Former Mob Kingpin and Underling Get Life in Prison

Two coldblooded Colombo mob bigs convicted of rubbing out an intra-family rival in 1999 were sentenced to life in prison yesterday.

Former Colombo kingpin Alphonse "Allie Boy" Persico, 55, and underling John "Jackie" DeRoss, 71, were found guilty in 2007 of orchestrating the hit on William "Wild Bill" Cutolo.

Prosecutors said at trial in federal court in Central Islip, LI, that Cutolo had been dumped at sea. But his corpse eventually was discovered last fall in a Farmingdale, LI, industrial park after several days of digging by federal authorities.

Persico ordered Cutolo's hit after growing nervous about his position as acting family don in 1999 as he prepared to go to prison, prosecutors said. He feared Cutolo, then second in command, was planning a coup with Persico behind bars.

Persico had set up a meeting with Cutolo near 92nd Street and Shore Road in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the day he vanished in May 1999.

Thanks to Selim Agar

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Did Victoria Gotti Have an Affair with Key Witness Against Her Brother?

Before he became a mob rat, Gambino associate John Alite says he was a horndog who had a secret affair with Mafia princess Victoria Gotti.

Alite took center stage Monday in Brooklyn Federal Court in the murder trial of reputed hit man Charles Carneglia, but much of his testimony was about how close he was to John A. (Junior) Gotti - and the mob scion's older sister.

"I was fooling around with his sister Vicky Gotti on the sneak," Alite said, roughly fixing the time frame in the late 1980s, when she was married to her then-husband, Carmine Agnello.

Alite said the husband came after him and he ended up shooting one of Agnello's goons. Alite said Junior refused to give him permission to retaliate against Agnello.

Reached for comment, Victoria Gotti ridiculed the heavily-tattooed thug's claim of a tryst with her. "He's an out-and-out liar - he's vermin," she said. "This animal [Alite] had a crush on me from the first time I met him. He was in our bridal party and he tried to kiss me at my wedding. He missed the cheek by a lot.

"Carmine knew he had a crush on me. That's why he despised him.

"In Mr. Alite's dreams would someone like me even give him a second glance let alone 'fool around' with him. I was raised a good Catholic girl and always played by the rules.

"I met and married my first and only boyfriend. I never slept with Alite or anyone else.

"Dare him to take a lie detector test. I will take a lie detector test anytime, anywhere."

Alite said Junior Gotti's refusal to approve a retaliatory strike against Agnello was one of the reasons their close friendship broke up.

Under questioning by Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Burlingame, the witness said he grew up around gangsters in Woodhaven, Queens, and had a promising future at one time as a baseball pitcher.

He said he threw out his arm after one semester at the University of Tampa and returned to his old stomping grounds selling cocaine in bars on Jamaica Ave. in Queens.

Alite met Junior Gotti in the early 1980s and began paying him a cut of his $1 million-a-month drug profits. He said he and Junior were best friends for a decade. After rival drug dealers robbed an associate, Junior Gotti accompanied them on a drive-by in which two of the rivals were shot, he testified. "After that [Junior] didn't look at me like some college kid no more," Alite said.

Getting close to the younger Gotti was Alite's opening to the Mafia big leagues. They became inseparable, and Junior and his late father, Gambino crime boss John Gotti, reaped the profits of Alite's litany of crimes.

"You name it, we did it," Alite said.

Alite was Albanian, so he could never be inducted into the Gambino family, but he had his own crew, as did two other non-Italian, uniquely powerful mob associates - James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke and Joseph (Joe) Watts.

On Feb. 14, 1988, Junior Gotti was best man at Alite's wedding in Queens. The date was selected not because it was Valentine's Day, but as a sign of respect for Junior because it was his birthday.

Wearing a gray sweat suit, the heavily tattooed thug said Junior's bad-mouthing of his other close friends left him feeling it was only a matter of time before he would be left out in the cold, too.

"I didn't believe in the life," Alite said. "It's kind of like reading a brochure when you're a kid. You're going to Paradise Island and everything looks nice, but you forgot to read the fine print."

Thanks to John Marzulli

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Junior Gotti Ordered Rivals Shot, Former Best Friend, John Alite, Testifies

The former best friend of John A. "Junior" Gotti says that the famous mob offspring collected drug money and ordered shootings of rivals.

Gambino crime family associate John Alite testified about Gotti's alleged misdeeds on Monday at the Brooklyn trial of a Gambino soldier accused of murder. Alite took the stand as part of a plea deal.

He told the jury that on orders from Gotti, he drove a car used in a drive-by shooting in the 1980s. He also claimed Gotti, son of notorious Gambino boss John Gotti, collected monthly cash payments from a drug-dealing operation.

