Historic Photo Links Al Capone to Chicago's Mayor

A Chicago professor thinks he has finally gotten the goods on Chicago Mayor William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson and Al "Scarface" Capone.

His key piece of evidence comes courtesy of a photo snapped long ago in La Salle County by an Ottawa photographer.

On Dec. 9, 1930, a panoramic shot was taken of about 300 people standing in front of and on top of St. Joseph's Health Resort, along the Fox River in Wedron. The occasion was William Hale Thompson Day, because Thompson was at the resort recuperating from appendix surgery.

Thompson was considered by some the best mayor money could buy, holding Chicago's highest office from 1915 to 1923 and again from 1927 to 1931 — smack in the middle of the Capone era. Many historians also believe Thompson was smack in the middle of Capone's pocket. However, the hard proof connecting the two was not there.

Until perhaps now, according to John Binder, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and a researcher into Windy City crime. In 2003, Binder penned a book, "The Chicago Outfit." He has also been interviewed about the Chicago underworld on such cable television channels as A&E, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel.

He recently bought a print of the Wedron photo from a man who worked for the gas company in Chicago. The man said he entered a vacant building on the North Side to disconnect gas lines and found the photo on top a garbage can.

"I asked him about the origins of the photo several times and he never waivered from his story," Binder said as to how the man claimed he came upon the photo.

Binder examined the approximately three-foot long photo. Thompson was easily identifiable, but determining if Capone was present among the sea of mugs was similar to playing the game "Where's Waldo?" One heavy-set Italian-looking gentleman smoking a cigar in the front row, has always been a favorite choice for Capone among La Salle County locals who examined the picture. But despite sharing a general similarity, the man is not Capone, husband of Mae, said Binder.

Binder went online to search for information about the picture, coming upon an excerpt about Thompson and Wedron in the book, "Capone's Cornfields: The Mob in the Illinois Valley." During the next few days, Binder kept studying the photo until it came time for him to yell, "Eureka!"

Binder said he is "99 percent plus positive" Capone is standing about dead center on the roof, diagonally from Thompson, who is below on the resort's steps. The man Binder tapped for Capone is smiling, clad in an unbuttoned overcoat and wearing a vest and pearl gray fedora, the same type fedora Capone wore in a 1929 mug shot taken by Philadelphia police.

Several men on either side of the possible Capone also sport pearl gray fedoras — a trademark among the Capone gang, Binder pointed out. One of the chaps near Capone is also built like a refrigerator. Another trademark. Binder is certain one of the men is Mike Spranze, an underworld gunsel who was close to Capone. Another one looks similar to a man visible in a newsreel of Capone leaving the federal courthouse in Chicago in 1931.

Capone was 31 years old at the time of the St. Joseph's photo, standing 5 feet 10 1/2 inches tall and tipping the scales at more than 220 pounds.

Binder showed the photo to two other Capone experts — Scarface scholar Jeff Thurston and Mars Eghigian, biographer of Capone chum Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti — and they agreed with him. Capone and Thompson in the same picture.

"It makes it undeniable there was a connection. This explicitly links them. This wasn't downtown Chicago, where they could have accidentally come together," Binder said. "This photo is historically significant."

Binder is also convinced this links well with La Salle County lore that says Capone visited the county, in particular the Wedron resort.

Binder also pointed out as a clue Thompson and Capone were in cahoots, was the fact the Chicago Tribune more than once ran stories accusing Thompson of accepting money from Capone, stories which Thompson did not deny and for which he did not try to sue. After Thompson went to his reward in 1944, almost $1.5 million cash was found in his safety deposit boxes. Thompson never earned more than $22,500 annually during his 12 years as mayor.

The man who possibly rewarded Thompson on Earth — Capone — followed Thompson into the hereafter three years later, dying in Florida from complications of syphilis. The man who shot the Wedron photo, Ottawa commercial photographer Richard Kuyl, died in his apartment at 805 1/2 Court St., Ottawa, in December 1958 at age 73.

Thanks to DAN CHURNEY, who wrote this article. Dan is the author of "Capone's Cornfields: The Mob in the Illinois Valley."He was called by John Binder, and they discussed the merits of the historic photo, with Dan sharing information about the resort, Thompson's visit and local lore about Capone. Dan sees the resemblance, but would like to see more evidence. If you have any thoughts, email Dan at danc@mywebtimes.com.

Chicago professor and mob researcher John Binder is convinced infamous gangster Al Capone is present in this photograph of Chicago Mayor William "Big Bill" Thompson and others, which was snapped Dec. 9, 1930, at St. Joseph's Health Resort in Wedron. The man Binder believes is Capone, is standing on the roof, marked No. 2. The man third from Capone's left, marked No. 3, Binder identifies as Mike Spranze, a Capone henchman. This is a cropped version of the original photo, which shows more people.

The overall view of the Wedron photo. Chicago Mayor william Thompson is shown on or near steps at the left and is marked No. 1.

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Chicago Mob Boss Dies

One of Chicago's oldest, most powerful mob figures has passed away.

ABC-7's I-Team has learned that Alphonse Tornabene died on Sunday. ABC7 investigative reporter Chuck Goudie was the last reporter ever to question Tornabene.

In mob ranks Tornabene was known as "Pizza Al" because of the west suburban pizzeria that he'd owned for decades. But federal authorities say Al Tornabene was also into another kind of dough as an overseer of the crime syndicate's books.

By the time he died on Sunday at age 86, Pizza Al had risen to the upper crust of the Chicago Outfit.

When the I-Team first met the outfit octogenarian in 2007, he was a relative unknown to the public and even to federal agents. Authorities had been surprised to learn of Tornabene's high-ranking position in the mob hierarchy.

Former hitman and federal informant Nick Calabrese had told U.S. investigators that Tornabene was one of two men who administered the initiation rites of Outfit.

The so-called making ceremony was just like Hollywood showed it, complete with bloodmixing and burning holy cards, according to Calabrese, with Tornabene co-officiating the proceedings with Joey "Doves" Aiuppa, the late mob boss.

Such an assignment would have made Tornabene one of the mob's top men.

His house in Summit and a summer outpost in William's Bay, Wisconsin, were both modest by top hoodlum standards.

The pizzeria that Tornabene founded is open for business on Monday but a sign announces the sad news that "due to a death in the family" they will be closed Wednesday for the funeral.

Mobwatchers say Tornabene's true legacy is in another family, one that the ailing pizzaman laughed off in his final interview.

GOUDIE: "The Crime Commission is saying that you run the mob?"
TORNABENE: (laughs) "I can't even move..."

He managed to get around for almost two more years after we met him that day.

The wake for Al Tornabene will be Wednesday and his funeral will be Thursday morning.

With Tornabene gone and wisecracking mobster Joey "the Clown" Lombardo in prison for life, that leaves the reigns of the Chicago Outfit in the hands of just one man, according to federal agents: John "No Nose" DiFronzo.

Thanks to Chuck Goudie

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Mob Tours of Niagara Falls Releases Schedule

The Mob ToursTM, a specialty sightseeing company based in Niagara Falls, New York, has released their summer schedule, which will mark the one year anniversary of the company.

This year marks the first full season of operations for the company, and they have ambitious plans. “We missed the beginning of last season,” stated company founder Mike Rizzo, “and have been working since late last year to make all the connections and develop partnerships that would allow us to grow accordingly this year. So far, everything is coming together nicely.”

For the remainder of May there are Saturday tours, as well as tours all Memorial Day weekend. “In June we are offering Friday evening tours, as well as Saturday and Sunday tours. The Friday night tour is something we haven't tried before. It puts a different perspective on it than in the morning when we usually run.” The company has open tours Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays during July and August. The week of Independence Day the company is offering tours daily, and open tours Labor day weekend.

The company specializes in tours of the former mafia in Niagara Falls. The 90-minute bus tour visits about a dozen former mob sites in Niagara Falls and tells the story of the late Stefano Magaddino, a former mafia boss, through story, music and a stop at Little Italy Niagara, a small mafia museum. Tours can be booked by phone, online at the company's website themobtours.com, at niagara-usa.biz, or through various visitor centers and sales booths in Niagara Falls. Pick up point is usually at the corner of Rainbow Boulevard and Third Street.

AAA Show Your Card & Save

In an effort to give even more value to their customers, the company is now accepting AAA members Show Your Card & Save and offering a 10% discount.

About The Mob ToursTM

Meticulously researched by Michael Rizzo, a entrepreneur, historian, researcher, and author of two local history books, and developed with Michelle Rizzo, the tour debuted in June 2008. This is the only tour company in western New York offering tours of former mafia crime spots. Rizzo has become an expert on the Magaddino crime family. For further information or interview requests, please contact Mike Rizzo, 716-578-4939 or info@themobtours.com.

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Playstations Used by Organized Crime Bosses Behind Bars to Maintain Control of Their Empires

The Serious Organized Crime Agency in the U.K. says jailed crime bosses are using PlayStations and "interactive internet games" to maintain control of their criminal organizations from behind bars.

Bill Hughes, the director-general of the agency, said criminals are using coded messages in chat rooms to pass on their orders and that PlayStations are being used to play interactive games with people on the outside as well as to charge cellphones that were being smuggled into prisons.

"We know that one of the issues is that if you are locked up, how do you communicate with others? And we have been highlighting the fact it is not always with mobile telephones," Hughes said. "There is other technology used - people are using PlayStations to charge their mobile phones and are playing games interactively with others, so are able to communicate with them."

"The Prison Service is concerned that prisoners are using interactive games to talk to people outside the prison," he continued. "Communication is the name of the game and criminals are looking to exploit new technologies. Prisoners have rights and they have access to the internet."

The accusation resulted from a report by SOCA that it is currently monitoring 5000 "crime bosses" in the U.K. and elsewhere. "Many of the 5,000 are not in the U.K. but are impacting on the U.K. from overseas. Some are in prison running their organizations and we are working with colleagues in the Prison Service," said outgoing SOCA Chairman Sir Stephen Lander. "Recidivism among organized criminals is high. These are lifestyle choices for these people. They will go to prison and we need to find a way of making it more difficult for them to re-engage."

