster Bay, L.I., home. The terms of the deal bar him from living in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut or Massachusetts, a source said.
Gotti's lawyer, Charles Carnesi, declined to comment on the negotiations. A call to prosecutors was not returned.
Gotti has admitted he once ran the Gambino crime family for his father, but claims he left the mob in 1999.
To accept the deal, Gotti would have to admit to more recent racketeering charges, including loan-sharking and extortion, and the sensational 1992 kidnapping of radio host Curtis Sliwa. Sliwa was shot in a stolen taxi allegedly piloted by a Gambino thug, but managed to escape by climbing out the window.
The new offer, with its five-year prison term, is a fraction of any previous deal put on the table. Prior his first trial, in the summer of 2005, Gotti rejected an offer that would have forced him to serve 18 years behind bars.
When a jury failed to reach a verdict, Gotti's then-lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, negotiated a 10-year sentence and $1 million in forfeitures, but Gotti had a change of heart and rejected the offer. The gamble paid off when a second jury failed to reach a verdict in March - it was reported split 8-4 in favor of acquittal.
The mob scion has long been a suspect in three murders - a double hit in 1992 on Thomas and Rosemary Uva, who were known for robbing mob-connected social clubs, as well as the slaying of Danny Silva in a 1983 barroom brawl.
The new offer does not protect him from prosecution in those cases should the feds develop new evidence.
Thanks to Kati Cornell
The feds have made John "Junior" Gotti an offer he likely can't refuse.
Gotti is secretly weighing whether to accept a new plea deal that would put him behind bars for less than four years in exchange for pleading guilty to racketeering charges, two sources familiar with the negotiations told The Post.
While Gotti, 42, has yet to sign off on the deal, he is seriously considering it and could plead guilty as soon as next week, one of the sources said.
The offer includes a five-year prison sentence that would likely be whittled down to 31/2 years behind bars with credit for time he's already served - roughly one-tenth of the 30-year sentence he could face if a jury convicts him.
The new terms mirror those sought by Gotti last November, but prosecutors then refused to go below a 10-year sentence. The feds sweetened the deal after a jury failed to reach a verdict in his case last month - Gotti's second mistrial. A third trial is scheduled to begin July 5.
The son of John "Dapper Don" Gotti would also have to fork over $500,000 in cash under the proposed deal - a measly sum compared to the $25 million in forfeitures now hanging over his head.
Once released, the father of five would be forced to move from his Oyster Bay, L.I., home. The terms of the deal bar him from living in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut or Massachusetts, a source said.
Gotti's lawyer, Charles Carnesi, declined to comment on the negotiations. A call to prosecutors was not returned.
Gotti has admitted he once ran the Gambino crime family for his father, but claims he left the mob in 1999.
To accept the deal, Gotti would have to admit to more recent racketeering charges, including loan-sharking and extortion, and the sensational 1992 kidnapping of radio host Curtis Sliwa. Sliwa was shot in a stolen taxi allegedly piloted by a Gambino thug, but managed to escape by climbing out the window.
The new offer, with its five-year prison term, is a fraction of any previous deal put on the table. Prior his first trial, in the summer of 2005, Gotti rejected an offer that would have forced him to serve 18 years behind bars.
When a jury failed to reach a verdict, Gotti's then-lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, negotiated a 10-year sentence and $1 million in forfeitures, but Gotti had a change of heart and rejected the offer. The gamble paid off when a second jury failed to reach a verdict in March - it was reported split 8-4 in favor of acquittal.
The mob scion has long been a suspect in three murders - a double hit in 1992 on Thomas and Rosemary Uva, who were known for robbing mob-connected social clubs, as well as the slaying of Danny Silva in a 1983 barroom brawl.
The new offer does not protect him from prosecution in those cases should the feds develop new evidence.
Thanks to Kati Cornell
Gambino Boss Heading to Jail
NINE YEARS FOR GEEZER GODFATHER
Friend of ours: Gambino Crime Family, Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri, Peter Gotti, John Gotti, Gregory DePalma
Reputed Gambino head Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri copped a plea to racketeering charges stemming from a daring three-year probe by an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the crime family's ranks and brought down its leadership.
Squitieri, 70, confessed to racketeering and three shakedown schemes in a plea deal with the feds that will likely land him behind bars for nine years - roughly half the time he would have faced had he taken his chances with a jury. But the aging mafioso, who appeared in Manhattan Federal Court clad in tan prison garb that exposed a tattooed arm, made it clear he wasn't pleading guilty to save himself.
After admitting his misdeeds yesterday, Squitieri turned to coldly point at his wife, Marie, in the spectator seats.
"I did it for you. I pleaded guilty because of you," Squitieri said, prompting his wife to well up with tears and rush from the courtroom.
Also looking on were three of Squitieri's daughters, including raven-haired attorney Ginger Squitieri, who sat next to her father as a member of his defense team and greeted him with a kiss.
The feds claim Squitieri took the reins as Gambino acting boss when reputed boss Peter Gotti was arrested in 2002 - the first generation of Gambino bosses in the post-John Gotti era.