Alite is expected to be a key government witness when Gotti goes on trial later this year. Gotti is charged with involvement in three gangland murders and cocaine trafficking.

Thanks to Newsday

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Whitey Bulger's Femme Fatale Speaks Out

In an exclusive interview - her first since being paroled from state prison - a femme fatale associate of James “Whitey” Bulger is revealing for the first time who she believes ordered her death 25 years ago when she survived three gunshots to the head.

Eva “Liz” McDonough, 51, said she believes South Boston mob boss Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi wanted her dead for asking too many questions about her missing cousin, Debra Davis.

“I wish I could (expletive) see him face to face. I’d probably spit on him,” she said of Flemmi, 73, who is serving life for 10 murders, including Davis. “She used to tell me Whitey didn’t like her. I just want to know why. Why? She’s probably more at peace than I am.”

McDonough still wears hats - flaunts them, truth be told, for pure amusement in the North End neighborhood where a cowboy hat famously took the worst of the bullets meant for her brain.

Never to be caught, her would-be executioner came masked March 20, 1984 to a dive called One If By Land and left her with scars on her scalp and right ear. McDonough has been vocal in the past about the now dead drug dealer she thought fired the gun, but now says she believes Flemmi ordered the hit because she was badgering him about her cousin, and his girlfriend, Davis, 26, who went missing in 1981.

“One time I got little rough with him,” said McDonough.

In an age of cutthroat chauvinism, Flemmi and serial psycho killer James “Whitey” Bulger were surprisingly tolerant of the lusty McDonough, trophy moll of late Boston Mafia made man Nicky Giso, with whom she has a son, 25.

She said she confronted Flemmi, her lips loosened by liquor, at his and Bulger’s headquarters at the Lancaster Street garage and demanded, “ ‘I want to know where the (expletive) Deb is.’ I always knew he was worried I would say something to the (Mafia) and they would have that on him.

McDonough has four months left on the parole she was granted from MCI-Framingham on Aug. 18 after serving 18 years for burglary and drug possession. The woman who once posed as a cleaning lady and census taker to rip off Boston’s legitimate rich will be on probation until 2018.

Swearing - admittedly, not for the first time - the addictions to booze and dope are in her past - McDonough is still a standout in Dior eyeglasses, high-heeled spat boots and a fedora. But instead of loathsome lovers lavishing her with furs and Mercedes Benzes, the 7th-grade dropout uses money she earned making salads in a restaurant pre-release to bargain hunt in consignment shops. She hopes to land a job.

“They say to receive a blessing you have to pass one on. I worked on myself, really worked on myself,” the sober house resident said. “I’m grateful the Parole Board gave me a chance. Parole and probation continue to help me with re-entry.

“I don’t have what I had,” she said, “but I’m comfortable. I have myself, and that’s priceless. My intentions are, down the road, to open a sober house for abused women. I want to give other addicts hope.”

Asked if she wonders how Southie moll Catherine Greig is holding up on the lam now 14 years with Bulger, McDonough said, “I know she’s living the best that anyone could live. They’ve got plenty of dough, right or wrong. I think he’d rather have a woman as a partner. He doesn’t trust men. He’s no fool.”

As for those persistent rumors Bulger is bisexual, McDonough, who spoke fondly of his “movie star” charisma, nearly fell out of her chair, laughing. “He likes broads too much. Maybe just too young,” she said. “But gay? Naw!

“He got a kick out of me. He used to say, ‘Smile, they’re (the FBI) snapping (photos)!’ I laugh at these guys who say they ‘talked’ to him. He was by appointment only. He liked to have a good laugh, too, don’t think he didn’t.”

Bulger, she said, “hated women who smoked” and would have ditched even Raquel Welch if she’d lit up in his face. To push his buttons, McDonough would jump into his car when his back was turned and puff away.

“He knew I was busting his (expletive). He thought it was daredevil (expletive).” Then, her face darkening, she said, “I just wish I was smarter than I was. Drugs brought me to my knees.

“That era’s gone. It was glamorous. It was a lot of fun. But, it stripped me of my pride, my dignity. I guess sometimes it takes a wise woman to play the fool.”

Thanks to Laurel J. Sweet

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Can Mobster Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso Answer a Mystery Around the French Connection Case?

In prison, far from the Brooklyn haunts where his name was scrawled in blood, Anthony Casso stews. He stews over old vendettas. He stews over betrayals of the flesh — heart problems and prostate cancer.

