Friends of ours: Gambino Crime Family, Junior Gotti, John Gotti.
Radio host Curtis Sliwa captivated a federal jury with an action-packed account of how he was kidnapped and shot in a stolen cab by two alleged Gambino goons - and then narrowly escaped death by hurling himself out the window. Testifying at the trial of John "Junior" Gotti, who stands accused of hatching the plot to stop Sliwa from bad-mouthing his father John "Dapper Don" Gotti, the radio host described how a cab ride to work turned into a nightmare in which he was shot at "like a duck in a duck pond."
Sliwa, 51, said he sensed trouble when the taxi made a sudden wrong turn the morning of June 19, 1992. "Hey, Mack! Turn this hack around! You're going in the wrong direction!" Sliwa recalled barking at the driver.
Seconds later, Sliwa - founder of the Guardian Angels civilian patrol group - said he heard rustling in the front seat. "All of a sudden there was this guy who had popped up. His backside was on the dashboard. He was pointing a gun at me," said Sliwa. "The gunman said, 'Take this you son of a bitch,' " Sliwa told Assistant U.S. Attorney Joon Kim. "The gun sounded like a cannon . . . I saw the fire of the gun."
Sliwa said he heard three shots and felt excruciating pain in his abdomen and legs as he tried to escape the rear of the taxi, which had been stripped of its door and window handles. "I'm stuck in a corner. I'm thinking in a matter of seconds I'm going to be dead," Sliwa said. "He's shooting you like a duck in a duck pond."
The radio host said he grabbed his two-way radio and shouted, "Angel One! Code Red!" He said he then felt a gust of wind from the front passenger area as the speeding taxi rounded a turn. "I used the back seat like one would a trampoline. I bounced off there," Sliwa said, describing a death-defying stunt that propelled him past the gunman and through an open window. Sliwa said he underwent extensive surgery for damage caused by two bullets and was forced to wear a colostomy bag for a year.
This is the second time Sliwa has taken the witness stand against Gotti in Manhattan federal court. Last year a jury failed to reach a verdict on the kidnapping charge against Gotti and acquitted the alleged shooter. The admitted driver of the cab, mob turncoat Joseph D'Angelo, is set to testify.
Under cross-examination, Sliwa said he could not identify either the gunman or the driver, but said, "I had always been suspicious of the Gottis and the Gambinos."
Defense lawyer Charles Carnesi asked Sliwa if he'd said on his radio show that before he testified he planned to "rub onions in your eyes so you would be crying." Sliwa acknowledged making the statement, but said it was a joke. "I wouldn't do that," he said.
Sliwa also acknowledged six instances in the late 1970s and early 1980s when he staged acts of heroism to get positive media attention for his fledgling Guardian Angels group.
"I appreciated the opportunity of being able to tell the jury my story a second time," Sliwa said, speaking outside of court. "I should have been dead long ago."
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Mourning Good Guy Who Went After Wiseguys
Friends of ours: John Gotti, Peter Gotti, Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, Junior Gotti
Federal mob investigator Kenneth McCabe scoured the death notices for the names of mobsters so he could be sure and pay his respects. Or he turned up at their weddings, where they'd greet him with a slice of cake and coffee that was always refused. For more than three decades, first as an NYPD detective and then with the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, McCabe deftly handled skittish government cooperators while charting the Mafia underworld's every move with his camera.
His work provided the backbone for dozens of successful prosecutions, including the late mob boss John Gotti and his brother Peter, that have left the city's Mafia families weakened to the point of extinction.
McCabe, 59, died last Sunday after a year-long battle with cancer.
His intense preparation and his shun-the-spotlight manner won the 6-foot, 6-inch former college basketball player the respect of colleagues - and of the mobsters he arrested. They would regularly counsel their attorneys not to ask McCabe a question when he took the witness stand, said former Manhattan U.S. Attorney David Kelley. "The mob is all about playing by the rules," said Kelley. "He didn't lie. He dealt with them fairly. They got arrested fair and square."