But Her Majesty's Prison Service strongly denied the allegations, claiming that prisoners did not have access to the "wireless enabled technology" available in some consoles. "A decision was taken some years ago that the then-current generation of games consoles should be barred because the capability to send or receive radio signals is an integral part of the equipment," a representative said.

I'm not sure which side of the console wars the U.K. prison system has taken but the use of the term "PlayStation" in this context sounds rather generic and not necessarily a reference to any of Sony's consoles. Regardless, it's comforting to know that even though I have no idea how to apply prison tattoos or make toilet wine, I now apparently possess a skill set that will help me survive if I ever land in the Big House.

Thanks to Andy Chalk

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Foreclosure for The Mafia Princess, Victoria Gotti?

The Mafia Princess may soon be thrown out of her castle.

Victoria Gotti is a deadbeat on the mortgage for her mansion in Old Westbury, L.I., which was prominently featured in the TV series "Growing Up Gotti."

The daughter of the late Gambino crime boss owes JPMorgan Chase about $650,000 and hasn't made a payment in two years, court papers say.

A four-judge panel of the Brooklyn Appellate Division has granted the lender's motion for summary judgment on the foreclosure and the appointment of a referee to report whether the six-acre property can be sold in one parcel.

Gotti blamed the financial mess on her ex-husband Carmine Agnello, who she says took a $856,000 loan against the home without her knowledge.

She became the sole owner of the home in 2004 and the mortgage went into default while she and Agnello "were involved in a bitter matrimonial action," court papers say. Agnello pleaded guilty to racketeering in 2004. "I won a house that was a booby prize riddled with debt," Gotti told the Daily News.

Agnello was sprung from prison earlier this year after serving about eight years .

Gotti said he still hasn't paid court-ordered alimony or child support for his three sons although he's living large with his new wife in a tony suburb in Ohio. "He still owes the federal government nearly $10 million and yet they still allow him to live this way?" she said.

When their middle son expressed a desire to attend law school, Agnello responded, "'Wow, I'm proud of him, but I have no money,'" Gotti said.

The Long Island mansion, with six bedrooms and seven bathrooms, is on the market for $3 million - marked down from $4 million. It's an eyesore in the exclusive enclave, in need of a fresh paint job and landscaping. The yearly tax bill for the compound, which includes a stable and pond, is $92,000.

Gotti says she staved off a scheduled foreclosure sale in 2005 by agreeing to pay JPMorgan Chase $50,000 up front and $25,000 a month. Gotti made several payments and then stopped, which prompted the bank to declare her in default again.

The appellate court's decision reversed a lower court decision in 2007 that said foreclosure proceedings were premature at the time.

Agnello's lawyer, Scott Leemon, declined comment.

Victoria's brother John Jr., who is facing trial in the fall on murder and racketeering charges, is also beset by money woes. A federal judge shot down the mob scion's bid for taxpayer money for his legal defense.

Thanks to Lisa Colangelo and John Marzulli

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Is the Mafia on the Rise or on the Run?

Two themes have emerged from recent media coverage of organized crime. On the one hand, protests like those held in Naples two months ago and sweeping arrests are said to signal the decline of the Mob. On the other, the international financial crisis is said to present new opportunities for mafiosi to take advantage of credit-constrained conditions to seize control of businesses and gain ground against the law.

As to the first point, this sort of give-and-take between the forces of order and disorder has been going on for most of a century. Mussolini near broke them but the US occupation put them back in business. Corruption is ingrained in certain parts of the world; see the municipal scandal in Naples and a medical scam in Sicily. As to the second, cash is king and the mafia has cash.

Stepping back, the larger issue is that organized crime is not a problem, for problems can be solved. It is a condition with which one deals. The last major round of globalization (1870-1914) saw the large local mobs — Sicilian Mafia, Neapolitan Camorra, Chinese Tongs, Corse Unione, etc. — all go worldwide. Today, as in the past, globalization offers new vistas for such groups. Two points:

1. Drugs and people are huge businesses for smugglers and illegal local dealers. The failure of the First World to be serious about either of these things creates quite rich transnational networks. Such networks can be used to move terrorists, weapons, restricted nuclear technologies, etc. The smart ones won’t do it — brings down too much scrutiny from the police — but enough of the players are undereducated thugs with attitude who will deal in anything for a short-term profit. As these crews tend to be linked but mostly independent, rather than the top-down Godfather-type empires, one can always find some wild boy who will do your deal.

2. Cultural “diversity” means demographic replacement in many areas. This, in turn, creates situations of social chaos and lack of cohension which, again, leave openings on the internal security front. Italy and Spain, for example, are both in the process of becoming national states that lack a clearly defined national population as immigrants with little interest in becoming genuine socio-cultural nations, dilute the native population.

Thanks to Bellum

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Nobody Does a Funeral Quite like the Mafia

The local chapter of La Cosa Nostra may be a hapless shell of its former self. But when it comes to staging a funeral, nobody does it quite like the Mafia.

“Three flower cars, wow!” said a pilgrim from Wisconsin who was just about to chomp down on a chocolate cannoli from Mike’s Pastry yesterday morning. The cheesehead was momentarily spellbound by the stately procession of black Cadillacs gliding toward him up Hanover Street, coming to rest at the venerable gates of St. Leonard’s Church. “Wonder who that is?” the tourist said to his wife.

Standing within earshot was a slight gentleman wrapped in a tailored black suit, black tie, black sunglasses and a perfectly coiffed head of white hair that seemed to glow in the sun.

The dapper gent studied the rube for a moment, then made his way across Hanover Street, where he began kissing the family and friends of Donato “Danny” Angiulo, a capo regime in brother Jerry’s mob franchise, who expired Sunday night at the ripe age of 86.

Inside St. Leonard’s, a Franciscan Friar told the congregation that “death comes to all of us. Yes, we think we are going to live forever . . . that death will never touch us . . . it’s not a part of our future . . . but sooner or later . . .”

In a consoling gesture, the priest went on to remind the mourners that fate had actually smiled upon the old capo they called “Smiley.”

“Donato’s death was a peaceful death,” the priest noted, “whereas other deaths can be violent, horrible.” The words just hung in the incensed silence, floating among the statues of the saints and the chorus of angels swirling in vast murals across the domed ceiling.

“Danny was always the muscle in the (Angiulo) family,” recalled one law enforcement source, who studied the kid brother who enforced the Angiulo family will on the street.

“Where Jerry was always the yeller and the screamer, Danny was the guy who carried out the assignments. He was the brother that functioned where the rubber met the road. As result, he was respected on the street.”

There was a strange clash of cultures seeing that long black train of Cadillacs choke traffic in a North End where tourists and yuppie condo-dwellers now exert far more sway than bookies and leg-breakers.

Smiley Angiulo died peacefully surrounded by his family, which, in the end, is all any aging Mafioso could ask given the range of alternatives.

As the flower cars headed north, a certain nostalgia took hold. Could it be the end of an era? Or will there be four . . . maybe five flower cars, for brother Jerry, the tempestuous old don who stayed largely out of sight yesterday.

Thanks to Peter Gelzinis

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Six Indicted in Organized Crime Bust

The statewide Grand Jury has handed up an indictment Thursday naming six local men in connection with an organized crime bust.

Donald St. Germain , of West Warwick, Joseph Montuori, of Cranston, Michael Sherman of West Warwick, Michael Lillie of West Warwick, and Jeremy Lavoie also of West Warwick are charged with one count each of conspiracy and extortion. Police say the five men conspired together to extort money in West Warwick back in January. Officials also say the men threatened to injure someone with the intent of extorting cash.

St. Germain is facing several additional charges, including bookmaking, as well as drug possession and intent to deliver drugs, including Oxycodone and Hydrocodone. All of the incidents were witnessed by an undercover West Warwick Police officer.

Montouri is also named on one count of bookmaking, and involvement in an organized crime business. Sherman is named on four additional drug charges, as well as possessing a pistol while delivering a controlled substance.

Lillie and Richard Crowley are also facing charges involving the delivery of drugs.

All six men will be arraigned in Providence County Superior Court.

Thanks to Amanda Mathias

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On the Spot - The Only Regularly Published Magazine on Early 20th Century Crime and Crime Control Needs You!

Letter from Rick Mattix the force behind the excellent Early 20th Century Crime magazine - On the Spot.

First off, Thanks to all our loyal supporters who've kept this thing going for over two years! Thanks to our readers, Thanks to our advertisers, Thanks to those loyal subscribers who've chosen to stay with us, and another extra-special Thanks to our (unpaid) contributors who've furnished us with so many great historical articles!

Now, for the rest of you, On the Spot is ON THE SPOT! We're printing and mailing this -- THE ONLY REGULARLY PUBLISHED MAGAZINE ON EARLY 20TH CENTURY CRIME AND CRIME CONTROL -- out of our own pockets and, contrary to what some of you may think We Are Not Independently Wealthy! Virtually all money generated from sales of On the Spot Journal is spent printing and mailing it to our subscribers throughout North America, the UK, and Europe.

If you want to keep this thing afloat, or if you have any serious interest whatever in crime history, I urge those who haven't subscribed to do so and those subscribers who haven't renewed to do so. We simply can't keep going otherwise and that would be A REAL CRIME.

Authors and publishers, museums, event planners, etc.: We need advertisers. If you've got a book to sell, or other cops and robbers merchandise, stuff pertaining to Prohibition or Depression era, etc., write us for advertising rates (onthespotnewsletter@yahoo.com). Authors are again invited to donate promo books for new subscribers, which has aided our sales in the past.

Our planned move to MagCloud for future publishing and individual issue sales has been rescheduled to begin with our Fall 2009 issue, if we can keep going until then.

Here are some great articles scheduled for the near future that may never see
publication without your help:

Crime in the Catskills: The Capture of Waxey Gordon
by John Conway

Margaret Collins -- “The Kiss of Death Girl”
by Rose Keefe

Roy Gardner: The Last of the Old West Badmen
by Robert E. Bates

Eastern State Penitentiary: A Bastion of Solitude
by Gregory Peduto

Last Days of the Brady Gang
by Richard Shaw

Whiskey Women, Moonshining Mamas and Bootlegging Babes
by Kate Clabough

Plus book reviews, news of upcoming events, etc.

