Whether the name of Richie Urso ever makes it into the corruption trial of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich next June is anybody's guess.
You've probably never heard of Richie Urso. But the FBI sure has heard of him.
His is a classic Chicago story, about a beefy yet charming guy born on Grand Avenue, who got in trouble with the law as a kid, only to make political friends and become extremely wealthy.
He was arrested once for jewelry theft in the '60s by the Outfit's top Chicago police detective, William Hanhardt. Urso's alleged partner in the theft was the mob enforcer Frankie Cullotta, who later became the technical adviser for the movie "Casino." The charges against Urso went away. Like I said, it's a Chicago story.
Richie went from the trucking business into real estate, dropping thousands of dollars in contributions to politicians like Mayor Richard Daley and former Gov. Dead Meat. He hung around with bankers, real estate players, insiders at the Cook County Board of (Tax) Review, at Mart Anthony's Restaurant on Randolph Street.
He was worth millions in real estate. He was also the victim of an Outfit shakedown that figured in the FBI's landmark Family Secrets case against top mob bosses.
Now the FBI is going through his business, interested in his associates, including former Mutual Bank of Harvey boss Amrish Mahajan, who has dropped off the political map. Though not charged, Uncle Amrish is under investigation as a top Blagojevich fundraiser. "My husband was excited because he was supposed to go with Amrish and Daley on a trip to India," said Richie's wife, Joanne Urso, recalling what she told federal investigators. "They were all going to go together. But then he died."
Daley and his wife, Maggie, made the trip with a Chicago business delegation.
Amrish Mahajan was a political connection for Daley, Blagojevich and other politicians to the Indian community. His wife, Anita, said, "He did not go on the trip with the mayor."
Anita -- charged with bilking the state out of millions of dollars in phony drug tests -- said her husband was in India, and unreachable.
After Richie's death in 2003, lenders called in their notes. Lawyers demanded big fees. The will that he told Joanne was stashed in a Mutual Bank safe deposit box was never found. And Daley's City Hall, which had never given Richie much trouble, suddenly slapped Joanne with a series of citations on their properties.
City Hall is also demanding she sell Richie's prized 24-acre site just west of the Cook County Jail for millions less than she says it's worth. Ald. George Cardenas (12th) is demanding the site for a park. "I'm getting ripped off by everybody. By everybody," Joanne Urso said.
She told me Richie died of a heart attack on the kitchen floor of a girlfriend's home, on April 15, 2003. "You should call her," she said.
So we did. The woman is Mary Ann Dinovo, who works in human resources for the county tax review board, which handles tax appeals for every parcel of real estate in the county.
"He said, 'What do you got to eat?' " recalled Dinovo. "I'd just made a big tuna salad. He said, 'Can I have some?' The TV was on in the kitchen. The fork dropped out of his hand. He said he felt sick and went to the bathroom."
Minutes later, Richie Urso, his mouth full of tuna salad, was dead at age 61.
"It was karma that we met," Dinovo said. "We loved to do things together, go to shows, go to Navy Pier. ... He'd always play like he was poor. 'I'm just a poor truck driver,' he'd say. Sometimes we'd drive by a piece of property and he'd ask me who owned it."
Did you help him find out who owned it? "Absolutely not," said Dinovo, who said she has not been contacted by federal authorities. "I never knew what the hell he had. I didn't ask. But how do you think I felt when after he died, his friends told me that he was worth, like, $50 million? I said, 'What?' "
In late November of last year, Blagojevich hadn't yet been arrested. But the noose was tightening.
About a week before the FBI knocked on the governor's door, they knocked on Joanne Urso's door. FBI agents and a lawyer from the U.S. attorney's office wanted to chat.
"They asked about everything that was going on with the banks, the lawyers, our properties," Joanne Urso said. "... They asked about Amrish Mahajan and the governor. Oh, and [state Sen.] Jimmy DeLeo, they asked about him."
Only Blagojevich has been charged with a crime, and it's not illegal to know a guy like Richie Urso.
The FBI didn't have to ask about Richie and the Outfit. Without Richie, there may not have been a Family Secrets case that sent three mob bosses to prison.
That's because in 1986, just three months after gangsters Tony and Michael Spilotro were murdered, Richie Urso was the victim of an Outfit shakedown.
It all came out in testimony by mob turncoat Nicholas Calabrese, and chronicled in the book "Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob" by my colleague Jeff Coen.
Nick's brother, Frank Calabrese Sr., and fellow mobster John Fecarotta were competing to squeeze Urso for payments on a juice loan from the 1960s. It wasn't even Urso who borrowed the money. The father of an Urso partner owed the juice.
Urso was growing wealthy by the 1980s, and the mob wanted a piece. Fecarotta demanded that Urso make Fecarotta's house payments. Frank Calabrese Sr. held a knife to Urso's crotch, also demanding cash, according to trial testimony.
By then, Fecarotta had botched the burial of the Spilotro bodies, leaving them in a shallow grave in an Indiana cornfield, allowing them to be found. Fecarotta's shakedown of Richie Urso gave Frank Sr. another reason to lobby Outfit bosses for a Fecarotta solution. "And that sort of put the nail in the coffin," Nick Calabrese testified.
Nick and Frank helped kill Fecarotta on Belmont Avenue, but Nick lost a bloody glove at the scene. Years later, the FBI used DNA from that glove to turn Nick Calabrese into a star government witness.
The Outfit usually doesn't shake down legitimate squares, but targets people who can't run to the government.
"My husband helped all of them," Joanne Urso said. "When people borrowed money, he paid for that. He was paying and paying all his life."
At the time of his death Richie Urso controlled a string of properties, including a South Loop building housing the Pink Monkey strip club, a Cicero property housing the adult bookstore Bare Assets and a Chicago Chinatown neighborhood shopping complex. But the crown jewel was the land near the jail complex.
Now City Hall has moved to take the property. According to public records, Joanne Urso owes Mutual Bank more than $9 million on that property and another huge lot at 6501 W. 51st St.
The city has offered her $7.1 million for the Little Village parcel. Her appraisers say it's worth $13 million. It would be worth much more if Cook County expands the jail.
"They [City Hall] thought I would sell it right away," she said. "But I wasn't going to just give it away. Now it feels they've decided to try and just take it."
Joanne Urso is a woman alone. Her clout died six years ago, on another woman's kitchen floor, with tuna salad in his mouth.
Once, Richie Urso was squeezed by the Outfit. Now his widow is getting squeezed by City Hall. It's a classic Chicago story.
The central theme is that there's nothing deader than dead clout. And now Joanne Urso has to pay for it.
Thanks to John Kass
Sunday, July 12, 2009
John Dillinger Was Bad for the Business of the Chicago Outfit
After watching the excellent new Johnny Depp movie "Public Enemies" -- the story of romanticized desperado John Dillinger's murder in Chicago with the help of the Outfit -- Wings and I realized something.
We were hungry. So we walked over to Volare, the fine Italian restaurant at Grand and St. Clair on Wednesday evening, where three amazing things happened:
1. We had the most superb sausage and peppers in the universe. The sausage was beyond tasty, the peppers perfectly cooked, the sauce to kill for.
2. A group of people came in, the women in red dresses, the men in 1930s gangster outfits, fedoras for the guys, the women with much cleavage, feathered hats, tiny veils, red lips. It was a surprise party for Craig Alton, the fellow who runs Untouchable Tours, taking tourists to famous mob murder scenes, including where Dillinger fell facedown, near the Biograph Theater on Lincoln. We went over to say hello. He seemed like a nice fellow, dressed in a straw hat with suspenders, a fat, painted tie and a curly mustache. They were all going to the movie afterward. I asked: Don't you tour some of the newer sites, like the Melrose Park restaurant where Tony Zizzo disappeared a few years ago? Or the 2001 hit of street boss Anthony "The Hatch" Chiaramonti in Lyons? "No," Alton said, sheepishly. "The guys who did that are still alive."
3. At another table nearby was a handsome Italian family. Mother, father, sons and grandsons, proud, straight backed, polite. They proved their good manners by quietly chanting "chumbolone" at us.
The father, who said his name was John, announced to his family and half the restaurant that he grew up on Chicago's Taylor Street and then in River Forest.
"You wrote about Al Capone, and you also wrote about the real boss, the old man," said John. "You went past Capone and wrote about the real boss."
Paul Ricca?
"Yes," said John. "Paul Ricca."
Capone got all the attention. Ricca, a quiet fellow, never wanted to be a star. He let Capone get the applause and wisecrack with reporters. Ricca made the decisions and built modern organized crime in America. Hollywood has never made a movie about Paul Ricca. That should tell you something.
The Ricca mention by a stranger in a nice restaurant brings me back to "Public Enemies," directed by Michael Mann.
Mann gets it. He was born in Chicago, and produced one of my favorite films, one that actually speaks truth about this city: "Thief," starring James Caan. In that film, real Chicago cops played gangsters, and real gangsters played Chicago detectives. In any other town this might be seen as ironic. Not here.
So in "Public Enemies," Mann allows truth to press up against the Dillinger myth, the one with which generations of Americans were led to believe that The Lady in Red caused Dillinger's demise.
All The Lady in Red got was deported back to Romania, if she got that far and didn't end up on the bottom of the Cal-Sag Canal. And the Chicago Outfit got what it wanted: happy cops and happy FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, who kept winning at the racetracks while insisting there was no organized crime in America.
Mann understands Chicago. I'm not going to spoil anything. Anyone with a room temperature IQ knows how this one ends. But it was Mann's method of revealing this real Chicago truth that I found fascinating. It was in a big speech, by one of the actors playing an Outfit guy, talking to Depp's Dillinger.
Big speeches are usually disasters and belong only in manipulative TV shows like "Law and Order," where the big speech is delivered before the final commercial by a wise old actor with crinkly eyes.
In a movie, the big speech can ruin things. It can pull you out of that willing suspension of disbelief directors work so hard to achieve, and it can plop you back into reality, tasting the stale popcorn and the stale message from the actor delivering the big speech.
You might guess that I'm not a big fan of the big speech. Except the one in "Public Enemies," with the Outfit giving the message to Dillinger.
It's set in a wire room, with bets coming in on the phone, and Dillinger is told that the old freelance days are done. Freelancers bring heat and embarrass the locals. Businesses don't need heat. It costs money.
"You're bad for business," Dillinger is told.
It was almost subtle by comparison to other big speeches. But it was necessary, because the romantic outlaw had to learn the truth from the guys who snap their fingers and have chiefs of detectives and mayors shine their shoes.
Freelancers were entertaining, once. But freelancers cost too much. They get crushed.
Like John Dillinger.
Thanks to John Kass
We were hungry. So we walked over to Volare, the fine Italian restaurant at Grand and St. Clair on Wednesday evening, where three amazing things happened:
1. We had the most superb sausage and peppers in the universe. The sausage was beyond tasty, the peppers perfectly cooked, the sauce to kill for.
2. A group of people came in, the women in red dresses, the men in 1930s gangster outfits, fedoras for the guys, the women with much cleavage, feathered hats, tiny veils, red lips. It was a surprise party for Craig Alton, the fellow who runs Untouchable Tours, taking tourists to famous mob murder scenes, including where Dillinger fell facedown, near the Biograph Theater on Lincoln. We went over to say hello. He seemed like a nice fellow, dressed in a straw hat with suspenders, a fat, painted tie and a curly mustache. They were all going to the movie afterward. I asked: Don't you tour some of the newer sites, like the Melrose Park restaurant where Tony Zizzo disappeared a few years ago? Or the 2001 hit of street boss Anthony "The Hatch" Chiaramonti in Lyons? "No," Alton said, sheepishly. "The guys who did that are still alive."
3. At another table nearby was a handsome Italian family. Mother, father, sons and grandsons, proud, straight backed, polite. They proved their good manners by quietly chanting "chumbolone" at us.
The father, who said his name was John, announced to his family and half the restaurant that he grew up on Chicago's Taylor Street and then in River Forest.
"You wrote about Al Capone, and you also wrote about the real boss, the old man," said John. "You went past Capone and wrote about the real boss."
Paul Ricca?
"Yes," said John. "Paul Ricca."
Capone got all the attention. Ricca, a quiet fellow, never wanted to be a star. He let Capone get the applause and wisecrack with reporters. Ricca made the decisions and built modern organized crime in America. Hollywood has never made a movie about Paul Ricca. That should tell you something.
The Ricca mention by a stranger in a nice restaurant brings me back to "Public Enemies," directed by Michael Mann.
Mann gets it. He was born in Chicago, and produced one of my favorite films, one that actually speaks truth about this city: "Thief," starring James Caan. In that film, real Chicago cops played gangsters, and real gangsters played Chicago detectives. In any other town this might be seen as ironic. Not here.
So in "Public Enemies," Mann allows truth to press up against the Dillinger myth, the one with which generations of Americans were led to believe that The Lady in Red caused Dillinger's demise.
All The Lady in Red got was deported back to Romania, if she got that far and didn't end up on the bottom of the Cal-Sag Canal. And the Chicago Outfit got what it wanted: happy cops and happy FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, who kept winning at the racetracks while insisting there was no organized crime in America.
Mann understands Chicago. I'm not going to spoil anything. Anyone with a room temperature IQ knows how this one ends. But it was Mann's method of revealing this real Chicago truth that I found fascinating. It was in a big speech, by one of the actors playing an Outfit guy, talking to Depp's Dillinger.
Big speeches are usually disasters and belong only in manipulative TV shows like "Law and Order," where the big speech is delivered before the final commercial by a wise old actor with crinkly eyes.
In a movie, the big speech can ruin things. It can pull you out of that willing suspension of disbelief directors work so hard to achieve, and it can plop you back into reality, tasting the stale popcorn and the stale message from the actor delivering the big speech.
You might guess that I'm not a big fan of the big speech. Except the one in "Public Enemies," with the Outfit giving the message to Dillinger.
It's set in a wire room, with bets coming in on the phone, and Dillinger is told that the old freelance days are done. Freelancers bring heat and embarrass the locals. Businesses don't need heat. It costs money.
"You're bad for business," Dillinger is told.
It was almost subtle by comparison to other big speeches. But it was necessary, because the romantic outlaw had to learn the truth from the guys who snap their fingers and have chiefs of detectives and mayors shine their shoes.
Freelancers were entertaining, once. But freelancers cost too much. They get crushed.
Like John Dillinger.
Thanks to John Kass
Russian Organized Crime Enterprise Expanding to Cleveland?
They looted computer buyers, insurance companies and their own countrymen in a series of scams and extortions that caused police in Northeast Ohio to scramble for years.
But were the crimes, committed by Russian immigrants, part of a sinister, organized mob or were they unconnected acts linked only by the ancestry of the criminals?
Authorities say the disjointed Russian criminal network in Cleveland is hardly the structured version of the Italian Mafia during the city's mob wars, but its links offer a shadowy threat that often sprouts into the public's consciousness through white-collar crimes.
This week, a district attorney in upstate New York said an investigation into what he called organized Russian crime in suburban Cleveland plugged a $27 million marijuana pipeline that flowed from an Indian reservation to Northeast Ohio. Three people from Greater Cleveland, including Konstantin Sorin, were among several charged.
Authorities seized $1.3 million in cash, 14 vehicles and two utility trailers. One man, Daniel Simonds, who made drug runs from upstate New York to Cleveland, was found shot to death in his home in May 2008.
Jeffrey Buck, Reminderville police chief, said the marijuana pipeline was organized crime, with Russians involved. He declined to discuss whether the network could be deemed the Russian mob.
Richard Blake, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted dozens of Russian crime cases in Cleveland, acknowledged what he called "criminal elements" in Northeast Ohio, but he stopped short of saying that they were part of a broader, organized mob.
Blake agreed with the work of James Finckenauer, a criminal justice professor at Rutgers University who studied the Russian mob for the U.S. Justice Department. Finckenauer said in an interview Thursday that unlike the better known Italian Mafia, what people call the Russian mob is more of a loosely linked network of criminals with no central leadership.
In his research, Finckenauer found that about 15 organized Russian groups operate in the United States, with a handful maintaining their links overseas. The networks are built of individuals cooperating with each other, rather than orderly ranks following orders from above, according to Finckenauer.
"Generally, there's no capo [or leader] as there was in the traditional La Cosa Nostra," Blake said.
The FBI has investigated Russian crime in Cleveland for years. A spokesman for the FBI declined to say whether Northeast Ohio is a hub of the Russian mob.
About 24,000 people with Russian ancestry live in Cuyahoga County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The hub is Mayfield Heights and other eastern suburbs. The local Russian community grew dramatically in the 1990s, when many Jews fled religious persecution in the former Soviet Union. Cleveland's Jewish community helped to resettle more than 6,000 Russian Jews.
Some Russian leaders say little about crime. Olga Sonis, a Beachwood-based refugee counselor who has helped to resettle hundreds of Russian immigrants, said she has never heard about mob troubles here. Grigoriy Topolynskiy, the president of the American Association of Jews from the former Soviet Union, told a reporter he wouldn't discuss it Thursday, saying, "I'll give you a call in a few days."
Others say the Russian mob is an easy stereotype to make, so those Russians accused of crimes are automatically linked to the "mob," similar to Italians and the Mafia.
"There are multitudes of Russian people here who are warm, good people," said Kenneth Kovach, the executive director of the International Community Council in Cleveland. "They are the vast majority."
The council is a networking group representing most of the international cultures of Northeast Ohio. Kovach also the choir director at St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Tremont.
But Kovach said he believes he sees evidence of what Blake and other authorities say exists in Cleveland, threads of a loosely linked group of criminals. He said he attended an FBI citizens academy class a few years ago. During a break, he and some agents talked about organized crime. Kovach, who has made 19 trips to Russia in the past 15 years, said an agent told him that outside of New York, Cleveland is a key place for the Russian mob.
"I believe it is here, but I'm not sure of the extent of it," he said. "I believe it is in the white-collar crime, not in crimes of violence."
