Sicilian mobsters - with their infamous history of violence and drug trafficking across several continents - are re-emerging as major powers in the Big Apple, The Post has learned. And their ranks within New York's crime families are only expected to grow with the recent release of notorious "Pizza Connection" Mafiosi, including a convicted heroin trafficker once linked to "Mafia Cop" Louis Eppolito.
The hardened mobsters giving the feds the most agita include the heroin-trafficking Gambino brothers Rosario, John and Joseph, who were once the Sicilian mob's chieftains here. They had been cooling their heels in jail since the mid-1980s and 1990s, refusing to squeal in exchange for deals with the feds and reputedly waiting to reclaim their lucrative organized-crime slots.
Now they're free to get back in the game.
The Post has learned that the resurgence of the Sicilian-led mob has been so strong that the FBI and the Italian government have established a special "cooperative venture" that involves stationing U.S. agents in Rome and having cops from the Italian National Police working at FBI Headquarters in Washington.
The initiative - dubbed "The Pantheon Project" - guarantees that the FBI and its Italian counterparts share surveillance and intelligence on developing cases and track the connections between La Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the United States, officials said. "Despite convictions and crackdowns both here and in Sicily, the Sicilian mob is still part of the Mafia culture and have been reconstituting their power bases in the U.S. and abroad," a top Mafia expert said.
Given that the Sicilian Mafia's single greatest asset is its ability to move narcotics, federal agents believe that the jail-hardened Pizza Connection-era gangsters - who had been trafficking heroin through pizza parlors around the country - will likely return to the narcotics trade now that they're out. But they will be shifting their enterprises into moving huge amounts of marijuana.
Selling pot is just as lucrative as heroin, sources said, but the penalties are far less severe than the decades-long sentences meted out to the Gambino brothers and rising crime-family star Lorenzo Mannino, who once tried to get Frank Sinatra to help crooner Al Martino find work in Las Vegas - evoking images from the book and movie "The Godfather." Martino, incidentally, played Johnny Fontane, a character loosely based on Sinatra, in the movie.
"Mafia Cop" Eppolito, whose father and other relatives were mobsters, was related to Rosario Gambino, an old-world mob figure. In 1984, Eppolito was brought up on departmental charges for allegedly passing confidential NYPD files to Gambino, but beat the rap. He's now in jail for carrying out hits for other big mobsters.
The trio of Gambino brothers, all relatives of the crime syndicate's namesake, Carlo Gambino, have been freed. Joseph was deported back to his native Sicily.
"Do you think they have been rehabilitated by prison?" a federal official asked sarcastically. Federal officials suspect these Gambinos, as well others due for release soon, will return to doing what they know best. "Narcotics is something they understand, they have the network and, as importantly, they have the respect," the federal source said.
Numerous Sicilian gangsters and associates - many targeted recently by the FBI and federal prosecutors - not only trace their heritage to the lush mountains of towns like Borgetto and Castellammare Del Golfo, their fathers and close relatives are key "Godfather"-like figures running the Mafia in their native land.
For example, Sicilian brothers-in-law Vito Rappa and Francesco Nania are presently under federal indictment for paying $70,000 to bribe a U.S. immigration official to keep Nania from being deported. The case also snared Gambino crime-family members, including mob captain George DeCicco, 78.
According to federal court records, Rappa's father is the "official head of the Mafia based in the Borgetto region of Sicily."
Nania, a fugitive wanted for mob-related crimes in Italy, is the son of an "influential member of the Mafia based in Partinico, Sicily," a long-established mob stronghold in Italy, Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf's prosecutors wrote in a detention memo.
And then there is Vito Rizzuto - dubbed the John Gotti of Canada and a leading figure in the Bonanno crime family. The 70-year-old Rizzuto is related by marriage to the godfather of the agrarian town of Cattolica Eraclea, where Rizzuto was born.
Rizzuto accepted a 10-year, plea-bargained sentence last week for his role in the spectacular 1981 rubouts of Bonanno captains Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato, Philip "Philly Lucky" Giaccone and Dominick "Big Trin" Trinchera. The slayings were a murderous trifecta immortalized in the movie "Donnie Brasco" and carried out to stem an internal coup.
Despite these indictments and convictions, law-enforcement sources say the Sicilians still hold sway over a string of key New York spots.
Dominic "Italian Dom" Cefalu is currently considered the reputed underboss of the Gambinos, the largest crime syndicate in the nation, sources say. Cefalu, 60, a convicted heroin trafficker, was "made" by John Gotti 17 years ago.
Thanks to Murray Weiss
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Chicago Mafia Figures on Trial For Spilotro Murders
Friends of ours: Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, Al Capone, Frank Cullotta
Friends of mine: Michael Spilotro
Federal prosecutors are ready to drive what may be the final nail into the coffin of the country's most powerful Mafia family. It's the most significant prosecution of the Chicago outfit in history.
Fourteen suspected Mafia leaders are charged with numerous crimes, including the murders of suspected mobsters who controlled street rackets in Las Vegas.
This week marks what would have been Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro's 69th birthday. He was a feared man in the '70s and '80s, but was murdered in 1986 along with his brother Michael. Murders that were made famous by the movie "Casino." The case was never solved but now federal prosecutors are going after some of the men they believe were involved, men whose criminal enterprises are inextricably linked to Las Vegas.
On the wall of defense attorney Rick Halprin's Chicago office is a newspaper cartoon, which pokes fun at how Joey "The Clown" Lombardo got his nickname. While in federal court one day, and to avoid being photographed, Lombardo made a mask out of a newspaper. People thought it was clownish.
In the big-shouldered city of Chicago, where organized crime has been a fact of life since before Al Capone, everyone knows Lombardo's name. For more than 30 years, the word "reputed" has been attached to it.
Rick Halprin, Lombardo's defense attorney, said, "Without question, when you walk down the street, if you ask a citizen about the case, the mob case, the only name they know is Joey Lombardo." Defense attorney Rick Halprin knows that overcoming Lombardo's longstanding reputation, as a top boss of Chicago's outfit will be his major challenge in the upcoming trial based on the FBI's "Operation Family Secrets."
Lombardo is one of fourteen Windy City Mafia figures charged with a vast assortment of serious crimes, including eighteen unsolved murders. More than 1,000 murders have been attributed to the Chicago outfit over the years. Fewer than twenty have been solved. This massive indictment represents the most serious assault on the mob since Capone was put away.
Rick Halprin continued, "The interest is intense, and the pressure -- it's very, very big 'cause you're talking about Chicago. You're talking about an indictment that goes back 63 years."
A document known as a Santiago Proffer outlines the government's case. It reads like a Mario Puzo novel. Much of the information is so sensitive, involving protected witnesses, which the government blacked it out. What's clear from the case is the symbiotic relationship between mob bosses in Chicago and their emissaries in Las Vegas.
Loans from the Mafia-controlled Teamsters pension fund built much of Las Vegas. The loans came with strings attached. The mob not only used Nevada casinos to launder money from illicit businesses, they skimmed tens of millions of dollars from the countrooms, money that found its way back to Chicago. In the 1980's, Joey Lombardo was one of several mobsters convicted in a federal skimming case. Those prosecutions spurred many of the murders that only now might be resolved.
John Flood, a former Chicago lawman, said, "Any outfit murder out of Chicago, Lombardo would have been involved in it."
John Flood spent more than 30 years chasing mobsters in Chicago. He says Lombardo once tried to kill him by running him down with a car. He and others believe that Lombardo would have had to okay all of the murders mentioned in the indictment, including those of brothers Tony and Michael Spilotro.
Tony was Chicago's main man in Las Vegas. He protected the skim and allegedly oversaw a criminal operation known as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The murders of the Spilotro brothers were immortalized in the movie "Casino." One man who agrees that Lombardo played a role is Frank Cullotta, a Spilotro soldier who turned government witness and who is likely to be called in the Chicago trial. Cullotta gave the I-Team an exclusive interview earlier this year.
Chief Investigative Reporter George Knapp: "Joey Lombardo?"
Frank Cullotta: "He was Tony's boss and he was my boss."
George Knapp: "You guys reported directly to him."
Frank Cullotta: "Tony did. I reported to Tony, so Joe relayed messages to Tony. Do I think Joe Lombardo was involved in it? I think they would have to go to him for an okay."
Cullotta has written a book about his life with the mob. It's due out in a matter of weeks. Rick Halprin thinks Cullotta is a flawed witness. However, he admits the government has stronger witnesses, including two members of the Calabrese family, made members of the mob who agreed to testify.
They've already given tips that led to the search for buried remains of murder victims. But don't count the Cagey Lombardo out. He's ready to spring a unique strategy called the withdrawal defense. After his release from prison in the '90s, he took out an ad in a Chicago paper announcing his formal withdrawal from the mob. It's not a joke.
Rick Halprin said, "So, ultimately we have to let the jury decide whether: a) Lombardo was involved in a conspiracy at all, which we say he wasn't, and b) if he was, did he withdraw from the conspiracy? And the government would like to prove that he did not."
The trial was scheduled to begin Tuesday, May 15th but has been delayed for another two weeks. The notoriety of the Spilotro murders means those slayings will play a central part in the government's case. But the version we've all seen is not how the murders went down at all.
Thanks to George Knapp
Friends of mine: Michael Spilotro
Federal prosecutors are ready to drive what may be the final nail into the coffin of the country's most powerful Mafia family. It's the most significant prosecution of the Chicago outfit in history.
Fourteen suspected Mafia leaders are charged with numerous crimes, including the murders of suspected mobsters who controlled street rackets in Las Vegas.
This week marks what would have been Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro's 69th birthday. He was a feared man in the '70s and '80s, but was murdered in 1986 along with his brother Michael. Murders that were made famous by the movie "Casino." The case was never solved but now federal prosecutors are going after some of the men they believe were involved, men whose criminal enterprises are inextricably linked to Las Vegas.
On the wall of defense attorney Rick Halprin's Chicago office is a newspaper cartoon, which pokes fun at how Joey "The Clown" Lombardo got his nickname. While in federal court one day, and to avoid being photographed, Lombardo made a mask out of a newspaper. People thought it was clownish.
In the big-shouldered city of Chicago, where organized crime has been a fact of life since before Al Capone, everyone knows Lombardo's name. For more than 30 years, the word "reputed" has been attached to it.
Rick Halprin, Lombardo's defense attorney, said, "Without question, when you walk down the street, if you ask a citizen about the case, the mob case, the only name they know is Joey Lombardo." Defense attorney Rick Halprin knows that overcoming Lombardo's longstanding reputation, as a top boss of Chicago's outfit will be his major challenge in the upcoming trial based on the FBI's "Operation Family Secrets."
Lombardo is one of fourteen Windy City Mafia figures charged with a vast assortment of serious crimes, including eighteen unsolved murders. More than 1,000 murders have been attributed to the Chicago outfit over the years. Fewer than twenty have been solved. This massive indictment represents the most serious assault on the mob since Capone was put away.
Rick Halprin continued, "The interest is intense, and the pressure -- it's very, very big 'cause you're talking about Chicago. You're talking about an indictment that goes back 63 years."
A document known as a Santiago Proffer outlines the government's case. It reads like a Mario Puzo novel. Much of the information is so sensitive, involving protected witnesses, which the government blacked it out. What's clear from the case is the symbiotic relationship between mob bosses in Chicago and their emissaries in Las Vegas.
Loans from the Mafia-controlled Teamsters pension fund built much of Las Vegas. The loans came with strings attached. The mob not only used Nevada casinos to launder money from illicit businesses, they skimmed tens of millions of dollars from the countrooms, money that found its way back to Chicago. In the 1980's, Joey Lombardo was one of several mobsters convicted in a federal skimming case. Those prosecutions spurred many of the murders that only now might be resolved.
John Flood, a former Chicago lawman, said, "Any outfit murder out of Chicago, Lombardo would have been involved in it."
John Flood spent more than 30 years chasing mobsters in Chicago. He says Lombardo once tried to kill him by running him down with a car. He and others believe that Lombardo would have had to okay all of the murders mentioned in the indictment, including those of brothers Tony and Michael Spilotro.
Tony was Chicago's main man in Las Vegas. He protected the skim and allegedly oversaw a criminal operation known as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The murders of the Spilotro brothers were immortalized in the movie "Casino." One man who agrees that Lombardo played a role is Frank Cullotta, a Spilotro soldier who turned government witness and who is likely to be called in the Chicago trial. Cullotta gave the I-Team an exclusive interview earlier this year.
Chief Investigative Reporter George Knapp: "Joey Lombardo?"
Frank Cullotta: "He was Tony's boss and he was my boss."
George Knapp: "You guys reported directly to him."
Frank Cullotta: "Tony did. I reported to Tony, so Joe relayed messages to Tony. Do I think Joe Lombardo was involved in it? I think they would have to go to him for an okay."
Cullotta has written a book about his life with the mob. It's due out in a matter of weeks. Rick Halprin thinks Cullotta is a flawed witness. However, he admits the government has stronger witnesses, including two members of the Calabrese family, made members of the mob who agreed to testify.
They've already given tips that led to the search for buried remains of murder victims. But don't count the Cagey Lombardo out. He's ready to spring a unique strategy called the withdrawal defense. After his release from prison in the '90s, he took out an ad in a Chicago paper announcing his formal withdrawal from the mob. It's not a joke.
Rick Halprin said, "So, ultimately we have to let the jury decide whether: a) Lombardo was involved in a conspiracy at all, which we say he wasn't, and b) if he was, did he withdraw from the conspiracy? And the government would like to prove that he did not."
The trial was scheduled to begin Tuesday, May 15th but has been delayed for another two weeks. The notoriety of the Spilotro murders means those slayings will play a central part in the government's case. But the version we've all seen is not how the murders went down at all.
Thanks to George Knapp
Widow Wants Jewelry from Top Chicago Outfit Cop Returned
Friends of mine: William Hanhardt
Marlene Rolecek wants her stolen jewelry back. It's worth more than $100,000.
The jewelry was not stolen from her. It was stolen from unsuspecting salesmen targeted by a highly sophisticated theft ring, overseen by former Chicago Police chief of detectives William Hanhardt, now in prison.
In an unusual twist in the Hanhardt case, Rolecek, 75, filed court papers recently asking for 22 pieces of jewelry, including gems and watches, to be returned to her. The federal government seized the jewelry as evidence in 2000. The items include a gold Rolex watch, a three-carat pearl-shaped pendant, and a diamond and ruby cocktail ring, court records show.
Rolecek's husband, Charles Rolecek, a onetime Chicago Police officer, bought the pieces over several years from Hanhardt's right-hand man in the jewelry theft ring, Joseph Basinski, according to court records.
Marlene Rolecek did not return phone messages but said in court papers neither she nor her husband had any idea the jewelry was stolen, so she deserves it back.
Federal prosecutors argue Marlene Rolecek knew full well her husband wasn't buying the baubles at Tiffany's. Prosecutors point to her grand jury testimony in June 2000 as part of the investigation.
Rolecek said she didn't question where the jewelry was coming from or how her husband afforded it.
Charles Rolecek bought jewelry from Basinski for as little as one-fourth its appraised value.
"My husband says mind your own business. It's a gift. It's a gift for you. And that was it. And if I wanted more gifts, I shut my mouth," Rolecek said, according to the grand jury transcript.
Now, it's up to a judge to decide if she gets the jewelry back.
Thanks to NBC5
Marlene Rolecek wants her stolen jewelry back. It's worth more than $100,000.
The jewelry was not stolen from her. It was stolen from unsuspecting salesmen targeted by a highly sophisticated theft ring, overseen by former Chicago Police chief of detectives William Hanhardt, now in prison.
In an unusual twist in the Hanhardt case, Rolecek, 75, filed court papers recently asking for 22 pieces of jewelry, including gems and watches, to be returned to her. The federal government seized the jewelry as evidence in 2000. The items include a gold Rolex watch, a three-carat pearl-shaped pendant, and a diamond and ruby cocktail ring, court records show.Rolecek's husband, Charles Rolecek, a onetime Chicago Police officer, bought the pieces over several years from Hanhardt's right-hand man in the jewelry theft ring, Joseph Basinski, according to court records.
Marlene Rolecek did not return phone messages but said in court papers neither she nor her husband had any idea the jewelry was stolen, so she deserves it back.
Federal prosecutors argue Marlene Rolecek knew full well her husband wasn't buying the baubles at Tiffany's. Prosecutors point to her grand jury testimony in June 2000 as part of the investigation.
Rolecek said she didn't question where the jewelry was coming from or how her husband afforded it.
Charles Rolecek bought jewelry from Basinski for as little as one-fourth its appraised value.
"My husband says mind your own business. It's a gift. It's a gift for you. And that was it. And if I wanted more gifts, I shut my mouth," Rolecek said, according to the grand jury transcript.
Now, it's up to a judge to decide if she gets the jewelry back.
Thanks to NBC5
"Better Off Dead: In Paradise" - A Mafia Novel to Die For!
Just when you think you are safe, all Hell breaks loose! That's what has happened to Frankie Granstino and his fiancée, Alicia.
"Better Off Dead: In Paradise", is the new fiction Mafia thriller, and sequel to "Better Off Dead
". "Better Off Dead" told the story of Frankie Granstino, the young life insurance salesman from Brooklyn New York, who got trapped by the Vongemi Mafia Family into writing life insurance policies on people who ended up dying mysteriously.
Frank was in line to get killed to keep him quiet. The FBI managed to save him and Alicia in the nick of time whereby they became FBI witnesses and placed in the Witness Protection Program. The Vongemi Family Mob leaders were sent to prison for life. But prison doesn't weaken a powerful Mob Family. They continue to rule, but with a newfound vengeance, an intense urgency for revenge.
Better Off Dead In Paradise, now takes us to the pristine Cayman islands in the Caribbean, where Frank and Alicia, a former FBI agent, believe they are safely hidden away from the powerful Vongemi Family, safe in the Witness Protection Program.