We need help to keep this thing going.

Yerz,
Rick Mattix
www.onthespotjournal.com/journal.html

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Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer Join Cast of Big Screen Adaption of "To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia"

Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer will play the leads in "The Irishman," a crime story that Jonathan Hensleigh will direct.

Code Entertainment is producing the action movie, which is based on the real story of mobster Danny Greene (Stevenson). Hensleigh and Jeremy Walters ("Dali") wrote the script, inspired by the book "To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia" by Rick Porrello.

Greene was a violent Irish-American gangster who competed with the Italian mob in 1970s Cleveland and ended up provoking a countrywide turf war that crippled the mafia. Walken will play the loan shark and nightclub owner Shondor Birns, and Kilmer is a Cleveland police detective who befriends Greene.

Code's Al Corley, Bart Rosenblatt and Eugene Musso are producing, along with Dundee Entertainment's Tommy Reid and Tara Reid, who brought the property to Code. Jonathan Dana, Peter Miller and Porrello are exec producers, with George Perez serving as co-producer.

The production has also hired cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub, production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein and editor Douglas Crise. Principal photography begins May 19 in Detroit.

Lightning Entertainment will shop the project to international buyers at Cannes, while ICM and Dana handle domestic sales.

The ICM-repped Hensleigh co-wrote and directed "The Punisher." The writer or co-writer of "Die Hard With a Vengeance" and "Jumanji" has the crime story "Nine Lives" in development with Jerry Bruckheimer Films.

Walken and Kilmer are repped by ICM and Affirmative Entertainment. Stevenson is repped by Endeavor.

Code last produced "You Kill Me" and "Spring Breakdown.

thanks to Jay A. Fernandez

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Mafia Cops Sent to Separate Prisons

Mafia cops Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were partners as detectives, partners in crime, neighbors in Las Vegas - and cellmates after being convicted as mob hit men.

Now, their illicit partnership has been broken up forever.

Caracappa, 67, who requested a prison on the East Coast, has been shipped out to Victorville Penitentiary in California to serve his life-plus-80-year sentence.

The high-security prison 86 miles northeast of Los Angeles was once home to notorious inmates John Walker Lindh - the so-called American Taliban - and Ingmar Guandique, suspected of killing Capitol Hill intern Chandra Levy.

Two prisoners have been slain there since it opened in 2004, and a bomb exploded in the prison in February. "It's not a good place to be, but it's better than where he was," said Caracappa's lawyer Daniel Nobel.

Sources said the laconic Caracappa was miserable having to spend every waking moment with a loudmouth like Eppolito in the Brooklyn federal lockup in Sunset Park.

Because they're ex-cops, they were locked down 23 hours a day as a safety precaution and kept away from other inmates.

"If you have two persons together in a small cell that is the size of a closet for some New Yorkers, most marriages would dissolve under those circumstances," Nobel said of their time at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Eppolito, 60, is still awaiting word from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons as to which cinder-block tomb he will be sent to die.

"It was very peculiar to me that they were housed together," said Eppolito's lawyer Joseph Bondy. "The alternative was solitary confinement."

Eppolito and Caracappa are appealing their convictions, arguing that their trial lawyers were incompetent.

In a letter to Judge Jack Weinstein, Eppolito's daughter Andrea wrote, "The rest of my life will be dedicated to bringing him home where he belongs."

Thanks to John Marzulli

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Reputed Genovese Made Member and Associated Arrested on Sports Betting Charges

A Dover man is among more than 30 people arrested Thursday in connection with a $1 million-a-week, multistate sports betting operation related to prominent organized crime families.

The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office said 36-year-old Dulo Bolijevic of Dover was charged with promoting gambling and conspiracy to promote gambling in connection with this week’s raids, which spanned Bergen, Essex, Somerset and Monmouth counties.

The was no immediate word, however, on what role Bolijevic, who works at Villa Pizza in Rockaway, played in the betting ring.

Authorities from the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, the FBI and other agencies began executing search and arrest warrants beginning Tuesday night. More than 30 arrests were made and more than $1.3 million was seized.

The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office said the North Jersey investigation began in September 2008 and focused on money-laundering. Undercover detectives infiltrated the bookmaking operation being run by Thomas Conforti of Hawthorne and John “Blue” DeFroscia of Saddle Brook.

DeFroscia is a documented “made” member of the Genovese organized crime family, and Conforti is a high-level associate, authorities said. Each ran separate bookmaking and money-laundering enterprises. and passed a portion of their earnings to Genovese Family.

Conforti and DeFroscia had a large network of agents, who were paid a commission on their profits. Mid-level members were responsible for numerous gambling packages and would meet with the individual agents or package holders and then pass the proceeds to DeFroscia and Conforti.

Investigators found that hundreds of bettors used a system of code names and passwords to place bets on sporting events each week. It was the agents who collected losses from or paid winnings to bettors. The wagers were placed via toll-free telephone numbers or the Internet.

The actual wire room providing betting lines and accepting the wagers is located in Costa Rica — a common practice employed by organized crime families to avoid apprehension of those running the wire room, authorities said.

The investigation revealed that DeFroscia and Conforti used “middle men” as a buffer between themselves and their agents to insulate themselves from law enforcement detection. In the case of Thomas Conforti, an individual identified as Michael Cirelli of Belleville helped run the operation for him. John DeFroscia employed Paul “Shortline” Weber of Aramark, Pa., and Gerald “Jay” Napolitano of Summit, among others, to help run his network of agents.

Napolitano would deliver weekly profits to DeFroscia by dropping envelopes of cash at Racioppi’s Taralles, a store on Bloomfield Avenue, Bloomfield. Nicholas “Pigeon” Restaino of Bloomfield would temporarily hold the cash at the store until DeFroscia picked it up.

Weber, Napolitano and other ranking members would meet with agents in parking lots, bookstores, diners and on the street to exchange cash. Napolitano was seen several times meeting one of his agents, Louis Orangeo of Newark, in various parking lots in Clifton. Orangeo, a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, would meet with Napolitano while on duty in his mail truck. They would exchange an envelope through the mail truck window as if it were ordinary mail.

In addition, Weber, who is employed as a vendor at both CitiField and Yankee Stadium, arranged meetings and drop-offs in each stadium while working. Detectives who conducted surveillance of Weber at the stadiums with the assistance and cooperation of Major League Baseball security, observed him exchange cash proceeds from this enterprise with various co-conspirators.

Thanks to Daily Record

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Victoria Gotti Shouts Out in Court

The mother of John "Junior" Gotti interrupted a hearing on her son's racketeering case Friday by telling a federal judge that the government is trying to kill him before he even gets to trial.

"Why don't you just hang him now!" Victoria Gotti shouted from the spectator section of a room in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

She spoke out after Judge Kevin P. Castel asked lawyers at the end of the pretrial hearing whether there were any other matters to address.

"Excuse me, you honor, may I speak?" she asked as she stood up. "I'm his mother." The judge asked if she was a party to the proceedings. When she said she was not, he told her she could not speak.

Still, she asked him what he thought about perjury - a reference to claims a mob turncoat made that he had slept with her daughter, also named Victoria, the former star of the reality TV series "Growing up Gotti."

Then she made the reference to the hanging of her son and added: "They're trying to kill him before trial!"

Outside court she passed out copies of a lie detector test in which the younger Victoria Gotti said she never slept with the turncoat, John Alite, a Gambino organized crime family associate.

She also told reporters that the government was trying to ruin her daughter's reputation in pursuit of a conviction of Gotti, 44. "This trial is rigged before he sets foot in it," she said.

Before Victoria Gotti's outburst, the judge had rejected Gotti's request to have a public defender added to the case to assist his lawyer, Charles Carnesi. Castel said his review of Gotti's assets left him doubting he would qualify for a lawyer at taxpayer expense.

Carnesi said three trials for Gotti had taken a toll on the family's finances, forcing him to take out a $250,000 loan at 14 percent interest. Carnesi explained the high interest rate, saying: "Mr. Gotti's name, for better or worse, is a well known name which causes lenders pause before they're willing to make a loan to him."

He said Gotti had to spend $75,000 of the loan toward credit cards that have been used to pay the family's living expenses.

Carnesi told the judge he will file papers asking that the latest indictment be thrown out. He said the charges brought in August were "from my view, basically the same indictment" as Gotti's previous three trials. Prosecutors have said Gotti assumed control of the powerful Gambino family after his father's 1992 conviction on racketeering and murder charges. His father died in prison.

The current indictment accuses Gotti of involvement in three slayings in the late 1980s and early 1990s and of possessing and trafficking more than 5 kilograms of cocaine.

Gotti is being held at a federal lockup in Brooklyn. He has been tried three times in Manhattan on racketeering charges for an alleged plot to kidnap Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. Trials in 2005 and 2006 ended in hung juries and mistrials after Gotti's lawyers argued he had long since retired from organized crime.

Federal prosecutors announced after the third trial that they were giving up.

The hearing Friday was attended by Sliwa, who wore his red Guardian Angels jacket.

Sliwa, who testified at the earlier trials about the kidnapping attempt, which left him with bullet wounds and continuing injuries, said he won't be satisfied until Gotti "follows his father to hell without an asbestos suit."

He noted that Castel is different from the judge who presided over Gotti's earlier trials and suggested it will make a difference in the outcome.

"He's got a tough judge, a no-nonsense judge," Sliwa said. "He's been stripped of his Guardian Angel."

Thanks to TBO

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Unseen Victims from Mob Killings

Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose -- convicted last week of passing information to the Chicago Outfit about a top mob witness -- was only 7 years old when Joe the janitor was found dead.

So he probably didn't read the small 1975 Tribune story about the body of the 33-year-old janitor found in the basement of Chalmers Elementary School on the West Side. Chicago detectives said the janitor suffered a massive heart attack. But a mortician at the Daniel Lynch Funeral Home in Evergreen Park made an amazing discovery along The Chicago Way.

There was a hole in the back of Joe the janitor's head. A heart attack didn't make that hole. A .22-caliber bullet was found lodged in the brain of the janitor.