Some major crimes committed by Russians in Cuyahoga County have followed that pattern. In 2001, Blake, the federal prosecutor, helped convict about 25 Russian immigrants in an insurance scam involving high-priced cars. The case stemmed from an undercover FBI investigation.
That same year, police found two Russian men stopped along Interstate 271, near Fairmount Boulevard, with machine guns, silencers, duct tape, bulletproof vests and ammunition. They were prepared to rob a computer store owner.
In 1999, Igor Abramovsky, a Twinsburg computer store manager, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for bilking customers and threatening to kill people who complained about his bad business. A few years earlier, two Russian men approached a half-dozen Cleveland business owners and demanded a total of about $25,000 to $50,000 in loans from their fellow countrymen, which were never paid back.
Thanks to John Caniglia
But were the crimes, committed by Russian immigrants, part of a sinister, organized mob or were they unconnected acts linked only by the ancestry of the criminals?
Authorities say the disjointed Russian criminal network in Cleveland is hardly the structured version of the Italian Mafia during the city's mob wars, but its links offer a shadowy threat that often sprouts into the public's consciousness through white-collar crimes.
This week, a district attorney in upstate New York said an investigation into what he called organized Russian crime in suburban Cleveland plugged a $27 million marijuana pipeline that flowed from an Indian reservation to Northeast Ohio. Three people from Greater Cleveland, including Konstantin Sorin, were among several charged.
Authorities seized $1.3 million in cash, 14 vehicles and two utility trailers. One man, Daniel Simonds, who made drug runs from upstate New York to Cleveland, was found shot to death in his home in May 2008.
Jeffrey Buck, Reminderville police chief, said the marijuana pipeline was organized crime, with Russians involved. He declined to discuss whether the network could be deemed the Russian mob.
Richard Blake, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted dozens of Russian crime cases in Cleveland, acknowledged what he called "criminal elements" in Northeast Ohio, but he stopped short of saying that they were part of a broader, organized mob.
Blake agreed with the work of James Finckenauer, a criminal justice professor at Rutgers University who studied the Russian mob for the U.S. Justice Department. Finckenauer said in an interview Thursday that unlike the better known Italian Mafia, what people call the Russian mob is more of a loosely linked network of criminals with no central leadership.
In his research, Finckenauer found that about 15 organized Russian groups operate in the United States, with a handful maintaining their links overseas. The networks are built of individuals cooperating with each other, rather than orderly ranks following orders from above, according to Finckenauer.
"Generally, there's no capo [or leader] as there was in the traditional La Cosa Nostra," Blake said.
The FBI has investigated Russian crime in Cleveland for years. A spokesman for the FBI declined to say whether Northeast Ohio is a hub of the Russian mob.
About 24,000 people with Russian ancestry live in Cuyahoga County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The hub is Mayfield Heights and other eastern suburbs. The local Russian community grew dramatically in the 1990s, when many Jews fled religious persecution in the former Soviet Union. Cleveland's Jewish community helped to resettle more than 6,000 Russian Jews.
Some Russian leaders say little about crime. Olga Sonis, a Beachwood-based refugee counselor who has helped to resettle hundreds of Russian immigrants, said she has never heard about mob troubles here. Grigoriy Topolynskiy, the president of the American Association of Jews from the former Soviet Union, told a reporter he wouldn't discuss it Thursday, saying, "I'll give you a call in a few days."
Others say the Russian mob is an easy stereotype to make, so those Russians accused of crimes are automatically linked to the "mob," similar to Italians and the Mafia.
"There are multitudes of Russian people here who are warm, good people," said Kenneth Kovach, the executive director of the International Community Council in Cleveland. "They are the vast majority."
The council is a networking group representing most of the international cultures of Northeast Ohio. Kovach also the choir director at St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Tremont.
But Kovach said he believes he sees evidence of what Blake and other authorities say exists in Cleveland, threads of a loosely linked group of criminals. He said he attended an FBI citizens academy class a few years ago. During a break, he and some agents talked about organized crime. Kovach, who has made 19 trips to Russia in the past 15 years, said an agent told him that outside of New York, Cleveland is a key place for the Russian mob.
"I believe it is here, but I'm not sure of the extent of it," he said. "I believe it is in the white-collar crime, not in crimes of violence."
Some major crimes committed by Russians in Cuyahoga County have followed that pattern. In 2001, Blake, the federal prosecutor, helped convict about 25 Russian immigrants in an insurance scam involving high-priced cars. The case stemmed from an undercover FBI investigation.
That same year, police found two Russian men stopped along Interstate 271, near Fairmount Boulevard, with machine guns, silencers, duct tape, bulletproof vests and ammunition. They were prepared to rob a computer store owner.
In 1999, Igor Abramovsky, a Twinsburg computer store manager, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for bilking customers and threatening to kill people who complained about his bad business. A few years earlier, two Russian men approached a half-dozen Cleveland business owners and demanded a total of about $25,000 to $50,000 in loans from their fellow countrymen, which were never paid back.
Thanks to John Caniglia
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Stonewall Gay Bar Crackdown Originally Targeted Mafia Activities in New York
I WAS perhaps the unlikeliest person in the world to cover the Stonewall riots for The Village Voice. It was June 27, 1969. I had graduated from West Point only three weeks earlier and was spending my summer leave in New York before reporting for duty at Fort Benning, in Georgia. After a late dinner in Chinatown, I was about to enter the Lion’s Head, a writers’ hangout on Christopher Street near the Voice’s offices, when I blundered straight into the first moments of the police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar a couple of doors down the street. Even a newly minted second lieutenant of infantry could see that it was a story.
Across the street from the Stonewall, a crowd of maybe 100 was watching the police march out a dozen or so bar patrons and employees into a paddy wagon. The young arrestees paused at the back of the waiting paddy wagon and struck vampy poses, smiling and waving to the crowd.
This was not the way gays were supposed to behave when they were arrested, and the officers started shoving them with their nightsticks. People in the crowd yelled at the police to stop. The officers responded by telling them to get off the street. Someone started throwing pocket change at the officers, and others began rocking the paddy wagon. Then, from the back of the crowd, beer cans and bottles flew through the air. In a hail of coins and street debris, the paddy wagon drove away with two patrol cars, and the remaining officers retreated inside the Stonewall, locking the doors behind them.
Soon enough, loose cobblestones from a nearby repaving site rained down on the bar’s windows. An uprooted parking meter was used to ram the club’s doors. Someone lighted a wad of newspaper and threw it through the bar’s broken window, starting a small fire. The policemen inside the Stonewall put it out with a fire hose, which they then turned on the crowd.
Instead of dispersing, the people in the street cavorted sarcastically in the spray, teasing the officers with suggestive come-ons. A few moments later, patrol cars came screaming down Christopher Street from Sixth Avenue. And at approximately 2 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, the gay men decided they weren’t going to take it anymore. The clash outside the Stonewall went on for 48 more hours and become famous as the riots that started the gay-rights movement.
Amazingly, there was no TV coverage and only a few paragraphs in the city’s daily papers. Myths and controversies have arisen in the vacuum left by the mainstream news media.
One involves the argument about who is, and isn’t, a “veteran” of Stonewall. A handful can prove they were there by pointing to themselves in the famous photograph, taken by Fred McDarrah, that was on the cover of the following week’s Voice, accompanying my article and another by a colleague, Howard Smith.
For the record, I orchestrated that image. Fred was famously parsimonious as a photographer, in the habit of taking only a few photos for a story. Outside the Stonewall that night, he took a look at the scene and asked me to get a bunch of rioters together. I rounded them up and posed them on a stoop, and Fred got his shot.
A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.
I was there on the Saturday and Sunday nights when the Village’s established gay community, having heard about the incidents of Friday night, rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island and elsewhere. Although several older activists participated in the riots, most stood on the edges and watched.
Many told me they were put off by the way the younger gays were taunting the police — forming chorus lines and singing, “We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls!” Many of the older gay men lived largely closeted lives, had careers to protect and years of experience with discrimination. They believed the younger generation’s behavior would lead to even more oppression.
In part, at least, they were correct. It would take several more years before major New York political figures came out in favor of employment anti-discrimination laws, and much longer before other gay rights would be realized.
Another myth is that the police raid on the Stonewall was part of a broader crackdown on gay bars in the summer of 1969, a mayoral election year. In fact, the Stonewall operation was the work of a Police Department deputy inspector, Seymour Pine, and officers from the morals unit, and they carried it out without the knowledge of the officers of the local police precinct, whom they suspected of taking payoffs from the Stonewall and other Mafia-run gay bars in the Village.
Deputy Inspector Pine had two stated reasons for the raid: the Stonewall was selling liquor without a license, which it was, and it was being used by a Mafia blackmail ring that was setting up gay patrons who worked on Wall Street, which also seems likely.
The owner of the Stonewall, Tony Lauria, was reputed to be a front man for Matty Ianniello (known as “Matty the Horse”), a capo in the Genovese crime family who oversaw a string of clubs in the city. New York’s gay-bar scene at the time was a corrupt system apparently designed to benefit mobster owners, who served watered-down drinks at inflated prices, often made with ill-gotten liquor from truck hijackings.
It worked like this: citing disorderly behavior laws, the State Liquor Authority ruled that bars catering to openly homosexual patrons were not entitled to liquor licenses. Gay bars were thus made effectively illegal, which left them to the mob, which happily ran clubs without liquor licenses and paid the police to look the other way. Several more years would pass before the first clubs with openly gay owners would be licensed — places like the Ballroom on West Broadway and Reno Sweeney on West 13th Street — and the mob lost its stranglehold, an early legacy of Stonewall.
On Sunday, the third night of the riots, I ran into Allen Ginsberg on the street and accompanied him into the reopened Stonewall, where he talked and danced with some of the young revelers. Afterward, as the last of the riot police packed up to go home, I walked with him toward his home in the East Village. He said everything seemed different after the riots — how grim, even sad, gay bars were compared to the “beautiful” scene at the Stonewall that night.
As I turned south on Lafayette Street, he waved and cried out, “Defend the fairies!” His jolly farewell was obviously meant in jest, because after Stonewall, they didn’t need defending any more.
Thanks to Lucian K. Truscott IV
Across the street from the Stonewall, a crowd of maybe 100 was watching the police march out a dozen or so bar patrons and employees into a paddy wagon. The young arrestees paused at the back of the waiting paddy wagon and struck vampy poses, smiling and waving to the crowd.
This was not the way gays were supposed to behave when they were arrested, and the officers started shoving them with their nightsticks. People in the crowd yelled at the police to stop. The officers responded by telling them to get off the street. Someone started throwing pocket change at the officers, and others began rocking the paddy wagon. Then, from the back of the crowd, beer cans and bottles flew through the air. In a hail of coins and street debris, the paddy wagon drove away with two patrol cars, and the remaining officers retreated inside the Stonewall, locking the doors behind them.
Soon enough, loose cobblestones from a nearby repaving site rained down on the bar’s windows. An uprooted parking meter was used to ram the club’s doors. Someone lighted a wad of newspaper and threw it through the bar’s broken window, starting a small fire. The policemen inside the Stonewall put it out with a fire hose, which they then turned on the crowd.
Instead of dispersing, the people in the street cavorted sarcastically in the spray, teasing the officers with suggestive come-ons. A few moments later, patrol cars came screaming down Christopher Street from Sixth Avenue. And at approximately 2 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, the gay men decided they weren’t going to take it anymore. The clash outside the Stonewall went on for 48 more hours and become famous as the riots that started the gay-rights movement.
Amazingly, there was no TV coverage and only a few paragraphs in the city’s daily papers. Myths and controversies have arisen in the vacuum left by the mainstream news media.
One involves the argument about who is, and isn’t, a “veteran” of Stonewall. A handful can prove they were there by pointing to themselves in the famous photograph, taken by Fred McDarrah, that was on the cover of the following week’s Voice, accompanying my article and another by a colleague, Howard Smith.
For the record, I orchestrated that image. Fred was famously parsimonious as a photographer, in the habit of taking only a few photos for a story. Outside the Stonewall that night, he took a look at the scene and asked me to get a bunch of rioters together. I rounded them up and posed them on a stoop, and Fred got his shot.
A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.
I was there on the Saturday and Sunday nights when the Village’s established gay community, having heard about the incidents of Friday night, rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island and elsewhere. Although several older activists participated in the riots, most stood on the edges and watched.
Many told me they were put off by the way the younger gays were taunting the police — forming chorus lines and singing, “We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls!” Many of the older gay men lived largely closeted lives, had careers to protect and years of experience with discrimination. They believed the younger generation’s behavior would lead to even more oppression.
In part, at least, they were correct. It would take several more years before major New York political figures came out in favor of employment anti-discrimination laws, and much longer before other gay rights would be realized.
Another myth is that the police raid on the Stonewall was part of a broader crackdown on gay bars in the summer of 1969, a mayoral election year. In fact, the Stonewall operation was the work of a Police Department deputy inspector, Seymour Pine, and officers from the morals unit, and they carried it out without the knowledge of the officers of the local police precinct, whom they suspected of taking payoffs from the Stonewall and other Mafia-run gay bars in the Village.
Deputy Inspector Pine had two stated reasons for the raid: the Stonewall was selling liquor without a license, which it was, and it was being used by a Mafia blackmail ring that was setting up gay patrons who worked on Wall Street, which also seems likely.
The owner of the Stonewall, Tony Lauria, was reputed to be a front man for Matty Ianniello (known as “Matty the Horse”), a capo in the Genovese crime family who oversaw a string of clubs in the city. New York’s gay-bar scene at the time was a corrupt system apparently designed to benefit mobster owners, who served watered-down drinks at inflated prices, often made with ill-gotten liquor from truck hijackings.
It worked like this: citing disorderly behavior laws, the State Liquor Authority ruled that bars catering to openly homosexual patrons were not entitled to liquor licenses. Gay bars were thus made effectively illegal, which left them to the mob, which happily ran clubs without liquor licenses and paid the police to look the other way. Several more years would pass before the first clubs with openly gay owners would be licensed — places like the Ballroom on West Broadway and Reno Sweeney on West 13th Street — and the mob lost its stranglehold, an early legacy of Stonewall.
On Sunday, the third night of the riots, I ran into Allen Ginsberg on the street and accompanied him into the reopened Stonewall, where he talked and danced with some of the young revelers. Afterward, as the last of the riot police packed up to go home, I walked with him toward his home in the East Village. He said everything seemed different after the riots — how grim, even sad, gay bars were compared to the “beautiful” scene at the Stonewall that night.
As I turned south on Lafayette Street, he waved and cried out, “Defend the fairies!” His jolly farewell was obviously meant in jest, because after Stonewall, they didn’t need defending any more.
Thanks to Lucian K. Truscott IV
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
One Year Anniversary of World Wide Mafia Wars
Zynga, the largest developer of social games, announced the one year anniversary of social gaming’s most popular crime-based game, Mafia Wars. Since its launch in June 2008, Mafia Wars has grown to more than four million daily active users; in the last three months, alone, the game has doubled the number of daily players.
In celebration of Mafia Wars’ one year anniversary, Zynga also launched Cuba, an entirely new destination, and extends the amount of time players can enjoy Mafia Wars. Players who have reached the rank of “Consigliere” (level 35) can leave New York City and cross the Cuban border which has been outside the reach of the Mafia’s influence for almost 50 years. Now with Cuba as a destination, players can expand their influence and increase their power with new loot, weapons, businesses, collections and achievements. Cuba offers more than 100 levels of additional jobs, items, a unique property system, and opens up a wealth of new opportunities including:
* 40+ new jobs to carry out
* 52 brand new weapons, armor and vehicles
* Four businesses that can be purchased and upgraded
“Mafia Wars is on its way to becoming a cult classic,” said Bill Mooney, executive producer, MMO Studios, Zynga. “We have the most dedicated and loyal players who have made the game a hit and we want to thank them by extending the game in a dynamic destination that makes the game unique and challenging.”
The Mafia Wars franchise has reached key milestones during its first year. The iPhone version which launched in April contains rich, high-quality graphics and interface including original animations and sounds, creating a fun and addictive gaming experience. Mafia Wars was also recently voted Best Game of the Year in the Webby People’s Voice Awards where more than 50,000 votes were cast by people around the world for their favorite sites, video, and ads. Additionally, Mafia Wars has garnered over two million fans on its Facebook Page making it the highest ranked page.
In celebration of Mafia Wars’ one year anniversary, Zynga also launched Cuba, an entirely new destination, and extends the amount of time players can enjoy Mafia Wars. Players who have reached the rank of “Consigliere” (level 35) can leave New York City and cross the Cuban border which has been outside the reach of the Mafia’s influence for almost 50 years. Now with Cuba as a destination, players can expand their influence and increase their power with new loot, weapons, businesses, collections and achievements. Cuba offers more than 100 levels of additional jobs, items, a unique property system, and opens up a wealth of new opportunities including:
* 40+ new jobs to carry out
* 52 brand new weapons, armor and vehicles
* Four businesses that can be purchased and upgraded
“Mafia Wars is on its way to becoming a cult classic,” said Bill Mooney, executive producer, MMO Studios, Zynga. “We have the most dedicated and loyal players who have made the game a hit and we want to thank them by extending the game in a dynamic destination that makes the game unique and challenging.”
The Mafia Wars franchise has reached key milestones during its first year. The iPhone version which launched in April contains rich, high-quality graphics and interface including original animations and sounds, creating a fun and addictive gaming experience. Mafia Wars was also recently voted Best Game of the Year in the Webby People’s Voice Awards where more than 50,000 votes were cast by people around the world for their favorite sites, video, and ads. Additionally, Mafia Wars has garnered over two million fans on its Facebook Page making it the highest ranked page.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, Taken Over by The Mob
Not so long ago, the faces of gaming on social networks were those of zombies, vampires, and cuddly virtual pets. Now it's more along the lines of Michael Corleone or Tony Soprano.