Something goes terribly wrong when Frankie and Alicia's witness protection location is suddenly compromised, and Mob associates are suddenly in the Caymans blowing up cars and shooting up victims in their mad pursuit of Frank and Alicia.
The story takes us through all three Cayman Islands, to New York City, and back to the Caymans. All the while, lives are lost, bullets fly, and Frankie and Alicia are on the run for their lives, once again, from the ruthless Vongemi Mob Family.
Author, John Paul Carinci, in his fifth novel, gets inside our heads as we feel, taste, and fully visualize the intense fear Frank and Alicia sense from an all out imminent Mafia hit on their lives, where no one stands in the killer's way in the pursuit of the two.
Dramatic events keep unfolding chapter by chapter, which makes the exciting Better Off Dead: In Paradise a page turner of a book!
"Better Off Dead: In Paradise", is the new fiction Mafia thriller, and sequel to "Better Off Dead
". "Better Off Dead" told the story of Frankie Granstino, the young life insurance salesman from Brooklyn New York, who got trapped by the Vongemi Mafia Family into writing life insurance policies on people who ended up dying mysteriously.Frank was in line to get killed to keep him quiet. The FBI managed to save him and Alicia in the nick of time whereby they became FBI witnesses and placed in the Witness Protection Program. The Vongemi Family Mob leaders were sent to prison for life. But prison doesn't weaken a powerful Mob Family. They continue to rule, but with a newfound vengeance, an intense urgency for revenge.
Better Off Dead In Paradise, now takes us to the pristine Cayman islands in the Caribbean, where Frank and Alicia, a former FBI agent, believe they are safely hidden away from the powerful Vongemi Family, safe in the Witness Protection Program.
Something goes terribly wrong when Frankie and Alicia's witness protection location is suddenly compromised, and Mob associates are suddenly in the Caymans blowing up cars and shooting up victims in their mad pursuit of Frank and Alicia.
The story takes us through all three Cayman Islands, to New York City, and back to the Caymans. All the while, lives are lost, bullets fly, and Frankie and Alicia are on the run for their lives, once again, from the ruthless Vongemi Mob Family.
Author, John Paul Carinci, in his fifth novel, gets inside our heads as we feel, taste, and fully visualize the intense fear Frank and Alicia sense from an all out imminent Mafia hit on their lives, where no one stands in the killer's way in the pursuit of the two.
Dramatic events keep unfolding chapter by chapter, which makes the exciting Better Off Dead: In Paradise a page turner of a book!
Hanhardt Seeks to Overturn Conviction
Friends of mine: William Hanhardt
A legendary former Chicago police deputy superintendent serving 12 years in prison for heading a sophisticated jewelry theft ring is seeking to overturn his 2001 conviction, arguing he was mentally unfit to plead guilty days after a suicide attempt.
In a federal lawsuit, William Hanhardt contends his lawyers at the time were incompetent for pushing him to plead guilty despite the fact that "my emotions were completely overwhelmed."
Hanhardt, 78 and said to be suffering from a long list of medical woes, also sought to be moved to a prison camp closer to his family.
U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle sentenced Hanhardt to almost 16 years in prison in 2002 for heading a mob-connected crew that used pinpoint timing and meticulous planning to steal millions of dollars of jewels from traveling salesmen. After a federal appeals court took issue with a part of the sentence, Norgle resentenced Hanhardt in 2004 to 11 years and 9 months in prison.
Hanhardt's guilty plea was postponed after he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on prescribed painkillers. The following week, Hanhardt pleaded guilty "blind" -- without a plea agreement with prosecutors.
In the federal lawsuit, filed Monday, Hanhardt's lawyer, Jeffrey Steinback, argued that Hanhardt was denied his constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel when his lawyers pressed ahead with the guilty plea despite the suicide attempt. The suit contends that the lawyers ignored the concerns of Hanhardt's family that he needed psychological help and didn't want to plead guilty.
At the time of his guilty plea and sentencing, Hanhardt had little to say publicly. But in a four-page affidavit made part of his lawsuit, he said he participated in and witnessed "many dreadful and horrific" events in his more than three decades on the police force. "I regularly experience flashbacks to this day, which evoke powerful and, at times, overwhelming emotions," he wrote.
Since he was imprisoned, Hanhardt has been diagnosed by a psychologist as suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, according to the lawsuit.
In his early days on the force, when counseling wasn't available after a deadly incident, Hanhardt states in the affidavit that he regularly drank after work to "take the edge off."
Eventually, he mixed alcohol and prescription painkillers and then began seeing a psychiatrist, Hanhardt states.
A few years ago, Hanhardt said he learned on separate occasions from the FBI that certain members of the Chicago Police Department and organized crime wanted him killed. "The pressures, past and present, overwhelmed my cognitive and emotional faculties," Hanhardt's affidavit states. "In short, my internal defenses were breaking down. I was unable to make rational decisions as to my future."
Steinback also said Hanhardt has battled testicular cancer and congestive heart failure, prostate and chronic back problems and an arthritic knee and severe hearing loss, virtually immobilizing him and leaving him in severe pain.
Steinback asked Norgle to review a ruling he made that has kept prison officials from moving Hanhardt to a federal prison camp in Oxford, Wis., so he can be closer to his family. Hanhardt is incarcerated in Minnesota.
Thanks to Matt O'Connor
A legendary former Chicago police deputy superintendent serving 12 years in prison for heading a sophisticated jewelry theft ring is seeking to overturn his 2001 conviction, arguing he was mentally unfit to plead guilty days after a suicide attempt.
In a federal lawsuit, William Hanhardt contends his lawyers at the time were incompetent for pushing him to plead guilty despite the fact that "my emotions were completely overwhelmed."
Hanhardt, 78 and said to be suffering from a long list of medical woes, also sought to be moved to a prison camp closer to his family.
U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle sentenced Hanhardt to almost 16 years in prison in 2002 for heading a mob-connected crew that used pinpoint timing and meticulous planning to steal millions of dollars of jewels from traveling salesmen. After a federal appeals court took issue with a part of the sentence, Norgle resentenced Hanhardt in 2004 to 11 years and 9 months in prison.
Hanhardt's guilty plea was postponed after he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on prescribed painkillers. The following week, Hanhardt pleaded guilty "blind" -- without a plea agreement with prosecutors.
In the federal lawsuit, filed Monday, Hanhardt's lawyer, Jeffrey Steinback, argued that Hanhardt was denied his constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel when his lawyers pressed ahead with the guilty plea despite the suicide attempt. The suit contends that the lawyers ignored the concerns of Hanhardt's family that he needed psychological help and didn't want to plead guilty.
At the time of his guilty plea and sentencing, Hanhardt had little to say publicly. But in a four-page affidavit made part of his lawsuit, he said he participated in and witnessed "many dreadful and horrific" events in his more than three decades on the police force. "I regularly experience flashbacks to this day, which evoke powerful and, at times, overwhelming emotions," he wrote.
Since he was imprisoned, Hanhardt has been diagnosed by a psychologist as suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, according to the lawsuit.
In his early days on the force, when counseling wasn't available after a deadly incident, Hanhardt states in the affidavit that he regularly drank after work to "take the edge off."
Eventually, he mixed alcohol and prescription painkillers and then began seeing a psychiatrist, Hanhardt states.
A few years ago, Hanhardt said he learned on separate occasions from the FBI that certain members of the Chicago Police Department and organized crime wanted him killed. "The pressures, past and present, overwhelmed my cognitive and emotional faculties," Hanhardt's affidavit states. "In short, my internal defenses were breaking down. I was unable to make rational decisions as to my future."
Steinback also said Hanhardt has battled testicular cancer and congestive heart failure, prostate and chronic back problems and an arthritic knee and severe hearing loss, virtually immobilizing him and leaving him in severe pain.
Steinback asked Norgle to review a ruling he made that has kept prison officials from moving Hanhardt to a federal prison camp in Oxford, Wis., so he can be closer to his family. Hanhardt is incarcerated in Minnesota.
Thanks to Matt O'Connor
Monday, May 14, 2007
The Real Sopranos Were More Brutal and Less Stylish Than Tony's Crew
"The Sopranos," the HBO series now in its final season, won fame by depicting a Mafia crew whose members had begun assimilating into middleclass suburban life -- moving into McMansions, raising kids who attend Ivy League schools, discovering the psychiatrist's couch (or armchair).
Interestingly, it was HBO, nearly 20 years ago, that first gave us a look at what the real mob was like when it started to go suburban -- and the picture is nothing like "The Sopranos." The now-forgotten "Confessions of an Undercover Cop," a fascinating 1988 documentary, traced the decline and fall of the very Jersey crew that inspired "The Sopranos" -- the crime family of Ruggerio "Richie the Boot" Boiardo, whose gang was less introspective, even more violent, and a lot less glamorous than Tony's fictional mob.
"Sopranos" creator David Chase had learned about this Jersey mob as a child. Visiting relatives in Newark's predominantly Italian-American North Ward, he met a cousin with "fuzzy connections to a prominent mob family in Livingston," an exclusive suburb where Boiardo had moved. Though Chase says in a 2002 interview in New Jersey Monthly that "90 percent of [the show] is made up. . . . it's patterned after this [family]."
Boiardo, known simply as the Boot around Newark, began running numbers while working as a milkman before Prohibition, and he quickly figured out that crime paid better than dairy. He moved up the racketeering ranks and during Prohibition competed with another prominent Newark mobster, Abner "Longy" Zwillman, to smuggle booze through Newark. Working independently, the pair supplied much of the eastern half of the United States.
There was little mystery about the Boot's rise. Like the fictional Vito Corleone, he was brutal and had a knack for surviving. He earned his nickname from his habit of stomping his enemies to death, and he consolidated his power in Newark after withstanding a hit by a rival gang that left him full of bullets but defiantly alive. The Boot, moreover, passed his viciousness on to his son Anthony "Tony Boy" Boiardo and recruited other like-minded hoods. Not only did these guys dispose of their enemies as sadistically as anyone in "The Sopranos," but rather than brood over their bad deeds as some characters in the TV series do, the real Sopranos recounted their nastiest killings with relish.
In one FBI surveillance tape, for instance, Tony Boy declares, "How about the time we hit the little Jew." An associate adds, "As little as they are, they struggle." Then Tony Boy finishes describing the scene: "The Boot hit him with a hammer. The guy goes down and he comes up. So I got a crowbar this big. . . . Eight shots in the head. What do you think he finally did to me? He spit at me." In another tape, the mobsters recall with equal delight locking a victim in a car trunk and setting it afire. "He must have burned like a bastard," one mobster says.
As in "The Sopranos," the Boot joined the flight of Italian Americans out of Newark to the Essex County suburbs, where he built an opulent walled-in retreat in Livingston. But unlike Tony Soprano's modern McMansion, the Boot's estate was more like some European fortress, described by Life as "Transylvanian traditional" in its architectural style, with busts of famous Romans dotting its grounds. Another particularly noteworthy feature: a large furnace, rumored to be where the Boot's crew disposed of his enemies' remains.
By the time "Confessions" takes up this gang's story in the mid-1980s, Boiardo had recently died, as, unexpectedly of a heart attack, had his son and heir apparent, Tony Boy, leaving what remained of the crew to their lieutenants. Most of these hoodlums had also by now decamped to Newark's suburbs -- places like North Caldwell, Roseland and Bellville, all mentioned frequently in "The Sopranos." But unlike Tony's crew, the real Sopranos still used Newark's decidedly unglamorous and gritty North Ward as their base of operations.
The investigation at the center of "Confessions" begins by chance, when a retired East Orange, New Jersey cop named Mike Russell is driving down Bloomfield Avenue in North Newark and sees two young guys attacking an older one. Russell goes to the aid of the older man, driving off the attackers. He discovers that the guy he helped is Andrew "Andy" Gerardo, now head of Boiardo's old gang. Gerardo invites Russell into his hangout, a coffee shop on the avenue just a few steps from a monument to Christopher Columbus and the Italian American contribution to America. There, Russell meets other key members of the crew, who treat him like a hero and befriend him.
Russell then contacts a friend in the state police, who asks him to begin surveillance on the crew. Incredibly, the mobsters invite Russell to move his oil delivery business into a storefront adjoining their Newark headquarters, figuring he's friendly, and from there the investigation takes off. But unbeknownst to the state police, Russell enlists a cameraman and begins his own videotaping of the Jersey crew, which provides most of the material for the HBO documentary.
The footage illustrates the gap between Hollywood and mobster reality. Like most celluloid gangsters, Tony Soprano's crew carries itself with a certain "mob chic," evident in everything from Silvio's elaborately coiffed jet-black mane to Paulie's meticulously delineated gray sideburns to the expensive Italian suits that Tony and the boys favor. Their headquarters is the baby boomer's fantasy of bad-boy living, the Bada Bing strip club. But the real-life evil is more banal. The Boot made his headquarters inside a candy shop on Roseville Avenue in North Newark, transformed by the time of "Confessions" into a rinky-dink pizzeria and dimly lit adjoining cocktail lounge called the Finish Line. One look inside the Finish Line and it's clear that for this real mob crew, style took a back seat to earning money.
Most of the action that Russell investigates takes place in even less glamorous social clubs around North Newark -- little more than storefronts sporting linoleum floors, faux wood paneling, folding chairs and card tables. From these motley locations, the crew ran nightly card games that netted about $1 million a week. The earnings were big, though these games were nothing like those in "The Sopranos," where mob-run gambling sessions take place in hotel suites and occasionally feature big name "guest" players like Lawrence Taylor.
"Confessions" makes it clear that few real mobsters could ever score a bit part on "The Sopranos" or any other gangster show -- they simply look too ordinary. The "Confessions" crew runs around North Newark in Bermuda shorts, white T-shirts and knee-high socks, or in cheap polyester slacks and Ban Lon shirts -- a look that would never get you a photo shoot in Vanity Fair or on the cover of Cigar Aficionado, where James Gandolfini, who plays Tony Soprano, has appeared.
The investigation recounted in "Confessions" resulted in 48 indictments and more than 30 convictions or guilty pleas for gambling, loan sharking and racketeering, which effectively broke the back of the Genovese family in Jersey. At the end of "Confessions," we see the crew making a "perp" walk as they head to court, and it's clear just how unsympathetic and crude such mobsters really were -- nothing like the strangely appealing Tony Soprano. As the reporters badger them for a statement, one of the crew's top soldiers tells the newsmen: "Fugettaboutit. Go get a job." That's about the level of sophistication of the real mob.
Hollywood will no doubt continue to find new and innovative ways to package the Mafia, as Chase did brilliantly in his series. But for a sobering dose of reality, get your hands on a copy of "Confessions of an Undercover Cop."
Thanks to Steven Malanga
Interestingly, it was HBO, nearly 20 years ago, that first gave us a look at what the real mob was like when it started to go suburban -- and the picture is nothing like "The Sopranos." The now-forgotten "Confessions of an Undercover Cop," a fascinating 1988 documentary, traced the decline and fall of the very Jersey crew that inspired "The Sopranos" -- the crime family of Ruggerio "Richie the Boot" Boiardo, whose gang was less introspective, even more violent, and a lot less glamorous than Tony's fictional mob.
"Sopranos" creator David Chase had learned about this Jersey mob as a child. Visiting relatives in Newark's predominantly Italian-American North Ward, he met a cousin with "fuzzy connections to a prominent mob family in Livingston," an exclusive suburb where Boiardo had moved. Though Chase says in a 2002 interview in New Jersey Monthly that "90 percent of [the show] is made up. . . . it's patterned after this [family]."
Boiardo, known simply as the Boot around Newark, began running numbers while working as a milkman before Prohibition, and he quickly figured out that crime paid better than dairy. He moved up the racketeering ranks and during Prohibition competed with another prominent Newark mobster, Abner "Longy" Zwillman, to smuggle booze through Newark. Working independently, the pair supplied much of the eastern half of the United States.
There was little mystery about the Boot's rise. Like the fictional Vito Corleone, he was brutal and had a knack for surviving. He earned his nickname from his habit of stomping his enemies to death, and he consolidated his power in Newark after withstanding a hit by a rival gang that left him full of bullets but defiantly alive. The Boot, moreover, passed his viciousness on to his son Anthony "Tony Boy" Boiardo and recruited other like-minded hoods. Not only did these guys dispose of their enemies as sadistically as anyone in "The Sopranos," but rather than brood over their bad deeds as some characters in the TV series do, the real Sopranos recounted their nastiest killings with relish.
In one FBI surveillance tape, for instance, Tony Boy declares, "How about the time we hit the little Jew." An associate adds, "As little as they are, they struggle." Then Tony Boy finishes describing the scene: "The Boot hit him with a hammer. The guy goes down and he comes up. So I got a crowbar this big. . . . Eight shots in the head. What do you think he finally did to me? He spit at me." In another tape, the mobsters recall with equal delight locking a victim in a car trunk and setting it afire. "He must have burned like a bastard," one mobster says.
As in "The Sopranos," the Boot joined the flight of Italian Americans out of Newark to the Essex County suburbs, where he built an opulent walled-in retreat in Livingston. But unlike Tony Soprano's modern McMansion, the Boot's estate was more like some European fortress, described by Life as "Transylvanian traditional" in its architectural style, with busts of famous Romans dotting its grounds. Another particularly noteworthy feature: a large furnace, rumored to be where the Boot's crew disposed of his enemies' remains.
By the time "Confessions" takes up this gang's story in the mid-1980s, Boiardo had recently died, as, unexpectedly of a heart attack, had his son and heir apparent, Tony Boy, leaving what remained of the crew to their lieutenants. Most of these hoodlums had also by now decamped to Newark's suburbs -- places like North Caldwell, Roseland and Bellville, all mentioned frequently in "The Sopranos." But unlike Tony's crew, the real Sopranos still used Newark's decidedly unglamorous and gritty North Ward as their base of operations.