His name? Joseph Lipuma.

A couple of weeks later, Lipuma's friend and alleged stolen-goods dealer Ronald Magliano, 42, was found shot to death in his South Side home. The home had been set ablaze, an Outfit practice to destroy evidence. Detectives figured the two murders were related, but no arrests were made.

Two years later, a friend of Joe's and Ronnie's was killed in a sensational daytime Outfit hit. Mobster Sam Annerino was chewed up by three men with shotguns outside Mirabelli's Furniture store in Oak Lawn. The Outfit had sway in Oak Lawn. The town's motto? "Be prudent, stay safe."

A few miles to the east in Evergreen Park lived Joe Lipuma's young nephew. A top student at Evergreen Park High School, an excellent athlete, he was so impressive that he was accepted as a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. But he didn't like the military life, came home after a year, went to law school, and became a federal prosecutor before becoming a criminal defense attorney.

Recently, at John Ambrose's trial, I met that man. He was John Ambrose's attorney, Francis Lipuma, Joe's nephew. I disagree with him about Ambrose, but I couldn't help admiring his skill in the courtroom.

"I was just a kid -- a freshman -- when my uncle was killed," Frank Lipuma told me the other day after the Ambrose guilty verdict. "All I really remember about it was pain. Pain and sadness throughout my house, throughout my family."

Just in case you think I'm drawing some nefarious inference about Frank Lipuma, let me be clear: I'm not.

Lipuma was an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago. To become a federal prosecutor, applicants must undergo a rigorous FBI background check.

They reach back into your childhood, interview your friends from elementary school and scrub your family. If there were anything there, the FBI would have found it. But what they did find was a young man who felt the pain of his Uncle Joe's death but never learned why he was killed.

"I do remember the funeral home found he'd been shot, and that police thought it was a heart attack, but someone had put a gun behind his ear," Frank Lipuma told me. "It was terrible, all that pain in the family then. He was involved with people. There was just speculation. He knew Annerino, they said. I was just a kid playing baseball, trying to get to college."

Through weeks of testimony in Ambrose's trial, we heard about the Outfit informant he was supposed to protect: the deadly hit man turned star government witness in the historic Family Secrets case, Nicholas Calabrese.

Calabrese was in the federal witness protection program. Ambrose was convicted of leaking information to the mob about what Calabrese told the feds concerning dozens and dozens of unsolved Outfit murders.

One of the murders involved Annerino, the friend of Joe Lipuma and Ronnie Magliano who was known as "Sam the Mule."

The leaked information was contained in the FBI's 2002 threat assessment detailing Nick Calabrese's cooperation, a document prosecutors alleged was read by Ambrose before he leaked details of it to the mob through an Outfit messenger boy:

"Nicholas Calabrese will testify that he, along with Joseph LaMantia, Frank Calabrese Sr. and Frank Saladino, planned and attempted to murder Samuel Annerino. Ronald Jarrett, who is deceased [murdered], also participated in the planning. ... Though the attempt was unsuccessful, Nicholas Calabrese later learned that the murder was later carried out by Joseph Scalise. William Petrocelli and Anthony Borsellino also participated in the murder, but are deceased."

I asked Frank Lipuma if he became a federal prosecutor in part to find out who killed his Uncle Joe, but he wouldn't say: "I couldn't find any hard facts. I deal in facts."

The Chicago Outfit has many victims, and some might consider Ambrose to be one of them. He wanted to ingratiate himself with the bosses. He'll soon be fired from federal service and may even serve prison time. Joe Lipuma was a victim, too, and so was his family.

Murder isn't just between killer and target, especially Outfit murders. The victims are found among living survivors, legitimate folk spaced apart, often unknowing, as if on a vine reaching back through time, remembering.

Thanks to John Kass

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"Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob" Mafia Book Signing

Jeff Coen, the author of Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob, will be at Centuries and Sleuths Bookstore in Forest Park on Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 2:00 PM to sign copies of his first rate book on the historic Operation Family Secrets Mafia Trial.

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Highlights from the John Ambrose Trial

*Brother Patrick Martin was the last defense witness, called to tell of Ambrose's character. He had coached Ambrose on the wrestling team at St. Laurence High School in Burbank and had remained in regular contact with him. When Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur addressed Martin as "Father," he corrected her, saying "My name is 'Brother.'" She was about to resume questioning him, when he interrupted her with, "I'm sorry, I don't know your name." It might've been the one time MacArthur was thrown off her game.

*The jurors asked many questions during the trial via notes they submitted to U.S. District Judge John Grady, mostly wanting to ask something else of a particular witness.

*Grady is a judge who apparently thinks this is a good idea. One of the jurors' questions elicited one of the more interesting revelations of the trial - that two witnesses at a major mob trial in 2007 did not want to be protected by marshals after hearing of Ambrose's alleged security breach. They were guarded instead by FBI agents.

* Also, a juror requested a transcript from the opening arguments and closing statements of the trial. Grady laughed as he turned that one down.

* During his time on the witness stand, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald kept talking about his habit of not wearing a watch. "I should wear a watch," he concluded after the third reference.

* A large gray partition was used during the testimony of some deputy marshals to protect their identities from the public - even for one who retired in January and another who has a different job now. They were identified only as Inspector Four and Deputy Six.

* The trial did not have a lot of drama. No shouting by attorneys. During the prosecution's closing argument, Grady told Ambrose to stop "wagging his head" back and forth. When his attorney gave his closing arguments, Ambrose wept silently when his father, Thomas, was mentioned - a former Chicago police officer who was convicted in the famous "Marquette 10" police corruption trial in 1982 and imprisoned. The man to whom Ambrose allegedly leaked the critical information was a former Chicago cop who was convicted with Ambrose's father.

One of the Chicago mob's more colorful figures, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, was "smitten" with Ambrose's mother, who would visit her husband at a federal prison that also housed Lombardo, an FBI agent testified during the trial. He said she used to go to the prison in Milan, Mich., with the wife of Frank DeRango, a fellow "Marquette 10" defendant who was Thomas Ambrose's police partner and was incarcerated with him there. After Ambrose died in prison, his wife continued to travel with Mrs. DeRango, and one day Lombardo insisted on taking a photo with her, the agent said.

Thanks to Lauren Fitzpatrick

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Video of U.S. Marshal Convicted for Leaking Secrets to the Mafia

Video of U.S. Marshal convicted for leaking secrets to the mafia. John Ambrose leaked info about a witness to the mafia, he faces up to 15 years in prison.

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Degenerate Gambler Accountant Aides the Feds in Bringing Down Mobsters

Las Vegas has always been an attractive place for the hail-fellow, the hustler, and the man on the make.

With its shadowy history, seductive setting and proximity to a limitless river of cash, it brims with dreamers, scufflers and schemers. It's a spot where a guy who knows a guy can make a good living.

It was perhaps the ideal spot for the FBI to turn a man like Stephen Corso loose with a recording device. By all accounts, Corso was the street-wise guy Las Vegas tourists fantasize about and most locals rarely experience, the one who exists in dimly lighted bars and nondescript strip mall offices.

Corso was an accountant by training, a salesman by calling, and a high-rolling degenerate gambler by compulsion when he got caught swiping clients' money to feed his blackjack Jones and penthouse lifestyle. He spent $5 million that didn't belong to him and was on his way to a prison stretch when he began cooperating with the FBI in 2002.

From what I've pieced together from public documents and street sources, the smooth-talking accountant found his true calling as an undercover informant. Reliable sources say Corso worked his way into the local mob scene and pulled the pants off some very experienced wiseguys.

According to a federal document from the Eastern District of Virginia, where Corso's efforts helped nail securities attorney David Stocker on a "pump and dump" stock manipulation scheme with connections reaching into the Securities and Exchange Commission, the accountant was a one-man La Cosa Nostra census worker.

"He provided information related to the activities of individuals with ties to several LCN organized crime families to include: the Chicago Outfit, Lucchese LCN, Bonanno LCN, Genovese LCN, Colombo LCN, Philadelphia LCN, Decavalcante LCN, and Gambino LCN," the document states. "Corso was also instrumental in providing FBI agents with information on individuals with ties to Russian organized crime, Youngstown, Ohio gangsters, and the Irish Mob which exists in the Boston, Mass. area."

Sounds like the guy did everything but dig up Jimmy Hoffa. Corso back-slapped his way into the Las Vegas underworld, then used his accounting and tax preparation skills to give the wiseguys a financial endoscopic treatment.

He played an integral role in sealing the deal in the lengthy "Mafia Cops" case, in which Las Vegas residents and former NYPD detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were found guilty of acting as contract killers for the Lucchese crime family. Corso's work in Las Vegas proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Mafia Cops continued their criminal conspiracy years after leaving New York.

"Corso's testimony was critical to the ... conclusion that the conspiracy continued into the limitations period," one government document states.

It's as simple as this: No Corso, no Mafia Cops conviction. And it will be intriguing to see whether the government gets a victory in a related drug case involving Eppolito's son, Anthony Eppolito, and Guido Bravatti now that Corso has been sentenced to a year and a day for his own transgressions.

It's also been reported Corso worked in connection with the Crazy Horse Too investigation. I imagine former Crazy Horse official Bobby D'Apice, who now resides at government expense, won't be sending his former tax consultant, Corso, a letter of reference.

At his February sentencing in Connecticut, U.S. District Judge Janet Hall seemed almost apologetic. Although she called Corso's crime "an extraordinary violation of trust," she admitted, "I can't find the words to describe the value, at least in my judgment, of this cooperation."

The feds have a long tradition of going to embarrassing lengths to help their most effective informants. Not this time. Corso, the accountant, will serve longer than some informants with murder convictions.

Who could blame him if he told the government to get stuffed? The FBI and U.S. attorney's office in Connecticut credit Corso with generating at least seven arrests, 20 convictions, and $4.2 million in seizures and forfeitures. And it isn't over.

"The LCN is well known for its tradition of seeking retribution against those who cooperate with law enforcement," a federal memo states. "Corso knew of the danger, but continually put himself in harm's way for the benefit of the government."

So much for loyalty.