At his funeral Thursday at St. Thomas More Church in Breezy Point, Queens, a priest told the story of a wiseguy who ambled up to McCabe's car while he was conducting another surveillance. "You know, Kenny," he said. "I'm thinking of retiring. I'm getting too old for this." To which, McCabe replied: "Make sure it's someplace warm because I'm tired of freezing out here."
Mob informant Michael (Mikey Scars) DiLeonardo paid tribute to McCabe during his testimony at John A. (Junior) Gotti's federal kidnapping trial last week. Asked to identify a surveillance shot, DiLeonardo guessed that it was probably taken by McCabe. "He was relentless," DiLeonardo said.
McCabe was reared in Park Slope and attended Cathedral High School before playing power forward for Loyola College in Maryland.
His photographs allowed prosecutors to piece together mobster associations and link them together at key moments in a conspiracy. In some shots, smiling mobsters wave hello to McCabe.
Less known was McCabe's handling of wiseguys-turned-informants. "The cooperators had a tremendous amount of respect for him," Kelley said. "He didn't pull any punches. He told it like it was."
Thanks to Thomas Zambito
Federal mob investigator Kenneth McCabe scoured the death notices for the names of mobsters so he could be sure and pay his respects. Or he turned up at their weddings, where they'd greet him with a slice of cake and coffee that was always refused. For more than three decades, first as an NYPD detective and then with the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, McCabe deftly handled skittish government cooperators while charting the Mafia underworld's every move with his camera.
His work provided the backbone for dozens of successful prosecutions, including the late mob boss John Gotti and his brother Peter, that have left the city's Mafia families weakened to the point of extinction.
McCabe, 59, died last Sunday after a year-long battle with cancer.
His intense preparation and his shun-the-spotlight manner won the 6-foot, 6-inch former college basketball player the respect of colleagues - and of the mobsters he arrested. They would regularly counsel their attorneys not to ask McCabe a question when he took the witness stand, said former Manhattan U.S. Attorney David Kelley. "The mob is all about playing by the rules," said Kelley. "He didn't lie. He dealt with them fairly. They got arrested fair and square."
At his funeral Thursday at St. Thomas More Church in Breezy Point, Queens, a priest told the story of a wiseguy who ambled up to McCabe's car while he was conducting another surveillance. "You know, Kenny," he said. "I'm thinking of retiring. I'm getting too old for this." To which, McCabe replied: "Make sure it's someplace warm because I'm tired of freezing out here."
Mob informant Michael (Mikey Scars) DiLeonardo paid tribute to McCabe during his testimony at John A. (Junior) Gotti's federal kidnapping trial last week. Asked to identify a surveillance shot, DiLeonardo guessed that it was probably taken by McCabe. "He was relentless," DiLeonardo said.
McCabe was reared in Park Slope and attended Cathedral High School before playing power forward for Loyola College in Maryland.
His photographs allowed prosecutors to piece together mobster associations and link them together at key moments in a conspiracy. In some shots, smiling mobsters wave hello to McCabe.
Less known was McCabe's handling of wiseguys-turned-informants. "The cooperators had a tremendous amount of respect for him," Kelley said. "He didn't pull any punches. He told it like it was."
Thanks to Thomas Zambito
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Gotti's Girl
Sandy Grillo, yesterday on Staten Island, denies being the late John Gotti's paramour.
A woman who was one of the late mob don John Gotti's mistresses - and allegedly the mother of a secret love child - lives on Staten Island with her three daughters. Meet Shannon "Sandy" Grillo, the estranged wife of reputed Gambino associate Ernesto Grillo - and the woman who had an affair with the Dapper Don, according to several sources. She's now the center of speculation that she has a child by the dashing don.
Mrs. Grillo lives modestly with her mother, Rosemary - described as the companion of the late Gambino underboss Aniello Dellacroce - and three kids. She is separated from her husband, purported mobster Ernesto Grillo. Dellacroce was Gotti's mentor.