You've probably seen it in your news feed: From Facebook to MySpace and now Twitter, Mafia-themed games have more or less taken over. Mobsters, a game created by development company Playdom, is the most popular application on MySpace's platform. Mafia Wars, owned by Zynga, is a huge hit on Facebook. The Social Gaming Network has an iPhone app called Mafia: Respect and Retaliation. And earlier this month, a Twitter-based game called 140 Mafia launched. The craze appears to have started with a Facebook app called Mob Wars, which was built by a smaller company called Psycho Monkey.
The premises of most of these games are the same. You can found or join a "mob" with friends from the social network that the game has been built on. You can carry out missions, including "killing" other players in rival mobs, in order to earn points. Your activities are broadcast, via news feeds or Twitter posts, to your friends on the network in question.
With the mobster gaming craze, social-network developers may have found the secret to bringing multiplayer role-playing games--long the lucrative domain of ultrageeks--fully into the mainstream. They can build elaborate role-playing scenarios with points, levels, teams, and weapons, but without the nerdy stigma that's become attached to fantasy-themed games in the vein of World of Warcraft. (A 2006 episode of the Comedy Central cartoon "South Park" summed this up well.)
"A lot of the core architecture is very similar to role-playing games in the past, in the way that levels and achievements and so forth are often themed around the certain topic but are pretty generic, actually," said Justin Smith, who runs the blogs Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games. "When you compare a dragon game to a mob-based game, they're actually pretty much the same thing with different content."
"People just really like the crime genre," said Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, which publishes Mafia Wars. The mobster game is currently the company's most popular app, with 15 million active users across social networks Facebook, MySpace, and Tagged. "GTA (Grand Theft Auto) and a lot of derivative games of GTA top the charts, and I think that it's more those games feel more culturally relevant to people than a lot of other games that go into other genres that are either historical or more fantasy. I think that people like fantasies that are closer to reality."
There's another side to it: Organized crime in the real world tends to be concerned with the illicit transfer of wealth in one form or another (drugs, laundered money, gambling, you name it). When you take the popular perception of the mobster lifestyle and transport it to a gaming environment, there are plenty of opportunities to bring money into the mix. Most of the Web's Mafia-themed role-playing games make money from display ads as well as the sale of virtual goods, and some make it possible to earn extra points and "level up" by completing offers and surveys. It's no secret that some social gaming companies are making a ton of money, but mobster games are a particularly lucrative enterprise.
"(It's about) climbing your way to the top, and the status, and the ego of being the biggest and the best and the toughest," said Jason Bailey, CEO and co-founder of Super Rewards, the company that has partnered with 140 Mafia to power its payment platform. In 140 Mafia, for example, players who want to speed up their "recovery" from a round of game play can petition to the "godfather" for a favor (and that'll cost them real money).
Plus, Bailey said, it gets personal: "It has that small violence factor as well, being able to feed on people and put them on the hit list. When somebody does that to you, when somebody kills your character...the rage that it conjures up in people is much much stronger and they're much more willing to retaliate than in a sports game or a racing-themed game."
As with any online sensation, though, the question remains: Is this just a fad? From film noir to "The Godfather" to "The Sopranos," mobster themes have a solid shelf life to them, but mobster games on social networks could easily fade from favor if something more exciting comes along. But the real lasting power, social gaming insiders said, is in the fact that Web development makes it possible to keep a game in a constant stage of evolution. Once these games hit critical mass--which Mafia games arguably have--it's easier to keep people around.
Short attention spans
They're also low-maintenance, said Dave Kahn, head product manager for Zynga's Mafia Wars.
"I would say the difference between what makes Mafia Wars more popular over time than your traditional console game or your traditional hardcore game is that you can have the same experience with five minutes of play and you can interact with your friends," Kahn said. "I would say a game like GTA or a game of that crime genre would be much more popular if you could interact with your friends on a daily basis, and it doesn't require much time investment for you and your friends to have that satisfactory interaction."
"You're able to come in and come out in short spurts. You can play for 30 seconds, you can play for five minutes," Jason Bailey said. "It's not like a first-person shooter or a real-time strategy game where, if the phone rings, you're going to get shot. It's really easy to come in and out of these games."
On the flip side, though, casual players who haven't put a massive time investment into a game are quite likely to be more fickle about whether they stick around or not. Time will tell when it comes to just how "sticky" mobster games turn out to be for players who aren't completely hardcore.
But beyond attention span issues, perhaps the biggest challenge to the creators of mobster games is that there are simply too many of them already, and the companies that make them have fallen into courtroom infighting that bears an ironic resemblance to actual mob warfare. There's an outstanding lawsuit between Zynga and Playdom, for example, over the latter's allegedly illegal use of the Mafia Wars name in advertising its own Mobsters game. And Mob Wars creator Psycho Monkey sued Zynga over copyright infringement in February.
"There's a variety of litigation that's still pending, and I think it just generally reflects the current culture of game development on social networks right now," Inside Social Games' Justin Smith said. "There's a lot of rapid iteration based on adapting other games and twisting them in a very slight way, and there haven't been many good examples of cases in which the IP has been successfully protected in the courts. So I think it will really be interesting in seeing how some of these cases play out over the next few months."
As we learned in the Scrabulous-Wordscraper-Lexulous affair last year, in which the manufacturer of board game Scrabble used litigation to force a Facebook-based imitator to change its name, intellectual property laws for games are complicated, and extremely similar games may legally coexist as long as they don't share a few key features. But it's not clear whether the mob wars over Mob Wars and its ilk will be without carnage.
"There's literally 20 or 30 mob-themed games on the Facebook and MySpace platforms, and that's conservative," Jason Bailey said. "If people find something that works, they copy it and copy it and copy it, ad nauseam."
The playing field for mobster games, as well as any other games on social networks that make money through virtual goods and transactions, could also change dramatically when social networks start introducing payment systems of their own. Facebook will start to do this soon, and it's also been circulated as a possible business model for Twitter. It's unclear what the rules will be in either case.
But Super Rewards' Jason Bailey--whose company will be a competitor to Facebook's in-house virtual currency platform, it should be said--thinks the dominance of mobster games won't change much if Facebook brings new rules to the applications on its platform. It may be too late for the massive social network to be the real kingpin when it comes to monetizing the likes of the mobster game craze.
"Facebook's issue, I believe, is it's hard to tack something like this on later...companies go out and spend millions of dollars building games for your platform," he said. Were Facebook to start requiring a cut of the revenues, "there would be literally a riot of people with torches at (CEO Mark) Zuckerberg's house tonight complaining about it."
Well, that's a whole different kind of mob.
Thanks to Caroline McCarthy
You've probably seen it in your news feed: From Facebook to MySpace and now Twitter, Mafia-themed games have more or less taken over. Mobsters, a game created by development company Playdom, is the most popular application on MySpace's platform. Mafia Wars, owned by Zynga, is a huge hit on Facebook. The Social Gaming Network has an iPhone app called Mafia: Respect and Retaliation. And earlier this month, a Twitter-based game called 140 Mafia launched. The craze appears to have started with a Facebook app called Mob Wars, which was built by a smaller company called Psycho Monkey.
The premises of most of these games are the same. You can found or join a "mob" with friends from the social network that the game has been built on. You can carry out missions, including "killing" other players in rival mobs, in order to earn points. Your activities are broadcast, via news feeds or Twitter posts, to your friends on the network in question.
With the mobster gaming craze, social-network developers may have found the secret to bringing multiplayer role-playing games--long the lucrative domain of ultrageeks--fully into the mainstream. They can build elaborate role-playing scenarios with points, levels, teams, and weapons, but without the nerdy stigma that's become attached to fantasy-themed games in the vein of World of Warcraft. (A 2006 episode of the Comedy Central cartoon "South Park" summed this up well.)
"A lot of the core architecture is very similar to role-playing games in the past, in the way that levels and achievements and so forth are often themed around the certain topic but are pretty generic, actually," said Justin Smith, who runs the blogs Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games. "When you compare a dragon game to a mob-based game, they're actually pretty much the same thing with different content."
"People just really like the crime genre," said Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, which publishes Mafia Wars. The mobster game is currently the company's most popular app, with 15 million active users across social networks Facebook, MySpace, and Tagged. "GTA (Grand Theft Auto) and a lot of derivative games of GTA top the charts, and I think that it's more those games feel more culturally relevant to people than a lot of other games that go into other genres that are either historical or more fantasy. I think that people like fantasies that are closer to reality."
There's another side to it: Organized crime in the real world tends to be concerned with the illicit transfer of wealth in one form or another (drugs, laundered money, gambling, you name it). When you take the popular perception of the mobster lifestyle and transport it to a gaming environment, there are plenty of opportunities to bring money into the mix. Most of the Web's Mafia-themed role-playing games make money from display ads as well as the sale of virtual goods, and some make it possible to earn extra points and "level up" by completing offers and surveys. It's no secret that some social gaming companies are making a ton of money, but mobster games are a particularly lucrative enterprise.
"(It's about) climbing your way to the top, and the status, and the ego of being the biggest and the best and the toughest," said Jason Bailey, CEO and co-founder of Super Rewards, the company that has partnered with 140 Mafia to power its payment platform. In 140 Mafia, for example, players who want to speed up their "recovery" from a round of game play can petition to the "godfather" for a favor (and that'll cost them real money).
Plus, Bailey said, it gets personal: "It has that small violence factor as well, being able to feed on people and put them on the hit list. When somebody does that to you, when somebody kills your character...the rage that it conjures up in people is much much stronger and they're much more willing to retaliate than in a sports game or a racing-themed game."
As with any online sensation, though, the question remains: Is this just a fad? From film noir to "The Godfather" to "The Sopranos," mobster themes have a solid shelf life to them, but mobster games on social networks could easily fade from favor if something more exciting comes along. But the real lasting power, social gaming insiders said, is in the fact that Web development makes it possible to keep a game in a constant stage of evolution. Once these games hit critical mass--which Mafia games arguably have--it's easier to keep people around.
Short attention spans
They're also low-maintenance, said Dave Kahn, head product manager for Zynga's Mafia Wars.
"I would say the difference between what makes Mafia Wars more popular over time than your traditional console game or your traditional hardcore game is that you can have the same experience with five minutes of play and you can interact with your friends," Kahn said. "I would say a game like GTA or a game of that crime genre would be much more popular if you could interact with your friends on a daily basis, and it doesn't require much time investment for you and your friends to have that satisfactory interaction."
"You're able to come in and come out in short spurts. You can play for 30 seconds, you can play for five minutes," Jason Bailey said. "It's not like a first-person shooter or a real-time strategy game where, if the phone rings, you're going to get shot. It's really easy to come in and out of these games."
On the flip side, though, casual players who haven't put a massive time investment into a game are quite likely to be more fickle about whether they stick around or not. Time will tell when it comes to just how "sticky" mobster games turn out to be for players who aren't completely hardcore.
But beyond attention span issues, perhaps the biggest challenge to the creators of mobster games is that there are simply too many of them already, and the companies that make them have fallen into courtroom infighting that bears an ironic resemblance to actual mob warfare. There's an outstanding lawsuit between Zynga and Playdom, for example, over the latter's allegedly illegal use of the Mafia Wars name in advertising its own Mobsters game. And Mob Wars creator Psycho Monkey sued Zynga over copyright infringement in February.
"There's a variety of litigation that's still pending, and I think it just generally reflects the current culture of game development on social networks right now," Inside Social Games' Justin Smith said. "There's a lot of rapid iteration based on adapting other games and twisting them in a very slight way, and there haven't been many good examples of cases in which the IP has been successfully protected in the courts. So I think it will really be interesting in seeing how some of these cases play out over the next few months."
As we learned in the Scrabulous-Wordscraper-Lexulous affair last year, in which the manufacturer of board game Scrabble used litigation to force a Facebook-based imitator to change its name, intellectual property laws for games are complicated, and extremely similar games may legally coexist as long as they don't share a few key features. But it's not clear whether the mob wars over Mob Wars and its ilk will be without carnage.
"There's literally 20 or 30 mob-themed games on the Facebook and MySpace platforms, and that's conservative," Jason Bailey said. "If people find something that works, they copy it and copy it and copy it, ad nauseam."
The playing field for mobster games, as well as any other games on social networks that make money through virtual goods and transactions, could also change dramatically when social networks start introducing payment systems of their own. Facebook will start to do this soon, and it's also been circulated as a possible business model for Twitter. It's unclear what the rules will be in either case.
But Super Rewards' Jason Bailey--whose company will be a competitor to Facebook's in-house virtual currency platform, it should be said--thinks the dominance of mobster games won't change much if Facebook brings new rules to the applications on its platform. It may be too late for the massive social network to be the real kingpin when it comes to monetizing the likes of the mobster game craze.
"Facebook's issue, I believe, is it's hard to tack something like this on later...companies go out and spend millions of dollars building games for your platform," he said. Were Facebook to start requiring a cut of the revenues, "there would be literally a riot of people with torches at (CEO Mark) Zuckerberg's house tonight complaining about it."
Well, that's a whole different kind of mob.
Thanks to Caroline McCarthy
Friday, July 03, 2009
Carmen "The Cheeseman" DiNunzio, The Reputed Underboss of the New England Mob, Pleads Guilty
The reputed underboss of the New England mob has pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges in a plea deal that will send him to prison for six years.
Carmen "The Cheeseman" DiNunzio pleaded guilty Wednesday to bribing an undercover FBI agent posing as a state highway department official in an attempt to win a $6 million contract on the Big Dig highway project.
DiNunzio is expected to plead guilty next week to separate state gambling and extortion charges.
Prosecutors have agreed to wrap both cases together under one plea agreement and to recommend a sentence of six years in federal prison. Sentencing was scheduled for Sept. 24.
Authorities say the 51-year-old DiNunzio has been underboss of the New England branch of the Mafia since 2004
Carmen "The Cheeseman" DiNunzio pleaded guilty Wednesday to bribing an undercover FBI agent posing as a state highway department official in an attempt to win a $6 million contract on the Big Dig highway project.
DiNunzio is expected to plead guilty next week to separate state gambling and extortion charges.
Prosecutors have agreed to wrap both cases together under one plea agreement and to recommend a sentence of six years in federal prison. Sentencing was scheduled for Sept. 24.
Authorities say the 51-year-old DiNunzio has been underboss of the New England branch of the Mafia since 2004
Mob Hit on Reputed Bonanno Crime Family Solider Anthony Seccafico?
A man identified by a law enforcement official as a soldier in the Bonanno crime family who was under federal investigation was shot to death early Thursday morning near a bus stop on Staten Island, the authorities said.
The man, Anthony Seccafico, was waiting for a bus near his town house on Ilyssa Way about 4:30 a.m. when an unknown number of attackers opened fire, law enforcement officials said.
Witnesses told the police that they heard seven shots and passers-by discovered Mr. Seccafico bleeding in the street about 100 feet from the bus stop, on Arthur Kill Road, the authorities said. Mr. Seccafico, 46, who was waiting for the X17 bus to take him to work in Manhattan, was shot several times and apparently tried to flee his attackers, investigators said. He was taken to Staten Island University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival, the police said.
On Thursday, detectives were trying to determine the motive behind the killing. A police official said it was possible that it was related to Mr. Seccafico’s criminal history, including a 1996 case in Coney Island in which he was charged with four counts of assault and illegal possession of a weapon.
The medical examiner’s office has scheduled an autopsy for Friday morning.
In November 2002, Mr. Seccafico was arrested with 19 others on charges of participating in a $2.5 million-a-year gambling ring as part of a Bonanno crew.
Mr. Seccafico pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges, and received a three-month sentence. Also involved in that case was Salvatore Montagna, who had been elevated to the head of the Bonanno family and was recently deported.
A federal law enforcement official said Mr. Seccafico had been under federal investigation when he was killed, though the official would not describe the nature of the investigation. When Mr. Seccafico was arrested in 2002, he was in the mobster Patrick DeFilippo’s crew, the official said. Mr. DeFilippo, who lived in Manhattan, operated out of the Bronx, and Mr. Seccafico “spent a little time in the Bronx,” the official said. Mr. DeFilippo is serving 40 years in federal prison for racketeering conspiracy, gambling and loan sharking. Mr. Seccafico became a “made” member of the Bonanno crime family after 2003, the official said.
The official said that according to a list obtained by federal authorities, Mr. Seccafico was proposed for membership in the family by Mr. DeFilippo.
An investigator familiar with Mr. Seccafico said he had been a laborer and a member of Local 79 of the Construction and General Building Laborers’ Union. That investigator said Mr. Seccafico was “just a runner” for the 2002 gambling operation.
Before his arrest in connection with the organized crime ring, Mr. Seccafico had a criminal record dating to 1984, when he was arrested on drug and gun charges. He served less than a year for selling a controlled substance. After his 1996 arrest in Coney Island, Mr. Seccafico pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a weapon and served eight days in jail and three years’ probation.
In stark contrast to his life as a soldier for the New York mob, Mr. Seccafico was described by neighbors as a blue-collar family man who worked to support his wife and two young children. “They’re very, very nice people,” said Mona Gaber, a neighbor of the Seccafico family. Ms. Gaber said she would often see Mr. Seccafico come home still dirty from his job as a construction worker.
Thanks to Dominick Tao
The man, Anthony Seccafico, was waiting for a bus near his town house on Ilyssa Way about 4:30 a.m. when an unknown number of attackers opened fire, law enforcement officials said.
Witnesses told the police that they heard seven shots and passers-by discovered Mr. Seccafico bleeding in the street about 100 feet from the bus stop, on Arthur Kill Road, the authorities said. Mr. Seccafico, 46, who was waiting for the X17 bus to take him to work in Manhattan, was shot several times and apparently tried to flee his attackers, investigators said. He was taken to Staten Island University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival, the police said.
On Thursday, detectives were trying to determine the motive behind the killing. A police official said it was possible that it was related to Mr. Seccafico’s criminal history, including a 1996 case in Coney Island in which he was charged with four counts of assault and illegal possession of a weapon.