Now all Stephen Corso has to do is watch his back the rest of his life.

Thanks to John L. Smith

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What do Vincent "The Chin" Gigante. New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey. Hollywood Actor Steven Seagal Have in Common?

Vincent "The Chin" Gigante. New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey. Hollywood actor Steven Seagal.

All had one thing in common: Their names have been attached to mob captain Angelo Prisco, who today was found guilty in the murder of a cousin suspected of stealing from fellow mobsters.

After a two-week jury trial in New York City, Prisco, a Genovese crime family captain who was in charge of the New Jersey operations, was convicted in the 1992 murder of Angelo Sangiuolo in the Bronx.

Prisco, 69, who divided his time between Toms River and the Bronx and was nicknamed "The Horn," was found guilty of murder, racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, robbery, extortion, firearms crimes, property theft and operating an illegal gambling business.

Prisco was at the center of headlines in 2002 when an aide to McGreevey and tough-guy actor Seagal allegedly sought to get him early parole on a 1998 arson and conspiracy conviction.

Facing a shakedown by the Gambino crime family, Seagal sought Prisco's help as a mediator, according to an FBI tape. Prisco in turn asked for the actor's assistance in helping him win parole, which he was granted in 2002, having served just four years of a 12-year sentence.

McGreevey and his aide denied the allegations, but state and federal grand juries were formed to investigate the controversial parole. No charges were ever filed, but sources at the time told The Star-Ledger parole officials told investigators the governor's office intervened to help Prisco.

Prisco received the order to kill Sangiuolo from then-boss Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, and assigned John "Johnny Balls" Leto and another member of his crew to carry out the killing at a Bronx social club, prosecutors said. After Prisco ordered Sangiuolo into a van, Leto shot Sangiuolo numerous times before leaving the body in the back of the van at a McDonald's, prosecutors said.

Prisco then picked up Leto at the fast food restaurant and accompanied him while Leto disposed of the gun, prosecutors said.

Prisco also was convicted of conspiring to commit robberies with crew members in 1991-92, including car-jackings and armed robberies of jewelry dealers transporting large quantities of gold bought in the Dominican Republic, prosecutors said. One robbery yielded a bag of gold worth $50,000, and Prisco bragged about the heists by passing around a newspaper article on the robberies, prosecutors said.

In 1997, in an attempt to extort $50,000 from a Manhattan construction company owner, prosecutors said Prisco sent his crew to break a glass coffeepot over the head of the owner's business partner. Later, crew members threatened to cut off the owner's finger and harm his family, prosecutors said.

Between 2003-05, Prisco "green lighted" multiple violent home robberies in which individuals thought to have cash in their homes were tied up and beaten, prosecutors said.

He faces 15 years to life in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for July 23.

Among his plaudits, Lev L. Dassin, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, praised law enforcement agencies in New Jersey for their contributions to the investigation and prosecution of the case, including the FBI's Newark field office, the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, the Morris County prosecutor's office and Rockaway Township police.

On FBI tapes, Prisco told his driver: "Outside of you being the boss, this life sucks. And it's like a Catch-22. If you're the boss, you go to jail. This life ... it ain't what it's cracked up to be."

Thanks to Mike Frassinelli

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Angelo Priso Guilty of Whacking Ordered by Vincent "The Chin" Gigante

Genovese family capo Angelo Prisco was found guilty Monday of conspiring to kill his cousin in a 1992 hit ordered by The Oddfella - Genovese boss Vincent (The Chin) Gigante.

A Manhattan Federal Court jury found Prisco, 69, responsible for the slaying of Angelo Sangiuolo, as well as a series of violent, gunpoint robberies dating to 1991. The pajama-fan Gigante gave Prisco the order to kill Sangiuolo because he suspected Sangiuolo was robbing from a Genovese soldier.

Prisco, of Toms River, N.J., recruited John Leto and another trusted member of his crew to carry out the job.

Prisco lured Sangiuolo to a Bronx social club and urged him to get inside a van with Leto, who shot Sangiuolo numerous times, prosecutors said. Prisco then picked up Leto in the parking lot of a Bronx McDonald's where they left the body in the van and drove away.

In the early 1990s, Prisco ran a robbery crew that carjacked jewelry dealers transporting gems purchased in the Dominican Republic, including a heist that netted a $50,000 bag of gold.

During 2003 and 2005, a Prisco-led crew tied up and beat robbery victims in their homes and then kicked up a portion of the proceeds to their capo, prosecutors say. Prisco counseled his charges to "play dumb" if by mistake they ripped off a fellow member of organized crime.

Prisco's 2003 parole from a New Jersey prison four years into a 12-year sentence for arson and conspiracy prompted a state-level review of Gov. James McGreevey's role in the release.

Thanks to Thomas Zambito

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Juror Dismissed with the Flu, Prior to Guilty Verdict in Trial of U.S. Deputy Marshal

Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose was convicted today on charges that he leaked secret government information that made its way to the mob.

A federal jury found Ambrose guilty of one count of theft of information and one count of illegal disclosure of information but found him innocent on two counts of lying to federal agents.

Ambrose wiped away tears after the verdict and embraced his wife. Ambrose, 42, is a decorated deputy marshal who has hunted down national and international fugitives. He was the second highest ranking member of a regional fugitive task force. The verdict delivers Ambrose a similar fate of that of his father, who was convicted in the 1980s with police corruption in a case known as the Marquette 10. The elder Ambrose died in prison.

Both Ambrose and his father had the same judge.

Ambrose was acquitted of charges that he lied to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and FBI chief Rob Grant. His lawyer, Frank Lipuma, raised questions about why Grant and Fitzgerald didn’t record their interview with the deputy marshal. Several character witnesses testified on Ambrose's behalf at the trial, including U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras, who said he knew Ambrose to be truthful.

The jury deliberated tor three full days. One juror sick with the flu — though not swine flu — was excused this morning after U.S. District Judge John Grady said the panel should continue without her. Grady said case law supports a jury moving forward with one fewer person.

There were alternate jurors chosen in the case. But if an alternate is called back, the entire panel must start its deliberations from scratch.

Ambrose is accused of leaking information after he worked two brief stints with the federal witness protection program in 2002 and 2003, watching over mob witness Nick Calabrese. Ambrose is accused of committing a “criminal betrayal of trust” by leaking highly secretive information about Calabrese’s cooperation and activities, prosecutors have said in the case.

The leaked information made its way to members of the Chicago Outfit at a time mobsters were looking for solid confirmation that Calabrese was cooperating so they could “act,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Markus Funk said early in the trial.

Ambrose is charged with leaking sensitive government information about Calabrese and then lying to FBI chief Robert Grant and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald when they questioned him. Both Grant and Fitzgerald testified against him.

Ambrose's lawyer, Frank Lipuma, said his client is a hard-working, good, honest man who made "a big mistake in his job ... but it was not with criminal intent." Lipuma admitted that Ambrose had discussions with a man he looked to as a father figure, William Guide, about Calabrese. Guide had done prison time with Ambrose's late father, who went to prison as part of the “Marquette 10” police corruption case. Ambrose’s father died in prison.

“John got caught up in this because he was boasting about what he was doing,” Lipuma said.

Thanks to Natasha Korecki

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Guilty Verdict Against U.S. Deputy Marshal John Ambrose at Mob Leak Trial

A deputy U.S. marshal has been convicted in Chicago of leaking secret information to the mob about a protected witness in a federal organized crime investigation.

Deputy marshal John T. Ambrose stared straight ahead as jurors returned the verdict Tuesday following almost three days of deliberation.

Prosecutors say it was the first time in the 39-year history of the government's witness security program that its secrecy was deliberately violated.

Prosecutors say they realized there was a leak when two mobsters were overheard in a prison visiting room talking about having a "mole" inside federal law enforcement.

The 42-year-old Ambrose was acquitted of two charges of lying to federal agents.

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Convictions for 4 in Racketeering, Loan Sharking and Extortion Case Including Arthur Gianelli

Reputed Mafia associate Arthur Gianelli kept meticulous records for his sprawling sports betting and loan shark ring, including a list of so-called problem people that included deadbeat gamblers and mobsters who were shaking him down for a cut of his profits.

He warned his girlfriend to "keep your mouth shut" about his gambling business, unaware that State Police investigators were secretly recording that phone call and hundreds more as he and his associates blabbed about arson, extortion, money-laundering, and other crimes.

Yesterday, after weighing all those records and phone calls, a US District Court jury in Boston found Gianelli, 51, of Lynnfield, guilty of hundreds of charges, including racketeering, arson, illegal gambling, money laundering, and attempted extortion.

The jury of six men and six women, which deliberated 23 hours over four days, also found Gianelli's three codefendants - Dennis "Fish" Albertelli, 56, and his wife, Gisele Albertelli, 54, of Stow, and Frank Iacaboni, 65, of Leominster - guilty of racketeering conspiracy and a variety of other charges in the case that prosecutors say marked the downfall of a sprawling enterprise protected by the Mafia.

"This prosecution eliminated one of the largest gambling and loan-sharking operations operating in the Greater Boston area," Assistant US Attorney Fred Wyshak said after the verdict. "It was affiliated with organized crime, and this is part of the government's battle against organized crime."

There was testimony during the eight-week trial that Gianelli, who is the brother-in-law of disgraced former FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr., paid $2,000 a month in tribute to New England Mafia underboss Carmen "The Cheese Man" DiNunzio from 2001 to 2003. In exchange, the Mafia protected Gianelli's organization, prosecutors said.

Jurors also heard tapes and testimony indicating that another reputed mobster, Dennis LePore, allegedly started shaking Gianelli down for money after relatives told him they had heard Gianelli's gambling business was booming.

In a Feb. 5, 2004, call recorded by State Police and played at the trial, Gianelli accused Daniele Mazzei, then his girlfriend, of putting him in jeopardy with the Mafia by talking about his business to LePore's nephew. "Just don't tell anybody these [expletive] things, because it ends up a [expletive] problem," Gianelli said. "These [expletive] people are jealous against everybody, and and they're lookin' to rob everybody, all right? And they ain't gonna rob me."

In a telephone call with LePore the next day, Gianelli agreed to pay him $15,000.