Under the deal hammered out with Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Conniff, Squitieri confessed to racketeering and raking in cash through shakedown schemes targeting two construction companies, in Mineola, L.I., and Westchester, and a New Jersey trucking company.
"I know it was wrong," Squitieri said. But the reputed mob leader - identified by the feds as an acting boss - kept his lips zipped when asked to acknowledge his role in the Gambino crime family.
"Mr. Squitieri makes no concession with respect to the name of the enterprise," defense lawyer Gerald Shargel told Magistrate Judge Michael Dolinger.
"With the Gambino name out of it? Guilty," said Squitieri, who must also forfeit $100,000 in cash.
The gravelly-voiced wiseguy joked with the judge when asked to identify the time frame of his crimes. "I can't remember too good, your honor. I'm getting up in age," Squitieri said, estimating that the extortions occurred between 1999 and 2005.
The feds have pegged Squitieri as official underboss and acting boss of the crime family, but some members of his ranks viewed him as holding the ultimate power, according to tapes of secretly recorded conversations.
On Nov. 5, 2004, steely-nerved undercover FBI agent "Jack Falcone" asked reputed capo Gregory DePalma if Squitieri was acting boss, to which the high-ranking mobster replied, "No, he's the boss. The boss is the boss," law-enforcement sources said.
In that same momentous conversation, DePalma told the 6-foot-4, 300-pound-plus Falcone he wanted to propose him as a "made" member of the crime family - not knowing he was an undercover agent.
The probe came to an abrupt end soon after this exchange in order to protect the burly agent, who was later targeted in a $250,000 murder contract foiled by the feds in August 2005 and first reported by The Post.
Squitieri was one of 32 reputed mobsters rounded up in March 2005 as the result of the daring undercover investigation, and all but two have pleaded guilty.
Thanks to Kati Cornell and Murray Weis
Friend of ours: Gambino Crime Family, Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri, Peter Gotti, John Gotti, Gregory DePalma
Reputed Gambino head Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri copped a plea to racketeering charges stemming from a daring three-year probe by an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the crime family's ranks and brought down its leadership.
Squitieri, 70, confessed to racketeering and three shakedown schemes in a plea deal with the feds that will likely land him behind bars for nine years - roughly half the time he would have faced had he taken his chances with a jury. But the aging mafioso, who appeared in Manhattan Federal Court clad in tan prison garb that exposed a tattooed arm, made it clear he wasn't pleading guilty to save himself.
After admitting his misdeeds yesterday, Squitieri turned to coldly point at his wife, Marie, in the spectator seats.
"I did it for you. I pleaded guilty because of you," Squitieri said, prompting his wife to well up with tears and rush from the courtroom.
Also looking on were three of Squitieri's daughters, including raven-haired attorney Ginger Squitieri, who sat next to her father as a member of his defense team and greeted him with a kiss.
The feds claim Squitieri took the reins as Gambino acting boss when reputed boss Peter Gotti was arrested in 2002 - the first generation of Gambino bosses in the post-John Gotti era.
Under the deal hammered out with Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Conniff, Squitieri confessed to racketeering and raking in cash through shakedown schemes targeting two construction companies, in Mineola, L.I., and Westchester, and a New Jersey trucking company.
"I know it was wrong," Squitieri said. But the reputed mob leader - identified by the feds as an acting boss - kept his lips zipped when asked to acknowledge his role in the Gambino crime family.
"Mr. Squitieri makes no concession with respect to the name of the enterprise," defense lawyer Gerald Shargel told Magistrate Judge Michael Dolinger.
"With the Gambino name out of it? Guilty," said Squitieri, who must also forfeit $100,000 in cash.
The gravelly-voiced wiseguy joked with the judge when asked to identify the time frame of his crimes. "I can't remember too good, your honor. I'm getting up in age," Squitieri said, estimating that the extortions occurred between 1999 and 2005.
The feds have pegged Squitieri as official underboss and acting boss of the crime family, but some members of his ranks viewed him as holding the ultimate power, according to tapes of secretly recorded conversations.
On Nov. 5, 2004, steely-nerved undercover FBI agent "Jack Falcone" asked reputed capo Gregory DePalma if Squitieri was acting boss, to which the high-ranking mobster replied, "No, he's the boss. The boss is the boss," law-enforcement sources said.
In that same momentous conversation, DePalma told the 6-foot-4, 300-pound-plus Falcone he wanted to propose him as a "made" member of the crime family - not knowing he was an undercover agent.
The probe came to an abrupt end soon after this exchange in order to protect the burly agent, who was later targeted in a $250,000 murder contract foiled by the feds in August 2005 and first reported by The Post.
Squitieri was one of 32 reputed mobsters rounded up in March 2005 as the result of the daring undercover investigation, and all but two have pleaded guilty.
Thanks to Kati Cornell and Murray Weis
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
What's Your Mob Nickname?
Someone has designed a Mafia Name Generator for those who are interested in trying it out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