The medical examiner’s office has scheduled an autopsy for Friday morning.
In November 2002, Mr. Seccafico was arrested with 19 others on charges of participating in a $2.5 million-a-year gambling ring as part of a Bonanno crew.
Mr. Seccafico pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges, and received a three-month sentence. Also involved in that case was Salvatore Montagna, who had been elevated to the head of the Bonanno family and was recently deported.
A federal law enforcement official said Mr. Seccafico had been under federal investigation when he was killed, though the official would not describe the nature of the investigation. When Mr. Seccafico was arrested in 2002, he was in the mobster Patrick DeFilippo’s crew, the official said. Mr. DeFilippo, who lived in Manhattan, operated out of the Bronx, and Mr. Seccafico “spent a little time in the Bronx,” the official said. Mr. DeFilippo is serving 40 years in federal prison for racketeering conspiracy, gambling and loan sharking. Mr. Seccafico became a “made” member of the Bonanno crime family after 2003, the official said.
The official said that according to a list obtained by federal authorities, Mr. Seccafico was proposed for membership in the family by Mr. DeFilippo.
An investigator familiar with Mr. Seccafico said he had been a laborer and a member of Local 79 of the Construction and General Building Laborers’ Union. That investigator said Mr. Seccafico was “just a runner” for the 2002 gambling operation.
Before his arrest in connection with the organized crime ring, Mr. Seccafico had a criminal record dating to 1984, when he was arrested on drug and gun charges. He served less than a year for selling a controlled substance. After his 1996 arrest in Coney Island, Mr. Seccafico pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a weapon and served eight days in jail and three years’ probation.
In stark contrast to his life as a soldier for the New York mob, Mr. Seccafico was described by neighbors as a blue-collar family man who worked to support his wife and two young children. “They’re very, very nice people,” said Mona Gaber, a neighbor of the Seccafico family. Ms. Gaber said she would often see Mr. Seccafico come home still dirty from his job as a construction worker.
Thanks to Dominick Tao
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Mafia Drama, Brotherhood, Cancelled
Showtime has confirmed that the drama Brotherhood, about two Irish brothers on opposite sides of the law, has been cancelled.
After three seasons on TV the show, set in Providence, will not be renewed. Brotherhood's story was one told many times before, but with a New England mafia twist: Tommy (Jason Clarke) and Michael (Jason Isaacs) Caffee, Irish-American brothers, find themselves on enemy fronts, the first being a policeman and the second a mafia professional.
E! Online's Watch With Kristin reports that, "News that the ax had officially dropped was first reported when TVShowsonDVD.com discovered that the season-three discs were to be branded 'the final season.' The cancellation news might have been surprising even for the show's own cast since, according to the same article on E!, actress Fionnula Flanagan was awaiting news from Showtime regarding the show's "on hiatus" status in February.
Thanks to Romina Massa
After three seasons on TV the show, set in Providence, will not be renewed. Brotherhood's story was one told many times before, but with a New England mafia twist: Tommy (Jason Clarke) and Michael (Jason Isaacs) Caffee, Irish-American brothers, find themselves on enemy fronts, the first being a policeman and the second a mafia professional.
E! Online's Watch With Kristin reports that, "News that the ax had officially dropped was first reported when TVShowsonDVD.com discovered that the season-three discs were to be branded 'the final season.' The cancellation news might have been surprising even for the show's own cast since, according to the same article on E!, actress Fionnula Flanagan was awaiting news from Showtime regarding the show's "on hiatus" status in February.
Thanks to Romina Massa
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Reputed Chicago Outfit Informant Battles Cook County State's Attorney for Child Custody
A politically connected Cook County state's attorney's office employee threatened to use her position to expose her ex-boyfriend as a federal informant against the Outfit, voice mail messages played in court suggest.
Prosecutors are investigating two cell phone messages that narcotics unit administrator Patti Simone left the father of her children, Nicky Rosales, during a bitter split earlier this year, Cook County State's Atty. Anita Alvarez's spokeswoman Sally Daly said. The tapes were played by Rosales on Friday for a family court judge handling the couple's custody battle.
In the first message, Simone refers to several alleged Outfit-connected suburbs and neighborhoods, threatening to expose Rosales unless he moves out of their Palos Hills apartment. "Everyone will know that you are working with the government," she warns. "Do you understand?"
In the second, Simone tells Rosales, "There are several investigators who will be more than happy to let certain people know you are cooperating with the Feds -- do you understand?"
Simone left the messages April 4 after Rosales told her he had a gun and implied he would abduct the couple's daughter and son, evidence showed.
Rosales had sent a series of "scary" text messages to her before she responded by recording the voice mail messages, an emotional Simone on Friday told Judge Martha Mills. "I thought he was capable of anything," Simone added, saying Rosales had held a gun to her head in 2008.
She and Rosales, who had been together on-and-off for 10 years, finally separated this spring. Mills on Friday awarded Simone a protection order against Rosales, saying she found his claims that he hadn't threatened Simone "incredible."
Rosales denies pending charges of violating an earlier interim protection order.
Daly said the state's attorney could still bring "disciplinary or criminal" charges against Simone over the voice mail messages.
Simone works in Alvarez's narcotics unit. She has continued to work at the Criminal Court building since the tapes surfaced. She is the daughter of Palos Township Democratic Committeeman Sam Simone.
The godfather to her children is Richie "The Cat" Catazone, reputed to run the Chicago Outfit's 26th Street gambling operation, while Rosales' cousin is convicted mob hit man Harry Aleman, Rosales said.
Speaking outside court, he denied being a federal informant.
Simone declined to comment. Her attorney, Joseph Parisi, said the judge's decision to grant an order of protection showed Simone was in the right.
FBI spokeswoman Virginia Wright declined to comment.
Thanks to Kim Jannsen
Prosecutors are investigating two cell phone messages that narcotics unit administrator Patti Simone left the father of her children, Nicky Rosales, during a bitter split earlier this year, Cook County State's Atty. Anita Alvarez's spokeswoman Sally Daly said. The tapes were played by Rosales on Friday for a family court judge handling the couple's custody battle.
In the first message, Simone refers to several alleged Outfit-connected suburbs and neighborhoods, threatening to expose Rosales unless he moves out of their Palos Hills apartment. "Everyone will know that you are working with the government," she warns. "Do you understand?"
In the second, Simone tells Rosales, "There are several investigators who will be more than happy to let certain people know you are cooperating with the Feds -- do you understand?"
Simone left the messages April 4 after Rosales told her he had a gun and implied he would abduct the couple's daughter and son, evidence showed.
Rosales had sent a series of "scary" text messages to her before she responded by recording the voice mail messages, an emotional Simone on Friday told Judge Martha Mills. "I thought he was capable of anything," Simone added, saying Rosales had held a gun to her head in 2008.
She and Rosales, who had been together on-and-off for 10 years, finally separated this spring. Mills on Friday awarded Simone a protection order against Rosales, saying she found his claims that he hadn't threatened Simone "incredible."
Rosales denies pending charges of violating an earlier interim protection order.
Daly said the state's attorney could still bring "disciplinary or criminal" charges against Simone over the voice mail messages.
Simone works in Alvarez's narcotics unit. She has continued to work at the Criminal Court building since the tapes surfaced. She is the daughter of Palos Township Democratic Committeeman Sam Simone.
The godfather to her children is Richie "The Cat" Catazone, reputed to run the Chicago Outfit's 26th Street gambling operation, while Rosales' cousin is convicted mob hit man Harry Aleman, Rosales said.
Speaking outside court, he denied being a federal informant.
Simone declined to comment. Her attorney, Joseph Parisi, said the judge's decision to grant an order of protection showed Simone was in the right.
FBI spokeswoman Virginia Wright declined to comment.
Thanks to Kim Jannsen
FBI Reports on John Dillinger Crossing the Line
An elderly janitor walked into the cell block of the Lake County Jail at Crown Point, Indiana. The date: March 3, 1934. It was a relatively new facility, built onto the back of the sheriff’s house in 1926, easy to clean, impossible to escape from. The addition of a notorious prisoner—John Dillinger—would prove that. Or so the sheriff thought.
As the janitor entered the cell, the prisoner jumped him and jammed a gun—actually a piece of wood carved in the shape of one—into his ribs. Quickly, through a combination of bravado and desperation, Dillinger tricked half a dozen guards back to the cell block, confiscated their weapons, and jailed the jailors.
On that day, Dillinger was 30 years old.
He was of medium build and average height, with brown, thinning hair. His most distinguishing feature was a roguish smile, which he had put to good use in a series of press photos with the prosecuting attorney Robert Estill and the sheriff upon his extradition to Crown Point. The chummy nature of the photos contributed to both these officials losing their jobs that year. And Dillinger’s charm had already begun to captivate the American people, who began to see him as part Robin Hood, part vicious thug.
The notorious gangster had been captured in Arizona two months earlier. He was wanted in connection with the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana police officer named William O’Malley. At the time Dillinger was not on our radar; he had committed no federal crimes. But we had been assisting Ohio law enforcement in their search for him after was freed from a Lima jail by his confederates in the fall of 1933.
Now Dillinger had escaped once more. In making the break, he’d stolen the sheriff’s car and driven it to Chicago, 50 or so miles northwest of Crown Point. In the process, he crossed the Indiana/Illinois border and violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act, commonly called the “Dyer Act.” John Dillinger was now a federal fugitive and an FBI subject.
Over the next several months, the Bureau tracked Dillinger and a wide array of violent criminals who worked with him—making mistakes along the way, but ultimately bringing these violent criminals to justice.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of that chase. More importantly, it is the 75th anniversary of the emergence of the FBI as an organization of national and international stature.
The Bureau’s success in dealing with the gangsters led to significant changes in the FBI and law enforcement nationwide.
Thanks to the FBI.
As the janitor entered the cell, the prisoner jumped him and jammed a gun—actually a piece of wood carved in the shape of one—into his ribs. Quickly, through a combination of bravado and desperation, Dillinger tricked half a dozen guards back to the cell block, confiscated their weapons, and jailed the jailors.
On that day, Dillinger was 30 years old.
He was of medium build and average height, with brown, thinning hair. His most distinguishing feature was a roguish smile, which he had put to good use in a series of press photos with the prosecuting attorney Robert Estill and the sheriff upon his extradition to Crown Point. The chummy nature of the photos contributed to both these officials losing their jobs that year. And Dillinger’s charm had already begun to captivate the American people, who began to see him as part Robin Hood, part vicious thug.The notorious gangster had been captured in Arizona two months earlier. He was wanted in connection with the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana police officer named William O’Malley. At the time Dillinger was not on our radar; he had committed no federal crimes. But we had been assisting Ohio law enforcement in their search for him after was freed from a Lima jail by his confederates in the fall of 1933.
Now Dillinger had escaped once more. In making the break, he’d stolen the sheriff’s car and driven it to Chicago, 50 or so miles northwest of Crown Point. In the process, he crossed the Indiana/Illinois border and violated the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act, commonly called the “Dyer Act.” John Dillinger was now a federal fugitive and an FBI subject.
Over the next several months, the Bureau tracked Dillinger and a wide array of violent criminals who worked with him—making mistakes along the way, but ultimately bringing these violent criminals to justice.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of that chase. More importantly, it is the 75th anniversary of the emergence of the FBI as an organization of national and international stature.
The Bureau’s success in dealing with the gangsters led to significant changes in the FBI and law enforcement nationwide.
Thanks to the FBI.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Top 10 Best Hollywood Mobsters of All-Time
As moviegoers prepare for Johnny Depp's John Dillinger facing off against Christian Bale's FBI man Melvin Purvis in "Public Enemies," the mob is on the mind - so here, for your debating pleasure, are 10 of the greatest "trouble boys" to ever grace the screen, small or big. And before you snatch your gats to drill this jingle-brained finkeloo, nibble one and pipe the rules: These are mobsters, as in members of highly organized crime syndicates, not just criminals who are well organized (sorry, Robert De Niro in "Heat"), free agents (such as Dillinger's gang) or lugs with bean-shooters (sorry, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in "Bonnie and Clyde" and James Cagney in "White Heat"). All silk so far?
10 Roman Moroni (Richard Dimitri, "Johnny Dangerously"):
Just as Al Capone went to the big house for income-tax evasion, the malevolently malapropping Moroni ("You fargin sneaky bastage ... bunch of fargin iceholes") was convicted of murdering ... the English language. The headlines blared his punishment: "Moroni Deported to Sweden. Says He's Not From There."
9 Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci, "GoodFellas (Two-Disc Special Edition)"):
Martin Scorsese's masterwork may be the greatest mobster movie ever, mostly because of his gripping direction. The cocaine freak-out sequence should be taught in film-school editing classes. Pesci's Tommy, with the deadliest case of short man's disease this side of Kim Jong Il, made lines such as, "Funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you?" part of the tough-guy lexicon.
8 Al Capone (Robert De Niro, "The Untouchables (Special Collector's Edition)"):
"I want him dead! I want his family dead! ... I want to go there in the middle of the night and piss on his ashes!" Chicago's poet laureate, David Mamet, was the perfect guy to write the screenplay, and De Niro, in yet another stunningly transformative performance, was the last guy you'd want pacing behind you with a baseball bat.
7 Sonny Corleone (James Caan, "The Godfather - The Coppola Restoration"):
The trash-can beating he administered to his brother-in-law is a classic. Viewers suffered tollbooth phobia that had nothing to do with misplaced FasTrak passes for years after witnessing Sonny's fate (which Mad magazine attributed to his trying to pay with a large bill). Bonus points: The DVD includes a great Easter egg (hidden feature) of Caan doing a Marlon Brando impersonation.
6 Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen, "Eastern Promises (Widescreen Edition)"):
If you had never seen Mortensen before this film, you'd think he was that guy, that the filmmakers had just pulled some Russian dude out of a high-end London nightclub. Equal parts preening macho narcissist and cold-blooded hatchet man, he tops even "Borat" for best naked fight.
5 Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro, "The Godfather Part II - The Coppola Restoration"):
The up-and-coming De Niro was picking up the origin story of an already-iconic character that had won an Oscar for an iconic actor (Marlon Brando in "The Godfather"), and he had to do it in Sicilian, a dialect he had learned just a few years before for another film. His portrayal is not only feeling, thinking and reactive, but it also creates a bridge to Brando's work that brilliantly illustrates the character's evolution.
4 Bill "The Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis, "Gangs of New York (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)"):
One of the great screen villains, which we can now see as Daniel Plainview with one more pin of civility removed. A movie monster on the order of Hannibal Lecter, but with a heart and that disturbing false eye. There is, by the way, no truth to the Internet rumor that Day-Lewis was originally to play "Priest" Vallon to Robert De Niro's Bill.
3 Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini, "The Sopranos - The Complete Series"):
The best TV mobster ever. Like Vito Corleone, a multilayered family man - but he's more flawed and real. Bonus points: There's a classic Easter egg in the bonus disc of the original "Godfather" set in which Tony and the boys try to watch a bootleg copy of the 1972 movie.
2 Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando, "The Godfather - The Coppola Restoration"):
Brando gets the nod over De Niro's portrayal of the title character because of the older version's dark mystery and the already arrived quality of the kindly patriarch, who also made people wet their pants in fear. The improvised orange-in-the-mouth ape scene alone, in the greater context of the head of the Corleone crime family, is enough for enshrinement here.
1 Tony Montana (Al Pacino, "Scarface (Widescreen Anniversary Edition)"):
One of the rare ultra-violent movies that women love as much as men do. Its excesses are its successes, from the nosedive into a molehill of yayo to the chain-saw-in-the-shower scene. But the true test of this performance's greatness is to imagine its famous lines delivered by someone - anyone - else. Could even Daniel Day-Lewis or Denzel Washington or Robert De Niro have so unforgettably spat out, "Say hello to my little friend"? No, there is no one else who could have quite pulled off that haircut, that suit, that accent, that je ne sais quoi. It's Pacino waaaay over the top, where he belongs. And considering the character's lingering cultural impact, especially in hip-hop, it surpasses even the Godfather himself. So take a look at the bad guy. You won't see his kind again.
Runners-up: Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson, "Pulp Fiction"), Don Logan (Ben Kingsley, "Sexy Beast"), Furio Giunta (Federico Castelluccio, "The Sopranos - The Complete Series"), Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio, "Bugsy Malone"), Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington, "American Gangster (2-Disc Unrated Extended Edition)") and Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi, "The Sopranos - The Complete Series").
Thanks to Michael Ordona
10 Roman Moroni (Richard Dimitri, "Johnny Dangerously"):
Just as Al Capone went to the big house for income-tax evasion, the malevolently malapropping Moroni ("You fargin sneaky bastage ... bunch of fargin iceholes") was convicted of murdering ... the English language. The headlines blared his punishment: "Moroni Deported to Sweden. Says He's Not From There."
9 Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci, "GoodFellas (Two-Disc Special Edition)"):
Martin Scorsese's masterwork may be the greatest mobster movie ever, mostly because of his gripping direction. The cocaine freak-out sequence should be taught in film-school editing classes. Pesci's Tommy, with the deadliest case of short man's disease this side of Kim Jong Il, made lines such as, "Funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you?" part of the tough-guy lexicon.
8 Al Capone (Robert De Niro, "The Untouchables (Special Collector's Edition)"):
"I want him dead! I want his family dead! ... I want to go there in the middle of the night and piss on his ashes!" Chicago's poet laureate, David Mamet, was the perfect guy to write the screenplay, and De Niro, in yet another stunningly transformative performance, was the last guy you'd want pacing behind you with a baseball bat.
7 Sonny Corleone (James Caan, "The Godfather - The Coppola Restoration"):
The trash-can beating he administered to his brother-in-law is a classic. Viewers suffered tollbooth phobia that had nothing to do with misplaced FasTrak passes for years after witnessing Sonny's fate (which Mad magazine attributed to his trying to pay with a large bill). Bonus points: The DVD includes a great Easter egg (hidden feature) of Caan doing a Marlon Brando impersonation.