The bombshell secret love life of one of America's most notorious gangsters was first revealed in court Friday during the racketeering trial of Gotti's son John "Junior" Gotti.
Mob rat and star prosecution witness Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo claimed the younger Gotti told him "his father had a secret second family and a daughter he had fathered out of wedlock."
As The Post reported yesterday, sources said the older Gotti had two mistresses who both bore him children. Both secret families live on Staten Island. The second mistress had a daughter who is older than the one Gotti is purported to have had with Grillo, according to a knowledgeable source. And it was that second alleged Gotti paramour to whom Mikey Scars was referring at Junior's trial on Friday - an affair Scars knew about both from Junior and from another mobster, according to the source. The second woman's identity has not been disclosed.
As for the Grillo affair, Dellacroce, who was not Sandy Grillo's biological father, strongly disapproved of her relationship with Gotti, the source said. Dellacroce, then the No. 2 Gambino boss and Gotti's mentor, died in 1985.
"John Gotti became much more free-wheeling after Neil [Aniello] passed away in his personal and professional life," the source said. It was after Dellacroce's death that Gotti assassinated Gambino boss Paul Castellano, a move Dellacroce - who didn't like Castellano - would nonetheless have disapproved of, and prevented, if he were alive.
When approached at her home yesterday, the attractive, 50-year-old Grillo was asked: "Are you denying you had a relationship with John Gotti?" "Yes," she said politely, yet firmly.
Later, when one of Grillo's daughters was approached, she acknowledged her mom was Sandy Grillo. Asked if she had seen news accounts of Gotti's secret love life, she said: "No." "I don't know anything about this," she said, adding, "That's not true at all," when asked about an illicit affair and out-of-wedlock child involving her mom and Gotti.
The young woman said she lives with her mom, grandmother Rosemary and two other sisters. There's no hint any of the children in the household were treated as anything other than part of the Grillo household.
It's not the first time Sandy Grillo's name has been bandied about in connection with one of the most well-known members of New York's underworld
. The salacious 2004 book "Il Dottore: The Double Life of a Mafia Doctor" recounts a mob doctor's first encounter with the Dapper Don Juan and Sandy Grillo: a house call to tend to an ulcer that hampered the couple's lovemaking.
In the book, the dutiful mob doc is summoned to Manhattan's Barbizon Plaza Hotel on June 15, 1984, to examine Gotti, who complained of stomach pain. "Beautiful broad like Sandy here . . . but a goddamned stomach turns itself inside out right when I'm about to make love to her like Rudolph Valentino," Gotti allegedly told the doctor.
A week later, a fellow mob doctor told the author: "An unspoken La Cosa Nostra rule is that a 'made' man, especially a capo like Gotti, is not supposed to violate another man's wife or children.
"In sleeping with Shannon Grillo, Gotti seems to be violating two sacred oaths with the same woman."
A woman who was one of the late mob don John Gotti's mistresses - and allegedly the mother of a secret love child - lives on Staten Island with her three daughters. Meet Shannon "Sandy" Grillo, the estranged wife of reputed Gambino associate Ernesto Grillo - and the woman who had an affair with the Dapper Don, according to several sources. She's now the center of speculation that she has a child by the dashing don.
Mrs. Grillo lives modestly with her mother, Rosemary - described as the companion of the late Gambino underboss Aniello Dellacroce - and three kids. She is separated from her husband, purported mobster Ernesto Grillo. Dellacroce was Gotti's mentor.
The bombshell secret love life of one of America's most notorious gangsters was first revealed in court Friday during the racketeering trial of Gotti's son John "Junior" Gotti.
Mob rat and star prosecution witness Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo claimed the younger Gotti told him "his father had a secret second family and a daughter he had fathered out of wedlock."