Mr. Casso has served 15 years at a “supermax” prison in Colorado. And Mr. Casso, the once fearsome underboss of the Lucchese family who is now serving multiple life sentences amounting to 455 years for murder, stews over his secrets: unsolved crimes that, he says in an outpouring of letters, he is eager to help close if only he could show the authorities where the bodies are buried (especially if it entails a trip outside the gates).

“I would go out there in a heartbeat,” Mr. Casso said on Friday in a telephone call to a former detective seeking the mobster’s help in clearing his own name. But as much as he hopes for a taste of freedom, or a reduction of his sentence, prosecutors question what his information may be worth and what perils may lie in reopening contact with an antagonist some compare to the fictional monster Hannibal Lecter.

Dangling as a prize is the answer to one of New York’s most scandalous mysteries: how 400 pounds of heroin and cocaine, much of it seized in the so-called French Connection drug bust in 1962, were spirited out of the police property vault for resale back on the street. By the time the record theft was discovered in December 1972, the drugs — then valued at $73 million — had been replaced with flour and cornstarch.

Who committed the deed? There were four narcotics detectives,” Mr. Casso wrote the former detective, Pat Intrieri, in October, amplifying information he offered in his 2008 biography, Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss. “One worked inside the property clerk’s office.” One, he added, was later shot to death; Mr. Casso said he remembers where the gun was thrown. But Mr. Casso, 66, whose mob nickname was Gaspipe, says he is having trouble with exact locations. So, naturally, he would like to get out, if only for a day, to be helpful. Or at least win some leniency along the lines of a plea deal he says the government reneged on: six and a half years in prison.

“Of course he’d like to get out — he’s serving 55 million years,” said Michael F. Vecchione, chief of the rackets division in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Like other prosecutors, Mr. Vecchione has little stomach for Mr. Casso. But without any promises, he has arranged to visit Mr. Casso on Tuesday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C., where he has been undergoing cancer treatment, although it would take corroboration far beyond the mobster’s word to make any case.

“I bet you when the state guys come, they don’t know half the things,” Mr. Casso said on Friday to Mr. Intrieri, who relayed his remarks to The New York Times.

There is little chance that Mr. Casso, now 15 years behind the stoutest walls America can contrive, will ever see his release — not after pleading guilty in 15 murders and being tied to some 22 others.

He has also been accused of plotting to kill a federal judge and prosecutors, and violating the terms of his agreement to turn informant as one of the highest-level mobsters ever to flip — becoming the only major Mafia defector to be thrown out of the federal witness protection program.

Mr. Casso has also waffled on whether he corrupted an F.B.I. agent and hired two New York City police detectives, Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, as mob assassins. The former detectives are to be sentenced on March 6 on racketeering charges.

If, moreover, he still wonders why the authorities are leery of his offers, Mr. Casso may have provided the answer to his biographer, Philip Carlo. In his 2008 book, “Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss,” Mr. Carlo, a longtime friend of the Casso family, outlined several of the mobster’s escape schemes, including the planned ambush of a van carrying him back from court after his capture in New Jersey in 1993.

“He’s where he should be,” said Gregory O’Connell, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn who initially interviewed Mr. Casso with his late partner, Charles Rose, and called him “the most treacherous sociopath we ever dealt with.”

But a man can dream, and for Mr. Casso, that means being back once again in the Brooklyn sunshine, pinpointing old Mafia execution grounds and the watery grave of a murder weapon. Not rising at 5 a.m. every day to meticulously clean his cell in a federal “supermax” prison in Florence, Colo., that also houses the likes of the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski; the Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols; and such fellow mobsters as Gregory Scarpa Jr. and Salvatore Gravano, known as Sammy the Bull.

“I think he got a raw deal,” said Joshua L. Dratel, the latest of Mr. Casso’s many lawyers. Mr. Dratel said Mr. Casso was “poor at playing the system” and threatened major cases by exposing Mr. Gravano and other government witnesses and federal agents as liars. Mr. Casso has long claimed that the records of his F.B.I. debriefings, never made public, would show that the government covered up his warnings of moles in its ranks and that to get out of their plea deal with him, prosecutors used other Mafia turncoats as witnesses instead.

Perhaps Mr. Casso’s staunchest pen pal is Mr. Intrieri, 79, a onetime decorated New York detective lieutenant who was convicted of tax evasion in 1976 in the aftermath of the French Connection drug thefts. Mr. Intrieri, who has drafted a memoir asserting his innocence, saw new information on the case in Mr. Carlo’s book and said he found Mr. Casso’s accounts of unsolved crimes credible.