6 Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen, "Eastern Promises (Widescreen Edition)"):
If you had never seen Mortensen before this film, you'd think he was that guy, that the filmmakers had just pulled some Russian dude out of a high-end London nightclub. Equal parts preening macho narcissist and cold-blooded hatchet man, he tops even "Borat" for best naked fight.
5 Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro, "The Godfather Part II - The Coppola Restoration"):
The up-and-coming De Niro was picking up the origin story of an already-iconic character that had won an Oscar for an iconic actor (Marlon Brando in "The Godfather"), and he had to do it in Sicilian, a dialect he had learned just a few years before for another film. His portrayal is not only feeling, thinking and reactive, but it also creates a bridge to Brando's work that brilliantly illustrates the character's evolution.
4 Bill "The Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis, "Gangs of New York (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)"):
One of the great screen villains, which we can now see as Daniel Plainview with one more pin of civility removed. A movie monster on the order of Hannibal Lecter, but with a heart and that disturbing false eye. There is, by the way, no truth to the Internet rumor that Day-Lewis was originally to play "Priest" Vallon to Robert De Niro's Bill.
3 Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini, "The Sopranos - The Complete Series"):
The best TV mobster ever. Like Vito Corleone, a multilayered family man - but he's more flawed and real. Bonus points: There's a classic Easter egg in the bonus disc of the original "Godfather" set in which Tony and the boys try to watch a bootleg copy of the 1972 movie.
2 Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando, "The Godfather - The Coppola Restoration"):
Brando gets the nod over De Niro's portrayal of the title character because of the older version's dark mystery and the already arrived quality of the kindly patriarch, who also made people wet their pants in fear. The improvised orange-in-the-mouth ape scene alone, in the greater context of the head of the Corleone crime family, is enough for enshrinement here.
1 Tony Montana (Al Pacino, "Scarface (Widescreen Anniversary Edition)"):
One of the rare ultra-violent movies that women love as much as men do. Its excesses are its successes, from the nosedive into a molehill of yayo to the chain-saw-in-the-shower scene. But the true test of this performance's greatness is to imagine its famous lines delivered by someone - anyone - else. Could even Daniel Day-Lewis or Denzel Washington or Robert De Niro have so unforgettably spat out, "Say hello to my little friend"? No, there is no one else who could have quite pulled off that haircut, that suit, that accent, that je ne sais quoi. It's Pacino waaaay over the top, where he belongs. And considering the character's lingering cultural impact, especially in hip-hop, it surpasses even the Godfather himself. So take a look at the bad guy. You won't see his kind again.
Runners-up: Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson, "Pulp Fiction"), Don Logan (Ben Kingsley, "Sexy Beast"), Furio Giunta (Federico Castelluccio, "The Sopranos - The Complete Series"), Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio, "Bugsy Malone"), Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington, "American Gangster (2-Disc Unrated Extended Edition)") and Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi, "The Sopranos - The Complete Series").
Thanks to Michael Ordona
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Was Michael Jackson Targeted for Death by the Mafia?
Speculation is building that Michael Jackson was targeted by members of the mafia in Los Angeles in what was believed an attempt by various disgruntled creditors to recover millions of dollars of money owed on failed business ventures.
Sources in Los Angeles believe various "high-ranking" members of the underworld had been given orders to approach Michael Jackson in an attempt to recover money given the stars apparent rise in fortunes.
The star is believed in an act of desperation may have overdosed on sleeping pills in a desperate last ditch attempt to avoid a grueling 50 date tour in London and confrontations with the underworld.
An autopsy of Michael Jackson is likely to take place in the next few days, with funeral arrangement yet to be confirmed.
Thanks to The London Daily News
Sources in Los Angeles believe various "high-ranking" members of the underworld had been given orders to approach Michael Jackson in an attempt to recover money given the stars apparent rise in fortunes.
The star is believed in an act of desperation may have overdosed on sleeping pills in a desperate last ditch attempt to avoid a grueling 50 date tour in London and confrontations with the underworld.
An autopsy of Michael Jackson is likely to take place in the next few days, with funeral arrangement yet to be confirmed.
Thanks to The London Daily News
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Hollywood's Love Affair with Gangsters Continues to Grow
What is it about the gangster that has always captivated our public imagination?
In America, since the very first black- and-white silent films, we’ve been mesmerized by the fedoras, the guns, the women and the nightlife. These were the men who broke all the rules - when they weren’t writing their own rules - and lived the good life as a result.
In this way, they aren’t just criminals but also a certain special sort of capitalist. Take away the nasty, back-alley murders and they are living the American dream: building up mini corporate empires and reaping the profits.
We’re less than a week away from the next gangster movie epic: "Public Enemies," which opens in theaters Wednesday. Attracting the talents of such considerable film artists as director Michael Mann and actors Johnny Depp and Christian Bale it’s clear that gangsters remain as fascinating a force today as they were for the authors and filmmakers of a century ago.
What’s different this time around, however, is that "Public Enemies" focuses on not just one, but two emerging power structures. Less a claustrophobic view of the mafia power structure ("The Godfather"), "Public Enemies" is about a clash of two titans in the public sphere: bank robber John Dillinger (Depp) who wanted to be the renegade celebrity of his time, and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), who brought all his forces to bear in his hunt for Dillinger because he was convinced that this was the case that could legitimize and nationalize the FBI.
It’s a face-off of epic proportions, but hardly the first. Here’s a quick look back at the evolution of the movie gangster:
Scarface
(1932)
More people are familiar with the 1983 remake starring Al Pacino, but the very first "Scarface," released in 1928, was a bleak affair. So, too, was the Howard Hawks remake in 1932, which viewed the gangster life as an apocalyptic one - a sure-fire path to the grave. Made back in the day when gangs and mafia kingpins really did rule with an iron fist, this was a movie that reflected its era.
The Public Enemy
(1931)
It’s truly shocking to go back and rent "The Public Enemy" some 77 years after it was first released. This is an intense, vicious, fierce movie - and it comes as a surprise how very little about this old-time movie seems soft or dated. It stars James Cagney as an up-and-comer in Chicago, working his way through the ranks of gangsters even as a murder threatens to unleash havoc amid those in the underground community. Cagney is cool and calculating, and downright nefarious when he needs to be. We can smell the smoke, and feel the ferocity of the time period.
Kiss Me Deadly
(1955)
One of my personal favorites, "Kiss Me Deadly" brought gangsters and the film noir genre into the nuclear age. Mike Hammer was a firebrand of a private eye, quick to fire off the first punch or the first bullet. And in "Kiss Me Deadly," a mysterious hitchhiker draws him into a web of violence and mystery, as everyone seems determined to take possession of a mysterious suitcase that glows whenever you open it (it was the inspiration behind the golden glowing suitcase in Quentin Tarantino’s "Pulp Fiction.")
The Godfather Part II - The Coppola Restoration
(1974)
Francis Ford Coppola was brilliant in the way he structured this sequel to "The Godfather," paralleling a modern-day story starring Al Pacino with a turn-of-the-century subplot involving Robert De Niro (playing Pacino’s father when still a young man). Establishing friendships with local businessmen, stocking up favors and slowly starting to exert his influence among the establishment, we come to see the way that thughood can be a grass-roots affair. Forget tyrant, De Niro is almost a populist in the way he helps the community and earns their undying allegiance in the process.
Road to Perdition (Widescreen Edition)
(2002)
A modern and moody spin on the standard gangster thriller, "Road to Perdition" went beyond the blood and the testosterone to offer us a wave of sincere emotion beneath the surface. Paul Newman plays the Chicago mob boss in 1931, and Tom Hanks works for him directly. Hanks’ world is flipped upside down when his son follows him one night and witnesses what daddy does for a living. More than just about a gangster ruling with an iron fist, "Road to Perdition" poses the question of whether violence is truly manly, or if it’s a weak man’s attempt to provide for a family. And as Hanks shares his trade with his son, we see the way that bad traditions are passed down through the generations, a cycle of dark despair.
Heat
(1995)
It’s also worth taking a moment to acknowledge the last gangster movie that was made by "Public Enemies" director Michael Mann. "Heat" viewed the gangster and the cop as equals, with Al Pacino in the part of the detective and Robert De Niro in the part of the master criminal. Sitting down to coffee as they try to intimidate - and relate to - one another, "Heat" is less about good and evil, crime and justice, than about seeing the men of the law and the men of the shadows as two personas cut from the same cloth. Both are obsessed, vigilant, and cut-throat; "Heat" is truly one of the great thrillers.
Thanks to Steven Snyder
In America, since the very first black- and-white silent films, we’ve been mesmerized by the fedoras, the guns, the women and the nightlife. These were the men who broke all the rules - when they weren’t writing their own rules - and lived the good life as a result.
In this way, they aren’t just criminals but also a certain special sort of capitalist. Take away the nasty, back-alley murders and they are living the American dream: building up mini corporate empires and reaping the profits.
We’re less than a week away from the next gangster movie epic: "Public Enemies," which opens in theaters Wednesday. Attracting the talents of such considerable film artists as director Michael Mann and actors Johnny Depp and Christian Bale it’s clear that gangsters remain as fascinating a force today as they were for the authors and filmmakers of a century ago.
What’s different this time around, however, is that "Public Enemies" focuses on not just one, but two emerging power structures. Less a claustrophobic view of the mafia power structure ("The Godfather"), "Public Enemies" is about a clash of two titans in the public sphere: bank robber John Dillinger (Depp) who wanted to be the renegade celebrity of his time, and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), who brought all his forces to bear in his hunt for Dillinger because he was convinced that this was the case that could legitimize and nationalize the FBI.
It’s a face-off of epic proportions, but hardly the first. Here’s a quick look back at the evolution of the movie gangster:
Scarface
(1932)
More people are familiar with the 1983 remake starring Al Pacino, but the very first "Scarface," released in 1928, was a bleak affair. So, too, was the Howard Hawks remake in 1932, which viewed the gangster life as an apocalyptic one - a sure-fire path to the grave. Made back in the day when gangs and mafia kingpins really did rule with an iron fist, this was a movie that reflected its era.
The Public Enemy
(1931)
It’s truly shocking to go back and rent "The Public Enemy" some 77 years after it was first released. This is an intense, vicious, fierce movie - and it comes as a surprise how very little about this old-time movie seems soft or dated. It stars James Cagney as an up-and-comer in Chicago, working his way through the ranks of gangsters even as a murder threatens to unleash havoc amid those in the underground community. Cagney is cool and calculating, and downright nefarious when he needs to be. We can smell the smoke, and feel the ferocity of the time period.
Kiss Me Deadly
(1955)
One of my personal favorites, "Kiss Me Deadly" brought gangsters and the film noir genre into the nuclear age. Mike Hammer was a firebrand of a private eye, quick to fire off the first punch or the first bullet. And in "Kiss Me Deadly," a mysterious hitchhiker draws him into a web of violence and mystery, as everyone seems determined to take possession of a mysterious suitcase that glows whenever you open it (it was the inspiration behind the golden glowing suitcase in Quentin Tarantino’s "Pulp Fiction.")
The Godfather Part II - The Coppola Restoration
(1974)
Francis Ford Coppola was brilliant in the way he structured this sequel to "The Godfather," paralleling a modern-day story starring Al Pacino with a turn-of-the-century subplot involving Robert De Niro (playing Pacino’s father when still a young man). Establishing friendships with local businessmen, stocking up favors and slowly starting to exert his influence among the establishment, we come to see the way that thughood can be a grass-roots affair. Forget tyrant, De Niro is almost a populist in the way he helps the community and earns their undying allegiance in the process.
Road to Perdition (Widescreen Edition)
(2002)
A modern and moody spin on the standard gangster thriller, "Road to Perdition" went beyond the blood and the testosterone to offer us a wave of sincere emotion beneath the surface. Paul Newman plays the Chicago mob boss in 1931, and Tom Hanks works for him directly. Hanks’ world is flipped upside down when his son follows him one night and witnesses what daddy does for a living. More than just about a gangster ruling with an iron fist, "Road to Perdition" poses the question of whether violence is truly manly, or if it’s a weak man’s attempt to provide for a family. And as Hanks shares his trade with his son, we see the way that bad traditions are passed down through the generations, a cycle of dark despair.
Heat
(1995)
It’s also worth taking a moment to acknowledge the last gangster movie that was made by "Public Enemies" director Michael Mann. "Heat" viewed the gangster and the cop as equals, with Al Pacino in the part of the detective and Robert De Niro in the part of the master criminal. Sitting down to coffee as they try to intimidate - and relate to - one another, "Heat" is less about good and evil, crime and justice, than about seeing the men of the law and the men of the shadows as two personas cut from the same cloth. Both are obsessed, vigilant, and cut-throat; "Heat" is truly one of the great thrillers.
Thanks to Steven Snyder
Friday, June 26, 2009
Convicted Family Secrets Cop to Petition Police Pension Board to Keep Pension
Chumbolone (pronounced chum-buh-LOAN), my favorite Chicago political word that explains exactly what politicians think of us taxpayers, has finally made it to the big time, with its own listing on urbandictionary.com. And as a bonus, today there's even more chumbolonian news.
The corrupt cop Anthony "Twan" Doyle -- who first uttered the word from a federal witness stand and was sentenced to 12 years in prison for being a messenger boy for bosses of the Chicago Outfit -- will petition the police pension board on Thursday in the hopes of keeping his pension.
"I'm not going to diminish his conviction and say it's insignificant, because it's not," said Twan's lawyer, the criminal defense whiz Ralph Meczyk. "But one event erased the career of a hardworking copper, and as far as his pension goes, it shouldn't be a complete loss.
"It's not going to be easy, I know."
Meczyk is scheduled to appear before the police pension board, one of the groups that mysteriously gave Mayor Richard Daley's nephew $68 million of city pension cash to invest, and the mayor says he knew absolutely nothing about it. The mayor thinks we're chumbolones.
Twan's gambit, that he was a good cop despite the Outfit messenger boy stuff, probably won't work. But given precedent, it's worth a try.
Just last February, convicted serial arsonist and former Chicago Fire Department Lt. Jeffrey "Matches" Boyle sought to recover his $50,000-a-year city pension despite the arson convictions.
Boyle's legal theory? When he set the fires, he was off duty, not on city time. The city fire pension board asked Boyle what his years as a firefighter taught him about being a good arsonist. "The hotter it got, the more it would burn," Boyle said. A clean answer without ambiguity. But he didn't receive his pension.
The reason I called Meczyk was to inform him that "chumbolone" had made it to urbandictionary.com, and to ask Meczyk to get all his friends and clients to go online and vote a jolly "thumbs up" for the word.
"I like chumbolone," Meczyk said. "You popularized it. And it's such a Chicago thing, it's part of Chicagoese now. I haven't met anyone, almost, who doesn't like the word, except for one person."
Who?
"Twan."
Oh.
Twan was known as the big silent guy with the big biceps who hung around with reputed mob street boss Frank "Toots" Caruso in Chinatown.
Twan had been picked up on federal recordings, visiting convicted Outfit boss Frank Calabrese Sr. in prison and talking about murder evidence while joking about using a cattle prod on mafioso cooperating with the FBI. But Twan testified he had no idea what Calabrese had been saying. He said he only kept nodding and agreeing out of good manners.
"I gave him lip service," Twan said from the witness stand, shrugging. "I didn't know what he was talking about. I don't wanna look like a chumbolone, an idiot, stupid."
Search for the word on urbandictionary.com, and you'll see it right next to the condom ad and the photo of a curvy young woman selling T-shirts that say: "Make Awkward Sexual Advances, Not War."
Here's the Web site's definition:
Chumbolone -- idiot, stupid -- Popularized by Chicago newspaper columnist John Kass after first hearing the word spoken in testimony by mob messenger boy Anthony "Twan" Doyle during a 2007 federal trial. While working for the mob, Doyle got himself hired into the Chicago Police Department evidence department in order to remove or destroy DNA and other evidence of mob homicides.
Some readers insist that chumbolone is not a proper word. Others say it refers to a tasty Italian cake. One reader in particular really doesn't want me to use it.
"Twan doesn't like you using the word," Meczyk said. "He really doesn't like it."
Really? Why?
"He never said. He's quite stoic in this regard," Meczyk said. "He's in prison, but he's no chumbolone."
Thanks to John Kass
The corrupt cop Anthony "Twan" Doyle -- who first uttered the word from a federal witness stand and was sentenced to 12 years in prison for being a messenger boy for bosses of the Chicago Outfit -- will petition the police pension board on Thursday in the hopes of keeping his pension.
"I'm not going to diminish his conviction and say it's insignificant, because it's not," said Twan's lawyer, the criminal defense whiz Ralph Meczyk. "But one event erased the career of a hardworking copper, and as far as his pension goes, it shouldn't be a complete loss.
"It's not going to be easy, I know."
Meczyk is scheduled to appear before the police pension board, one of the groups that mysteriously gave Mayor Richard Daley's nephew $68 million of city pension cash to invest, and the mayor says he knew absolutely nothing about it. The mayor thinks we're chumbolones.
Twan's gambit, that he was a good cop despite the Outfit messenger boy stuff, probably won't work. But given precedent, it's worth a try.
Just last February, convicted serial arsonist and former Chicago Fire Department Lt. Jeffrey "Matches" Boyle sought to recover his $50,000-a-year city pension despite the arson convictions.
Boyle's legal theory? When he set the fires, he was off duty, not on city time. The city fire pension board asked Boyle what his years as a firefighter taught him about being a good arsonist. "The hotter it got, the more it would burn," Boyle said. A clean answer without ambiguity. But he didn't receive his pension.
The reason I called Meczyk was to inform him that "chumbolone" had made it to urbandictionary.com, and to ask Meczyk to get all his friends and clients to go online and vote a jolly "thumbs up" for the word.
"I like chumbolone," Meczyk said. "You popularized it. And it's such a Chicago thing, it's part of Chicagoese now. I haven't met anyone, almost, who doesn't like the word, except for one person."