As The Post reported yesterday, sources said the older Gotti had two mistresses who both bore him children. Both secret families live on Staten Island. The second mistress had a daughter who is older than the one Gotti is purported to have had with Grillo, according to a knowledgeable source. And it was that second alleged Gotti paramour to whom Mikey Scars was referring at Junior's trial on Friday - an affair Scars knew about both from Junior and from another mobster, according to the source. The second woman's identity has not been disclosed.
As for the Grillo affair, Dellacroce, who was not Sandy Grillo's biological father, strongly disapproved of her relationship with Gotti, the source said. Dellacroce, then the No. 2 Gambino boss and Gotti's mentor, died in 1985.
"John Gotti became much more free-wheeling after Neil [Aniello] passed away in his personal and professional life," the source said. It was after Dellacroce's death that Gotti assassinated Gambino boss Paul Castellano, a move Dellacroce - who didn't like Castellano - would nonetheless have disapproved of, and prevented, if he were alive.
When approached at her home yesterday, the attractive, 50-year-old Grillo was asked: "Are you denying you had a relationship with John Gotti?" "Yes," she said politely, yet firmly.
Later, when one of Grillo's daughters was approached, she acknowledged her mom was Sandy Grillo. Asked if she had seen news accounts of Gotti's secret love life, she said: "No." "I don't know anything about this," she said, adding, "That's not true at all," when asked about an illicit affair and out-of-wedlock child involving her mom and Gotti.
The young woman said she lives with her mom, grandmother Rosemary and two other sisters. There's no hint any of the children in the household were treated as anything other than part of the Grillo household.
It's not the first time Sandy Grillo's name has been bandied about in connection with one of the most well-known members of New York's underworld
. The salacious 2004 book "Il Dottore: The Double Life of a Mafia Doctor" recounts a mob doctor's first encounter with the Dapper Don Juan and Sandy Grillo: a house call to tend to an ulcer that hampered the couple's lovemaking.In the book, the dutiful mob doc is summoned to Manhattan's Barbizon Plaza Hotel on June 15, 1984, to examine Gotti, who complained of stomach pain. "Beautiful broad like Sandy here . . . but a goddamned stomach turns itself inside out right when I'm about to make love to her like Rudolph Valentino," Gotti allegedly told the doctor.
A week later, a fellow mob doctor told the author: "An unspoken La Cosa Nostra rule is that a 'made' man, especially a capo like Gotti, is not supposed to violate another man's wife or children.
"In sleeping with Shannon Grillo, Gotti seems to be violating two sacred oaths with the same woman."
Mob Wife on Scar's Betrayal
Toni Marie Ricci knows all about husbands with secret families. Ricci says her ex - mob rat Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, who told a jury last week that Mafia don John Gotti had a secret family and that "Junior" Gotti had a mistress - had secrets about everything. The secrets included his jobs, friends, mistress, out-of-wedlock son - even his phone number.
In an explosive interview in the upcoming issue of New York magazine, Ricci, detailed the turncoat's trail of lies and obsessions - calling him a "sicko" for dragging their college-age son into the middle of the high-profile mob trial, and railing at her ex-husband's secret family. "Michael was my life," Ricci told the magazine. "I did anything and everything possible to make the man happy. I never stopped and said to myself, 'You know, my husband is a gangster.' "Did I think anything? Yeah, I did. But did I talk to him about it? No. I guess I blocked it out."
Ricci, 19 when she married a 29-year-old DiLeonardo in 1985, was easily seduced by the perks of marrying into the mob. There were parties at "Sammy Bull's" house, Junior Gotti's wedding at the Helmsley Palace and an army of hangers-on. The glamour wore off. "I never had proof he was cheating, but I knew," she said.
"The first confrontation occurred in '95, '96. I got a job in a school in Mill Basin as an aide. I wanted to go to work; he never wanted me to. I came home one day and heard him upstairs on the phone in the bedroom, saying, 'I'll pick you up tonight. Just get dressed.' I ran up. 'Who were you talking to?' " He told her it was a male friend.