The investigation at the center of "Confessions" begins by chance, when a retired East Orange, New Jersey cop named Mike Russell is driving down Bloomfield Avenue in North Newark and sees two young guys attacking an older one. Russell goes to the aid of the older man, driving off the attackers. He discovers that the guy he helped is Andrew "Andy" Gerardo, now head of Boiardo's old gang. Gerardo invites Russell into his hangout, a coffee shop on the avenue just a few steps from a monument to Christopher Columbus and the Italian American contribution to America. There, Russell meets other key members of the crew, who treat him like a hero and befriend him.
Russell then contacts a friend in the state police, who asks him to begin surveillance on the crew. Incredibly, the mobsters invite Russell to move his oil delivery business into a storefront adjoining their Newark headquarters, figuring he's friendly, and from there the investigation takes off. But unbeknownst to the state police, Russell enlists a cameraman and begins his own videotaping of the Jersey crew, which provides most of the material for the HBO documentary.
The footage illustrates the gap between Hollywood and mobster reality. Like most celluloid gangsters, Tony Soprano's crew carries itself with a certain "mob chic," evident in everything from Silvio's elaborately coiffed jet-black mane to Paulie's meticulously delineated gray sideburns to the expensive Italian suits that Tony and the boys favor. Their headquarters is the baby boomer's fantasy of bad-boy living, the Bada Bing strip club. But the real-life evil is more banal. The Boot made his headquarters inside a candy shop on Roseville Avenue in North Newark, transformed by the time of "Confessions" into a rinky-dink pizzeria and dimly lit adjoining cocktail lounge called the Finish Line. One look inside the Finish Line and it's clear that for this real mob crew, style took a back seat to earning money.
Most of the action that Russell investigates takes place in even less glamorous social clubs around North Newark -- little more than storefronts sporting linoleum floors, faux wood paneling, folding chairs and card tables. From these motley locations, the crew ran nightly card games that netted about $1 million a week. The earnings were big, though these games were nothing like those in "The Sopranos," where mob-run gambling sessions take place in hotel suites and occasionally feature big name "guest" players like Lawrence Taylor.
"Confessions" makes it clear that few real mobsters could ever score a bit part on "The Sopranos" or any other gangster show -- they simply look too ordinary. The "Confessions" crew runs around North Newark in Bermuda shorts, white T-shirts and knee-high socks, or in cheap polyester slacks and Ban Lon shirts -- a look that would never get you a photo shoot in Vanity Fair or on the cover of Cigar Aficionado, where James Gandolfini, who plays Tony Soprano, has appeared.
The investigation recounted in "Confessions" resulted in 48 indictments and more than 30 convictions or guilty pleas for gambling, loan sharking and racketeering, which effectively broke the back of the Genovese family in Jersey. At the end of "Confessions," we see the crew making a "perp" walk as they head to court, and it's clear just how unsympathetic and crude such mobsters really were -- nothing like the strangely appealing Tony Soprano. As the reporters badger them for a statement, one of the crew's top soldiers tells the newsmen: "Fugettaboutit. Go get a job." That's about the level of sophistication of the real mob.
Hollywood will no doubt continue to find new and innovative ways to package the Mafia, as Chase did brilliantly in his series. But for a sobering dose of reality, get your hands on a copy of "Confessions of an Undercover Cop."
Thanks to Steven Malanga
Mob Menu: Donuts Followed by Jail for Sonny Franzese
At age 89, John "Sonny" Franzese still enjoys sitting for a bite with his friends. The problem, according to federal authorities, is when the octogenarian mobster inevitably puts his criminal interests on the menu.
For the third time since 1996, Franzese was back in federal lockup _ this time after authorities spotted him sharing donuts with associates in the Colombo crime family, violating his parole. In the two earlier arrests, Franzese was nabbed after meeting with alleged mobsters in a coffee shop and a restaurant.
It's enough to give the reputed family underboss indigestion. "It's really sad," said his son, Michael Franzese, who followed the elder Franzese into organized crime before leaving the mob and becoming a born-again Christian. "I believe he wasn't very active (with the Colombos) at all, but then again, I'm not with him 24/7. Many of his friends are dead."
No surprise there, since the elderly Franzese's contemporaries included mob veterans like Joe Colombo (RIP, 1978) or Alphonse "Allie Boy" Persico (RIP, 1989). But authorities said Franzese was spotted more than once in recent weeks sharing breakfast pastries with 21st century Colombo members.
Franzese was picked up last Wednesday during a scheduled check-in with his parole officer, said FBI spokesman Jim Margolin. He will remain behind bars pending resolution of his case, which could take up to three months, according to Tom Huchison of the U.S. Parole Commission.
If Franzese has a weakness for old friends, he also has an unfortunate predilection for meeting them in public places _ a major problem, since his parole bars him from any contact with organized crime figures.
A November 2000 sitdown for coffee with three Colombo associates at a Long Island Starbucks landed him behind bars for three years. A February 1996 bowl of spinach soup at Pucinella's restaurant in Great Neck led to a two-year term after authorities identified his dining companions as mobsters.
A decade earlier, Franzese was popped after a mobbed-up meal at Laina's Restaurant in Jericho. In all, Franzese has racked up five parole violations _ and gone to jail for each one _ since his November 1978 release on a bank robbery conviction.
By then, Franzese's reputation as a stand-up guy was already well-known among the Colombos.
He was once a frequent patron at the Copacabana nightclub, taking in headliners like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. And he was among the investors in the legendary movie "Deep Throat." But the up-and-coming mob star's career was derailed by a 1967 bank robbery conviction and subsequent 50-year jail term, which included parole restrictions that now extend though 2020 _ when Franzese would be 102 years old.
Franzese has not been convicted of any new crimes in the last 40 years.
When Michael and his father speak now, the discussions still focus on family _ Sonny's seven grandchildren (another son, John, went into federal witness protection). Michael says the old man is no longer in the best of health, and sometimes has trouble recognizing his voice.
The arrest, in an odd culinary twist, also denied Franzese one last good meal: A friend says they were due to share dinner in a Long Island restaurant just hours after his arrest.
Thanks to the Niagara Gazette.
For the third time since 1996, Franzese was back in federal lockup _ this time after authorities spotted him sharing donuts with associates in the Colombo crime family, violating his parole. In the two earlier arrests, Franzese was nabbed after meeting with alleged mobsters in a coffee shop and a restaurant.
It's enough to give the reputed family underboss indigestion. "It's really sad," said his son, Michael Franzese, who followed the elder Franzese into organized crime before leaving the mob and becoming a born-again Christian. "I believe he wasn't very active (with the Colombos) at all, but then again, I'm not with him 24/7. Many of his friends are dead."
No surprise there, since the elderly Franzese's contemporaries included mob veterans like Joe Colombo (RIP, 1978) or Alphonse "Allie Boy" Persico (RIP, 1989). But authorities said Franzese was spotted more than once in recent weeks sharing breakfast pastries with 21st century Colombo members.
Franzese was picked up last Wednesday during a scheduled check-in with his parole officer, said FBI spokesman Jim Margolin. He will remain behind bars pending resolution of his case, which could take up to three months, according to Tom Huchison of the U.S. Parole Commission.
If Franzese has a weakness for old friends, he also has an unfortunate predilection for meeting them in public places _ a major problem, since his parole bars him from any contact with organized crime figures.
A November 2000 sitdown for coffee with three Colombo associates at a Long Island Starbucks landed him behind bars for three years. A February 1996 bowl of spinach soup at Pucinella's restaurant in Great Neck led to a two-year term after authorities identified his dining companions as mobsters.
A decade earlier, Franzese was popped after a mobbed-up meal at Laina's Restaurant in Jericho. In all, Franzese has racked up five parole violations _ and gone to jail for each one _ since his November 1978 release on a bank robbery conviction.
By then, Franzese's reputation as a stand-up guy was already well-known among the Colombos.
He was once a frequent patron at the Copacabana nightclub, taking in headliners like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. And he was among the investors in the legendary movie "Deep Throat." But the up-and-coming mob star's career was derailed by a 1967 bank robbery conviction and subsequent 50-year jail term, which included parole restrictions that now extend though 2020 _ when Franzese would be 102 years old.
Franzese has not been convicted of any new crimes in the last 40 years.
When Michael and his father speak now, the discussions still focus on family _ Sonny's seven grandchildren (another son, John, went into federal witness protection). Michael says the old man is no longer in the best of health, and sometimes has trouble recognizing his voice.
The arrest, in an odd culinary twist, also denied Franzese one last good meal: A friend says they were due to share dinner in a Long Island restaurant just hours after his arrest.
Thanks to the Niagara Gazette.
The Sopranos: 3 Book Bundle
This week's Sopranos Deal of the Week
is 10% off of the Sopranos 3 Book Bundle. Perfect for any die-hard fan, this 3-book The Sopranos bundle includes The Sopranos Family Cookbook, the Entertaining with The Sopranos Cookbook, and The Sopranos: The Book. With Avellinese-style recipes, entertaining tips, and original interviews with actors on the show, this bundle has it all!
is 10% off of the Sopranos 3 Book Bundle. Perfect for any die-hard fan, this 3-book The Sopranos bundle includes The Sopranos Family Cookbook, the Entertaining with The Sopranos Cookbook, and The Sopranos: The Book. With Avellinese-style recipes, entertaining tips, and original interviews with actors on the show, this bundle has it all!Sunday, May 13, 2007
Did Bobby Kennedy Believe the Mob and Anti-Castro Backers Kill JFK?
One of the most intriguing mysteries about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that darkest of American labyrinths, is why his brother Robert F. Kennedy apparently did nothing to investigate the crime. Bobby Kennedy was, after all, not just the attorney general of the United States at the time of the assassination -- he was his brother's devoted partner, the man who took on the administration's most grueling assignments, from civil rights to organized crime to Cuba, the hottest Cold War flash point of its day. But after the burst of gunfire in downtown Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, ended this unique partnership, Bobby Kennedy seemed lost in a fog of grief, refusing to discuss the assassination with the Warren Commission and telling friends he had no heart for an aggressive investigation. "What difference does it make?" he would say. "It won't bring him back." But Bobby Kennedy was a complex man
, and his years in Washington had taught him to keep his own counsel and proceed in a subterranean fashion. What he said in public about Dallas was not the full story. Privately, RFK -- who had made his name in the 1950s as a relentless investigator of the underside of American power -- was consumed by the need to know the real story about his brother's assassination. This fire seized him on the afternoon of Nov. 22, as soon as FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, a bitter political enemy, phoned to say -- almost with pleasure, thought Bobby -- that the president had been shot. And the question of who killed his brother continued to haunt Kennedy until the day he too was gunned down, on June 5, 1968.
Because of his proclivity for operating in secret, RFK did not leave behind a documentary record of his inquiries into his brother's assassination. But it is possible to retrace his investigative trail, beginning with the afternoon of Nov. 22, when he frantically worked the phones at Hickory Hill -- his Civil War-era mansion in McLean, Va. -- and summoned aides and government officials to his home. Lit up with the clarity of shock, the electricity of adrenaline, Bobby Kennedy constructed the outlines of the crime that day -- a crime, he immediately concluded, that went far beyond Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old ex-Marine arrested shortly after the assassination. Robert Kennedy was America's first assassination conspiracy theorist.
CIA sources began disseminating their own conspiratorial view of Kennedy's murder within hours of the crime, spotlighting Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union and his public support for Fidel Castro. In New Orleans, an anti-Castro news organization released a tape of Oswald defending the bearded dictator. In Miami, the Cuban Student Directorate -- an exile group funded secretly by a CIA program code-named AMSPELL -- told reporters about Oswald's connections to the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But Robert Kennedy never believed the assassination was a communist plot. Instead, he looked in the opposite direction, focusing his suspicions on the CIA's secretive anti-Castro operations, a murky underworld he had navigated as his brother's point man on Cuba. Ironically, RFK's suspicions were shared by Castro himself, whom he had sought to overthrow throughout the Kennedy presidency.
The attorney general was supposed to be in charge of the clandestine war on Castro -- another daunting assignment JFK gave him, after the spy agency's disastrous performance at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. But as he tried to establish control over CIA operations and to herd the rambunctious Cuban exile groups into a unified progressive front, Bobby learned what a swamp of intrigue the anti-Castro world was. Working out of a sprawling Miami station code-named JM/WAVE that was second in size only to the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters, the agency had recruited an unruly army of Cuban militants to launch raids on the island and even contracted Mafia henchmen to kill Castro -- including mob bosses Johnny Rosselli, Santo Trafficante and Sam Giancana, whom Kennedy, as chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee in the late 1950s, had targeted. It was an overheated ecosystem that was united not just by its fevered opposition to the Castro regime, but by its hatred for the Kennedys, who were regarded as traitors for failing to use the full military might of the United States against the communist outpost in the Caribbean.
This Miami netherworld of spies, gangsters and Cuban militants is where Robert Kennedy immediately cast his suspicions on Nov. 22. In the years since RFK's own assassination, an impressive body of evidence has accumulated that suggests why Kennedy felt compelled to look in that direction. The evidence -- congressional testimony, declassified government documents, even veiled confessions -- continues to emerge at this late date, although largely unnoticed. The most recent revelation came from legendary spy E. Howard Hunt before his death in January. Hunt offered what might be the last will and testament on the JFK assassination by someone with direct knowledge about the crime. In his recent posthumously published memoir, American Spy, Hunt speculates that the CIA might have been involved in Kennedy's murder. And in handwritten notes and an audiotape he left behind, the spy went further, revealing that he was invited to a 1963 meeting at a CIA safe house in Miami where an assassination plot was discussed.
Bobby Kennedy knew that he and his brother had made more than their share of political enemies. But none were more virulent than the men who worked on the Bay of Pigs operation and believed the president had stabbed them in the back, refusing to rescue their doomed operation by sending in the U.S. Air Force and Marines. Later, when President Kennedy ended the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 without invading Cuba, these men saw not statesmanship but another failure of nerve. In Cuban Miami, they spoke of la seconda derrota, the second defeat. These anti-Kennedy sentiments, at times voiced heatedly to Bobby's face, resonated among the CIA's partners in the secret war on Castro -- the Mafia bosses who longed to reclaim their lucrative gambling and prostitution franchises in Havana that had been shut down by the revolution, and who were deeply aggrieved by the Kennedy Justice Department's all-out war on organized crime. But Bobby, the hard-liner who covered his brother's right flank on the Cuba issue, thought that he had turned himself into the main lightning rod for all this anti-Kennedy static.
"I thought they would get me, instead of the president," he told his Justice Department press aide, Edwin Guthman, as they walked back and forth on the backyard lawn at Hickory Hill on the afternoon of Nov. 22. Guthman and others around Bobby that day thought "they" might be coming for the younger Kennedy next. So apparently did Bobby. Normally opposed to tight security measures -- "Kennedys don't need bodyguards," he had said with typical brashness -- he allowed his aides to summon federal marshals, who quickly surrounded his estate.
Meanwhile, as Lyndon Johnson -- a man with whom he had a storied antagonistic relationship -- flew east from Dallas to assume the powers of the presidency, Bobby Kennedy used his fleeting authority to ferret out the truth. After hearing his brother had died at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Kennedy phoned CIA headquarters, just down the road in Langley, where he often began his day, stopping there to work on Cuba-related business. Bobby's phone call to Langley on the afternoon of Nov. 22 was a stunning outburst. Getting a ranking official on the phone -- whose identity is still unknown -- Kennedy confronted him in a voice vibrating with fury and pain. "Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?" Kennedy erupted.
Later that day, RFK summoned the CIA director himself, John McCone, to ask him the same question. McCone, who had replaced the legendary Allen Dulles after the old spymaster had walked the plank for the Bay of Pigs, swore that his agency was not involved. But Bobby Kennedy knew that McCone, a wealthy Republican businessman from California with no intelligence background, did not have a firm grasp on all aspects of the agency's work. Real control over the clandestine service revolved around the No. 2 man, Richard Helms, the shrewd bureaucrat whose intelligence career went back to the agency's OSS origins in World War II. "It was clear that McCone was out of the loop -- Dick Helms was running the agency," recently commented RFK aide John Seigenthaler -- another crusading newspaper reporter, like Guthman, whom Bobby had recruited for his Justice Department team. "Anything McCone found out was by accident."
Kennedy had another revealing phone conversation on the afternoon of Nov. 22. Speaking with Enrique "Harry" Ruiz-Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran who was his most trusted ally among exiled political leaders, Bobby shocked his friend by telling him point-blank, "One of your guys did it." Who did Kennedy mean? By then Oswald had been arrested in Dallas. The CIA and its anti-Castro client groups were already trying to connect the alleged assassin to the Havana regime. But as Kennedy's blunt remark to Williams makes clear, the attorney general wasn't buying it. Recent evidence suggests that Bobby Kennedy had heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald long before it exploded in news bulletins around the world, and he connected it with the government's underground war on Castro. With Oswald's arrest in Dallas, Kennedy apparently realized that the government's clandestine campaign against Castro had boomeranged at his brother.
That evening, Kennedy zeroed in on the Mafia. He phoned Julius Draznin in Chicago, an expert on union corruption for the National Labor Relations Board, asking him to look into a possible mob angle on Dallas. More important, the attorney general activated Walter Sheridan, his ace Justice Department investigator, locating him in Nashville, where Sheridan was awaiting the trial of their longtime nemesis, Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa.