Who?
"Twan."
Oh.
Twan was known as the big silent guy with the big biceps who hung around with reputed mob street boss Frank "Toots" Caruso in Chinatown.
Twan had been picked up on federal recordings, visiting convicted Outfit boss Frank Calabrese Sr. in prison and talking about murder evidence while joking about using a cattle prod on mafioso cooperating with the FBI. But Twan testified he had no idea what Calabrese had been saying. He said he only kept nodding and agreeing out of good manners.
"I gave him lip service," Twan said from the witness stand, shrugging. "I didn't know what he was talking about. I don't wanna look like a chumbolone, an idiot, stupid."
Search for the word on urbandictionary.com, and you'll see it right next to the condom ad and the photo of a curvy young woman selling T-shirts that say: "Make Awkward Sexual Advances, Not War."
Here's the Web site's definition:
Chumbolone -- idiot, stupid -- Popularized by Chicago newspaper columnist John Kass after first hearing the word spoken in testimony by mob messenger boy Anthony "Twan" Doyle during a 2007 federal trial. While working for the mob, Doyle got himself hired into the Chicago Police Department evidence department in order to remove or destroy DNA and other evidence of mob homicides.
Some readers insist that chumbolone is not a proper word. Others say it refers to a tasty Italian cake. One reader in particular really doesn't want me to use it.
"Twan doesn't like you using the word," Meczyk said. "He really doesn't like it."
Really? Why?
"He never said. He's quite stoic in this regard," Meczyk said. "He's in prison, but he's no chumbolone."
Thanks to John Kass
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Colombo Crime Family Illegal Gambing Den Building to Be Sold by the Feds as The Sons of Italy End Affiliation with Long Island Lodge
The Sons of Italy are getting the boot from their lodge on Long Island.
Prosecutors will seize the building that houses the Sons of Italy-William Paca Lodge on Sunrise Highway in Babylon, where the Colombo crime family was operating an illegal gambling den, according to a letter filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Because only half of the building was used for the high-stakes Texas Hold 'Em games supervised by reputed capo Michael Uvino, the group will get 50% of the proceeds from the sale of the property, said attorney Joseph Ryan, who represented the 15 members of the lodge.
The Sons of Italy state organization also cut its ties with the lodge.
"The lodge members are old and poor, but they love to play cards," Ryan said. "They have to find a new card room."
Uvino was caught on a wiretap boasting that the Sons of Italy was an effective cover for the illegal activity because of the group's respectable reputation.
Thanks to John Marzulli
Prosecutors will seize the building that houses the Sons of Italy-William Paca Lodge on Sunrise Highway in Babylon, where the Colombo crime family was operating an illegal gambling den, according to a letter filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Because only half of the building was used for the high-stakes Texas Hold 'Em games supervised by reputed capo Michael Uvino, the group will get 50% of the proceeds from the sale of the property, said attorney Joseph Ryan, who represented the 15 members of the lodge.
The Sons of Italy state organization also cut its ties with the lodge.
"The lodge members are old and poor, but they love to play cards," Ryan said. "They have to find a new card room."
Uvino was caught on a wiretap boasting that the Sons of Italy was an effective cover for the illegal activity because of the group's respectable reputation.
Thanks to John Marzulli
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Details Surface of The Real Housewives of New Jersey's Danielle Staub's Past "Organized Crime" Activities
Now that Bravo is milking additional episodes out of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey," the cable network's hit series about a quintet of Garden State lovelies, The Smoking Gun decided to join the examination of the tawdry history of the show's true star.
Archived federal court records provide a detailed account of the criminal, drug, prostitution, and informant history of Danielle Staub, the 46-year-old lightning rod from the reality TV program. Staub, once known as Beverly Ann Merrill, was arrested by FBI agents in June 1986 for her role in a kidnapping plot that grew out of a cocaine deal gone bad. According to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Miami, Merrill and Daniel Aguilar, who distributed narcotics for a Colombian drug family, sought to extort a $25,000 ransom from a man whose son they were holding. The captive, Carmen Centolella, was blamed by Merrill and Aguilar for the botched drug deal, which cost them a kilo of cocaine worth about $24,000, according to the below criminal complaint.
Merrill and Aguilar were arrested after federal agents traced ransom calls they placed to Centolella's father. Merrill was busted in a Miami apartment in which agents discovered six kilos of cocaine and about $16,000 in cash. In a subsequent indictment, Merrill was charged with eight felonies, including extortion, cocaine possession, and narcotics conspiracy. Prosecutors allege that Merrill placed the first call to Centolella's father and "threatened injury or death" to his son "unless a sum of money was paid."
Facing the possibility of decades in prison, Merrill quickly opted to flip. In August 1986, she copped to a single felony count and signed a plea agreement pledging to "provide full and complete cooperation" with federal prosecutors and FBI agents. Merrill's plea, the agreement noted, exposed her to a maximum of 20 years in prison. Merrill's decision to snitch out her cohorts resulted in threats allegedly directed at her by Aguilar and his family, prosecutors contended in one motion. Merrill, who at the time used the alias "Angela Minelli," received one phone call warning, "Angela, your life is at an end, honey," and another from a male caller noting, "I saw you walking your dog--I wouldn't take that kind of risk."
The government motion further described Merrill's role in the botched cocaine deal, noting that she "took one of the kilos from Aguilar to Centolella's apartment for testing." There, she was accosted by four armed men who robbed her of the cocaine. According to an FBI report, when Aguilar was interviewed by agents following his arrest, he stated that "Angela" was the "common link" that put him together with Centolella, the prospective cocaine buyer. Centolella, he said, knew that "Angela had sources that could provide a kilo of cocaine." He later described "Angela" as a friend whose last name he did not know. "She also uses cocaine," he told agents.
During a court hearing, FBI Agent Robert Favie testified that Merrill met Aguilar while she was working for an escort service (Aguilar was a customer). Asked by Aguilar's attorney if he had checked into Merrill's background as a prostitute, Favie replied, "I know that she has told me that she has worked for an escort service, yes." In November 1986, Merrill was sentenced to five years probation for her extortion conviction (by comparison, Aguilar got 15 years after pleading out to extortion and cocaine possession counts). She was also ordered to participate in a drug treatment program and submit to weekly urinalysis tests during the first six months of her supervision.
Two years after Merrill's sentencing, a substance abuse counselor (who worked in conjunction with Merrill's probation officer) recommended that, "considering the severity of Beverly's drug history and her former drug life style," that her "mandate for drug aftercare be continued." Court files do not indicate how Judge Eugene Spellman, who sentenced Merrill, ruled on this request.
In a recent interview with People magazine, Staub claimed records from her criminal case were "sealed" and that she was only charged as an "accessory."
Thanks to The Smoking Gun
Archived federal court records provide a detailed account of the criminal, drug, prostitution, and informant history of Danielle Staub, the 46-year-old lightning rod from the reality TV program. Staub, once known as Beverly Ann Merrill, was arrested by FBI agents in June 1986 for her role in a kidnapping plot that grew out of a cocaine deal gone bad. According to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Miami, Merrill and Daniel Aguilar, who distributed narcotics for a Colombian drug family, sought to extort a $25,000 ransom from a man whose son they were holding. The captive, Carmen Centolella, was blamed by Merrill and Aguilar for the botched drug deal, which cost them a kilo of cocaine worth about $24,000, according to the below criminal complaint.
Merrill and Aguilar were arrested after federal agents traced ransom calls they placed to Centolella's father. Merrill was busted in a Miami apartment in which agents discovered six kilos of cocaine and about $16,000 in cash. In a subsequent indictment, Merrill was charged with eight felonies, including extortion, cocaine possession, and narcotics conspiracy. Prosecutors allege that Merrill placed the first call to Centolella's father and "threatened injury or death" to his son "unless a sum of money was paid."
Facing the possibility of decades in prison, Merrill quickly opted to flip. In August 1986, she copped to a single felony count and signed a plea agreement pledging to "provide full and complete cooperation" with federal prosecutors and FBI agents. Merrill's plea, the agreement noted, exposed her to a maximum of 20 years in prison. Merrill's decision to snitch out her cohorts resulted in threats allegedly directed at her by Aguilar and his family, prosecutors contended in one motion. Merrill, who at the time used the alias "Angela Minelli," received one phone call warning, "Angela, your life is at an end, honey," and another from a male caller noting, "I saw you walking your dog--I wouldn't take that kind of risk."
The government motion further described Merrill's role in the botched cocaine deal, noting that she "took one of the kilos from Aguilar to Centolella's apartment for testing." There, she was accosted by four armed men who robbed her of the cocaine. According to an FBI report, when Aguilar was interviewed by agents following his arrest, he stated that "Angela" was the "common link" that put him together with Centolella, the prospective cocaine buyer. Centolella, he said, knew that "Angela had sources that could provide a kilo of cocaine." He later described "Angela" as a friend whose last name he did not know. "She also uses cocaine," he told agents.
During a court hearing, FBI Agent Robert Favie testified that Merrill met Aguilar while she was working for an escort service (Aguilar was a customer). Asked by Aguilar's attorney if he had checked into Merrill's background as a prostitute, Favie replied, "I know that she has told me that she has worked for an escort service, yes." In November 1986, Merrill was sentenced to five years probation for her extortion conviction (by comparison, Aguilar got 15 years after pleading out to extortion and cocaine possession counts). She was also ordered to participate in a drug treatment program and submit to weekly urinalysis tests during the first six months of her supervision.
Two years after Merrill's sentencing, a substance abuse counselor (who worked in conjunction with Merrill's probation officer) recommended that, "considering the severity of Beverly's drug history and her former drug life style," that her "mandate for drug aftercare be continued." Court files do not indicate how Judge Eugene Spellman, who sentenced Merrill, ruled on this request.
In a recent interview with People magazine, Staub claimed records from her criminal case were "sealed" and that she was only charged as an "accessory."
Thanks to The Smoking Gun
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Twitter Given a Mafia Offer That it Can Refuse, For Now
A new Mafia video game has presented Twitter with an offer, but it's one that Twitter thinks it can refuse.
On Tuesday, a Twitter-based game called "140 Mafia" became the first to use "virtual currency" on the social networking site, providing a money-making platform that experts believe could fuel Twitter's success.
Designed by a company called Super Rewards, the virtual currency lets users pay for game-playing advantages. For instance, in the popular role-playing game "140 Mafia," players will now be able to visit a character named the Godfather to buy virtual health, money and ammunition with their real credit cards or bank accounts.
Although most virtual currency users pay $15 to $20 per transaction, some have paid thousands of dollars playing the original Facebook version, "Mob Wars," which debuted in March 2008, and immensely popular "Mafia Wars" sequel.
Super Rewards Chief Executive Jason Bailey said his company is currently on track to make close to $100 million in revenue this year through the games' success on Facebook and MySpace, as well as iPhone applications. "This is a tremendous opportunity for Twitter, and they can make a ton of money" said Bailey.
Apple takes a cut of its app sales. Social networks like Facebook and NewsCorp's MySpace use an advertising model to generate revenue -- driving up site traffic as gamers use more and more virtual currency.
Facebook began selling "Facebook credits" that game players can use for virtual currency, but many analysts say they came too late to the table to be successful.
Bailey believes that Twitter, which is new to the virtual currency frontier, could lay down Apple-like ground rules for future games and make a killing off of it. But, he added that, "Twitter seems content to not make money. It's all about eyeballs with them."
They're getting those eyeballs. Twitter is by far the fastest-growing social networking Web site. The site attracted 18.2 million unique visits last month, up 1,448% from a year ago, according to the latest data from Nielsen. Average time spent on the site increased 175% during that same time period.
Excitement about Twitter has grown rapidly in the past few weeks, as the social network has gotten a lot of free press amid its role in broadcasting the post-election Iranian protests. Iran's tight restrictions on outside news coverage of the protests have led the global media to turn to protesters' 140-character "tweets" to find out what is happening on the ground.
Twitter continues to turn down opportunities to make money off of its popular Web site. It has no advertising. It allows third-party developers to use the social network's platform to make games and applications, but it doesn't charge those companies a fee. And it doesn't seem interested in revenue sharing with virtual currency companies either.
Many analysts believe that the company taking a Google-like path, generating millions of users as it figures out its business model. Google, which some believe is a prime candidate to buy Twitter, was popular for many years before it figured out the key to online advertising.
"Twitter absolutely wants to have a long-term sustainable business once they find their business model," said Ray Valdes, social network analyst at Gartner.
Others wonder if Twitter is becoming the Craigslist of social networks. Craigslist is an online classified Web site that famously does not monetize its business.
"I don't know who puts hippies in charge of these companies," said Bailey, who noted that he has begun making far more money with Twitter than Twitter itself.
Twitter not budging. Twitter appears to be content where it is.
Though the company declined to comment for this story, co-founder Biz Stone has previously said publicly that Twitter does not need to generate revenue for the time-being, since it has still yet to blow through the more than $50 billion it has raised from venture capitalists.
"They are passing by the pennies on the path for the real dollars further down the road," said Valdes. "As long as they provide opportunities for others to have an ongoing engagement with Twitter users, they can monetize later."
Valdes said Twitter is getting buyout offers from several companies for close to $1 billion. But he does not believe Twitter is interested in selling quite yet. Instead, Valdes said Twitter will likely take advantage of its unique position in the social networking world, as a kind of live-updating news service for millions of followers, as highlighted by the Iran protests.
Experts are mixed on how the company's business model will eventually pan out, but most say virtual currency and charging users to follow certain content could likely be a part of that.
"Twitter is a new kind of broadcasting, with millions of people listening in real time on their cell phones and computers," said Valdes. "There's money to be made on all sides of Twitter interactions."
Thanks to David Goldman
On Tuesday, a Twitter-based game called "140 Mafia" became the first to use "virtual currency" on the social networking site, providing a money-making platform that experts believe could fuel Twitter's success.
Designed by a company called Super Rewards, the virtual currency lets users pay for game-playing advantages. For instance, in the popular role-playing game "140 Mafia," players will now be able to visit a character named the Godfather to buy virtual health, money and ammunition with their real credit cards or bank accounts.
Although most virtual currency users pay $15 to $20 per transaction, some have paid thousands of dollars playing the original Facebook version, "Mob Wars," which debuted in March 2008, and immensely popular "Mafia Wars" sequel.
Super Rewards Chief Executive Jason Bailey said his company is currently on track to make close to $100 million in revenue this year through the games' success on Facebook and MySpace, as well as iPhone applications. "This is a tremendous opportunity for Twitter, and they can make a ton of money" said Bailey.
Apple takes a cut of its app sales. Social networks like Facebook and NewsCorp's MySpace use an advertising model to generate revenue -- driving up site traffic as gamers use more and more virtual currency.
Facebook began selling "Facebook credits" that game players can use for virtual currency, but many analysts say they came too late to the table to be successful.
Bailey believes that Twitter, which is new to the virtual currency frontier, could lay down Apple-like ground rules for future games and make a killing off of it. But, he added that, "Twitter seems content to not make money. It's all about eyeballs with them."
They're getting those eyeballs. Twitter is by far the fastest-growing social networking Web site. The site attracted 18.2 million unique visits last month, up 1,448% from a year ago, according to the latest data from Nielsen. Average time spent on the site increased 175% during that same time period.
Excitement about Twitter has grown rapidly in the past few weeks, as the social network has gotten a lot of free press amid its role in broadcasting the post-election Iranian protests. Iran's tight restrictions on outside news coverage of the protests have led the global media to turn to protesters' 140-character "tweets" to find out what is happening on the ground.
Twitter continues to turn down opportunities to make money off of its popular Web site. It has no advertising. It allows third-party developers to use the social network's platform to make games and applications, but it doesn't charge those companies a fee. And it doesn't seem interested in revenue sharing with virtual currency companies either.
Many analysts believe that the company taking a Google-like path, generating millions of users as it figures out its business model. Google, which some believe is a prime candidate to buy Twitter, was popular for many years before it figured out the key to online advertising.
"Twitter absolutely wants to have a long-term sustainable business once they find their business model," said Ray Valdes, social network analyst at Gartner.
Others wonder if Twitter is becoming the Craigslist of social networks. Craigslist is an online classified Web site that famously does not monetize its business.
"I don't know who puts hippies in charge of these companies," said Bailey, who noted that he has begun making far more money with Twitter than Twitter itself.
Twitter not budging. Twitter appears to be content where it is.
Though the company declined to comment for this story, co-founder Biz Stone has previously said publicly that Twitter does not need to generate revenue for the time-being, since it has still yet to blow through the more than $50 billion it has raised from venture capitalists.
"They are passing by the pennies on the path for the real dollars further down the road," said Valdes. "As long as they provide opportunities for others to have an ongoing engagement with Twitter users, they can monetize later."
Valdes said Twitter is getting buyout offers from several companies for close to $1 billion. But he does not believe Twitter is interested in selling quite yet. Instead, Valdes said Twitter will likely take advantage of its unique position in the social networking world, as a kind of live-updating news service for millions of followers, as highlighted by the Iran protests.
Experts are mixed on how the company's business model will eventually pan out, but most say virtual currency and charging users to follow certain content could likely be a part of that.
"Twitter is a new kind of broadcasting, with millions of people listening in real time on their cell phones and computers," said Valdes. "There's money to be made on all sides of Twitter interactions."
Thanks to David Goldman
Monday, June 22, 2009
Carmen “The Cheeseman” DiNunzio to Get Married, Despite House Arrest
“When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool, that’s amore!”
The late Dean Martin is unavailable to croon for the reception band, but reputed Boston Mafia godfather Carmen “The Cheeseman” DiNunzio has been shot by Cupid’s arrow and is engaged to be married, the Herald has learned.
A source confirms DiNunzio, 51, who has shed some 75 pounds since being placed on house arrest in East Boston more than a year ago, plans to wed Denise Spagnuolo, 53, of the North End.