She said she started to think about leaving. Ricci said she tried without success for 12 years to have a second child, hoping it would patch up the couple's fraying marriage. In vitro failed her, but it worked fine for Scars' mistress, Madelina Fischetti.
"Right after that, he took the girl to get pregnant with the same procedures," she complained. Proof of its success came in December 2002. "We get a Christmas card: 'Congratulations to Michael and Madelina on their new baby boy - more to come.'
"I read this not even realizing what I am reading. Two seconds later it hits me, and I fell on the floor. This is a year after I tried to have another child with him. And I learn that he has a 6-month-old son. "He turned beet red: 'Someone's making up lies.' But I knew it was true as soon as I looked in his face."
She said she made her husband call his mistress at the apartment DiLeonardo rented for her on well-heeled Shore Road in Brooklyn. "He handed me the phone, and I said to her, 'Where do you come off having this child? I'm married to this guy for 17 years.' She didn't answer. I said, 'What's the matter? You're not woman enough to answer?' . . . He took the phone and hung it up. "So I took the phone and hit him over the head with it."
In an explosive interview in the upcoming issue of New York magazine, Ricci, detailed the turncoat's trail of lies and obsessions - calling him a "sicko" for dragging their college-age son into the middle of the high-profile mob trial, and railing at her ex-husband's secret family. "Michael was my life," Ricci told the magazine. "I did anything and everything possible to make the man happy. I never stopped and said to myself, 'You know, my husband is a gangster.' "Did I think anything? Yeah, I did. But did I talk to him about it? No. I guess I blocked it out."
Ricci, 19 when she married a 29-year-old DiLeonardo in 1985, was easily seduced by the perks of marrying into the mob. There were parties at "Sammy Bull's" house, Junior Gotti's wedding at the Helmsley Palace and an army of hangers-on. The glamour wore off. "I never had proof he was cheating, but I knew," she said.
"The first confrontation occurred in '95, '96. I got a job in a school in Mill Basin as an aide. I wanted to go to work; he never wanted me to. I came home one day and heard him upstairs on the phone in the bedroom, saying, 'I'll pick you up tonight. Just get dressed.' I ran up. 'Who were you talking to?' " He told her it was a male friend.
She said she started to think about leaving. Ricci said she tried without success for 12 years to have a second child, hoping it would patch up the couple's fraying marriage. In vitro failed her, but it worked fine for Scars' mistress, Madelina Fischetti.
"Right after that, he took the girl to get pregnant with the same procedures," she complained. Proof of its success came in December 2002. "We get a Christmas card: 'Congratulations to Michael and Madelina on their new baby boy - more to come.'
"I read this not even realizing what I am reading. Two seconds later it hits me, and I fell on the floor. This is a year after I tried to have another child with him. And I learn that he has a 6-month-old son. "He turned beet red: 'Someone's making up lies.' But I knew it was true as soon as I looked in his face."
She said she made her husband call his mistress at the apartment DiLeonardo rented for her on well-heeled Shore Road in Brooklyn. "He handed me the phone, and I said to her, 'Where do you come off having this child? I'm married to this guy for 17 years.' She didn't answer. I said, 'What's the matter? You're not woman enough to answer?' . . . He took the phone and hung it up. "So I took the phone and hit him over the head with it."
Chicago Mob Time Line: January 1, 1985
Friends of ours: Sal DeLaurentis, Chuckie English, Sam Giancana, Joe Ferriola, Fifi Buccieri, Turk Torello, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Fat Tony Salerno, Genovese Crime Family, Dominic Palermo, Tony Spilotro, Rocco Infelise, John "No Nose" DiFronzo, Sam "Wings" Carlisi, Michael Carracci, Jackie Cerone
Friends of mine: Hal Smith, Dom Angelini, Chris Petti
IN THE YEAR 1985: Sal DeLaurentis was strongly suspected of playing a role in the torture murder of a bookmaker named Hal Smith. A few months before federal investigators caught Solly D on tape telling Smith that he would be "trunk music" unless he made a $6,000 a month street tax payment to him.