If Kennedy had any doubts about Mafia involvement in his brother's murder, they were immediately dispelled when, two days after JFK was shot down, burly nightclub owner Jack Ruby shouldered his way through press onlookers in the basement of the Dallas police station and fired his fatal bullet into Lee Harvey Oswald. Sheridan quickly turned up evidence that Ruby had been paid off in Chicago by a close associate of Hoffa. Sheridan reported that Ruby had "picked up a bundle of money from Allen M. Dorfman," Hoffa's chief adviser on Teamster pension fund loans and the stepson of Paul Dorfman, the labor boss' main link to the Chicago mob. A few days later, Draznin, Kennedy's man in Chicago, provided further evidence about Ruby's background as a mob enforcer, submitting a detailed report on Ruby's labor racketeering activities and his penchant for armed violence. Jack Ruby's phone records further clinched it for Kennedy. The list of men whom Ruby phoned around the time of the assassination, RFK later told aide Frank Mankiewicz, was "almost a duplicate of the people I called to testify before the Rackets Committee."
As family members and close friends gathered in the White House on the weekend after the assassination for the president's funeral, a raucous mood of Irish mourning gripped the executive mansion. But Bobby didn't participate in the family's doleful antics. Coiled and sleepless throughout the weekend, he brooded alone about his brother's murder. According to an account by Peter Lawford, the actor and Kennedy in-law who was there that weekend, Bobby told family members that JFK had been killed by a powerful plot that grew out of one of the government's secret anti-Castro operations. There was nothing they could do at that point, Bobby added, since they were facing a formidable enemy and they no longer controlled the government. Justice would have to wait until the Kennedys could regain the White House -- this would become RFK's mantra in the years after Dallas, whenever associates urged him to speak out about the mysterious crime.
A week after the assassination, Bobby and his brother's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy -- who shared his suspicions about Dallas -- sent a startling secret message to Moscow through a trusted family emissary named William Walton. The discreet and loyal Walton "was exactly the person that you would pick for a mission like this," his friend Gore Vidal later observed. Walton, a Time magazine war correspondent who had reinvented himself as a gay Georgetown bohemian, had grown close to both JFK and Jackie in their carefree days before they moved into the White House. Later, the first couple gave him an unpaid role in the administration, appointing him chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, but it was mainly an excuse to make him a frequent White House guest and confidant.
After JFK's assassination, the president's brother and widow asked Walton to go ahead as planned with a cultural exchange trip to Russia, where he was to meet with artists and government ministers, and convey an urgent message to the Kremlin. Soon after arriving in frigid Moscow, fighting a cold and dabbing at his nose with a red handkerchief, Walton met at the ornate Sovietskaya restaurant with Georgi Bolshakov -- an ebullient, roly-poly Soviet agent with whom Bobby had established a back-channel relationship in Washington. Walton stunned the Russian by telling him that the Kennedys believed Oswald was part of a conspiracy. They didn't think either Moscow or Havana was behind the plot, Walton assured Bolshakov -- it was a large domestic conspiracy. The president's brother was determined to enter the political arena and eventually make a run for the White House. If RFK succeeded, Walton confided, he would resume his brother's quest for detente with the Soviets.
Robert Kennedy's remarkable secret communication to Moscow shows how emotionally wracked he must have been in the days following his brother's assassination. The calamity transformed him instantly from a cocky, abrasive insider -- the second most powerful man in Washington -- to a grief-stricken, deeply wary outsider who put more trust in the Russian government than he did in his own. The Walton mission has been all but lost to history. But it is one more revealing tale that sheds light on Bobby Kennedy's subterranean life between his brother's assassination and his own violent demise less than five years later.
Over the years, Kennedy would offer bland and routine endorsements of the Warren Report and its lone gunman theory. But privately he derided the report as nothing more than a public relations exercise designed to reassure the public. And behind the scenes, he continued to work assiduously to figure out his brother's murder, in preparation for reopening the case if he ever won the power to do so.
Bobby held onto medical evidence from his brother's autopsy, including JFK's brain and tissue samples, which might have proved important in a future investigation. He also considered taking possession of the gore-spattered, bullet-riddled presidential limousine that had carried his brother in Dallas, before the black Lincoln could be scrubbed clean of evidence and repaired. He enlisted his top investigator, Walt Sheridan, in his secret quest -- the former FBI agent and fellow Irish Catholic whom Bobby called his "avenging angel." Even after leaving the Justice Department in 1964, when he was elected to the Senate from New York, Kennedy and Sheridan would slip back into the building now and then to pore over files on the case. And soon after his election, Kennedy traveled to Mexico City, where he gathered information on Oswald's mysterious trip there in September 1963.
In 1967, Sheridan went to New Orleans to check into the Jim Garrison investigation, to see whether the flamboyant prosecutor really had cracked the JFK case. (Sheridan was working as an NBC news producer at the time, but he reported back to RFK, telling him that Garrison was a fraud.) And Kennedy asked his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, to begin gathering information about the assassination for the day when they could reopen the investigation. (Mankiewicz later told Bobby that his research led him to conclude it was probably a plot involving the Mafia, Cuban exiles and rogue CIA agents.) Kennedy himself found it painful to discuss conspiracy theories with the ardent researchers who sought him out. But he met in his Senate office with at least one -- a feisty small-town Texas newspaper publisher named Penn Jones Jr., who believed JFK was the victim of a CIA-Pentagon plot. Bobby heard him out and then had his driver take Jones to Arlington Cemetery, where the newspaperman wanted to pay his respects at his brother's grave.
At times, this drive to know the truth would sputter, as Robert Kennedy wrestled with debilitating grief and a haunting guilt that he -- his brother's constant watchman -- should have protected him. And, ever cautious, Bobby continued to deflect the subject whenever he was confronted with it by the press. But as time went by, it became increasingly difficult for Kennedy to avoid wrestling with the specter of his brother's death in public.
In late March 1968, during his doomed and heroic run for the presidency, Kennedy was addressing a tumultuous outdoor campus rally in Northridge, Calif., when some boisterous students shouted out the question he always dreaded. "We want to know who killed President Kennedy!" yelled one girl, while others took up the cry: "Open the archives!"
Kennedy's response that day was a tightrope walk. He knew that if he fully revealed his thinking about the assassination, the ensuing media uproar would have dominated his campaign, instead of burning issues like ending the Vietnam War and healing the country's racial divisions. For a man like Robert Kennedy, you did not talk about something as dark as the president's assassination in public -- you explored the crime your own way.
But Kennedy respected college students and their passions -- and he was in the habit of addressing campus audiences with surprising honesty. He did not want to simply deflect the question that day with his standard line. So, while dutifully endorsing the Warren Report as usual, he went further. "You wanted to ask me something about the archives," he responded. "I'm sure, as I've said before, the archives will be open." The crowd cheered and applauded. "Can I just say," continued Kennedy, "and I have answered this question before, but there is no one who would be more interested in all of these matters as to who was responsible for uh . . . the uh, uh, the death of President Kennedy than I would." Kennedy's press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, long used to Kennedy ducking the question, was "stunned" by the reply. "It was either like he was suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down any further questioning. You know, 'Yes, I will reopen the case. Now let's move on.' "
Robert Kennedy did not live long enough to solve his brother's assassination. But nearly 40 years after his own murder, a growing body of evidence suggests that Kennedy was on the right trail before he too was cut down. Despite his verbal contortions in public, Bobby Kennedy always knew that the truth about Dallas mattered. It still does.
Excerpt from David Talbot's Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.
, and his years in Washington had taught him to keep his own counsel and proceed in a subterranean fashion. What he said in public about Dallas was not the full story. Privately, RFK -- who had made his name in the 1950s as a relentless investigator of the underside of American power -- was consumed by the need to know the real story about his brother's assassination. This fire seized him on the afternoon of Nov. 22, as soon as FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, a bitter political enemy, phoned to say -- almost with pleasure, thought Bobby -- that the president had been shot. And the question of who killed his brother continued to haunt Kennedy until the day he too was gunned down, on June 5, 1968.Because of his proclivity for operating in secret, RFK did not leave behind a documentary record of his inquiries into his brother's assassination. But it is possible to retrace his investigative trail, beginning with the afternoon of Nov. 22, when he frantically worked the phones at Hickory Hill -- his Civil War-era mansion in McLean, Va. -- and summoned aides and government officials to his home. Lit up with the clarity of shock, the electricity of adrenaline, Bobby Kennedy constructed the outlines of the crime that day -- a crime, he immediately concluded, that went far beyond Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old ex-Marine arrested shortly after the assassination. Robert Kennedy was America's first assassination conspiracy theorist.
CIA sources began disseminating their own conspiratorial view of Kennedy's murder within hours of the crime, spotlighting Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union and his public support for Fidel Castro. In New Orleans, an anti-Castro news organization released a tape of Oswald defending the bearded dictator. In Miami, the Cuban Student Directorate -- an exile group funded secretly by a CIA program code-named AMSPELL -- told reporters about Oswald's connections to the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But Robert Kennedy never believed the assassination was a communist plot. Instead, he looked in the opposite direction, focusing his suspicions on the CIA's secretive anti-Castro operations, a murky underworld he had navigated as his brother's point man on Cuba. Ironically, RFK's suspicions were shared by Castro himself, whom he had sought to overthrow throughout the Kennedy presidency.
The attorney general was supposed to be in charge of the clandestine war on Castro -- another daunting assignment JFK gave him, after the spy agency's disastrous performance at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. But as he tried to establish control over CIA operations and to herd the rambunctious Cuban exile groups into a unified progressive front, Bobby learned what a swamp of intrigue the anti-Castro world was. Working out of a sprawling Miami station code-named JM/WAVE that was second in size only to the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters, the agency had recruited an unruly army of Cuban militants to launch raids on the island and even contracted Mafia henchmen to kill Castro -- including mob bosses Johnny Rosselli, Santo Trafficante and Sam Giancana, whom Kennedy, as chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee in the late 1950s, had targeted. It was an overheated ecosystem that was united not just by its fevered opposition to the Castro regime, but by its hatred for the Kennedys, who were regarded as traitors for failing to use the full military might of the United States against the communist outpost in the Caribbean.
This Miami netherworld of spies, gangsters and Cuban militants is where Robert Kennedy immediately cast his suspicions on Nov. 22. In the years since RFK's own assassination, an impressive body of evidence has accumulated that suggests why Kennedy felt compelled to look in that direction. The evidence -- congressional testimony, declassified government documents, even veiled confessions -- continues to emerge at this late date, although largely unnoticed. The most recent revelation came from legendary spy E. Howard Hunt before his death in January. Hunt offered what might be the last will and testament on the JFK assassination by someone with direct knowledge about the crime. In his recent posthumously published memoir, American Spy, Hunt speculates that the CIA might have been involved in Kennedy's murder. And in handwritten notes and an audiotape he left behind, the spy went further, revealing that he was invited to a 1963 meeting at a CIA safe house in Miami where an assassination plot was discussed.
Bobby Kennedy knew that he and his brother had made more than their share of political enemies. But none were more virulent than the men who worked on the Bay of Pigs operation and believed the president had stabbed them in the back, refusing to rescue their doomed operation by sending in the U.S. Air Force and Marines. Later, when President Kennedy ended the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 without invading Cuba, these men saw not statesmanship but another failure of nerve. In Cuban Miami, they spoke of la seconda derrota, the second defeat. These anti-Kennedy sentiments, at times voiced heatedly to Bobby's face, resonated among the CIA's partners in the secret war on Castro -- the Mafia bosses who longed to reclaim their lucrative gambling and prostitution franchises in Havana that had been shut down by the revolution, and who were deeply aggrieved by the Kennedy Justice Department's all-out war on organized crime. But Bobby, the hard-liner who covered his brother's right flank on the Cuba issue, thought that he had turned himself into the main lightning rod for all this anti-Kennedy static.
"I thought they would get me, instead of the president," he told his Justice Department press aide, Edwin Guthman, as they walked back and forth on the backyard lawn at Hickory Hill on the afternoon of Nov. 22. Guthman and others around Bobby that day thought "they" might be coming for the younger Kennedy next. So apparently did Bobby. Normally opposed to tight security measures -- "Kennedys don't need bodyguards," he had said with typical brashness -- he allowed his aides to summon federal marshals, who quickly surrounded his estate.
Meanwhile, as Lyndon Johnson -- a man with whom he had a storied antagonistic relationship -- flew east from Dallas to assume the powers of the presidency, Bobby Kennedy used his fleeting authority to ferret out the truth. After hearing his brother had died at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Kennedy phoned CIA headquarters, just down the road in Langley, where he often began his day, stopping there to work on Cuba-related business. Bobby's phone call to Langley on the afternoon of Nov. 22 was a stunning outburst. Getting a ranking official on the phone -- whose identity is still unknown -- Kennedy confronted him in a voice vibrating with fury and pain. "Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?" Kennedy erupted.
Later that day, RFK summoned the CIA director himself, John McCone, to ask him the same question. McCone, who had replaced the legendary Allen Dulles after the old spymaster had walked the plank for the Bay of Pigs, swore that his agency was not involved. But Bobby Kennedy knew that McCone, a wealthy Republican businessman from California with no intelligence background, did not have a firm grasp on all aspects of the agency's work. Real control over the clandestine service revolved around the No. 2 man, Richard Helms, the shrewd bureaucrat whose intelligence career went back to the agency's OSS origins in World War II. "It was clear that McCone was out of the loop -- Dick Helms was running the agency," recently commented RFK aide John Seigenthaler -- another crusading newspaper reporter, like Guthman, whom Bobby had recruited for his Justice Department team. "Anything McCone found out was by accident."
Kennedy had another revealing phone conversation on the afternoon of Nov. 22. Speaking with Enrique "Harry" Ruiz-Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran who was his most trusted ally among exiled political leaders, Bobby shocked his friend by telling him point-blank, "One of your guys did it." Who did Kennedy mean? By then Oswald had been arrested in Dallas. The CIA and its anti-Castro client groups were already trying to connect the alleged assassin to the Havana regime. But as Kennedy's blunt remark to Williams makes clear, the attorney general wasn't buying it. Recent evidence suggests that Bobby Kennedy had heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald long before it exploded in news bulletins around the world, and he connected it with the government's underground war on Castro. With Oswald's arrest in Dallas, Kennedy apparently realized that the government's clandestine campaign against Castro had boomeranged at his brother.
That evening, Kennedy zeroed in on the Mafia. He phoned Julius Draznin in Chicago, an expert on union corruption for the National Labor Relations Board, asking him to look into a possible mob angle on Dallas. More important, the attorney general activated Walter Sheridan, his ace Justice Department investigator, locating him in Nashville, where Sheridan was awaiting the trial of their longtime nemesis, Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa.
If Kennedy had any doubts about Mafia involvement in his brother's murder, they were immediately dispelled when, two days after JFK was shot down, burly nightclub owner Jack Ruby shouldered his way through press onlookers in the basement of the Dallas police station and fired his fatal bullet into Lee Harvey Oswald. Sheridan quickly turned up evidence that Ruby had been paid off in Chicago by a close associate of Hoffa. Sheridan reported that Ruby had "picked up a bundle of money from Allen M. Dorfman," Hoffa's chief adviser on Teamster pension fund loans and the stepson of Paul Dorfman, the labor boss' main link to the Chicago mob. A few days later, Draznin, Kennedy's man in Chicago, provided further evidence about Ruby's background as a mob enforcer, submitting a detailed report on Ruby's labor racketeering activities and his penchant for armed violence. Jack Ruby's phone records further clinched it for Kennedy. The list of men whom Ruby phoned around the time of the assassination, RFK later told aide Frank Mankiewicz, was "almost a duplicate of the people I called to testify before the Rackets Committee."
As family members and close friends gathered in the White House on the weekend after the assassination for the president's funeral, a raucous mood of Irish mourning gripped the executive mansion. But Bobby didn't participate in the family's doleful antics. Coiled and sleepless throughout the weekend, he brooded alone about his brother's murder. According to an account by Peter Lawford, the actor and Kennedy in-law who was there that weekend, Bobby told family members that JFK had been killed by a powerful plot that grew out of one of the government's secret anti-Castro operations. There was nothing they could do at that point, Bobby added, since they were facing a formidable enemy and they no longer controlled the government. Justice would have to wait until the Kennedys could regain the White House -- this would become RFK's mantra in the years after Dallas, whenever associates urged him to speak out about the mysterious crime.
A week after the assassination, Bobby and his brother's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy -- who shared his suspicions about Dallas -- sent a startling secret message to Moscow through a trusted family emissary named William Walton. The discreet and loyal Walton "was exactly the person that you would pick for a mission like this," his friend Gore Vidal later observed. Walton, a Time magazine war correspondent who had reinvented himself as a gay Georgetown bohemian, had grown close to both JFK and Jackie in their carefree days before they moved into the White House. Later, the first couple gave him an unpaid role in the administration, appointing him chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, but it was mainly an excuse to make him a frequent White House guest and confidant.
After JFK's assassination, the president's brother and widow asked Walton to go ahead as planned with a cultural exchange trip to Russia, where he was to meet with artists and government ministers, and convey an urgent message to the Kremlin. Soon after arriving in frigid Moscow, fighting a cold and dabbing at his nose with a red handkerchief, Walton met at the ornate Sovietskaya restaurant with Georgi Bolshakov -- an ebullient, roly-poly Soviet agent with whom Bobby had established a back-channel relationship in Washington. Walton stunned the Russian by telling him that the Kennedys believed Oswald was part of a conspiracy. They didn't think either Moscow or Havana was behind the plot, Walton assured Bolshakov -- it was a large domestic conspiracy. The president's brother was determined to enter the political arena and eventually make a run for the White House. If RFK succeeded, Walton confided, he would resume his brother's quest for detente with the Soviets.
Robert Kennedy's remarkable secret communication to Moscow shows how emotionally wracked he must have been in the days following his brother's assassination. The calamity transformed him instantly from a cocky, abrasive insider -- the second most powerful man in Washington -- to a grief-stricken, deeply wary outsider who put more trust in the Russian government than he did in his own. The Walton mission has been all but lost to history. But it is one more revealing tale that sheds light on Bobby Kennedy's subterranean life between his brother's assassination and his own violent demise less than five years later.