Jurors found Gianelli ran an organization involved in sports betting, video poker machines, and later online gambling. They also convicted Gianelli of attempted extortion for trying to seize control of Clarke's Turn of the Century Saloon in Faneuil Hall and McCarthy's Bar and Grill on Boylston Street in Boston, between 1998 and 2002.

Gianelli's lawyer, Robert Sheketoff, who had argued that the government's witnesses were not credible, urged jurors not to be swayed by the sheer size of the 333-count indictment. He declined to comment after yesterday's verdict.

Gianelli's wife, Mary Ann, who pleaded guilty last month to money-laundering, racketeering, and other charges and is awaiting sentencing, is the sister of Connolly's wife, Elizabeth. The Gianellis and Connollys lived next door to each other in Lynnfield. Connolly was convicted of federal racketeering in Boston in 2002 and sentenced to 10 years.

Last November, Connolly was convicted of murder in Florida for helping longtime informants James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi orchestrate the 1982 slaying of a businessman.

Yesterday, Gianelli, who had been in custody while awaiting trial, showed little emotion as the verdict was read, and he said nothing afterward.

Iacaboni, who was convicted of eight of nine charges against him, said, "This is a shock," after the verdict was read.

Gianelli, Iacaboni, and Dennis Albertelli were all convicted of arson in plotting to burn down the Big Dog Sports Grille in North Reading in a bid to force its owners to sell Gianelli and Albertelli another bar in Lynnfield. The arson conviction carries a minimum mandatory 15-year prison term.

Gisele Albertelli's lawyer, Page Kelley, said, "I'm disappointed that they returned so many 'guilties,' because there were a lot of counts on which the evidence was dubious. The problem with an indictment like this that alleges so many crimes is that it's hard to overcome the presumption of guilt."

Dennis Albertelli's lawyer, Edward Pasquina Jr., referring to prosecution witnesses who were granted immunity in exchange for their cooperation, said, "Certainly the government marched in a parade of horribles, and they [jurors] took their word for it."

US District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton set sentencing for July 17 for Gianelli; July 23 for Dennis Albertelli, the following day for Iacaboni, and July 29 for Gisele Albertelli.

The case, investigated by the Massachusetts State Police Special Service Section, began with a wiretap and quickly mushroomed.

Thanks to Shelley Murphy

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Weekend Break for U.S. Marshal Trial Jury

Jurors will resume deliberations next week in the trial of a deputy U.S. marshal accused of leaking information about a witness to the mob.

The jury in John Ambrose's trial deliberated nearly seven hours before adjourning Friday afternoon. Deliberations will begin again Monday.

Ambrose, a veteran fugitive hunter, is accused of leaking confidential information about Nicholas Calabrese, whom he had been assigned to guard while the mobster was in Chicago talking to federal prosecutors in the "Family Secrets" mob trial. Ambrose denies he ever broke the law in handling secret information.

Ambrose is the only person in the 39-year history of the government's Witness Security Program to be accused of deliberately violating its security safeguards.

Thanks to AP

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US Marshal's Office and FBI's Relationship is Icy at Mob Leak Trial

Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose sat in federal court on Thursday to hear lawyers portray him two ways:

An honorable screw-up hoping to impress an Outfit-friendly father figure, or a criminal conduit to reputed Chicago mob boss John "No Nose" DiFronzo.

Either way the jury decides, the relationship between the U.S. marshal's office and the FBI is at best icy these days, though they won't formally admit it. But you could see the two tribes in the gallery in U.S. District Judge John Grady's courtroom, sitting stiffly as if in church at a wedding, the in-laws glaring, already at war.

The marshals in their street clothes, shoulders hunched, not happy, sitting behind their man Ambrose. The FBI agents and prosecutors impassive, across the aisle, sitting behind their team.

The cause of the deep freeze? Ambrose himself.

Ambrose has been charged with leaking extremely sensitive information to the mob about the most important federal witness in Chicago's history -- turncoat Outfit hit man Nicholas Calabrese. And with lying about it to federal agents until he later confessed to the FBI about what he'd done. But according to his lawyer Frank Lipuma, all Ambrose really confessed to was screwing up, bragging to a family friend that he was protecting a major Outfit witness.

Ambrose's friend was William Guide, a former crooked cop with Outfit connections, who spent time in prison, convicted with Ambrose's father, Thomas, in the Marquette 10 police drug dealer shakedown scandal.

What Ambrose said about Calabrese ended up in recorded prison conversations beginning in January 2003 between Mickey Marcello and his Outfit boss brother Jimmy.

What also came out during the trial is that Ambrose apparently thought that by leaking a little information, he could win favor from the Outfit and use their street network as a source of information to find fugitives.

At least, that was his story as told to senior FBI agents Anita Stamat and Ted McNamara when they finally caught him in 2006.

The International Olympic Committee might not know this, so don't tell them, but Chicago has a history of law enforcement conduits to the mob. The job has been held by many -- a patrol officer in the evidence section, hit men in the Cook County Sheriff's office, even the chief of detectives of the Chicago Police Department.

Since the time of Paul Ricca, the Outfit has had puppets, in politics, on the bench, in business and law enforcement. That's how it survives, while politically unsophisticated street gangs suffer legal troubles. And what was so unique about Ambrose is that he was a federal law enforcement officer guarding a federal witness.

"He screwed up ... shot his mouth off," said Lipuma, a former federal prosecutor himself, in a riveting closing argument, full of passion, trying to poke holes in the case. "John Ambrose admitted he broke policy. He broke procedure. It may have been a violation of policy. ... But he's an honest man."

Prosecutor Markus Funk was once the new guy on the federal organized crime team. But now he's the veteran, with the most significant convictions in Chicago history under his belt: Jimmy Marcello, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo and others from the Family Secrets trial.

"This is straightforward theft," Funk told the jury. "The defense is throwing up these vast smoke screens to confuse you. He confessed. Not once, not twice, but three times. He shot his mouth off? There was no criminal intent? He admitted it. That's not a legal defense. That's a crime."

The defense also brought my column up again, the one of Feb. 21, 2003, that broke the story that Nick Calabrese had disappeared from prison and speculated (correctly) that he was in the witness protection program.

Lipuma said the column was the "linchpin" of the defense because after it ran, Calabrese's cooperation was common knowledge. But a month before the column was published, Jimmy and Mickey Marcello were already talking about Calabrese's federal "baby-sitter" funneling information to them.

If Ambrose were, say, a plumber, you might excuse him for screwing up and talking about a federal witness to an Outfit messenger boy.

A plumber might be excused, because a plumber wouldn't be expected to know about witness protection. But Ambrose is no plumber, is he?

He's a deputy U.S. marshal.

For now.

Thanks to John Kass

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Deliberations Begin in Mob Leak Trial

As federal jurors began deliberating Thursday in the trial of Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose, one of many questions they faced was the value of a revealed secret.

In their final pitches of the nine-day trial, attorneys argued over whether Ambrose shared minimal information while bragging to a family friend or spilled sensitive details that might have crippled the Family Secrets mob investigation in its infancy.

Ambrose is charged with leaking details about the secret cooperation of hit man-turned-witness Nicholas Calabrese that ended up in the hands of the Chicago Outfit. Calabrese's crucial testimony in the 2007 Family Secrets trial resulted in murder convictions and life sentences for several Chicago mobsters.

In a series of FBI interviews in 2006, Ambrose admitted telling family friend William Guide about Calabrese's cooperation after twice working on his witness protection security detail in 2002 and 2003.

"Any release of information is critical. It puts people at risk," said Assistant U.S. Atty. Diane MacArthur. "A person doesn't know the world into which that information is being released. There's no way to judge its impact and what harm it may cause."

But Ambrose's attorney, Francis Lipuma, argued Thursday to the jury that his client had no criminal intent in telling Guide about "the big OC guy" he was guarding and had merely "shot his mouth off" to impress a man he looked up to as a father figure. "Police officers are humans like the rest of us," Lipuma said. "They make mistakes."

Criticizing the investigation as full of "major holes," Lipuma attacked the trial's highest-profile witnesses -- U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald and FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Grant -- for inconsistent testimony about Ambrose's initial, unrecorded FBI interview.

Thanks to Robert Mitchum

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Pizza King Phone Call Highlights Testimony in U.S. Marshal Mob Witness Protection Program Trial

A 14-minute phone call by Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose to a pizza restaurant owned by a family friend with reputed organized-crime ties highlighted the final day of prosecution testimony at Ambrose's trial Tuesday.

FBI Special Agent Edward McNamara testified that phone records showed Ambrose placed a call to The Pizza King, a South Side restaurant owned by his friend William Guide, hours after his second secret detail protecting mob witness Nicholas Calabrese ended. But Ambrose told agents in two 2006 interviews that he didn't speak to Guide until he happened to bump into him weeks after that detail ended, McNamara said.

Ambrose is accused of leaking Calabrese's secret cooperation early in the Family Secrets investigation to Guide, knowing organized crime would learn the details.

McNamara testified that Ambrose admitted telling Guide about Calabrese's visits to Chicago in the hope that Guide would help him track organized-crime fugitives in the future.

At a 2002 wrestling meet, Ambrose told agents, he "boasted" to Guide about protecting a prominent organized-crime witness, McNamara testified. On the second occasion, he told Guide that investigators had driven Calabrese to sites of several decades-old mob slayings.

The first two defense witnesses, Ambrose's colleagues in the Marshals Service, said they had used The Pizza King as a "staging area" for operations while Ambrose served on the fugitive warrant unit. Both praised Ambrose's honesty. "I would trust my life with him," said Supervisory Deputy Marshal Matt Block.

Thanks to Robert Mitchum

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The Mafia Has Been Replaced by Mexian Drug Cartels as the #1 Organized Crime Threat to the United States

Mexican drug cartels have displaced the mafia as the "number one organized crime threat" in the United States, Sen. Joe Lieberman said Monday as his Senate committee heard testimony in Phoenix on border violence.