- Chuckie English, Sam Giancana's top aide, died with vast interests in the Phoenix area, real estate and construction.
- Joe Ferriola, AKA Joe Negall, was now the boss over the Chicago mob. He had been with Fifi Buccieri's crew until Buccieri died, and Turk Torello took over. When he died, Ferriola took over and eventually assumed control of all the gambling in Chicago.
It was widely assumed that Tony Accardo was still in charge of the organization, just as Paul Ricca had been in charge when Accardo and Giancana were running things.
- Tony Accardo sold his condo on Harlem avenue and moved into affluent Barrington Hills, to live on the estate with his daughter Marie, Mrs. Ernie Kumerow. Mr. Kumerow is a union official.
- Fortune magazine declares that Tony Accardo is the second ranked boss in the country behind Fat Tony Salerno in New York of the Genovese family.
- According to Dominic Palermo's wife, who was an FBI informant, her husband Dominic got the order to kill the Spilotro brothers at a meeting he attended at the Czech Restaurant in Chicago. Palermo said that Joe Ferriola ordered the hit and Rocco Infelise gave it his okay.
Palermo, who worked for the very mobbed up Chicago Laborers local 5, was left behind in the cornfield by the other killers after they took the Spilotro's out. Palermo walked five miles to a phone both and called his wife, told her what happened and had her pick him up.
From that information, the FBI was able to locate the Spilotro bodies. The corpses were not, as the story so often goes, discovered when a farmer plowed them up. Rather, the Chicago office of the FBI probably spread that story to cover its informants.
- The Chicago mob's new boss, John "No Nose" DiFronzo decided to try and skim money out of legalized gambling at the Rincon Indian resort, on a federal reservation in San Diego County, California. It was a last ditch attempt to keep their grip on the Nevada gambling scene but the entire scam was a disaster.
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The first time the reservation scam was discussed was in July of 1985, between DiFronzo, Dom Angelini, who, at the time was Chicago's man in Vegas, and underboss, Sam "Wings" Carlisi at a meeting held at Rocky's Restaurant in suburban Melrose Park, Illinois.
The plan was to finance the tribe's venture into gambling, take over the operations, skim money from the casinos as well as use it to launder money from narcotics sales. Dom Angelini placed Chris Petti, the outfit's man in San Diego, in charge of the takeover. Petti was ordered to deal directly with Angelini's brother-in-law, Michael Caracci, a soldier in the DiFronzo crew.
To work the scam, Caracci called Petti at the same San Diego pay phone they had been using for years, which, unknown to them the FBI had tapped years before. They decided that although the Rincon deal looked good, Chicago didn't want to sink any money into it.
But that they would, however, get involved if an outside source wanted to put up the financing to take over the Indian gambling resort. Petti made contact with Peter Carmassi, whom he had been told was a money launderer for a Columbian drug cartel.
Carmassi, who was actually an undercover FBI agent, showed interest in the Rincon casino deal. In several tape recorded and filmed meetings with undercover agent Carmassi, Petti laid out the entire scam to take over the Rincon reservation gambling concession.
On January 9, 1992, the government indicted Petti, DiFronzo, Carlisi and the reservation's lawyer, on 15 counts of criminal conspiracy. DiFronzo and Angelini were convicted and got a 37-month sentence, with fines approaching one million dollars.
- Corbitt joined the Cook County Sheriff's Department, and was assigned to the Clerk of the Circuit Court. However, he was indicted and convicted for racketeering and obstructing justice in 1988.
- Jackie Cerone got nailed on federal charges for skimming $2,000,000 from the Stardust Casino in Vegas and was sent to prison in Texas.