Over the years, Kennedy would offer bland and routine endorsements of the Warren Report and its lone gunman theory. But privately he derided the report as nothing more than a public relations exercise designed to reassure the public. And behind the scenes, he continued to work assiduously to figure out his brother's murder, in preparation for reopening the case if he ever won the power to do so.
Bobby held onto medical evidence from his brother's autopsy, including JFK's brain and tissue samples, which might have proved important in a future investigation. He also considered taking possession of the gore-spattered, bullet-riddled presidential limousine that had carried his brother in Dallas, before the black Lincoln could be scrubbed clean of evidence and repaired. He enlisted his top investigator, Walt Sheridan, in his secret quest -- the former FBI agent and fellow Irish Catholic whom Bobby called his "avenging angel." Even after leaving the Justice Department in 1964, when he was elected to the Senate from New York, Kennedy and Sheridan would slip back into the building now and then to pore over files on the case. And soon after his election, Kennedy traveled to Mexico City, where he gathered information on Oswald's mysterious trip there in September 1963.
In 1967, Sheridan went to New Orleans to check into the Jim Garrison investigation, to see whether the flamboyant prosecutor really had cracked the JFK case. (Sheridan was working as an NBC news producer at the time, but he reported back to RFK, telling him that Garrison was a fraud.) And Kennedy asked his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, to begin gathering information about the assassination for the day when they could reopen the investigation. (Mankiewicz later told Bobby that his research led him to conclude it was probably a plot involving the Mafia, Cuban exiles and rogue CIA agents.) Kennedy himself found it painful to discuss conspiracy theories with the ardent researchers who sought him out. But he met in his Senate office with at least one -- a feisty small-town Texas newspaper publisher named Penn Jones Jr., who believed JFK was the victim of a CIA-Pentagon plot. Bobby heard him out and then had his driver take Jones to Arlington Cemetery, where the newspaperman wanted to pay his respects at his brother's grave.
At times, this drive to know the truth would sputter, as Robert Kennedy wrestled with debilitating grief and a haunting guilt that he -- his brother's constant watchman -- should have protected him. And, ever cautious, Bobby continued to deflect the subject whenever he was confronted with it by the press. But as time went by, it became increasingly difficult for Kennedy to avoid wrestling with the specter of his brother's death in public.
In late March 1968, during his doomed and heroic run for the presidency, Kennedy was addressing a tumultuous outdoor campus rally in Northridge, Calif., when some boisterous students shouted out the question he always dreaded. "We want to know who killed President Kennedy!" yelled one girl, while others took up the cry: "Open the archives!"
Kennedy's response that day was a tightrope walk. He knew that if he fully revealed his thinking about the assassination, the ensuing media uproar would have dominated his campaign, instead of burning issues like ending the Vietnam War and healing the country's racial divisions. For a man like Robert Kennedy, you did not talk about something as dark as the president's assassination in public -- you explored the crime your own way.
But Kennedy respected college students and their passions -- and he was in the habit of addressing campus audiences with surprising honesty. He did not want to simply deflect the question that day with his standard line. So, while dutifully endorsing the Warren Report as usual, he went further. "You wanted to ask me something about the archives," he responded. "I'm sure, as I've said before, the archives will be open." The crowd cheered and applauded. "Can I just say," continued Kennedy, "and I have answered this question before, but there is no one who would be more interested in all of these matters as to who was responsible for uh . . . the uh, uh, the death of President Kennedy than I would." Kennedy's press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, long used to Kennedy ducking the question, was "stunned" by the reply. "It was either like he was suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down any further questioning. You know, 'Yes, I will reopen the case. Now let's move on.' "
Robert Kennedy did not live long enough to solve his brother's assassination. But nearly 40 years after his own murder, a growing body of evidence suggests that Kennedy was on the right trail before he too was cut down. Despite his verbal contortions in public, Bobby Kennedy always knew that the truth about Dallas mattered. It still does.
Excerpt from David Talbot's Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.
Al Capone to be Played by Nicolas Cage in The Untouchables: Capone Rising
Friends of ours: Al Capone
MTV News has confirmed that Nicolas Cage is set to play Chicago crime boss Al Capone in “The Untouchables: Capone Rising.”
Cage will reteam with “Snake Eyes
” director Brian DePalma for the project, playing a younger version of the character made famous by Robert DeNiro. “Capone Rising” is a prequel to DePalma’s 1987 classic “The Untouchables,” and will revolve around the early dealings between Capone and Irish cop Jimmy Malone, a role that garnered an Oscar for Sean Connery.
Principal photography on the high-profile flick will begin in October, some 21 years after its predecessor was filmed. No word yet on whether the temporary “Capone Rising” title will be scrapped, following the chilly response audiences gave to February’s “Hannibal Rising (Unrated Widescreen Edition)
” prequel.
Based on the classic 50’s/60’s TV drama, “The Untouchables
” was a box-office and critical smash that announced Kevin Costner as a leading man, re-launched the career of Connery, and showed the world that you should never turn your back on DeNiro when he’s holding a baseball bat. Rumors continue to swirl that Sean Penn or Colin Farrell will be cast as the younger Connery, discussions that seem far more credible now that Cage has decided to pull a gun instead of a knife, and send doubters to the morgue rather than the hospital.
Because that, as he now knows, is the Chicago way.
Thanks to MTV
MTV News has confirmed that Nicolas Cage is set to play Chicago crime boss Al Capone in “The Untouchables: Capone Rising.”
Cage will reteam with “Snake Eyes
” director Brian DePalma for the project, playing a younger version of the character made famous by Robert DeNiro. “Capone Rising” is a prequel to DePalma’s 1987 classic “The Untouchables,” and will revolve around the early dealings between Capone and Irish cop Jimmy Malone, a role that garnered an Oscar for Sean Connery.Principal photography on the high-profile flick will begin in October, some 21 years after its predecessor was filmed. No word yet on whether the temporary “Capone Rising” title will be scrapped, following the chilly response audiences gave to February’s “Hannibal Rising (Unrated Widescreen Edition)
” prequel.Based on the classic 50’s/60’s TV drama, “The Untouchables
” was a box-office and critical smash that announced Kevin Costner as a leading man, re-launched the career of Connery, and showed the world that you should never turn your back on DeNiro when he’s holding a baseball bat. Rumors continue to swirl that Sean Penn or Colin Farrell will be cast as the younger Connery, discussions that seem far more credible now that Cage has decided to pull a gun instead of a knife, and send doubters to the morgue rather than the hospital.Because that, as he now knows, is the Chicago way.
Thanks to MTV
Split Verdict for Skinny Dom
Friends of ours: Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia, Gambino Crime Family, Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, John "Junior" Gotti, Bonanno Crime Family, Alfred Dicongilio
A federal jury convicted a 65-year-old mobster of racketeering and conspiring to murder a husband and wife stickup team who had been robbing Mafia clubhouses, but said the government had not proven he had actually killed the couple.
The ruling will spare Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia the possibility of a life sentence, but he could still get a lengthy prison term for his involvement in illegal gambling and the murder plot.
Prosecutors said Pizzonia, a reputed soldier in the Gambino organized crime family, was behind the slayings of Rosemarie and Thomas Uva. The couple were believed to have been humiliating the mob by ripping off card games at social clubs, usually armed with a submachine gun.
On Christmas Eve 1992, the Uvas were sitting in their car at a Queens intersection when they were each shot in the back of the head. The car rolled through the intersection and collided with another vehicle before it stopped; police officers found a stash of jewelry with the bloody corpses.
Prosecutors based their case against Pizzonia partly on testimony by Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, a Gambino crime family soldier who has been cooperating with authorities for several years.
Pizzonia "was very angry, as everybody else was, that these guys had the nerve to go around robbing clubs, like committing suicide," DiLeonardo told the Brooklyn jury. The turncoat Gambino capo said then-acting Gambino boss John A. "Junior" Gotti sanctioned the slayings -- an allegation Gotti has denied.
Defense attorney Joseph R. Corozzo Jr. attacked the government for building its case on the word of admitted killers like DiLeonardo and suggested another crime family -- the Bonannos -- whacked the Uvas. Corozzo argued in his closing argument Wednesday that the evidence was too weak for a conviction.
Jurors in the case delivered a split verdict, finding that Pizzonia had engaged in illegal gambling and had been in on the murder conspiracy, but finding him not guilty of carrying out the killings.
At trial, the panel heard testimony that the couple had gambled with their lives by ripping off card games at a Queens social club operated by Pizzonia. Rosemarie Uva, 31, took the wheel of the getaway car, and Thomas Uva, 28, armed with an Uzi submachine gun, stripped patrons of their money and jewelry and made the men drop their pants, witnesses said. Their brazenness earned them the nicknames Bonnie and Clyde.
A second defendant in the racketeering case, Alfred Dicongilio, was also found to have been involved in gambling, but was acquitted and walked free because federal racketeering cases require that a person has engaged in more than one illegal act.
Thanks to CNN
A federal jury convicted a 65-year-old mobster of racketeering and conspiring to murder a husband and wife stickup team who had been robbing Mafia clubhouses, but said the government had not proven he had actually killed the couple.
The ruling will spare Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia the possibility of a life sentence, but he could still get a lengthy prison term for his involvement in illegal gambling and the murder plot.Prosecutors said Pizzonia, a reputed soldier in the Gambino organized crime family, was behind the slayings of Rosemarie and Thomas Uva. The couple were believed to have been humiliating the mob by ripping off card games at social clubs, usually armed with a submachine gun.
On Christmas Eve 1992, the Uvas were sitting in their car at a Queens intersection when they were each shot in the back of the head. The car rolled through the intersection and collided with another vehicle before it stopped; police officers found a stash of jewelry with the bloody corpses.
Prosecutors based their case against Pizzonia partly on testimony by Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, a Gambino crime family soldier who has been cooperating with authorities for several years.
Pizzonia "was very angry, as everybody else was, that these guys had the nerve to go around robbing clubs, like committing suicide," DiLeonardo told the Brooklyn jury. The turncoat Gambino capo said then-acting Gambino boss John A. "Junior" Gotti sanctioned the slayings -- an allegation Gotti has denied.
Defense attorney Joseph R. Corozzo Jr. attacked the government for building its case on the word of admitted killers like DiLeonardo and suggested another crime family -- the Bonannos -- whacked the Uvas. Corozzo argued in his closing argument Wednesday that the evidence was too weak for a conviction.
Jurors in the case delivered a split verdict, finding that Pizzonia had engaged in illegal gambling and had been in on the murder conspiracy, but finding him not guilty of carrying out the killings.
At trial, the panel heard testimony that the couple had gambled with their lives by ripping off card games at a Queens social club operated by Pizzonia. Rosemarie Uva, 31, took the wheel of the getaway car, and Thomas Uva, 28, armed with an Uzi submachine gun, stripped patrons of their money and jewelry and made the men drop their pants, witnesses said. Their brazenness earned them the nicknames Bonnie and Clyde.
A second defendant in the racketeering case, Alfred Dicongilio, was also found to have been involved in gambling, but was acquitted and walked free because federal racketeering cases require that a person has engaged in more than one illegal act.
Thanks to CNN
Green Mill Capone Hangout, Still Jumping Joint
Friends of ours: Al Capone, "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn
It's a Saturday night at Chicago's Green Mill Lounge and "da joint" — as owner David Jemilo calls it — is jumpin'. A largely yuppie crowd is packed tightly inside the room. Alcohol (mostly beer and martinis) flows freely, the noise is deafening, and the air is thick with cigar and cigarette smoke. At the far end, heard long before they are visible through the smoky haze, the band plays what always plays at the Green Mill: jazz.
The people seated near the stage are listening intently to the music. Those sitting or standing near the bar are drinking and talking.
No one is eating. At the Green Mill, you will not encounter the menu of "buffalo wings" and other such fare found in most other bars. No popcorn, not even pretzels and nuts. Food would just be a hassle and a distraction from the jazz-booze-smoke-conversation aesthetic that makes the Green Mill the Green Mill.
David Jemilo calls the Green Mill a "jazz joint," and that's mostly what it has been since the doors opened in 1907. It's quite possible, in fact, that the joint antedates jazz, which grew out of a melange of musical styles in turn-of-the century New Orleans. Now celebrating its 100th year, the Green Mill has the distinction of being the oldest continuously running jazz club in America.
Opened in 1907 as Pop Morse's Roadhouse, the club in the Uptown area, about four miles north of Chicago's Loop, was purchased in 1910 by the Chamales brothers, who named it the Green Mill Gardens.
The club operating today is only a small part of the original sprawling complex. Adjacent to the club was an elegant restaurant, which was joined to a ballroom. A second-story ballroom called the Rhumba Room offered Latin music. The first-floor ballroom opened onto elegant gardens, and in the early years, tuxedoed men and women in evening gowns danced the night away to the tunes of leading orchestras. (The oldest ad for the Green Mill is for Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra in 1915.)
It was also the heyday of ragtime and vaudeville, and the nightclub's patrons listened to Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker belt out hits of the era. Chicago was then one of the main production centers for the new silent film industry, and the nearby Essanay Studios turned out a stream of Westerns filmed along the Chicago River. During breaks, "Bronco Billy" Anderson and other stars would mosey up to the Green Mill and tie their horses to a hitching post provided by the club while they knocked back a round or two.
In the early 1920s, Prohibition hit and the Green Mill became a wide-open "gin joint," in the words of Steve Brand, who tended bar there from 1928 to 1960. In the early '20s,, the Chamales brothers leased the place to members of the Chicago mob including a 25 percent interest to "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, thought to be one of the leaders of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Mr. Brand says the Mill became the favorite hangout of Al Capone, who was frequently found in the center booth in front of the bar where he could keep an eye on the door. Capone owned a speak-easy in the basement of a building across the street, but he preferred the Green Mill because the police had been paid off, permitting "wide-open" action. "People brought their booze in flasks or hollowed-out canes," says Mr. Brand, and "waitresses brought coffee mugs for them to drink it out of."
When Capone and company really wanted to swing, they opened a trap door behind the bar and descended into rooms in the basement where they could escape, if need be, through a series of tunnels. But mostly, "Big Al" just liked to hang out quietly and listen to the music of his favorite performer, Joe E. Lewis, who was earning the phenomenal fee of $650 a week.
In 1927, however, Lewis got greedy and took a job at the New Rendezvous Club for $1,000 a week. It was a big mistake. A week later, an outraged McGurn dispatched three thugs to visit Lewis. The three smashed Lewis' head, slit his throat, cut out part of his tongue and left him for dead.
Lewis survived, and a compassionate Capone gave him some money to get by on. Although it took him three years to learn to talk, Lewis made a comeback as a comic — at the Green Mill. The story was made into a 1957 movie, "The Joker Is Wild," with Frank Sinatra playing the part of Joe E. Lewis. Today in the Green Mill, the episode is immortalized by an unknown poet in doggerel framed behind the bar.
For two decades after the end of Prohibition , the Green Mill continued to flourish. Over a beer at "the joint," David Jemilo talks about those years as his father had described them to him. "He would go to the Aragon Ballroom when he was 18 years old with his buddy Duke and meet women or whatever and after that they would come over to the Green Mill after dancing at the Aragon, and they had drinks and dancing and lots of fun," Mr. Jemilo says.
The Uptown Theater was built next door to the Green Mill and brought a new spate of celebrities to the bar. Now boarded up, the Uptown in those days was an opulent movie palace that featured live entertainment by the leading stars, such as Charlie Chaplain. After the show, stars and patrons would head over to the Green Mill.
The Green Mill "was a cabaret joint," Mr. Jemilo says, "and a lot of famous people came here to hang out — you know like Charlie Chaplain, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman."
The list of famous patrons includes Billie Holiday, Lillian Russell and Wallace Beery, and many of them — Holiday and Goodman included — joined in impromptu performances. "You had to be dressed up at night in those days to come here," says Mr. Jemilo. "Of course, in those days, everyone was dressed up."
In the 1950s, things began to change. The Aragon Ballroom, and later the Uptown Theater, closed, the area deteriorated and many of the Green Mill patrons died or moved away. The owners struggled to keep the doors open, but by the 1980s their clientele was made up mostly of winos, homeless people and petty criminals. That was the situation when Mr. Jemilo and his wife visited the Green Mill for the first time.
"It was pretty rough," he says. "You know, drug dealers, pimps, whores, bums and people sleeping on the floor. You had to step over them when you walked in. It was just a real tough crowd and you had to look over your shoulder all the time. It was one of the roughest bars in the city."
Despite the deteriorated state of the Green Mill, "we immediately fell in love with the place," Mr. Jemilo says. "You could tell that it was beautiful at one time, but everything was falling apart," he says. "I told my wife I'm going to buy this place — just talking — and six months later, I did buy it because the price was right and the owner was 70 and his wife walked with a walker and the place was in a shambles."
Mr. Jemilo made basic repairs, cleaned up the "joint" and evicted the unsavory denizens. Now the historic club with its nightly jazz is an "in" place for Chicago yuppies and a magnet for jazz fans nationwide, as well as the preferred hangout for a diverse group of longtime regulars — and not just a few celebrities.
Mr. Jemilo fondly recalls the night he and jazz singer Sarah Vaughn "got drunk together," and "the Monday night I was working the door and Microsoft mogul Bill Gates came in with five guys after a Bears game." Told that there was a $3 cover charge, Mr. Gates "pulls out three singles and gives them to me. They were sitting around drinking and having a good time and I think he liked the fact that he had to pay the three dollars."
Behind the bar is a photo of Capone with the inscription, "Dave, thanks for running my joint real good. Al."
The inscription is bogus, of course, but hundreds of Green Mill regulars would enthusiastically endorse the sentiment.