Lieberman, an independent Democrat from Connecticut, and Sen. John McCain, a Republican on Lieberman's panel, told FOX News that the United States needs to step up the fight against the drug cartels. The two senators were in Arizona, McCain's home state, to hear from local officials on their advice for dealing with the drug-fueled violence many fear is spilling across the border.

"This is literally a war," said Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "They're fighting for the turf."

Lieberman has said he plans to seek $380 million in additional funding to help law enforcement stop the flow of guns and drugs across the border. On Monday, he praised Mexican President Felipe Calderon's campaign to fight the cartels, but said cartels have already taken root north of the border -- driving a kidnapping surge in Phoenix and operating, he said, in at least 230 U.S. metropolitan areas.

"The Mexican drug cartels have become the number one organized crime threat in America, displacing the mafia," Lieberman told FOX News.

McCain said the federal government needs to approve border states' requests for more National Guard troops, something Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said is under review.

"I think we can have significant control of our border," McCain said. "We should heed the governors who are having to fight this ... all the time."

But Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said the Department of Defense has effectively denied her request to send 250 additional National Guard troops to the Arizona-Mexico border to help authorities battle immigrant and drug smuggling and related violence.

The governor told Lieberman's committee meeting Monday that she was disappointed with the denial of her request to bring the number of troops at her state's southern boundary up to 400. One hundred fifty troops are already there as part of a long-standing border assistance program.

The Bush administration sent thousands of Guard troops to the border to perform support duties so that federal border authorities would be freed up to focus on border security. Bush's buildup began in 2006 and ended last year.

Thanks to Fox News

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Mexican Drug Cartels Working with Italian Mobsters

Mexican drug traffickers are funneling cocaine to Italian organized crime, and some shipments are moving through Dallas.

"We've got some of the major cartel members established here dealing their wares in Europe," said James Capra, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Dallas office.

Experts say warring cartels battered by unprecedented U.S. and Mexican government crackdowns are increasingly looking to Europe as an expansion market. Across the Atlantic, demand for cocaine is high and prices are up. A kilo sold for $20,000 in Dallas is worth up to three times as much overseas, experts say.

Mexican cartel operatives in North Texas "are dealing with Italy, Spain, you name it," he said. "They can operate their logistical center from here and coordinate between Mexico, Central America and Europe."

Italian capos are venturing to North Texas to get in on the action, says one mob expert.

"Places like Houston and Dallas are where these criminal organizations are most likely to invest their money," said Antonio Nicaso, an internationally recognized author and lecturer on Italian organized crime. "This is the right time, with the recession going on."

Dallas has long been a recognized distribution hub for drugs smuggled up the Interstate 35 corridor from Laredo. From here, narcotics head out across the country to Atlanta, Chicago, New England and elsewhere.

The revelation that the cartels are forming alliances with Italian syndicates came last year when the DEA revealed that the Mexican Gulf cartel, which supplies Dallas with cocaine, was working with New York associates of the powerful Italian 'Ndrangheta mafia.

Last August, the DEA arrested a Dallas County jailer accused of tipping off drug dealers to what appeared to be a small-time local narcotics conspiracy. The jailer, Brenda Medina Salinas, has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing. As others pleaded guilty and court documents piled up, it became clear that the drug pipeline in that case reached all the way to Europe and the clandestine world of the Camorra.

The Naples-based Camorra traces its roots to the 16th century. Ruthlessly violent when they need to be, Camorra members often smuggle behind quiet business fronts. They're known to work across ethnic and political lines.

Relatively little is known about the local Camorra associate, other than that he had ties to Dallas, Houston and Mexico. The Camorra associate was not charged in the case because agents had not developed enough information to nab him when they were forced to act because of Salinas' leaking information to co-conspirators.

Agents learned the Camorra associate's name last May. That's when DEA agents monitoring a meeting between him and his local contacts asked Dallas police to pull over the Camorra associate's car and check his identity.

He had just met with Higinio "Gino" Hernandez, a 30-year-old flooring installer from Carrollton, and Altin Kore, a 32-year-old Dallas man also charged in conspiracy. Kore is charged in the case but is a fugitive. Hernandez has pleaded guilty.

The DEA began investigating the Hernandez network after being tipped by Italian authorities in the fall of 2007. Their wiretaps on Camorra associates in Italy revealed a Dallas cocaine supplier.

Higinio Hernandez was close to his brother Henry "Tito" Hernandez, 34, of Dallas, who has also pleaded guilty. A third brother, Luis, 35, has been charged but is a fugitive.

Henry and Higinio worked for years as flooring installer subcontractors for Carpet One in Southlake.

"They were leading a double life," said prosecutor Ernest Gonzalez in Plano. "They were doing flooring by day, and at night they were conducting these drug transactions."

It was obvious to those around them that laying floors was not their only source of income.

When they were arrested last fall, federal agents seized Higinio's Cadillac Escalade and Lexus IS30, as well as Henry's Escalade.

Henry and Luis kept snapshots of themselves partying in limos with friends, booze and women. They also had dealings in Cuba, authorities say.

"They didn't hide their money," Gonzalez said.

Authorities say Higinio's supplier in Mexico was half brother Rodolfo Lopez, 35, another fugitive charged in the case.

While living in the U.S., Lopez forged the relationship with the Camorra associate and dealt with cocaine producers in Colombia and elsewhere, authorities say. Lopez eventually relocated to Mexico, where authorities say he directed shipments to his brothers in Dallas.

From Dallas, the cocaine was taken to Houston, where the Camorra associate operated a scented candle export business. It took about a month for the cocaine, smuggled amongst the candles, to make the voyage across the Atlantic to Italy.

Major ports attract Italian organized crime syndicates, which operate in at least 19 U.S. cities, according to the Justice Department's latest Drug Threat Assessment.

The Hernandez case is considered somewhat of an anomaly among law enforcement. Federal agents for years have said that the mafia has no significant grip here.

Still, after a lull, mob influence nationwide seems to be increasing, experts say. Much of their work is partnering with the Mexican distributors and Colombian producers and supplying Europe with cocaine.

It's a good time to expand to Europe, as crackdowns on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border have made smuggling cocaine into Texas increasingly difficult. In the past year, authorities have arrested more than 500 Gulf Cartel and 750 rival Sinaloa Cartel members here and in Mexico.

Extraditions of Mexican narcos to the U.S. for prosecution are on the rise under President Felipe Calderón, who has deployed military troops to quell violence in border towns.

Still, a downside to dabbling in international markets is the increased scrutiny by a larger net of law enforcement agencies – which is what stopped the Hernandez ring.

Last spring, DEA agents in Dallas learned that a meeting was to take place between Higinio and the Camorra associate. On May 15, agents set up surveillance at a Chili's restaurant on Knox Street in Dallas.

It was not a pleasant meeting for Higinio. DEA agents were watching as the Italian poked a finger in his chest. The cocaine they were selling wasn't pure enough, he told Hernandez. Customers were complaining. After the meeting, Higinio reached out to his brother, Henry, to see if his own supplier, Moises Duarte, could get purer powder. But agents were forced to swoop in before any more cocaine made it to Italy.

The reason: Brenda Salinas. The 23-year-old befriended Henry Hernandez and Duarte on the club scene in Dallas, and eventually dated both men.

As a jailer with Dallas County, she had access to law enforcement databases. In July, when agents learned that she was feeding both men information, DEA agents felt they had to act. They arrested Duarte and set up stings on his cohorts.

So far, nine defendants – including Salinas – have pleaded guilty. Among them is an Albanian financial consultant from Dallas. He has ties to an ex-stockbroker being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with an alleged pump-and-dump stock scam.

According to the DEA, the investigation is ongoing.

Thanks to Jason Trahan

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Top FBI Agent in Chicago Testifies that U.S. Marshal Admited He "Made a Huge Mistake"

Chicago's top FBI agent testified today that a deputy U.S. marshal accused of leaking secrets to the mob admitted to federal lawmen that he "made a huge mistake."

Robert Grant is the special agent in charge of the FBI's Chicago office. He testified in the trial of John T. Ambrose, who's on unpaid leave.

Grant says that Ambrose made the admissions in an emotional confrontation.

He says Ambrose initially denied the allegations, then decided he wanted to cooperate and admitted he was friends with people he shouldn't have been.

The 42-year-old Ambrose is charged with leaking information about a key witness in the FBI's Operation Family Secrets investigation - the biggest Chicago mob case in years.

The trial is now going into its second week.

Thanks to WBBM 780

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U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitgerald Testifes at Trial of Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald testified today that the carotid artery in Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose’s neck was pulsating with stress when he was told in 2006 that he was suspected of leaking sensitive information to the mob.

Fitzgerald and Robert Grant, director of the FBI’s Chicago office, confronted Ambrose after getting him to come to the FBI’s office on a ruse.

They told Ambrose they were trying to catch a fugitive terrorist and needed his help. But their actual plan was to let him know he was a suspected leaker, show how seriously they took the security breach in the Witness Security Program and then have Ambrose speak to FBI agents.

"I understood this was the first compromise of the witness protection program," Fitzgerald testified in Ambrose’s trial on charges of leaking information from mob informant Nicholas Calabrese’s secret files.

The files were kept in a safe location where Calabrese was being held in 2002 and 2003 to provide information about mob murders. Ambrose guarded Calabrese on those occasions.

Fitzgerald said he and Grant asked Ambrose to meet them at the FBI headquarters near Roosevelt and Damen to get him away from the federal building downtown. They knew the FBI would ask him to surrender his gun and cell phone when he entered the building. They were concerned what his reaction might be to the investigation — since his own father was convicted in federal court in the 1980s in the Marquette 10 police corruption scandal, Fitzgerald said.

Sitting in a large conference room, Fitzgerald recalled Grant telling Ambrose that his fingerprints were on a secret Calabrese witness file.

"I remember he was very stressed," Fitzgerald said. "The carotid artery on his neck was throbbing."

Initially, Ambrose told Fitzgerald and Grant that he did not know what they were talking about.

Later, he said he would never sell out his badge — and did not take any money. But he did tell them he spoke about his witness security details with a family friend, William Guide, who also went to prison in the Marquette 10 scandal with Ambrose’s late father, according to Fitzgerald.