It was unclear yesterday how the romance bloomed, given DiNunzio’s commitment to a GPS bracelet. The blushing bride hung up on a reporter who called to offer congratulations. Her groom-to-be’s attorney declined comment.
DiNunzio has asked a U.S. District Court judge to let him go to dinner in style tonight for a belated Father’s Day celebration at a restaurant approved by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and pretrial services.
In a promising sign of male bonding, the guest list includes Spagnuolo’s sons, Joseph and Caesar.
The honeymoon, however, may have to be put on ice.
DiNunzio faces state extortion and gambling charges in Essex County and is scheduled to go to trial Oct. 19 on federal charges that he bribed an undercover FBI agent posing as a Massachusetts Highway inspector $10,000 in 2006 to purchase 300,000 yards of untested loam for the Big Dig for $6 million.
In addition to being the alleged underboss of the New England La Cosa Nostra, DiNunzio owns the North End’s “Fresh Cheese” shop.
Last summer, when DiNunzio’s weight hit 400 pounds, the federal court agreed to grant him 60 minutes of freedom each day to join a gym or go walking. DiNunzio’s doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital said he had diabetes and was at risk of heart failure if he didn’t slim down.
Thanks to Laurel J. Sweet
The late Dean Martin is unavailable to croon for the reception band, but reputed Boston Mafia godfather Carmen “The Cheeseman” DiNunzio has been shot by Cupid’s arrow and is engaged to be married, the Herald has learned.
A source confirms DiNunzio, 51, who has shed some 75 pounds since being placed on house arrest in East Boston more than a year ago, plans to wed Denise Spagnuolo, 53, of the North End.
It was unclear yesterday how the romance bloomed, given DiNunzio’s commitment to a GPS bracelet. The blushing bride hung up on a reporter who called to offer congratulations. Her groom-to-be’s attorney declined comment.
DiNunzio has asked a U.S. District Court judge to let him go to dinner in style tonight for a belated Father’s Day celebration at a restaurant approved by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and pretrial services.
In a promising sign of male bonding, the guest list includes Spagnuolo’s sons, Joseph and Caesar.
The honeymoon, however, may have to be put on ice.
DiNunzio faces state extortion and gambling charges in Essex County and is scheduled to go to trial Oct. 19 on federal charges that he bribed an undercover FBI agent posing as a Massachusetts Highway inspector $10,000 in 2006 to purchase 300,000 yards of untested loam for the Big Dig for $6 million.
In addition to being the alleged underboss of the New England La Cosa Nostra, DiNunzio owns the North End’s “Fresh Cheese” shop.
Last summer, when DiNunzio’s weight hit 400 pounds, the federal court agreed to grant him 60 minutes of freedom each day to join a gym or go walking. DiNunzio’s doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital said he had diabetes and was at risk of heart failure if he didn’t slim down.
Thanks to Laurel J. Sweet
Friday, June 19, 2009
Johnny Depp Attends the Chicago Premiere of "Public Enemies"
Less than four miles from the Lincoln Park theater where the hunt for John Dillinger ended, a crowd of about 600 waited to get a glimpse of Johnny Depp
-- who portrays the notorious bank robber in "Public Enemies."
Depp walked the red carpet for the film's Chicago premiere on Thursday along with fellow "Enemies" stars Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard, and director and Humboldt Park native Michael Mann.
Parts of the movie were filmed last year at the actual Chicago locations Dillinger visited, including the front of the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue, where he was gunned down.
Depp was the last of the cast to arrive. Once he stepped out of the car, some of the crowd broke into high-pitched screaming, while others chanted "Johnny."
"It's nice to be able to come back here and say 'Thank you,' and this shindig is a way of doing it," said Depp.
While in Chicago the 46-year-old actor, as is traditional for out-of-towners, visited Wrigley Field. "It was mostly for fun," said Depp, who signed autographs for fans after speaking to the media. "It was great to go and see the Cubs and experience that. That was classic Dillinger ... He was a big Cubs fan."
Depp's rival in the film, Bale, is no stranger to Chicago after filming " Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight" here. Bale said his favorite place to visit in the city was Millenium Park.
As for his F.B.I. character who tracks Dillinger down, Bale said he is a "good guy" in the film. "It's a Dillinger movie," said Bale. "Whether it's legend or not, Dillinger was a charismatic man. He was being cheered for back then and I'm sure it will happen again now with all the fat cat factors everyone is dealing with nowadays."
Thanks to Luis Arroyave
-- who portrays the notorious bank robber in "Public Enemies."Depp walked the red carpet for the film's Chicago premiere on Thursday along with fellow "Enemies" stars Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard, and director and Humboldt Park native Michael Mann.
Parts of the movie were filmed last year at the actual Chicago locations Dillinger visited, including the front of the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue, where he was gunned down.
Depp was the last of the cast to arrive. Once he stepped out of the car, some of the crowd broke into high-pitched screaming, while others chanted "Johnny."
"It's nice to be able to come back here and say 'Thank you,' and this shindig is a way of doing it," said Depp.
While in Chicago the 46-year-old actor, as is traditional for out-of-towners, visited Wrigley Field. "It was mostly for fun," said Depp, who signed autographs for fans after speaking to the media. "It was great to go and see the Cubs and experience that. That was classic Dillinger ... He was a big Cubs fan."
Depp's rival in the film, Bale, is no stranger to Chicago after filming " Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight" here. Bale said his favorite place to visit in the city was Millenium Park.
As for his F.B.I. character who tracks Dillinger down, Bale said he is a "good guy" in the film. "It's a Dillinger movie," said Bale. "Whether it's legend or not, Dillinger was a charismatic man. He was being cheered for back then and I'm sure it will happen again now with all the fat cat factors everyone is dealing with nowadays."
Thanks to Luis Arroyave
Black Mafia Family Straggler, Vernon Marcus Coleman, is Target of America's Most Wanted
This SATURDAY, June 20, 2009, AMERICA’S MOST WANTED will be airing the following cases.
Atlanta, Georgia… VERNON COLEMAN… The U.S. Marshals and the DEA have teamed up to bring down the Black Mafia Family, a major drug trafficking organization. They were successful in arresting all but one of the suspects, and the only straggler is Vernon Marcus Coleman, known as Big Wu on the streets.
Harlem, New York… CARLOS THOMPSON… New York cops say rapper Carlos Thompson handed a .38-caliber revolver to a 13-year-old boy and ordered him to murder another teen. Now, more than a year later, Thompson is in custody.
Stone Mountain, Georgia… DERRICK YANCEY… Newly-released surveillance video shows Derrick Yancey, a former sheriff's deputy accused of killing his wife and another man, in his first hours on the run. Investigators say Yancey is seen buying a Greyhound bus ticket to California, but his whereabouts are now unknown.
Whitewater, Wisconsin… RICKY HOWARD… Cops in Whitewater, Wisc. say Ricky Howard is a perpetual danger to society. Throughout his life, Howard's been in and out of jail, but cops say in December of 1999, he reached a new low when he violently raped a 12-year-old girl. Nearly ten years later, Howard is still on the run and police need your help to find him.
Garland, Texas… CESAR OROZCO… Authorities are searching for Cesar Orozco, a man who they say shot and killed 26-year-old Joe Castillo last March. Police suspect that Orozco killed Castillo because he thought he was seeing his ex-wife.
Nationwide... JOHN PARIGIAN… After being convicted of wire fraud, cops say Boston con-man John Parigian rented a plane and vanished into thin air – literally. Now, police are piecing together his trail, and believe he could be hiding out in New York or Massachusetts.
Anchorage, Alaska… JOHN PEZZENTI KILLER… On December 3, 2007, detectives were called to a two-story shack in Anchorage, Alaska, where they found a body, soon identified as acclaimed wildlife photographer John Pezzenti, Jr. With no signs of forced entry or robbery, cops say John knew who pulled the trigger, and they hope that AMW viewers can help solve the murder.
Nationwide... PATRICIA PARDO… In 2000, cops say Patricia Pardo stole the identity of 17-year-old Joanna Saenz. Eight years later, Pardo was arrested but quickly disappeared after posting bond. Now, Joanna is determined to fight back and help police track down the woman they say changed her life forever. This Saturday, AMW will put Pardo on national TV in hopes of bringing her to justice.
Houston, Texas… TIMOTEO RIOS… In April of 2008, 39-year-old Tina Davila headed to a Cricket store in Houston, Texas to pay her cell phone bill. But before she got inside, cops say she was attacked in an attempted carjacking by Timoteo Rios. With her 4-month-old baby in the backseat, Tina fought back, but police say Rios stabbed Tina in the chest, killing her at the scene. Cops say Rios escaped in his own car, but that this was just the beginning of a crime spree that lasted all afternoon.
Washington, D.C…. TOP COPS 2009… Once a year, the bravest and most heroic police officers -- the nation’s TOP COPS -- are honored in a ceremony hosted by AMW Host John Walsh. This year’s TOP COPS AWARDS showcased some truly inspiring stories, with the night’s top honor going to a Georgia Police Officer who single handedly stopped an armed robbery and saved the life of a cashier who was taken hostage.
Atlanta, Georgia… VERNON COLEMAN… The U.S. Marshals and the DEA have teamed up to bring down the Black Mafia Family, a major drug trafficking organization. They were successful in arresting all but one of the suspects, and the only straggler is Vernon Marcus Coleman, known as Big Wu on the streets.
Harlem, New York… CARLOS THOMPSON… New York cops say rapper Carlos Thompson handed a .38-caliber revolver to a 13-year-old boy and ordered him to murder another teen. Now, more than a year later, Thompson is in custody.
Stone Mountain, Georgia… DERRICK YANCEY… Newly-released surveillance video shows Derrick Yancey, a former sheriff's deputy accused of killing his wife and another man, in his first hours on the run. Investigators say Yancey is seen buying a Greyhound bus ticket to California, but his whereabouts are now unknown.
Whitewater, Wisconsin… RICKY HOWARD… Cops in Whitewater, Wisc. say Ricky Howard is a perpetual danger to society. Throughout his life, Howard's been in and out of jail, but cops say in December of 1999, he reached a new low when he violently raped a 12-year-old girl. Nearly ten years later, Howard is still on the run and police need your help to find him.
Garland, Texas… CESAR OROZCO… Authorities are searching for Cesar Orozco, a man who they say shot and killed 26-year-old Joe Castillo last March. Police suspect that Orozco killed Castillo because he thought he was seeing his ex-wife.
Nationwide... JOHN PARIGIAN… After being convicted of wire fraud, cops say Boston con-man John Parigian rented a plane and vanished into thin air – literally. Now, police are piecing together his trail, and believe he could be hiding out in New York or Massachusetts.
Anchorage, Alaska… JOHN PEZZENTI KILLER… On December 3, 2007, detectives were called to a two-story shack in Anchorage, Alaska, where they found a body, soon identified as acclaimed wildlife photographer John Pezzenti, Jr. With no signs of forced entry or robbery, cops say John knew who pulled the trigger, and they hope that AMW viewers can help solve the murder.
Nationwide... PATRICIA PARDO… In 2000, cops say Patricia Pardo stole the identity of 17-year-old Joanna Saenz. Eight years later, Pardo was arrested but quickly disappeared after posting bond. Now, Joanna is determined to fight back and help police track down the woman they say changed her life forever. This Saturday, AMW will put Pardo on national TV in hopes of bringing her to justice.
Houston, Texas… TIMOTEO RIOS… In April of 2008, 39-year-old Tina Davila headed to a Cricket store in Houston, Texas to pay her cell phone bill. But before she got inside, cops say she was attacked in an attempted carjacking by Timoteo Rios. With her 4-month-old baby in the backseat, Tina fought back, but police say Rios stabbed Tina in the chest, killing her at the scene. Cops say Rios escaped in his own car, but that this was just the beginning of a crime spree that lasted all afternoon.
Washington, D.C…. TOP COPS 2009… Once a year, the bravest and most heroic police officers -- the nation’s TOP COPS -- are honored in a ceremony hosted by AMW Host John Walsh. This year’s TOP COPS AWARDS showcased some truly inspiring stories, with the night’s top honor going to a Georgia Police Officer who single handedly stopped an armed robbery and saved the life of a cashier who was taken hostage.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Michael Mann on His Production of "Public Enemies" Starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger
Hollywood is full of filmmakers who are uncompromising perfectionists, but only Michael Mann could boast that he not only has a favorite room to screen his films -- the Zanuck theater on the Fox lot -- but also a favorite row in the theater where you should park your fanny.
Michaelmann "If you sit in row J at the Zanuck, you'll find yourself in the perfect mean, the center of the bell curve for every theater in America," he told me the other day, camped out in his Santa Monica offices, surrounded by memorabilia from decades of his work, which includes a host of wildly compelling films and TV shows, including "Crime Story," "Heat," "The Insider," "Ali" and "Collateral."
"If your film can play in row J, you're in the heart of the zone," he says. "I know some people that want to sit farther back, but that's the worst place to sit. If you're too far back, the surrounds are too large."
Even though we got together to talk about "Public Enemies,"
his new film that stars Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, our conversation ranged far afield, since Mann often sounds more like a Marxist history professor than a filmmaker, waxing just as eloquent about the broad historical forces that shaped Depression-era gangsters like Dillinger as how the notorious criminal managed to bust out of a high-security prison armed with a wooden pistol.
At 66, Mann still has the swagger and stamina of men half his age. Our interview was pushed back a couple of hours because the filmmaker had pulled an all-nighter, staying up until 9 a.m. overseeing digital transfer work on "Public Enemies," which has its first public showing June 23 at the Los Angeles Film Festival. (It opens nationwide July 1.) Even though he was going on scant hours of sleep, Mann looked fresh, as if staying up all night were a tonic.
"Actually it's exhilarating at this stage, when it all comes together," he explains in a voice that still had the echo of his upbringing in Chicago's working-class Humboldt Park neighborhood. "The film feels like it's containable, in your hands, almost like it was when it just an idea on three paragraphs on a piece of paper."
Mann is part of an elite Hollywood club of veteran directors -- notably Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Ridley Scott and David Fincher -- who are both held in high critical esteem and act as magnets for A-list movie star talent, allowing them a freedom to pursue the kind of dark, difficult material largely out of favor with today's franchise-obsessed movie studios. Mann has never enjoyed a mega hit -- of his nine features, only one, "Collateral," made more than $72 million domestically. His last film, "Miami Vice," was a box-office dud. But he has earned the right to make a wide range of absorbing films, largely thanks to the presence of such stars as Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jaime Foxx and now Depp in the leading roles.
It's easy to see what attracts such star power. Mann has a great ear for dialogue, a brilliant eye for action and the beguiling charm of a guy who's comfortable hanging out with all sorts of ex-cops and hoods. His technical advisor on "Public Enemies" was a convicted armed robber who once, as Mann explains with a twinkle in his eye, "stole a diamond as big as a grapefruit."
But what happens when studio bosses try to control a filmmaker who is uncontrollable? Keep reading:
Being in the Michael Mann business isn't for the faint of heart. After butting heads with Mann, any number of studio heads have sworn to never work with him again, exhausted by what they view as his budget-busting intransigence. ("Public Enemies" cost roughly $100 million and came in on time, in part because the production had to be finished before last summer's presumptive SAG strike date.) But after a few years pass, the stance often softens, since the artistry of the film remains long after memories of the clashes with Mann fade. When Mann made "Ali," he battled with Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal, who was especially infuriated by the director's insistence on retaining a couple of obscenities in the picture, which prevented the film from earning a PG-13 rating that would have helped it reach a far broader audience. But now all is forgiven. "No matter what I said at the time, I think Michael is one of our most gifted filmmakers -- we're always trying to develop new directing projects for him," says Pascal. "You put all the disagreements behind you because you remember the great work, not the pain of the moment." She laughs. "You forget about the pain of childbirth too. I mean, whatever you go through, you still want another baby. It's like that with Michael too."
It's not so hard to see parallels between Mann, who has the fierce independence of an earlier generation of Hollywood filmmakers, and Dillinger, who is portrayed in "Public Enemies" as something of an anachronism, a lone wolf being squeezed out of the bank-robbing trade by the growing corporatization of crime. A key element in Mann's conception of the film -- which he wrote with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman -- is that it wasn't just J. Edgar Hoover's FBI who was gunning for Dillinger, but the newly organized crime syndicates who saw freelance outlaws like Dillinger as threats to their nationwide business aspirations.
"Dillinger was actually obsolete, but he was so damn good at what he did that he managed to survive, despite all the horrible attrition around him," explains Mann, who makes a point in the film of showing that virtually all of Dillinger's cohorts were gunned down before he famously meets his end outside Chicago's Biograph Theater. "There are two big evolutionary forces at work. There's what Hoover is doing with the FBI, with information gathering and data management. And there's organized crime, being cash rich, moving into corporate capitalism, and they don't want these Depression outlaws around [inspiring the Feds to pass crime legislation] against moving money across interstate lines."
Mann had always seen the 1930s as fertile territory. Back in the 1980s, he wrote a screenplay about Alvin Karpis, a Chicago bank robber who often crossed paths with Dillinger (he appears in "Public Enemies," played by Giovanni Ribisi). Nothing came of it, but Mann got interested again when he read an excerpt from Bryan Burrough's book "Public Enemies" in Vanity Fair. The filmmaker teamed up with producer Kevin Misher to put the project together. The first draft of the script was written by Bennett, a novelist Mann thought would have an interesting take on Dillinger, since when Bennett was a young IRA sympathizer he was accused of being involved with a series of bank robberies and ended up serving time in prison.
The film paints Dillinger in somber, fatalistic tones. Even though he has a soulful relationship with a Chicago hat-check girl (played in the film by Marion Cotillard), Dillinger always has a dark cloud of doom hovering over his head. He knows he won't be around long enough to worry about tomorrow. But he's also a populist icon. When a farmer offers him a few dollars in the middle of a bank heist, Dillinger refuses to take the cash, saying, "We're not here for your money. We're here for the bank's money."