Thanks to James C. Roberts
It's a Saturday night at Chicago's Green Mill Lounge and "da joint" — as owner David Jemilo calls it — is jumpin'. A largely yuppie crowd is packed tightly inside the room. Alcohol (mostly beer and martinis) flows freely, the noise is deafening, and the air is thick with cigar and cigarette smoke. At the far end, heard long before they are visible through the smoky haze, the band plays what always plays at the Green Mill: jazz.
The people seated near the stage are listening intently to the music. Those sitting or standing near the bar are drinking and talking.
No one is eating. At the Green Mill, you will not encounter the menu of "buffalo wings" and other such fare found in most other bars. No popcorn, not even pretzels and nuts. Food would just be a hassle and a distraction from the jazz-booze-smoke-conversation aesthetic that makes the Green Mill the Green Mill.
David Jemilo calls the Green Mill a "jazz joint," and that's mostly what it has been since the doors opened in 1907. It's quite possible, in fact, that the joint antedates jazz, which grew out of a melange of musical styles in turn-of-the century New Orleans. Now celebrating its 100th year, the Green Mill has the distinction of being the oldest continuously running jazz club in America.Opened in 1907 as Pop Morse's Roadhouse, the club in the Uptown area, about four miles north of Chicago's Loop, was purchased in 1910 by the Chamales brothers, who named it the Green Mill Gardens.
The club operating today is only a small part of the original sprawling complex. Adjacent to the club was an elegant restaurant, which was joined to a ballroom. A second-story ballroom called the Rhumba Room offered Latin music. The first-floor ballroom opened onto elegant gardens, and in the early years, tuxedoed men and women in evening gowns danced the night away to the tunes of leading orchestras. (The oldest ad for the Green Mill is for Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra in 1915.)
It was also the heyday of ragtime and vaudeville, and the nightclub's patrons listened to Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker belt out hits of the era. Chicago was then one of the main production centers for the new silent film industry, and the nearby Essanay Studios turned out a stream of Westerns filmed along the Chicago River. During breaks, "Bronco Billy" Anderson and other stars would mosey up to the Green Mill and tie their horses to a hitching post provided by the club while they knocked back a round or two.
In the early 1920s, Prohibition hit and the Green Mill became a wide-open "gin joint," in the words of Steve Brand, who tended bar there from 1928 to 1960. In the early '20s,, the Chamales brothers leased the place to members of the Chicago mob including a 25 percent interest to "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, thought to be one of the leaders of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Mr. Brand says the Mill became the favorite hangout of Al Capone, who was frequently found in the center booth in front of the bar where he could keep an eye on the door. Capone owned a speak-easy in the basement of a building across the street, but he preferred the Green Mill because the police had been paid off, permitting "wide-open" action. "People brought their booze in flasks or hollowed-out canes," says Mr. Brand, and "waitresses brought coffee mugs for them to drink it out of."
When Capone and company really wanted to swing, they opened a trap door behind the bar and descended into rooms in the basement where they could escape, if need be, through a series of tunnels. But mostly, "Big Al" just liked to hang out quietly and listen to the music of his favorite performer, Joe E. Lewis, who was earning the phenomenal fee of $650 a week.
In 1927, however, Lewis got greedy and took a job at the New Rendezvous Club for $1,000 a week. It was a big mistake. A week later, an outraged McGurn dispatched three thugs to visit Lewis. The three smashed Lewis' head, slit his throat, cut out part of his tongue and left him for dead.
Lewis survived, and a compassionate Capone gave him some money to get by on. Although it took him three years to learn to talk, Lewis made a comeback as a comic — at the Green Mill. The story was made into a 1957 movie, "The Joker Is Wild," with Frank Sinatra playing the part of Joe E. Lewis. Today in the Green Mill, the episode is immortalized by an unknown poet in doggerel framed behind the bar.
Big Al was ingesting spaghetti;
Machine Gun McGurn, surprisingly still
Said to Joe E, "You'll look like confetti
If you try to leave the Green Mill."
For two decades after the end of Prohibition , the Green Mill continued to flourish. Over a beer at "the joint," David Jemilo talks about those years as his father had described them to him. "He would go to the Aragon Ballroom when he was 18 years old with his buddy Duke and meet women or whatever and after that they would come over to the Green Mill after dancing at the Aragon, and they had drinks and dancing and lots of fun," Mr. Jemilo says.
The Uptown Theater was built next door to the Green Mill and brought a new spate of celebrities to the bar. Now boarded up, the Uptown in those days was an opulent movie palace that featured live entertainment by the leading stars, such as Charlie Chaplain. After the show, stars and patrons would head over to the Green Mill.
The Green Mill "was a cabaret joint," Mr. Jemilo says, "and a lot of famous people came here to hang out — you know like Charlie Chaplain, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman."
The list of famous patrons includes Billie Holiday, Lillian Russell and Wallace Beery, and many of them — Holiday and Goodman included — joined in impromptu performances. "You had to be dressed up at night in those days to come here," says Mr. Jemilo. "Of course, in those days, everyone was dressed up."In the 1950s, things began to change. The Aragon Ballroom, and later the Uptown Theater, closed, the area deteriorated and many of the Green Mill patrons died or moved away. The owners struggled to keep the doors open, but by the 1980s their clientele was made up mostly of winos, homeless people and petty criminals. That was the situation when Mr. Jemilo and his wife visited the Green Mill for the first time.
"It was pretty rough," he says. "You know, drug dealers, pimps, whores, bums and people sleeping on the floor. You had to step over them when you walked in. It was just a real tough crowd and you had to look over your shoulder all the time. It was one of the roughest bars in the city."
Despite the deteriorated state of the Green Mill, "we immediately fell in love with the place," Mr. Jemilo says. "You could tell that it was beautiful at one time, but everything was falling apart," he says. "I told my wife I'm going to buy this place — just talking — and six months later, I did buy it because the price was right and the owner was 70 and his wife walked with a walker and the place was in a shambles."
Mr. Jemilo made basic repairs, cleaned up the "joint" and evicted the unsavory denizens. Now the historic club with its nightly jazz is an "in" place for Chicago yuppies and a magnet for jazz fans nationwide, as well as the preferred hangout for a diverse group of longtime regulars — and not just a few celebrities.
Mr. Jemilo fondly recalls the night he and jazz singer Sarah Vaughn "got drunk together," and "the Monday night I was working the door and Microsoft mogul Bill Gates came in with five guys after a Bears game." Told that there was a $3 cover charge, Mr. Gates "pulls out three singles and gives them to me. They were sitting around drinking and having a good time and I think he liked the fact that he had to pay the three dollars."
Behind the bar is a photo of Capone with the inscription, "Dave, thanks for running my joint real good. Al."
The inscription is bogus, of course, but hundreds of Green Mill regulars would enthusiastically endorse the sentiment.
Thanks to James C. Roberts
Mobster's Cousin Jailed 22 Years for Whack He Did Not Commit?
Friends of ours: Vincent Carini, Eddie Carini, Salvatore "Fat Sal" Mangiavillano, Frank Smith
Friends of mine: Carmine Carini
Carmine Carini’s cousins were assassins. Prosecutors and Mafia defectors have credited them with numerous killings. One time they were ordered to kill a federal prosecutor but instead they killed his father, an administrative judge who handled parking tickets. They were killed for their blunder.
Their names were Vincent and Eddie Carini, and they were bad guys to hang around with if you wanted to stay out of trouble. Carmine did hang around with them, and did not stay out of trouble. At age 25, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the murder of a record store owner, a crime some say he did not commit.
That was the year his son was born, 1985. Since then he has never implicated his cousins in the killing, even as he filed eight applications to contest his conviction on procedural grounds. None of these found success — not the effort to fault a defense lawyer for failing to object when a juror was dismissed, not the effort to challenge the verdict sheet, nothing. But as of yesterday morning Mr. Carini is no longer a convicted murderer, on account of a celebrity lawyer and radio show host, two prolific Mafia cooperating witnesses and a story of tortured conscience that leads right back to Vincent and Eddie Carini.
Before a dozen of Carmine Carini’s relatives and supporters in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, Justice Guy J. Mangano Jr. vacated the conviction and ordered a new trial on charges of second-degree murder. Mr. Carini exhaled deeply, and there was a round of applause.
“In between crossing himself,” said his lawyer, Ronald L. Kuby, a host of a radio show, “he said he’s ready to come home.”
But first Mr. Carini will have to decide how ready. An assistant district attorney, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, offered him the chance to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, a charge that carries a sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years and would allow him to leave prison almost immediately. “The people still certainly believe in his guilt,” Ms. Nicolazzi said, adding that a plea bargain would require him to acknowledge a role in the killing.
Mr. Carini has maintained he played no role. After the hearing, he returned to the holding pens to consider his lot, a proposition requiring him to cast his memory back to the early 1980s.
Back then, court documents show, Salvatore Mangiavillano, known as Fat Sal, was a car thief and a high school classmate of Eddie Carini. And Frank Smith was a teenage car thief with a specialty: four-door models by General Motors.
After breaking a car’s interior lights to obscure the occupants from view, Mr. Smith has testified, he could get $200 from Vincent and Eddie Carini, whom he described as “tough guys and killers.” Mr. Smith, by his own account, graduated to participate in murders with Vincent and Eddie Carini.
On Nov. 18, 1983, a record store owner named Verdi Kaja, who had business dealings with the Carinis, was summoned to a car, driven several blocks, shot three times in the head and dumped in the street.
With the testimony of witnesses who said they had watched Carmine Carini get into the car, he was convicted as the driver and the gunman. Prosecutors said he later visited the victim’s family to warn them against talking to the police.
During Mr. Carini’s time in prison, the Mafia’s fortunes experienced a well-documented waning. Federal prosecutors adopted Mr. Smith and Mr. Mangiavillano as reliable cooperating witnesses in a number of cases. And in June 2004, United States attorneys wrote to the Homicide Bureau of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, disclosing that both men had heard Vincent Carini, who had long since been killed, confess to the murder of the record shop owner.
The homicide bureau chief, Kenneth M. Taub, passed this information along to Carmine Carini, who began to seek a new trial. At a hearing in February, Justice Mangano entertained the new accounts from the cooperating witnesses.
This put state prosecutors in a fix: To discredit the witnesses could amount to undermining successful federal Mafia prosecutions.
At the hearing, both men recounted hearing Vincent Carini’s confession.
Mr. Mangiavillano described it this way: “I seen him standing outside his mom’s house. His mom’s house, I believe to be on 88th Street and 17th Avenue, across the street from the schoolyard. Anyway, I seen him standing there. I pulled over and I seen that he was sobbing, he was crying. I asked him what was the matter and he told me, ‘My cousin Carmine just got convicted for a murder that I did.’ ”
Prosecutors argued that Carmine Carini has had access to this information for years; defense lawyers countered that factors including the intricacies of Mafia codes of conduct would have prevented him from obtaining any sworn testimony.
At a hearing in April, prosecutors said the new evidence fit a more convincing theory of the crime: Carmine Carini drove the car, while Vincent Carini sat in the back seat and fired the gun. Under the legal doctrine of acting in concert, a jury could accept that version of events and still convict Carmine Carini of murder. But before that theory can be explored in a new trial, Mr. Carini has a decision to make. Justice Mangano set his bail at $500,000. As he was handcuffed and led away, Mr. Carini blew a quick kiss to his family.
Outside the courtroom, his relations gathered around the lawyer, Mr. Kuby, to ask how they could mortgage their houses for bail. “I was hoping that he was going to walk out right now,” said Mr. Carini’s 22-year-old son, the one born the year he went to prison, the one he named Vincent, just like his cousin.
Thanks to Michael Brick
Friends of mine: Carmine Carini
Carmine Carini’s cousins were assassins. Prosecutors and Mafia defectors have credited them with numerous killings. One time they were ordered to kill a federal prosecutor but instead they killed his father, an administrative judge who handled parking tickets. They were killed for their blunder.
Their names were Vincent and Eddie Carini, and they were bad guys to hang around with if you wanted to stay out of trouble. Carmine did hang around with them, and did not stay out of trouble. At age 25, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the murder of a record store owner, a crime some say he did not commit.
That was the year his son was born, 1985. Since then he has never implicated his cousins in the killing, even as he filed eight applications to contest his conviction on procedural grounds. None of these found success — not the effort to fault a defense lawyer for failing to object when a juror was dismissed, not the effort to challenge the verdict sheet, nothing. But as of yesterday morning Mr. Carini is no longer a convicted murderer, on account of a celebrity lawyer and radio show host, two prolific Mafia cooperating witnesses and a story of tortured conscience that leads right back to Vincent and Eddie Carini.
Before a dozen of Carmine Carini’s relatives and supporters in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, Justice Guy J. Mangano Jr. vacated the conviction and ordered a new trial on charges of second-degree murder. Mr. Carini exhaled deeply, and there was a round of applause.
“In between crossing himself,” said his lawyer, Ronald L. Kuby, a host of a radio show, “he said he’s ready to come home.”
But first Mr. Carini will have to decide how ready. An assistant district attorney, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, offered him the chance to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, a charge that carries a sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years and would allow him to leave prison almost immediately. “The people still certainly believe in his guilt,” Ms. Nicolazzi said, adding that a plea bargain would require him to acknowledge a role in the killing.
Mr. Carini has maintained he played no role. After the hearing, he returned to the holding pens to consider his lot, a proposition requiring him to cast his memory back to the early 1980s.
Back then, court documents show, Salvatore Mangiavillano, known as Fat Sal, was a car thief and a high school classmate of Eddie Carini. And Frank Smith was a teenage car thief with a specialty: four-door models by General Motors.
After breaking a car’s interior lights to obscure the occupants from view, Mr. Smith has testified, he could get $200 from Vincent and Eddie Carini, whom he described as “tough guys and killers.” Mr. Smith, by his own account, graduated to participate in murders with Vincent and Eddie Carini.
On Nov. 18, 1983, a record store owner named Verdi Kaja, who had business dealings with the Carinis, was summoned to a car, driven several blocks, shot three times in the head and dumped in the street.
With the testimony of witnesses who said they had watched Carmine Carini get into the car, he was convicted as the driver and the gunman. Prosecutors said he later visited the victim’s family to warn them against talking to the police.
During Mr. Carini’s time in prison, the Mafia’s fortunes experienced a well-documented waning. Federal prosecutors adopted Mr. Smith and Mr. Mangiavillano as reliable cooperating witnesses in a number of cases. And in June 2004, United States attorneys wrote to the Homicide Bureau of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, disclosing that both men had heard Vincent Carini, who had long since been killed, confess to the murder of the record shop owner.
The homicide bureau chief, Kenneth M. Taub, passed this information along to Carmine Carini, who began to seek a new trial. At a hearing in February, Justice Mangano entertained the new accounts from the cooperating witnesses.
This put state prosecutors in a fix: To discredit the witnesses could amount to undermining successful federal Mafia prosecutions.
At the hearing, both men recounted hearing Vincent Carini’s confession.
Mr. Mangiavillano described it this way: “I seen him standing outside his mom’s house. His mom’s house, I believe to be on 88th Street and 17th Avenue, across the street from the schoolyard. Anyway, I seen him standing there. I pulled over and I seen that he was sobbing, he was crying. I asked him what was the matter and he told me, ‘My cousin Carmine just got convicted for a murder that I did.’ ”
Prosecutors argued that Carmine Carini has had access to this information for years; defense lawyers countered that factors including the intricacies of Mafia codes of conduct would have prevented him from obtaining any sworn testimony.
At a hearing in April, prosecutors said the new evidence fit a more convincing theory of the crime: Carmine Carini drove the car, while Vincent Carini sat in the back seat and fired the gun. Under the legal doctrine of acting in concert, a jury could accept that version of events and still convict Carmine Carini of murder. But before that theory can be explored in a new trial, Mr. Carini has a decision to make. Justice Mangano set his bail at $500,000. As he was handcuffed and led away, Mr. Carini blew a quick kiss to his family.
Outside the courtroom, his relations gathered around the lawyer, Mr. Kuby, to ask how they could mortgage their houses for bail. “I was hoping that he was going to walk out right now,” said Mr. Carini’s 22-year-old son, the one born the year he went to prison, the one he named Vincent, just like his cousin.
Thanks to Michael Brick
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Mob Hit Attempted on San Francisco Freeway?
A man underwent surgery for critical injuries on Thursday after a gunman riddled his car with bullets on a San Francisco freeway offramp - an attack a witness called a "mafia-style execution."
San Francisco police Sgt. Neville Gittens said the unnamed victim was taken by ambulance to San Francisco General Hospital after the 1:05 p.m. shooting at the end of the Interstate 80 offramp and Fifth and Harrison streets. The man suffered numerous gunshot wounds, including a shot to the chest, Gittens said.
Investigators do not believe it was a case of random violence. "This appears to be a targeted shooting, based on the number of rounds fired," Gittens said.
Witnesses watched in shock as the gunman got out of his vehicle and fired multiple shots into the victim's blue Dodge Charger.
One woman, who did not want to be named, said she was driving behind the Charger and a green vehicle and approaching the end of the ramp when traffic stopped at a light. A man got out of the green vehicle and walked over to the Charger with a gun in his hand. "He just opened fire until the light changed, then the green car sped up Fifth Street" toward downtown San Francisco, she said.
The victim's car remained in the middle of the intersection for hours Thursday afternoon, its rear window shattered and blood on the ground and in the vehicle, which was riddled with more than a dozen bullet holes. The Fifth and Harrison streets offramp was also closed as investigators examined the crime scene.
Thanks to Bay City News
San Francisco police Sgt. Neville Gittens said the unnamed victim was taken by ambulance to San Francisco General Hospital after the 1:05 p.m. shooting at the end of the Interstate 80 offramp and Fifth and Harrison streets. The man suffered numerous gunshot wounds, including a shot to the chest, Gittens said.
Investigators do not believe it was a case of random violence. "This appears to be a targeted shooting, based on the number of rounds fired," Gittens said.