Thanks to Mob Magazine
Friends of mine: Hal Smith, Dom Angelini, Chris Petti
IN THE YEAR 1985: Sal DeLaurentis was strongly suspected of playing a role in the torture murder of a bookmaker named Hal Smith. A few months before federal investigators caught Solly D on tape telling Smith that he would be "trunk music" unless he made a $6,000 a month street tax payment to him.
- Chuckie English, Sam Giancana's top aide, died with vast interests in the Phoenix area, real estate and construction.
- Joe Ferriola, AKA Joe Negall, was now the boss over the Chicago mob. He had been with Fifi Buccieri's crew until Buccieri died, and Turk Torello took over. When he died, Ferriola took over and eventually assumed control of all the gambling in Chicago.
It was widely assumed that Tony Accardo was still in charge of the organization, just as Paul Ricca had been in charge when Accardo and Giancana were running things.
- Tony Accardo sold his condo on Harlem avenue and moved into affluent Barrington Hills, to live on the estate with his daughter Marie, Mrs. Ernie Kumerow. Mr. Kumerow is a union official.
- Fortune magazine declares that Tony Accardo is the second ranked boss in the country behind Fat Tony Salerno in New York of the Genovese family.
- According to Dominic Palermo's wife, who was an FBI informant, her husband Dominic got the order to kill the Spilotro brothers at a meeting he attended at the Czech Restaurant in Chicago. Palermo said that Joe Ferriola ordered the hit and Rocco Infelise gave it his okay.
Palermo, who worked for the very mobbed up Chicago Laborers local 5, was left behind in the cornfield by the other killers after they took the Spilotro's out. Palermo walked five miles to a phone both and called his wife, told her what happened and had her pick him up.
From that information, the FBI was able to locate the Spilotro bodies. The corpses were not, as the story so often goes, discovered when a farmer plowed them up. Rather, the Chicago office of the FBI probably spread that story to cover its informants.
- The Chicago mob's new boss, John "No Nose" DiFronzo decided to try and skim money out of legalized gambling at the Rincon Indian resort, on a federal reservation in San Diego County, California. It was a last ditch attempt to keep their grip on the Nevada gambling scene but the entire scam was a disaster.
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The first time the reservation scam was discussed was in July of 1985, between DiFronzo, Dom Angelini, who, at the time was Chicago's man in Vegas, and underboss, Sam "Wings" Carlisi at a meeting held at Rocky's Restaurant in suburban Melrose Park, Illinois.
The plan was to finance the tribe's venture into gambling, take over the operations, skim money from the casinos as well as use it to launder money from narcotics sales. Dom Angelini placed Chris Petti, the outfit's man in San Diego, in charge of the takeover. Petti was ordered to deal directly with Angelini's brother-in-law, Michael Caracci, a soldier in the DiFronzo crew.
To work the scam, Caracci called Petti at the same San Diego pay phone they had been using for years, which, unknown to them the FBI had tapped years before. They decided that although the Rincon deal looked good, Chicago didn't want to sink any money into it.
But that they would, however, get involved if an outside source wanted to put up the financing to take over the Indian gambling resort. Petti made contact with Peter Carmassi, whom he had been told was a money launderer for a Columbian drug cartel.
Carmassi, who was actually an undercover FBI agent, showed interest in the Rincon casino deal. In several tape recorded and filmed meetings with undercover agent Carmassi, Petti laid out the entire scam to take over the Rincon reservation gambling concession.
On January 9, 1992, the government indicted Petti, DiFronzo, Carlisi and the reservation's lawyer, on 15 counts of criminal conspiracy. DiFronzo and Angelini were convicted and got a 37-month sentence, with fines approaching one million dollars.
- Corbitt joined the Cook County Sheriff's Department, and was assigned to the Clerk of the Circuit Court. However, he was indicted and convicted for racketeering and obstructing justice in 1988.
- Jackie Cerone got nailed on federal charges for skimming $2,000,000 from the Stardust Casino in Vegas and was sent to prison in Texas.
Thanks to Mob Magazine
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