To Mann, it's easy to identify with Dillinger. "He was a charismatic outlaw hero who spoke to people in the depths of the Depression. He assaulted the institution that made their lives miserable -- the bank -- and he outsmarted the institution -- the government -- that couldn't fix the problems brought about by the Depression."
Mann uses the same word over and over to describe Dillinger -- brio. When Dillinger broke out of Indiana's supposedly impregnable Crown Point jail, "he didn't just take a car, he takes the sheriff's new car, a V-8 Ford, and then he wrote a letter to Henry Ford, telling him that whenever he stole a car, he wanted to steal a Ford."
Once Mann had a finished script, he went to Depp, having been a fan of his work, especially offbeat fare like "Libertine." "Johnny is not afraid to take chances," says Mann. "I thought this was a character he could relate to internally, to mine the deeper currents within himself, the way he would if he were ever to play a musician. I wanted to see Johnny go inside this guy, to do something emotionally open and expressive."
So how does a filmmaker know he's in sync with an actor when they're preparing a film? "The more you do it, the more you know it when you know," Mann says. "When Russell Crowe came in for 'The Insider,' I thought it was going nowhere -- and suddenly we were reading a speech and after two lines -- wham! -- he was Jeffrey Wigand. It was all him." Mann had a similar moment of takeoff with Depp a few weeks before shooting began. "As he was reading, I started hearing the voice I heard in my head when I was writing the words. It was great."
It wasn't always great on the set. According to people who were there, Depp, accustomed to the clockwork production schedule on Gore Verbinski's "Pirates of the Caribbean" films, had trouble adjusting to Mann's more idiosyncratic schedule, which often forced Depp to wait for long hours until Mann was ready to proceed. (I got a little taste of it myself, cooling my heels in Mann's outer office before the filmmaker came out to meet me, with his assistant explaining that I'd have to wait "until he finishes thinking.")
Mann says reports that Depp sometimes left the set in frustration are untrue. "That's nonsense," he says. "He may have kept me waiting, I have may kept him waiting. That's not a big deal. For me, what goes on in a film set is sacrosanct, so I have nothing to say about what went on."
Mann isn't especially enamored by the tag of uncompromising perfectionist either. "If someone says, 'Are you a perfectionist?' I'd say no," he says. "There are many scenes in this film that were great that aren't in it anymore because I don't believe in wasting time on a meaningless detail at the risk of blowing the richness that's down the block. I know what's important [in a film] and what's not."
For Mann, it's all about delivering the goods. not just to the studio but also the moviegoer. "When I set out to make a movie, part of the thrill is the level of commitment," he says. "I ain't playing, you bet. I don't leave things half-[done], saying, 'Well, that scene is good enough. We can move on.' That doesn't happen. The ambition -- and it's a sizable one -- is to make a movie that has a dramatic impact on people."
Thanks to Patrick Goldstein
Michaelmann "If you sit in row J at the Zanuck, you'll find yourself in the perfect mean, the center of the bell curve for every theater in America," he told me the other day, camped out in his Santa Monica offices, surrounded by memorabilia from decades of his work, which includes a host of wildly compelling films and TV shows, including "Crime Story," "Heat," "The Insider," "Ali" and "Collateral."
"If your film can play in row J, you're in the heart of the zone," he says. "I know some people that want to sit farther back, but that's the worst place to sit. If you're too far back, the surrounds are too large."
Even though we got together to talk about "Public Enemies,"
his new film that stars Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, our conversation ranged far afield, since Mann often sounds more like a Marxist history professor than a filmmaker, waxing just as eloquent about the broad historical forces that shaped Depression-era gangsters like Dillinger as how the notorious criminal managed to bust out of a high-security prison armed with a wooden pistol.At 66, Mann still has the swagger and stamina of men half his age. Our interview was pushed back a couple of hours because the filmmaker had pulled an all-nighter, staying up until 9 a.m. overseeing digital transfer work on "Public Enemies," which has its first public showing June 23 at the Los Angeles Film Festival. (It opens nationwide July 1.) Even though he was going on scant hours of sleep, Mann looked fresh, as if staying up all night were a tonic.
"Actually it's exhilarating at this stage, when it all comes together," he explains in a voice that still had the echo of his upbringing in Chicago's working-class Humboldt Park neighborhood. "The film feels like it's containable, in your hands, almost like it was when it just an idea on three paragraphs on a piece of paper."
Mann is part of an elite Hollywood club of veteran directors -- notably Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Ridley Scott and David Fincher -- who are both held in high critical esteem and act as magnets for A-list movie star talent, allowing them a freedom to pursue the kind of dark, difficult material largely out of favor with today's franchise-obsessed movie studios. Mann has never enjoyed a mega hit -- of his nine features, only one, "Collateral," made more than $72 million domestically. His last film, "Miami Vice," was a box-office dud. But he has earned the right to make a wide range of absorbing films, largely thanks to the presence of such stars as Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jaime Foxx and now Depp in the leading roles.
It's easy to see what attracts such star power. Mann has a great ear for dialogue, a brilliant eye for action and the beguiling charm of a guy who's comfortable hanging out with all sorts of ex-cops and hoods. His technical advisor on "Public Enemies" was a convicted armed robber who once, as Mann explains with a twinkle in his eye, "stole a diamond as big as a grapefruit."
But what happens when studio bosses try to control a filmmaker who is uncontrollable? Keep reading:
Being in the Michael Mann business isn't for the faint of heart. After butting heads with Mann, any number of studio heads have sworn to never work with him again, exhausted by what they view as his budget-busting intransigence. ("Public Enemies" cost roughly $100 million and came in on time, in part because the production had to be finished before last summer's presumptive SAG strike date.) But after a few years pass, the stance often softens, since the artistry of the film remains long after memories of the clashes with Mann fade. When Mann made "Ali," he battled with Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal, who was especially infuriated by the director's insistence on retaining a couple of obscenities in the picture, which prevented the film from earning a PG-13 rating that would have helped it reach a far broader audience. But now all is forgiven. "No matter what I said at the time, I think Michael is one of our most gifted filmmakers -- we're always trying to develop new directing projects for him," says Pascal. "You put all the disagreements behind you because you remember the great work, not the pain of the moment." She laughs. "You forget about the pain of childbirth too. I mean, whatever you go through, you still want another baby. It's like that with Michael too."
It's not so hard to see parallels between Mann, who has the fierce independence of an earlier generation of Hollywood filmmakers, and Dillinger, who is portrayed in "Public Enemies" as something of an anachronism, a lone wolf being squeezed out of the bank-robbing trade by the growing corporatization of crime. A key element in Mann's conception of the film -- which he wrote with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman -- is that it wasn't just J. Edgar Hoover's FBI who was gunning for Dillinger, but the newly organized crime syndicates who saw freelance outlaws like Dillinger as threats to their nationwide business aspirations.
"Dillinger was actually obsolete, but he was so damn good at what he did that he managed to survive, despite all the horrible attrition around him," explains Mann, who makes a point in the film of showing that virtually all of Dillinger's cohorts were gunned down before he famously meets his end outside Chicago's Biograph Theater. "There are two big evolutionary forces at work. There's what Hoover is doing with the FBI, with information gathering and data management. And there's organized crime, being cash rich, moving into corporate capitalism, and they don't want these Depression outlaws around [inspiring the Feds to pass crime legislation] against moving money across interstate lines."
Mann had always seen the 1930s as fertile territory. Back in the 1980s, he wrote a screenplay about Alvin Karpis, a Chicago bank robber who often crossed paths with Dillinger (he appears in "Public Enemies," played by Giovanni Ribisi). Nothing came of it, but Mann got interested again when he read an excerpt from Bryan Burrough's book "Public Enemies" in Vanity Fair. The filmmaker teamed up with producer Kevin Misher to put the project together. The first draft of the script was written by Bennett, a novelist Mann thought would have an interesting take on Dillinger, since when Bennett was a young IRA sympathizer he was accused of being involved with a series of bank robberies and ended up serving time in prison.
The film paints Dillinger in somber, fatalistic tones. Even though he has a soulful relationship with a Chicago hat-check girl (played in the film by Marion Cotillard), Dillinger always has a dark cloud of doom hovering over his head. He knows he won't be around long enough to worry about tomorrow. But he's also a populist icon. When a farmer offers him a few dollars in the middle of a bank heist, Dillinger refuses to take the cash, saying, "We're not here for your money. We're here for the bank's money."
To Mann, it's easy to identify with Dillinger. "He was a charismatic outlaw hero who spoke to people in the depths of the Depression. He assaulted the institution that made their lives miserable -- the bank -- and he outsmarted the institution -- the government -- that couldn't fix the problems brought about by the Depression."
Mann uses the same word over and over to describe Dillinger -- brio. When Dillinger broke out of Indiana's supposedly impregnable Crown Point jail, "he didn't just take a car, he takes the sheriff's new car, a V-8 Ford, and then he wrote a letter to Henry Ford, telling him that whenever he stole a car, he wanted to steal a Ford."
Once Mann had a finished script, he went to Depp, having been a fan of his work, especially offbeat fare like "Libertine." "Johnny is not afraid to take chances," says Mann. "I thought this was a character he could relate to internally, to mine the deeper currents within himself, the way he would if he were ever to play a musician. I wanted to see Johnny go inside this guy, to do something emotionally open and expressive."
So how does a filmmaker know he's in sync with an actor when they're preparing a film? "The more you do it, the more you know it when you know," Mann says. "When Russell Crowe came in for 'The Insider,' I thought it was going nowhere -- and suddenly we were reading a speech and after two lines -- wham! -- he was Jeffrey Wigand. It was all him." Mann had a similar moment of takeoff with Depp a few weeks before shooting began. "As he was reading, I started hearing the voice I heard in my head when I was writing the words. It was great."
It wasn't always great on the set. According to people who were there, Depp, accustomed to the clockwork production schedule on Gore Verbinski's "Pirates of the Caribbean" films, had trouble adjusting to Mann's more idiosyncratic schedule, which often forced Depp to wait for long hours until Mann was ready to proceed. (I got a little taste of it myself, cooling my heels in Mann's outer office before the filmmaker came out to meet me, with his assistant explaining that I'd have to wait "until he finishes thinking.")
Mann says reports that Depp sometimes left the set in frustration are untrue. "That's nonsense," he says. "He may have kept me waiting, I have may kept him waiting. That's not a big deal. For me, what goes on in a film set is sacrosanct, so I have nothing to say about what went on."
Mann isn't especially enamored by the tag of uncompromising perfectionist either. "If someone says, 'Are you a perfectionist?' I'd say no," he says. "There are many scenes in this film that were great that aren't in it anymore because I don't believe in wasting time on a meaningless detail at the risk of blowing the richness that's down the block. I know what's important [in a film] and what's not."
For Mann, it's all about delivering the goods. not just to the studio but also the moviegoer. "When I set out to make a movie, part of the thrill is the level of commitment," he says. "I ain't playing, you bet. I don't leave things half-[done], saying, 'Well, that scene is good enough. We can move on.' That doesn't happen. The ambition -- and it's a sizable one -- is to make a movie that has a dramatic impact on people."
Thanks to Patrick Goldstein
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Reputed Chicago Mobster, Michael "The Large Guy" Sarno Released on $1,000,000 Bond
Reputed Chicago Outfit figure Michael "the Large Guy" Sarno pleaded not guilty today to racketeering charges that allege he ran an illegal gambling operation and coordinated the bombing of a rival.
Sarno was indicted last month in connection with a mob-connected criminal ring that also allegedly ran jewelry heists and intimidated witnesses. He was charged in connection with the 2003 bombing of C&S Coin Operated Amusements in Berwyn.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Sidney Schenkier ordered Sarno released to home confinement on a $1 million bond secured by four properties owned by his family members.
Prosecutors have alleged the ring operated with the protection of two suburban police officers, including former Berwyn officer James Formato, who allegedly provided information about law enforcement activity.
Agents from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive seized between 20 and 30 video poker machines in raids carried out in conjunction with the indictment last month. Sarno faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
Thanks to Jeff Coen
Sarno was indicted last month in connection with a mob-connected criminal ring that also allegedly ran jewelry heists and intimidated witnesses. He was charged in connection with the 2003 bombing of C&S Coin Operated Amusements in Berwyn.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Sidney Schenkier ordered Sarno released to home confinement on a $1 million bond secured by four properties owned by his family members.
Prosecutors have alleged the ring operated with the protection of two suburban police officers, including former Berwyn officer James Formato, who allegedly provided information about law enforcement activity.
Agents from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive seized between 20 and 30 video poker machines in raids carried out in conjunction with the indictment last month. Sarno faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
Thanks to Jeff Coen
Monday, June 15, 2009
Photo of Robert De Niro Hanging Out on Movie Set with Real Mobsters
Robert De Niro is another "GoodFella" who has hung out with the Gambino crime family.
While making the 1999 film "Analyze This," about a neurotic gangster, De Niro consulted with the late Gambino soldier Anthony (Fat Andy) Ruggiano - and the Daily News has obtained a never-before-seen photo of the Oscar-winning actor with the big-time gangster in the actor's trailer.
The film may have been a comedy, but Ruggiano was no joke. Ruggiano, who died in March 1999, was inducted into the crime family when the boss was Albert Anastasia. He was involved in at least seven murders, including giving the approval to whack his son-in-law.
"He did a lot of work for the family," Ruggiano's turncoat son Anthony Jr. testified recently at the trial of a Gambino hit man. "Work" is mob jargon for gangland killings. "He killed somebody with a fellow named Joe," Anthony Ruggiano Jr. recalled. "He killed a florist in Brooklyn. He killed three people in a warehouse that was robbing crap games.
"He killed somebody with me . . . and they had this guy Irish Danny killed behind the Skyway Motel on Conduit Blvd."
De Niro, who is famous for scrupulously researching his roles, was introduced to Ruggiano by reputed Gambino associate Anthony Corozzo, a member of the Screen Actors Guild and an extra on "Analyze This," a knowledgeable source said.
Anthony Corozzo is the brother of high-ranking Gambinos Nicholas (Little Nick) Corozzo, a powerful capo, and reputed consigliere Joseph Corozzo. He also appeared in another film starring De Niro, "A Bronx Tale," and forgettable flicks "This Thing of Ours, "The Deli" and "Men Lie."
"Anthony is like a liaison with the acting community," the source said.
De Niro's rep, Stan Rosenfeld, said the movie was made a long time ago and the actor doesn't recall Ruggiano. "Bob seldom, if ever, discusses his research techniques," Rosenfeld said.
Attorney Joseph Corozzo Jr. denied his uncle brought Fat Andy to the set.
Jerry Capeci of the Web site Ganglandnews.com said it's no secret actors like to rub elbows with real tough guys, and the feeling is mutual. "Even Carlo Gambino, the epitome of the understated, low-key mob boss, couldn't resist the lure of posing in that now famous backstage picture with Frank Sinatra surrounded by a bunch of smiling wise guys," Capeci said.
During the filming of "GoodFellas," De Niro was interested in talking to the legendary gangster he was playing, but James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke was in jail and refused to meet with the actor, the source said.
De Niro is the latest alumnus from the film "GoodFellas" to have met with members of the Gambino family. Actor Frank Sivero posed for photos at Gambino hit man Charles Carneglia's junkyard, and actor Anthony Borgese was indicted last week for participating in an extortion with a Gambino soldier.
Thanks to John Marzulli.
While making the 1999 film "Analyze This," about a neurotic gangster, De Niro consulted with the late Gambino soldier Anthony (Fat Andy) Ruggiano - and the Daily News has obtained a never-before-seen photo of the Oscar-winning actor with the big-time gangster in the actor's trailer.
The film may have been a comedy, but Ruggiano was no joke. Ruggiano, who died in March 1999, was inducted into the crime family when the boss was Albert Anastasia. He was involved in at least seven murders, including giving the approval to whack his son-in-law.
"He did a lot of work for the family," Ruggiano's turncoat son Anthony Jr. testified recently at the trial of a Gambino hit man. "Work" is mob jargon for gangland killings. "He killed somebody with a fellow named Joe," Anthony Ruggiano Jr. recalled. "He killed a florist in Brooklyn. He killed three people in a warehouse that was robbing crap games.
"He killed somebody with me . . . and they had this guy Irish Danny killed behind the Skyway Motel on Conduit Blvd."
De Niro, who is famous for scrupulously researching his roles, was introduced to Ruggiano by reputed Gambino associate Anthony Corozzo, a member of the Screen Actors Guild and an extra on "Analyze This," a knowledgeable source said.
Anthony Corozzo is the brother of high-ranking Gambinos Nicholas (Little Nick) Corozzo, a powerful capo, and reputed consigliere Joseph Corozzo. He also appeared in another film starring De Niro, "A Bronx Tale," and forgettable flicks "This Thing of Ours, "The Deli" and "Men Lie."
"Anthony is like a liaison with the acting community," the source said.
De Niro's rep, Stan Rosenfeld, said the movie was made a long time ago and the actor doesn't recall Ruggiano. "Bob seldom, if ever, discusses his research techniques," Rosenfeld said.
Attorney Joseph Corozzo Jr. denied his uncle brought Fat Andy to the set.
Jerry Capeci of the Web site Ganglandnews.com said it's no secret actors like to rub elbows with real tough guys, and the feeling is mutual. "Even Carlo Gambino, the epitome of the understated, low-key mob boss, couldn't resist the lure of posing in that now famous backstage picture with Frank Sinatra surrounded by a bunch of smiling wise guys," Capeci said.
During the filming of "GoodFellas," De Niro was interested in talking to the legendary gangster he was playing, but James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke was in jail and refused to meet with the actor, the source said.
De Niro is the latest alumnus from the film "GoodFellas" to have met with members of the Gambino family. Actor Frank Sivero posed for photos at Gambino hit man Charles Carneglia's junkyard, and actor Anthony Borgese was indicted last week for participating in an extortion with a Gambino soldier.
Thanks to John Marzulli.
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