Witnesses watched in shock as the gunman got out of his vehicle and fired multiple shots into the victim's blue Dodge Charger.
One woman, who did not want to be named, said she was driving behind the Charger and a green vehicle and approaching the end of the ramp when traffic stopped at a light. A man got out of the green vehicle and walked over to the Charger with a gun in his hand. "He just opened fire until the light changed, then the green car sped up Fifth Street" toward downtown San Francisco, she said.
The victim's car remained in the middle of the intersection for hours Thursday afternoon, its rear window shattered and blood on the ground and in the vehicle, which was riddled with more than a dozen bullet holes. The Fifth and Harrison streets offramp was also closed as investigators examined the crime scene.
Thanks to Bay City News
Friday, May 11, 2007
Happy Mother's Day from the Mob
Friends of ours: Jimmy "The Gent" Burke, Al Capone, Benjamin "Lefty Guns" Ruggiero, Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, Vincent "The Animal" Ferrara, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, Angelo "Buddha" Lutz, John "Junior" Gotti, John "Dapper Don" Gotti, Robert Spinelli, Paulie Vario, Henry Hill
Each and every Mother's Day until he landed behind bars, mobster Jimmy "The Gent" Burke performed a sacrosanct ritual.
Burke, the mastermind behind the $5.8 million Lufthansa heist immortalized in Goodfellas, dropped a few C-notes on dozens of red roses from a Rockaway Boulevard florist. He then toured the homes of his jailed Luchese crime family pals, providing their mothers with a bouquet and a kiss.
He never missed a year, or a mom.
Burke's gesture was no surprise to his fellow hoodlums: Mother's Day was the most important Sunday on the organized crime calendar, when homicide took a holiday and racketeering gave way to reminiscing - often over a plate of mom's pasta and sauce.
"These guys, they do have a love for their mothers," said Joe Pistone, the FBI undercover agent who spent six Mother's Days inside the Bonanno family as jewel thief Donnie Brasco. "They thought nothing of killing. But the respect for their mothers? It was amazing."
So amazing, Pistone recalled, that Bonanno member Benjamin "Lefty Guns" Ruggiero once told him that the Mafia - like a suburban Jersey mall shuttered by blue laws - closed for business when Mother's Day arrived each May.
No vendettas or broken bones. Just gift baskets and boxes of candy.
"Absolutely," said mob informant Henry Hill, who described his old friend Burke's annual rite. "It's Mother's Day, you know?"
The bond between gangsters and their mothers is more sacred than the oath of omerta and more complex than anything imagined by Oedipus. Pistone watched stone murderers suddenly grow misty when discussing their moms - or her meals.
"They're not embarrassed to say how much they love their mother," said Pistone, author of the new mob memoir Unfinished Business. "I can remember guys talking about cooking: 'My mom made the best braciole.' Or 'My mother taught me how to make this sauce.' "
No surprise there: The way to a made man's heart was often through his stomach, as many mob moms knew long before their sons moved from finger paints to fingerprints.
Mob heavyweight Al Capone - a man who never needed a restaurant reservation during his Roaring 20s reign atop the Chicago underworld - preferred his mother's spaghetti with meat sauce, heavy on the cheese. (Capone's sentimentality didn't extend to other holidays. On Feb. 14, 1929, he orchestrated the submachine-gun slayings of seven rival bootleggers in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.)
Capone wasn't alone in his mismatched emotions: warm, maternal love and cold, homicidal rage. Genovese family boss Vincent "The Chin" Gigante shared a Greenwich Village apartment with his ninetysomething mother, Yolanda, even as he ruthlessly directed the nation's most powerful organized crime operation during the 80s and 90s.
New England capo Vincent "The Animal" Ferrara did a 16-year prison stretch for racketeering, getting out of prison just two years ago. His first trip as a free man: a visit to see his 90-year-old mom. But gangland mother-son ties transcend more than just geography and generations; they cross ethnic lines, too.
Abe Reles, a Jewish hit man of the 30s, was known to contemporaries as "Kid Twist" for his preferred method of execution - he would wrap his thick fingers around a victim's neck for one final snap.
Despite 42 arrests (and 11 admitted murders), the "Kid" remained his mother's loving son. And he showed up at her apartment each Friday night for a traditional Sabbath meal of gefilte fish, chicken soup and boiled chicken.
One Friday, Reles showed up with a guest. The three shared a meal before the Kid's mother left for a movie. By the time the film was finished, her son - assisted by a mob associate - had bludgeoned and strangled their guest before disposing of the body.
Mrs. Reles returned to share a cup of tea and a piece of honey cake with her boy, according to Robert A. Rockaway's mob tome But He Was Good To His Mother - a history of loving Jewish sons turned heartless killers.
Those mobbed-up kids often had their affection reciprocated from mothers blinded by love to mounting evidence of their offspring's larcenous lifestyles.
Philadelphia gangster Angelo "Buddha" Lutz was arrested in 2001 on racketeering charges - and released on $150,000 bail when his mom put up her house as collateral. (She was later free to visit him in prison, where he was sentenced to serve nine years.)
Mob matriarch Victoria Gotti went even further for her son, John A. "Junior" Gotti, offering her $715,000 home up for his bail. When Junior went on trial three times in the last two years for racketeering, Victoria appeared in court each time - even as defense lawyers admitted that he once headed the Gambino crime family.
"If you're the president or a gangster, that has nothing to do with a mother's love," Pistone said. "I think that's one of the main reasons for their bond."
When authorities last year dropped the charges against Junior, the mob scion - his father was the late "Dapper Don" John Gotti - repaid his mom's devotion. Gotti spent Thanksgiving Day at Victoria's hospital bedside after she suffered a stroke.
For some, like Robert Spinelli, love of Mom complicated their chosen profession. Spinelli served as the getaway driver after his brother and a second man tried to kill the sister of mob informant "Big Pete" Chiodo, but he was stricken with guilt over the shooting.
At his 1999 sentencing, Spinelli stood with tears streaming down his face when recounting the botched hit against Patricia Capozzalo, who had just dropped her two children off at school. "She reminded me of my mother," the weepy gangster confessed before getting a 10-year jail term.
For Hill, his beloved mother provided a passport - Italian - into the Mafia back in the 1950s.
Young Henry was a mob wannabe, hanging around the taxi stand that served as the business office for Luchese capo Paulie Vario. When the mobsters discovered the kid with the Irish surname was half-Sicilian, on mother Carmela's side, he was greeted like a paisano. "Everything changed when they found out about my mother," Hill told author Nick Pileggi for the book Wiseguy, which chronicled his evolution from wiseguy to mob turncoat.
Hill, speaking from his current home somewhere on the West Coast, recalled that Jimmy Burke attached particular importance to Mother's Day because he was abandoned by his own parents at age 2. Hill also recalled how his hot-tempered pal wasn't so dewy-eyed one day later.
"He'd kiss all the mothers on Sunday," said Hill. "And then the next day, he'd kill their husbands."
Each and every Mother's Day until he landed behind bars, mobster Jimmy "The Gent" Burke performed a sacrosanct ritual.
Burke, the mastermind behind the $5.8 million Lufthansa heist immortalized in Goodfellas, dropped a few C-notes on dozens of red roses from a Rockaway Boulevard florist. He then toured the homes of his jailed Luchese crime family pals, providing their mothers with a bouquet and a kiss.
He never missed a year, or a mom.
Burke's gesture was no surprise to his fellow hoodlums: Mother's Day was the most important Sunday on the organized crime calendar, when homicide took a holiday and racketeering gave way to reminiscing - often over a plate of mom's pasta and sauce.
"These guys, they do have a love for their mothers," said Joe Pistone, the FBI undercover agent who spent six Mother's Days inside the Bonanno family as jewel thief Donnie Brasco. "They thought nothing of killing. But the respect for their mothers? It was amazing."
So amazing, Pistone recalled, that Bonanno member Benjamin "Lefty Guns" Ruggiero once told him that the Mafia - like a suburban Jersey mall shuttered by blue laws - closed for business when Mother's Day arrived each May.
No vendettas or broken bones. Just gift baskets and boxes of candy.
"Absolutely," said mob informant Henry Hill, who described his old friend Burke's annual rite. "It's Mother's Day, you know?"
The bond between gangsters and their mothers is more sacred than the oath of omerta and more complex than anything imagined by Oedipus. Pistone watched stone murderers suddenly grow misty when discussing their moms - or her meals.
"They're not embarrassed to say how much they love their mother," said Pistone, author of the new mob memoir Unfinished Business. "I can remember guys talking about cooking: 'My mom made the best braciole.' Or 'My mother taught me how to make this sauce.' "
No surprise there: The way to a made man's heart was often through his stomach, as many mob moms knew long before their sons moved from finger paints to fingerprints.
Mob heavyweight Al Capone - a man who never needed a restaurant reservation during his Roaring 20s reign atop the Chicago underworld - preferred his mother's spaghetti with meat sauce, heavy on the cheese. (Capone's sentimentality didn't extend to other holidays. On Feb. 14, 1929, he orchestrated the submachine-gun slayings of seven rival bootleggers in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.)
Capone wasn't alone in his mismatched emotions: warm, maternal love and cold, homicidal rage. Genovese family boss Vincent "The Chin" Gigante shared a Greenwich Village apartment with his ninetysomething mother, Yolanda, even as he ruthlessly directed the nation's most powerful organized crime operation during the 80s and 90s.
New England capo Vincent "The Animal" Ferrara did a 16-year prison stretch for racketeering, getting out of prison just two years ago. His first trip as a free man: a visit to see his 90-year-old mom. But gangland mother-son ties transcend more than just geography and generations; they cross ethnic lines, too.
Abe Reles, a Jewish hit man of the 30s, was known to contemporaries as "Kid Twist" for his preferred method of execution - he would wrap his thick fingers around a victim's neck for one final snap.
Despite 42 arrests (and 11 admitted murders), the "Kid" remained his mother's loving son. And he showed up at her apartment each Friday night for a traditional Sabbath meal of gefilte fish, chicken soup and boiled chicken.
One Friday, Reles showed up with a guest. The three shared a meal before the Kid's mother left for a movie. By the time the film was finished, her son - assisted by a mob associate - had bludgeoned and strangled their guest before disposing of the body.
Mrs. Reles returned to share a cup of tea and a piece of honey cake with her boy, according to Robert A. Rockaway's mob tome But He Was Good To His Mother - a history of loving Jewish sons turned heartless killers.
Those mobbed-up kids often had their affection reciprocated from mothers blinded by love to mounting evidence of their offspring's larcenous lifestyles.
Philadelphia gangster Angelo "Buddha" Lutz was arrested in 2001 on racketeering charges - and released on $150,000 bail when his mom put up her house as collateral. (She was later free to visit him in prison, where he was sentenced to serve nine years.)
Mob matriarch Victoria Gotti went even further for her son, John A. "Junior" Gotti, offering her $715,000 home up for his bail. When Junior went on trial three times in the last two years for racketeering, Victoria appeared in court each time - even as defense lawyers admitted that he once headed the Gambino crime family.
"If you're the president or a gangster, that has nothing to do with a mother's love," Pistone said. "I think that's one of the main reasons for their bond."
When authorities last year dropped the charges against Junior, the mob scion - his father was the late "Dapper Don" John Gotti - repaid his mom's devotion. Gotti spent Thanksgiving Day at Victoria's hospital bedside after she suffered a stroke.
For some, like Robert Spinelli, love of Mom complicated their chosen profession. Spinelli served as the getaway driver after his brother and a second man tried to kill the sister of mob informant "Big Pete" Chiodo, but he was stricken with guilt over the shooting.
At his 1999 sentencing, Spinelli stood with tears streaming down his face when recounting the botched hit against Patricia Capozzalo, who had just dropped her two children off at school. "She reminded me of my mother," the weepy gangster confessed before getting a 10-year jail term.
For Hill, his beloved mother provided a passport - Italian - into the Mafia back in the 1950s.
Young Henry was a mob wannabe, hanging around the taxi stand that served as the business office for Luchese capo Paulie Vario. When the mobsters discovered the kid with the Irish surname was half-Sicilian, on mother Carmela's side, he was greeted like a paisano. "Everything changed when they found out about my mother," Hill told author Nick Pileggi for the book Wiseguy, which chronicled his evolution from wiseguy to mob turncoat.
Hill, speaking from his current home somewhere on the West Coast, recalled that Jimmy Burke attached particular importance to Mother's Day because he was abandoned by his own parents at age 2. Hill also recalled how his hot-tempered pal wasn't so dewy-eyed one day later.
"He'd kiss all the mothers on Sunday," said Hill. "And then the next day, he'd kill their husbands."
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Was Mob Hit Really a Love Triangle?
Puzzled family members made plans Wednesday to return the body of a man killed in a Las Vegas Strip bombing to Mexico as investigators looked into his background for a motive. "They don't understand the killing or the way of the killing," said Johannes Jacome Cid, consul in charge at the Mexican Consulate in Las Vegas, who is advising the relatives of Willebaldo Dorantes Antonio.
Dorantes Antonio, 24, was killed early Monday when a homemade bomb left on this roof of his car at the Luxor hotel-casino's parking garage exploded as he picked it up.
Jacome Cid was helping the family handle donations to a bank account to transport Dorantes Antonio's body back to the town of San Jose Miahuatlan, in the Mexican state of Puebla.
Max Dorantes, a cousin helping make funeral plans, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he and other relatives had no idea who left the small bomb that killed Dorantes Antonio as he left work at a Nathan's Famous hot dog stand with a girlfriend. The woman escaped injury. "He was not part of any gang," Max Dorantes said. "He was a working guy, a very good guy. He worked two jobs. He was one of my good friends."
Max Dorantes, 22, of Newport, Ore., confirmed that his cousin was in the U.S. illegally and had two girlfriends - one a co-worker at Nathan's and the other who left their 6-month-old son with relatives at home in Mexico when she traveled to Las Vegas about two weeks ago. He was not sure if the two women knew about each other.
Investigators, who have said they believe Dorantes Antonio was the intended target of the blast, said the explosion was not a terrorist act or a mob hit.
Tom Mangan, a senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said investigators were fitting together the puzzle of Dorantes Antonio's dual dating relationships, his immigration status, his travels between Mexico and the U.S. and his work. "The questions are: Who would want to do this? Why this guy? And why this method?" Mangan said. "That information is going to come out once we delve into the details about this guy."
Authorities say the motion-activated device exploded with the force of a stick of dynamite, mortally wounding him in the head and blowing a 12-inch hole in the 1996 Dodge Stratus that Max Dorantes sold him in November. Dorantes Antonio died about two hours later at a hospital.
Police have been reviewing surveillance videotapes of the parking garage to try to identify who left the device and when.
Police have not identified the woman who was walking with Dorantes Antonio when he reached his car, but said she was cooperating with investigators. Max Dorantes said she was from Guatemala and had been dating Dorantes Antonio for about six months.
Willebaldo Dorantes Antonio had been in the United States illegally for about three years, his cousin said. He worked nights at Nathan's Famous hot dogs inside the pyramid-shaped Luxor hotel-casino, and days at Quiznos sandwich shop inside the neighboring Excalibur.
Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested three suspected illegal immigrants at Dorantes Antonio's house after the explosion, said Virginia Kice, regional spokeswoman for the federal agency in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Two men were from Mexico and one was from Guatemala, Kice said.
Frank Bonnano, chief executive of the Nathan's franchise owner, Fifth Avenue Restaurant Group in Las Vegas, said he believed Dorantes Antonio provided residency documentation when he was hired.
Quiznos manager Chris Spanna said Dorantes Antonio submitted a Social Security card and a required Las Vegas police health card when he was hired three weeks ago. Spanna said he did not know until Wednesday that Dorantes Antonio was not in the United States legally.
Funeral arrangements were being handled by Nevada Funeral Service in Las Vegas, which said plans and services were private.
Thanks to Ken Ritter
Dorantes Antonio, 24, was killed early Monday when a homemade bomb left on this roof of his car at the Luxor hotel-casino's parking garage exploded as he picked it up.
Jacome Cid was helping the family handle donations to a bank account to transport Dorantes Antonio's body back to the town of San Jose Miahuatlan, in the Mexican state of Puebla.
Max Dorantes, a cousin helping make funeral plans, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he and other relatives had no idea who left the small bomb that killed Dorantes Antonio as he left work at a Nathan's Famous hot dog stand with a girlfriend. The woman escaped injury. "He was not part of any gang," Max Dorantes said. "He was a working guy, a very good guy. He worked two jobs. He was one of my good friends."
Max Dorantes, 22, of Newport, Ore., confirmed that his cousin was in the U.S. illegally and had two girlfriends - one a co-worker at Nathan's and the other who left their 6-month-old son with relatives at home in Mexico when she traveled to Las Vegas about two weeks ago. He was not sure if the two women knew about each other.
Investigators, who have said they believe Dorantes Antonio was the intended target of the blast, said the explosion was not a terrorist act or a mob hit.
Tom Mangan, a senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said investigators were fitting together the puzzle of Dorantes Antonio's dual dating relationships, his immigration status, his travels between Mexico and the U.S. and his work. "The questions are: Who would want to do this? Why this guy? And why this method?" Mangan said. "That information is going to come out once we delve into the details about this guy."
Authorities say the motion-activated device exploded with the force of a stick of dynamite, mortally wounding him in the head and blowing a 12-inch hole in the 1996 Dodge Stratus that Max Dorantes sold him in November. Dorantes Antonio died about two hours later at a hospital.
Police have been reviewing surveillance videotapes of the parking garage to try to identify who left the device and when.
Police have not identified the woman who was walking with Dorantes Antonio when he reached his car, but said she was cooperating with investigators. Max Dorantes said she was from Guatemala and had been dating Dorantes Antonio for about six months.