“He wants to get out a little bit, I guess; he’s going stir-crazy,” Mr. Intrieri said, after getting more than a dozen phone calls from Mr. Casso in recent weeks. “But his goal is a sentence reduction.”

The drugs at the core of the mystery — popularized as “The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy” in a 1969 book by Robin Mooreand an Academy Award-winning film that followed two years later — were secreted in compartments in a 1960 Buick loaded aboard the liner United States sailing from Le Havre, France, to New York. The car and its 112 pounds of heroin were later claimed by a Lucchese family underling, Patsy Fuca, who, as it happened, was being tailed by a pair of dogged New York narcotics detectives, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso.

The drug bust in January 1962 was widely hailed as a record. But the heroics proved short-lived. In six thefts between March 1969 and January 1972, someone signing the register as Detective Joseph Nunziata, a member of the narcotics bureau’s widely corrupt special investigations unit, and using fictitious badge numbers, removed the French Connection drugs along with another 300 pounds of heroin and cocaine from the police property vault at 400 Broome Street (now a New York University dorm).

Handwriting analysis and a discovered fingerprint never established that Detective Nunziata actually signed the police register. But eight months before the thefts were discovered, Detective Nunziata, charged with corruption in an unrelated case, was found shot to death in his car. It was ruled a suicide.

Mr. Moore, the author, wrote that as far back as 1967, he and Detectives Nunziata, Egan and Grosso joked about stealing the French Connection heroin.

Many suspects emerged, including Vincent Papa, a major drug dealer; Frank King, a retired narcotics detective and private eye working for Mr. Papa; and Mr. Intrieri, who upon his retirement had joined Mr. King as a bodyguard for one of Mr. Papa’s sons — “the biggest mistake of my life,” Mr. Intrieri now says. (Mr. Papa’s lawyer was overheard on a wiretap asking Mr. King, “Do we have anything to worry about the handwriting analysis?”) After providing what he thought was confidential information on four corrupt narcotics detectives, Mr. Papa was stabbed to death in prison.

Also under scrutiny was Vincent Albano, another former narcotics detective, who had served under Mr. Intrieri and had survived a mysterious hail of bullets in 1969, only to be slain in 1985.

Thomas P. Puccio, then a Brooklyn federal prosecutor, focused on Mr. King and Mr. Intrieri, but failed to tie them to the drug thefts. Mr. Puccio charged them instead with tax evasion for unexplained income, winning convictions and five-year sentences for both, along with three years for tax evasion by Mr. Albano. But the case remained a puzzle, Mr. Puccio conceded in an interview. “We never really conclusively solved it,” he said.

Still indignant over his conviction more than 30 years later, Mr. Intrieri — who held 15 police citations for bravery and valor — saw in Mr. Carlo’s book that Mr. Casso had named Mr. Albano and a mob associate as two of the French Connection thieves. The book related how Mr. Albano had been shot to death in Brooklyn in 1985, and how Mr. Casso had supplied the gun and helped dump the body on Staten Island.

Mr. Carlo, in an interview, said Mr. Casso had told him Mr. Albano had conceived the drug heist and asked Mr. Casso how to carry it out.

Mr. Intrieri, in his own manuscript, “The French Connection: The Aftermath,” told of running into Mr. Albano several times over the years — including in 1980 while Mr. Albano was casing a Queens bank — and said that Mr. Albano had laughed at hearing that Mr. Intrieri was a suspect in the drug thefts.

By opening an exchange of letters with Mr. Casso — a correspondence that grew to include this reporter — Mr. Intrieri elicited other details, and other crimes.

Mr. Casso offered details of the 1986 car bombing aimed at John Gotti that killed his Gambino family underboss, Frank DeCicco; the killing of a Russian mob associate, Michael Markowitz, in 1989; and the apparently unreported killing of a Jewish drug importer near Mr. Albano’s office around 1980, among other crimes.

Officials at the Federal Medical Center in North Carolina did not respond to repeated requests to interview Mr. Casso by phone.

“I’ll be here awhile receiving treatments for prostate cancer,” Mr. Casso wrote Mr. Intrieri in December. “Just my luck.”

As for the gun that killed Mr. Albano, Mr. Casso supplied a hand-drawn map with imperfect punctuation showing, he said, where it had been thrown: “Its in Sheepshead Bay.”

He also sketched a site where, he said, another mob victim was buried, calling it: “Drawing for the Colombians remains.”

Mr. Intrieri said that his follow-up inquiries gave credence to Mr. Casso’s information and that it was worth giving the old mob boss a chance to hand prosecutors new evidence. “I sincerely believe that until he goes to the site, he won’t remember,” Mr. Intrieri said.

Thanks to Ralph Blumenthal

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