After Calabrese had visited the Chicago area in 2002 while under witness protection, Ambrose called Guide and told him, "I was working with a witness who was in the Outfit at a very interesting time," Fitzgerald testified.

Ambrose recalled that Guide answered, "Is there anything I need to know?" Fitzgerald testified.

Fitzgerald said Ambrose thought Guide wanted to know if Calabrese was giving up any information on reputed mob boss John "No Nose" DiFronzo.

Ambrose recalled telling Guide he did not know, Fitzgerald testified.

Ambrose then told Fitzgerald and Grant that he had spoken to Guide again after Calabrese’s second visit to Chicago in 2003 when he was taken around the Chicago area to point out crime scenes. Among those places was a parking lot near Sox Park where Calabrese said bodies were buried by the mob.

Ambrose allegedly admitted that he told Guide he took Calabrese to Sox Park — even though Ambrose did not handle that part of Calabrese’s security detail, Fitzgerald said.

Afterward, Ambrose said: "I broke all the rules... but I had no criminal intent," Fitzgerald said.

He also said, "I f----- up I shot my mouth off, but not like you think," Fitzgerald testified.

After the confrontation with Fitzgerald and Grant, Ambrose asked to meet with an uncle who works security for the federal courthouse downtown, as well as two top marshals officials.

He was allowed to speak to those three men. Then Fitzgerald left Ambrose at the FBI building and went back to the federal courthouse in downtown Chicago.

Fitzgerald said he sat in the spectators’ section of a courtroom where Gov. George Ryan was being sentenced in his corruption case. As he watched the sentencing, Fitzgerald took down the notes from his interview with Ambrose, he said.

Thanks to Frank Main

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John "Bulldog" Drummond - It Ain't Pretty, But It's Real

Veteran Chicago newsman John Drummond was covering the trial of some mob henchman when they started giving the snap-brimmed, stogie-chewing reporter a hard time.

Drummond didn't miss a beat. "I turned around and said, 'Hey, we're trying to get your point of the story, but you guys aren't talking. I've got a camera guy down in the lobby. Let's settle it right now. We'll be glad to talk to you.'"

The ne'er-do-wells didn't take Drummond up on his offer. But during a broadcast career that spanned more than four decades, the straight-talking WBBM-Channel 2 reporter nicknamed "Bulldog" scored the inside scoop on many of the area's most notorious crimes and the thugs who often left behind their fingerprints.

In his second book, "It Ain't Pretty, but It's Real," Drummond shares more tales of murder and mayhem in a follow-up to "Thirty Years in the Trenches Covering Crooks, Characters and Capers," released in 1998, which sold about 5,000 copies.

"I felt when I finished the first one I still had a lot good stories to tell," said Drummond, 79, in his trademark baritone voice, before a book signing at the Villa Park library. "Our book has no fabricated quotations. It's all real."

It includes nearly two dozen colorful vignettes, beginning with the haunting 1972 kidnapping of a Hillside police officer who was killed in Villa Park. His murder led to technological advances in suburban police radio equipment.

Drummond shares his encounters with notorious horseman Silas Jayne, who among his long list of crimes was convicted of conspiracy in his brother's October 1970 fatal shooting in Inverness. Jayne long was rumored to be involved in the still-unsolved 1977 disappearance of candy heiress Helen Vorhees Brach.

"He was a fascinating individual whether you liked him or not," Drummond said. "If you did him wrong, he believed in physical retribution, not litigation; he felt something had to be done and done ruthlessly."

Drummond also tells of other unsolved mysteries he covered, such as when 14-year-old Barbara Glueckert of Mount Prospect vanished in 1976 after attending a rock concert, never to be seen again. In a less notorious case, but just as mysterious, Arlington Heights couple Edward Andrews and his wife, Stephania, disappeared after leaving a cocktail party at the former Sheraton Chicago hotel in 1970. Their bodies still haven't been found.

Drummond, a kid from west-central Wisconsin infatuated with Chicago's big city tales and the lure of television, covered crime, politics and sports and had one-on-one's with presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

He was there when the city was rocked by the riots following Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination and the violence that erupted during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as well as the federal 1985 Greylord indictment linking Chicago judges to corruption. But the former U.S. Air Force veteran and radio broadcaster is best known for his work in front of the camera sniffing out leads on the Chicago Outfit. He even came out of semiretirement for the recent Family Secrets trial.

Drummond said the terrorists and mentally ill subjects he's covered posed far more of a threat than the mobsters he's known.

"The Outfit was very well disciplined in its heyday," he said. "It would have been counterproductive to kill or assault a news reporter because it would have put too much heat on the mob. We sort of had diplomatic immunity."

Drummond not only covered colorful characters with true grit, in his checkered sport coats and on-air lexicons, such as "coppers" for police or boxing terms like "palooka," but made for an interesting story himself. He's even made cameos in movies such as, "The Fugitive," "Chain Reaction," and "Above the Law," in which he played himself.

Inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame in 1997, his artfully weathered face and delivery never changed during a period of blow-dried, cookie-cutter television personalities. He outlasted nearly two dozen news directors during his Channel 2 tenure, which began in 1969.

One of his favorite spots was the "Chicago Chronicles" series that ran three times a week on the 6 p.m. news and featured stories on everyone from a prize fighter to cabbie to bartender to mobster to stripper. His sign off was, "You won't read about them in the Chicago guidebooks or travel brochures."

Drummond left the daily grind in 1995, but "Bulldog" said he still has plenty of good stories to tell. He delayed promotion for his second book after his beloved wife, Carol, with whom he raised three children during their 48-year marriage, died in October after a 10-year cancer battle.

"I survived," he said when reflecting back on his storied career. "I think we tried to be fair, and I'm very serious about that. I always tried to get both sides."

Thanks to Christy Gutowski

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Potential Gambino Crime Family Top Boss Sent to Prison

Nicholas "Little Nick" Corozzo, a high-level lieutenant in New York's Gambino crime family, is to spend 13 1/2 years in prison for murder, a judge has ruled.

Corozzo, 69 -- thought to have been in line to take over the mafia crime operation after Peter Gotti was sent to prison for life -- was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court for ordering the 1996 slaying of Luchese crime family associate Robert Arena that also left an innocent bystander dead, the New York Daily News reported Saturday.

Corozzo calmly accepted his sentence, but his daughter, Donna Paolino, cried, the newspaper said. Corozzo kissed his nephew Joseph Corozzo on the cheek as he left the courtroom.

Thanks to UPI

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It's Not the Hollywood Mob, It's the Chicago Outfit

In the mobster movies, a car pulls up and heavy men in hard shoes get out. And in the quiet suburban house, the wiseguy turned government witness stands foolishly in his new kitchen, oblivious in his bathrobe, scratching, boorishly guzzling milk from the carton.

The guns come up. The milk spills. The feds lose another witness.

Happily, it didn't happen in real life to Nicholas Calabrese, the Chicago Outfit hit man turned star government witness in the Family Secrets trial that sent mob bosses, soldiers, even a corrupt cop to prison. Calabrese is very much alive. Yet in federal court this week, the story of Outfit penetration of witness security is playing out in the case of Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose, accused of leaking sensitive information about Calabrese—including his movements—to Chicago's mob.

It's a difficult case to prove, since U.S. District Judge John Grady tossed out key evidence on Thursday. He invited an appeal by telling the jury "I made a mistake" in allowing secret prison tapes to be played linking Ambrose's late father, a Chicago cop convicted in the Marquette 10 police drug scandal, with other crooked cops connected to the Outfit.

Whether Ambrose is found guilty or not, it's obvious that imprisoned Outfit boss Jimmy Marcello and his sleepy brother Michael—who testified in a rumpled orange jumpsuit Thursday—believed they'd cracked the security around Calabrese.

The Marcellos knew of Calabrese being driven around town to murder locations where he briefed the FBI on unsolved hits that formed the basis of Family Secrets, which sent Jimmy and others to prison for life. They knew Calabrese called his wife from a phone dialed as Ambrose guarded Calabrese.

The Marcello brothers knew all about it in January 2003, weeks before I revealed in a Feb. 21, 2003, column that Calabrese was talking to the FBI about a series of unsolved homicides—including the murders of Anthony and Michael Spilotro—and that his federal prison records had disappeared.

Though I'm flattered the Marcellos are loyal readers, and that Ambrose's defense would try to use my column to argue that the leak could have come from just about anywhere, Mickey Marcello testified Thursday that he knew about Calabrese because a law-enforcement source was spilling.

According to Marcello, a fat reputed Chicago mobster, Johnny "Pudgy" Matassa Jr., would tell him what the source learned. Then Marcello would drive to federal prison to tell Jimmy. Then, unbeknownst to the Marcello brothers, the FBI would tape what they said.

"John says his source was giving him a list of names," the balding Mickey testified. "... I had John. He had who he had, who I presumed was a law-enforcement officer."

Matassa and Marcello would meet, but not over checkered tablecloths, candles stuck in bottles of Chianti.

"One time it was Dunkin' Donuts, various restaurants, places like that," Marcello said.

He said Matassa told him about others Nick Calabrese was helping the FBI to investigate, including the boss, John "No Nose" DiFronzo—implicated but not charged in the sensational Spilotro murders. And about Anthony "The Trucker" Zizzo, who later disappeared from a Melrose Park restaurant lot and has never been found.

Mickey Marcello, a font of information, developed a severe case of Fedzheimers when asked about Joe "The Builder" Andriacci, and those two brothers from Bridgeport, Bruno and Frank "Toots" Caruso. Andriacci and the Carusos were not charged.

"Andriacci. 'The Builder,' " said Ambrose lawyer Frank Lipuma during cross-examination. "Is he a mob boss?"

"I don't know," Marcello deadpanned.

"Are you aware of the Carusos who run Chinatown/Bridgeport?" Lipuma asked.

"No," Marcello said. "I'm not aware of that."

"Aren't they associated with organized crime?"

"They know a lot of people," sighed Marcello. "I guess you could say that. That they know a lot of people."

So do the Marcello brothers. They knew a guy who knew a guy who knew Nick Calabrese was taking the FBI to places where murders were committed.

That's not Hollywood.

It's Chicago.

Thanks to John Kass

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