Willebaldo Dorantes Antonio had been in the United States illegally for about three years, his cousin said. He worked nights at Nathan's Famous hot dogs inside the pyramid-shaped Luxor hotel-casino, and days at Quiznos sandwich shop inside the neighboring Excalibur.
Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested three suspected illegal immigrants at Dorantes Antonio's house after the explosion, said Virginia Kice, regional spokeswoman for the federal agency in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Two men were from Mexico and one was from Guatemala, Kice said.
Frank Bonnano, chief executive of the Nathan's franchise owner, Fifth Avenue Restaurant Group in Las Vegas, said he believed Dorantes Antonio provided residency documentation when he was hired.
Quiznos manager Chris Spanna said Dorantes Antonio submitted a Social Security card and a required Las Vegas police health card when he was hired three weeks ago. Spanna said he did not know until Wednesday that Dorantes Antonio was not in the United States legally.
Funeral arrangements were being handled by Nevada Funeral Service in Las Vegas, which said plans and services were private.
Thanks to Ken Ritter
90-Year-Old Sonny Franzese, Reputed Head of Colombo Crime Family, Jailed
A 90-year-old Colombo crime family leader who rubbed elbows with Frank Sinatra and other celebrities during his heyday was arrested for associating with known mobsters, his fifth parole violation in 25 years, the FBI said.
John "Sonny" Franzese was arrested Wednesday when he appeared for a regularly scheduled visit with a probation officer, said Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman.
It was the fifth parole violation for Franzese. Among the others: He was jailed for three years after a November 2000 meeting at a coffee shop with three Colombo family associates. Another time, he spent two years behind bars after federal agents watched him enjoying a bowl of spinach soup with mob associates at a restaurant.
Margolin had no details this time on where Franzese had violated his parole or what he might have been eating or drinking at the time.
Franzese was being held in jail and was to appear in court next week. He didn't have a lawyer, Margolin said.
Despite his age, Franzese reportedly ascended to Colombo underboss two years ago after family boss "Big Joey" Massino was convicted of racketeering and became a federal witness. Massino, who spent 14 years running the family, became the first sitting boss of one of New York's five Mafia families to flip. But Franzese was involved in organized crime long before Massino's ascension. He was a fixture at the Copacabana nightclub, where he often spent time with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., according to Jerry Capeci, author of several books on organized crime and operator of the Web site ganglandnews.com.
Franzese also had a financial stake in the legendary porn movie "Deep Throat."
Franzese's parole restrictions continue through 2020, when he would be older than 100. It was unclear how much prison time he might face on the parole violation.
Since going to jail in 1970 for a bank robbery, Franzese had spent more than two decades -- on and off -- behind bars. He was initially paroled on that charge in 1978, and the first of the parole violations was in 1982.
Franzese wasn't the only aging mobster in court Wednesday. Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello, 86, was sentenced in New Haven, Connecticut, to two years in prison for racketeering conspiracy and tax evasion. The case was part of a federal probe of the trash hauling industry in Connecticut and New York.
Thanks to CNN.
John "Sonny" Franzese was arrested Wednesday when he appeared for a regularly scheduled visit with a probation officer, said Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman.
It was the fifth parole violation for Franzese. Among the others: He was jailed for three years after a November 2000 meeting at a coffee shop with three Colombo family associates. Another time, he spent two years behind bars after federal agents watched him enjoying a bowl of spinach soup with mob associates at a restaurant.
Margolin had no details this time on where Franzese had violated his parole or what he might have been eating or drinking at the time.
Franzese was being held in jail and was to appear in court next week. He didn't have a lawyer, Margolin said.
Despite his age, Franzese reportedly ascended to Colombo underboss two years ago after family boss "Big Joey" Massino was convicted of racketeering and became a federal witness. Massino, who spent 14 years running the family, became the first sitting boss of one of New York's five Mafia families to flip. But Franzese was involved in organized crime long before Massino's ascension. He was a fixture at the Copacabana nightclub, where he often spent time with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., according to Jerry Capeci, author of several books on organized crime and operator of the Web site ganglandnews.com.
Franzese also had a financial stake in the legendary porn movie "Deep Throat."
Franzese's parole restrictions continue through 2020, when he would be older than 100. It was unclear how much prison time he might face on the parole violation.
Since going to jail in 1970 for a bank robbery, Franzese had spent more than two decades -- on and off -- behind bars. He was initially paroled on that charge in 1978, and the first of the parole violations was in 1982.
Franzese wasn't the only aging mobster in court Wednesday. Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello, 86, was sentenced in New Haven, Connecticut, to two years in prison for racketeering conspiracy and tax evasion. The case was part of a federal probe of the trash hauling industry in Connecticut and New York.
Thanks to CNN.
Vegas Killing Reminiscent of Mob Days
Friends of ours: Tony Spilotro
For some reason I had posted about the Explosive Device Used in Deadly Hit of Man at Las Vegas Casino and reported how the ATF Joins Vegas Police Investigating Homicide Bombing Outside the Luxor. However, I was asleep at the wheel and did not share this with my Mob Readers. Thanks to friends of mine at Brandolino's for bringing the oversight to my attention.
An apparent car bomb death at the Luxor Hotel Casino in Las Vegas sounds like a blast from the past for some residents in this Nevada gambling town, steeped in a history of mob "hits" and crime, greed and gambling.
The device was left on a car in the Luxor casino parking garage. It exploded early Monday killing a Luxor employee who police have not yet identified. Another person who was in the parking lot at the time received injuries in the blast.
The Las Vegas that draws millions of visitors each year was actually developed by active members of the Mafia, and for years the Mob ruled this desert city with an iron fist, with point men like the late murderer Tony Spilotro taking pride in devising new ways to inflict death and destruction upon those who challenged him.
In recent years this activity has waned, but today's car bomb explosion reminds all that Sin City is not out of the woods in terms of organized crime style "hits."
Police in Las Vegas are working with the FBI on the case. They say the 4:00 AM explosion was not a terrorist act, they say it is being investigated as a single murder.
Investigators say the man was moving the device from the top of the car when it exploded shortly after 4:00 AM. The car was parked on the second floor of a parking lot behind the Luxor hotel-casino. Apparently it was first reported that the device was in a backpack, police now say that it was not in a backpack.
Aerial video from Las Vegas TV stations shows no apparent damage to the Luxor's parking structure. The AP reports that the entrances were blocked while police, firefighters and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents investigated.
Las Vegas Metro Police say they are investigating the case as an homicide with an unusual weapon.
The Luxor is a pyramid-shaped hotel at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip which was completed in the late 1990's. The casino's design is a big draw for Vegas and the upper balcony has seen several full view suicides as people hurl themselves over the edge, straight to the casino floor. The Luxor has 6,000 employees and more than 4,000 rooms.
Thanks to Tim King
For some reason I had posted about the Explosive Device Used in Deadly Hit of Man at Las Vegas Casino and reported how the ATF Joins Vegas Police Investigating Homicide Bombing Outside the Luxor. However, I was asleep at the wheel and did not share this with my Mob Readers. Thanks to friends of mine at Brandolino's for bringing the oversight to my attention.
An apparent car bomb death at the Luxor Hotel Casino in Las Vegas sounds like a blast from the past for some residents in this Nevada gambling town, steeped in a history of mob "hits" and crime, greed and gambling.The device was left on a car in the Luxor casino parking garage. It exploded early Monday killing a Luxor employee who police have not yet identified. Another person who was in the parking lot at the time received injuries in the blast.
The Las Vegas that draws millions of visitors each year was actually developed by active members of the Mafia, and for years the Mob ruled this desert city with an iron fist, with point men like the late murderer Tony Spilotro taking pride in devising new ways to inflict death and destruction upon those who challenged him.
In recent years this activity has waned, but today's car bomb explosion reminds all that Sin City is not out of the woods in terms of organized crime style "hits."
Police in Las Vegas are working with the FBI on the case. They say the 4:00 AM explosion was not a terrorist act, they say it is being investigated as a single murder.
Investigators say the man was moving the device from the top of the car when it exploded shortly after 4:00 AM. The car was parked on the second floor of a parking lot behind the Luxor hotel-casino. Apparently it was first reported that the device was in a backpack, police now say that it was not in a backpack.
Aerial video from Las Vegas TV stations shows no apparent damage to the Luxor's parking structure. The AP reports that the entrances were blocked while police, firefighters and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents investigated.
Las Vegas Metro Police say they are investigating the case as an homicide with an unusual weapon.
The Luxor is a pyramid-shaped hotel at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip which was completed in the late 1990's. The casino's design is a big draw for Vegas and the upper balcony has seen several full view suicides as people hurl themselves over the edge, straight to the casino floor. The Luxor has 6,000 employees and more than 4,000 rooms.
Thanks to Tim King
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Donnie Brasco Extended Cut
Friends of ours: Bonanno Crime Family, Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero
Friends of mine: Donnie Brasco
In the 1970s, FBI undecover agent Joe Pistone infiltrates the mob, leaving his family behind and assuming the false persona of the "jewel man" Donnie Brasco. His assignment: to become a trusted insider with the infamous Bonanno family by gaining the confidence of a low-level gangster.
Lefty Ruggiero is an aging, two-bit hit-man who sees a new future for himself with the smart, young thief Donnie Brasco and enlists him as his protege. Together the two men enter into a camaraderie that will not allow either one to distance himself emotionally. Meanwhile, Donnie begins to get lost in the distance between his real and undercover selves.
As Donnie moves deeper and deeper into the Mafia chain of command, he realizes he is not only losing the line between federal agent and criminal, between who he pretends to be and who he actually is, he is also leading Lefty, his closest friend, to an almost certain death sentence.
Friends of mine: Donnie Brasco
In the 1970s, FBI undecover agent Joe Pistone infiltrates the mob, leaving his family behind and assuming the false persona of the "jewel man" Donnie Brasco. His assignment: to become a trusted insider with the infamous Bonanno family by gaining the confidence of a low-level gangster.
Lefty Ruggiero is an aging, two-bit hit-man who sees a new future for himself with the smart, young thief Donnie Brasco and enlists him as his protege. Together the two men enter into a camaraderie that will not allow either one to distance himself emotionally. Meanwhile, Donnie begins to get lost in the distance between his real and undercover selves.
As Donnie moves deeper and deeper into the Mafia chain of command, he realizes he is not only losing the line between federal agent and criminal, between who he pretends to be and who he actually is, he is also leading Lefty, his closest friend, to an almost certain death sentence.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Sopranos Item of the Week - 10% off The Purchase of Two or More T-Shirts
Celebrate the farewell season of one of the nation's most popular television shows with the Soprano's Deal of The Week. This week you can show their love for the Sopranos on your chest with 10% off the purchase of two or more t-shirts
. Customers can mix and match shirts including the popular "Bada Bing" and the Sopranos Crest t-shirt. This special offer ends May 13th.
Rat Pack Endorses Rudy Giuliani
Rudy Giuliani's first-quarter fundraising report showed he was the favorite candidate of the gambling, tobacco and alcohol industries. It makes perfect sense. Now that Rudy Giuliani is no longer prosecuting mobsters, he's got the Rat Pack's full support.
Friday, May 04, 2007
Little Italy's Bonnie and Clyde were Gambino's Trophy
Friends of ours: Gambino Crime Family Bonanno Crime Family, Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia, Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, John "Junior" Gotti, Joseph Massino
Thomas and Rosemarie Uva were not exactly criminal geniuses.
The couple liked to rob Mafia-run social clubs in Little Italy and elsewhere around the city, which, as just about everyone knows, is a really good way to get killed.
They even had the audacity to force mobsters to drop their pants as they swiped their cash and jewelry and cleaned out their card games.
The holdups proved predictably hazardous: The Uvas got whacked on Christmas Eve 1992.
Fifteen years later, the story of the bandits who made the stupid mistake of stealing from the mob is playing out at the trial of the man accused of murdering them, a reputed Gambino crime family captain named Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia.
"There's virtually no greater insult than robbing the Gambino family where they socialized and hung out," federal prosecutor Joey Lipton said last month in opening statements in Brooklyn.
Prosecutors claim that John A. "Junior" Gotti, while acting boss of the Gambino family once led by his father, sanctioned the killings -- a charge he has denied.
Pizzonia's attorney, Joseph R. Corozzo Jr., told the jurors they would hear testimony that members of the Bonanno crime family were the real culprits.
Mafia 'turncoats'
Corozzo noted that the government was relying on an unsavory cast of Mafia turncoats to make their case, including former Gambino capo Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, who got his nickname as a child after a dog bit him in the face.
The case reflects a new willingness among several old-school gangsters -- some admitted killers like DiLeonardo -- to break the mob's vow of omerta, or silence, and help prosecute graying reputed gangsters like Pizzonia, 65, for crimes dating back decades.
In 2005, Bonanno boss Joseph "Big Joey" Massino stunned the underworld by becoming the first boss of one of New York's five Mafia families to flip.
Exactly why the Uvas gambled with their lives by robbing mobsters remains a mystery. But their former boss at a New York collection agency, Michael Schussel, offered some possible clues for resorting to making collections of a criminal kind.
Schussel testified that Thomas was a Mafia aficionado who asked for days off to attend the trial of the elder John Gotti, the Gambino don who died behind bars in 2002. The couple lived in Gotti's neighborhood in Ozone Park, Queens. "He was obsessed with the mob," the witness said.
Authorities say the Uvas began their robbery spree in 1991, apparently believing that social clubs -- home to high-stakes card games -- would provide an easy mark.
Rosemarie, 31, took the wheel of the getaway car and Thomas, 28, armed with an Uzi submachine gun, stripped patrons of their money and jewelry and made the men drop their pants. The couple became known on the street as Bonnie and Clyde.
The moonlighting was stressful: The day after one of the holdups made headlines, Rosemarie showed up for work looking pale and fainted to the floor, her ex-employer said.
By the time the Uvas had hit his Cafe Liberty in Queens a second time, Pizzonia had tired of their act, DiLeonardo testified.
Pizzonia "was very angry, as everybody else was, that these guys had the nerve to go around robbing clubs, like committing suicide," DiLeonardo said. A plan was hatched to track down the couple by getting their license plate number, he said.
On the morning of December 24, they were sitting in their Mercury Topaz at an intersection in Queens when they were each shot three times in the back of the head. The car rolled through the intersection and collided with another vehicle before it stopped; police officers found a stash of jewelry with the bloody corpses.
The killers vanished as mob bosses argued behind the scenes over who should get credit, DiLeonardo said. During a sitdown with his Bonanno counterpart Massino, the younger Gotti set the record straight.
The Bonnie-and-Clyde hit, Gotti said, was "our trophy."
Thanks to CNN
Thomas and Rosemarie Uva were not exactly criminal geniuses.
The couple liked to rob Mafia-run social clubs in Little Italy and elsewhere around the city, which, as just about everyone knows, is a really good way to get killed.
They even had the audacity to force mobsters to drop their pants as they swiped their cash and jewelry and cleaned out their card games.
The holdups proved predictably hazardous: The Uvas got whacked on Christmas Eve 1992.
Fifteen years later, the story of the bandits who made the stupid mistake of stealing from the mob is playing out at the trial of the man accused of murdering them, a reputed Gambino crime family captain named Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia.
"There's virtually no greater insult than robbing the Gambino family where they socialized and hung out," federal prosecutor Joey Lipton said last month in opening statements in Brooklyn.
Prosecutors claim that John A. "Junior" Gotti, while acting boss of the Gambino family once led by his father, sanctioned the killings -- a charge he has denied.
Pizzonia's attorney, Joseph R. Corozzo Jr., told the jurors they would hear testimony that members of the Bonanno crime family were the real culprits.
Mafia 'turncoats'
Corozzo noted that the government was relying on an unsavory cast of Mafia turncoats to make their case, including former Gambino capo Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, who got his nickname as a child after a dog bit him in the face.
The case reflects a new willingness among several old-school gangsters -- some admitted killers like DiLeonardo -- to break the mob's vow of omerta, or silence, and help prosecute graying reputed gangsters like Pizzonia, 65, for crimes dating back decades.
In 2005, Bonanno boss Joseph "Big Joey" Massino stunned the underworld by becoming the first boss of one of New York's five Mafia families to flip.
Exactly why the Uvas gambled with their lives by robbing mobsters remains a mystery. But their former boss at a New York collection agency, Michael Schussel, offered some possible clues for resorting to making collections of a criminal kind.
Schussel testified that Thomas was a Mafia aficionado who asked for days off to attend the trial of the elder John Gotti, the Gambino don who died behind bars in 2002. The couple lived in Gotti's neighborhood in Ozone Park, Queens. "He was obsessed with the mob," the witness said.
Authorities say the Uvas began their robbery spree in 1991, apparently believing that social clubs -- home to high-stakes card games -- would provide an easy mark.
Rosemarie, 31, took the wheel of the getaway car and Thomas, 28, armed with an Uzi submachine gun, stripped patrons of their money and jewelry and made the men drop their pants. The couple became known on the street as Bonnie and Clyde.
The moonlighting was stressful: The day after one of the holdups made headlines, Rosemarie showed up for work looking pale and fainted to the floor, her ex-employer said.
By the time the Uvas had hit his Cafe Liberty in Queens a second time, Pizzonia had tired of their act, DiLeonardo testified.
Pizzonia "was very angry, as everybody else was, that these guys had the nerve to go around robbing clubs, like committing suicide," DiLeonardo said. A plan was hatched to track down the couple by getting their license plate number, he said.
On the morning of December 24, they were sitting in their Mercury Topaz at an intersection in Queens when they were each shot three times in the back of the head. The car rolled through the intersection and collided with another vehicle before it stopped; police officers found a stash of jewelry with the bloody corpses.
The killers vanished as mob bosses argued behind the scenes over who should get credit, DiLeonardo said. During a sitdown with his Bonanno counterpart Massino, the younger Gotti set the record straight.
The Bonnie-and-Clyde hit, Gotti said, was "our trophy."
Thanks to CNN
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