Quantcast
Channel: Mobsters in the News
Viewing all 718 articles
Browse latest View live
↧

Eris Censori, dubbed ‘Melbourne's Al Capone’ must remain on parole: court

September 21, 2015, 11:15 am
$
0
0

 SHANNON DEERY

But Eris Censori is still a step ahead of the system, after already beating a death sentence and order he remain behind bars for life over the murder of Perth man Michael Sideris in 1982.
Censori was ordered to face off with a Western Australian executioner over the murder, but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. He started serving the term in Western Australia but was transferred back to Victoria in 1987 so he could be closer to his family.
Ultimately he was released on parole to end in 1999, and has been on a crusade since for complete freedom.
But in a major blow to his case legislative changes reforms in 2013 and 2014 forced him to be placed back on parole, and he has been fighting the decision since.
Earlier this year the Supreme Court dismissed his proceedings, and the Court of Appeal today dismissed an appeal of that decision.
Censori, who impressed Supreme Court judge Stephen Kaye with his legal nous, represented himself on both occasions.
Among a myriad of arguments Censori had argued that as a prison transferee the only sentence he could have been legally subjected to was the Western Australian death sentence.
But he said because death sentence was abolished in Victoria in 1975, he was no longer subject to any sentence in this state Eris and his older brothers, Edmondo and Leo, were a well-known crime family involved in drugs and an illegal gambling syndicate.
Eldest brother Edmondo, known as “Eddie Capone”, has convictions in Victoria for violence, including assaulting police, theft and threats. The small but thickset man has been involved in the amusement machine business in Melbourne and Perth.
Eddie has previously given his occupation as a bouncer, labourer, machine operator, fitter, billiard marker and cafe proprietor.
He arrived from Italy with his parents in 1960 and was known to hang around inner-suburban coffee bars in Melbourne as a teenager.
Eddie and Eris moved to Perth in 1981 and set up an amusement machine company.
Gambling identity Leo Censori has convictions for possession of a pistol and for possession of fully jacketed ammunition.
In 1982 he was convicted in the County Court in Melbourne on a charge of possessing a prohibited import (heroin) and sentenced to five years with a minimum of three.
He was also fined $5000.
His ex-wife detailed how he was behind a massive illegal gambling empire he has helped run for more than a decade.
In a series of interviews with the Herald Sun in 1991, she exposed the inner workings of the cartel, which controlled a large slice of the lucrative illegal gambling industry in Melbourne.
Ms Glascott said her former husband had made a fortune from illegal gambling.
“I have seen the money,” she said. “Leo can stack money better than a bank.” She said she had found rolls of money — up to $40,000 — hidden around their Alphington home. She recalled seeing about $60,000 sitting on their coffee table at home.
At one time Leo Censori accepted a police guard when detectives discovered a group of bandits planned to kill him.
Ms Glascott said things turned a little sour in Perth for the family after Eris was convicted of murder.
“Eris destroyed it with the murder. Within 24 hours, the police seized his machines and closed him up.


↧
Search

HOW GOODFELLAS BECAME SCORSESE'S MOST MISUNDERSTOOD MASTERPIECE

September 22, 2015, 5:53 pm
$
0
0


BY MATTHEW ENG
It's not Scorsese, it's you.
Written on the occasion of Goodfellas' 25th anniversary.

In 2013, New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum posited a provocative but necessary theory on the joyless rise of the "bad fan," i.e. the die-hard viewers who have turned prestige-laden protagonists like Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Don Draper, among other middle-aged, middle-class, and — importantly — white male leads, into cultural idols. If these "bad fans" had their way, Breaking Bad would be comprised entirely of Bryan Cranston taking names and threatening competitors in huskily menacing whisper,The Sopranos would be nothing more than grisly offings and Bada Bing! scenes, and Mad Men would be reduced to an endless loop of Don Draper bedding nameless sixties bimbos in a pillowy cloud of Lucky Strike smoke. (And, needless to say, Skyler, Carmela, and Betty — that astonishing but oft-denigrated triptych of “Difficult” Wives — would be nowhere in sight.) This bluntly "badass" form of idolatry has threatened to scrub out the warts-and-all subtleties of these prodigious shows, diminishing these landmark one-hour classics to empty, reflex exercises in machismo.
Even though the "bad fan" phenomenon has gained traction as a TV mainstay in recent years with the rise of the cable drama antihero, its seeds have been deeply sown and its roots stretch as far back as James Cagney, that original toughie, smacking a grapefruit square into Mae Clarke's face in 1931’s touchstone gangster drama Public Enemy. That notorious scene — played straight but frequently misinterpreted as comedy — can be found on YouTube, with a hotbed of top comments that each grossly summarize typical "bad fan" reactions: "That was supremely funny,""Ah the good ol days hahaha," and, most chillingly, "She'll stay with him. And that's why men rule the world.” At what point does inappropriate appreciation become stomach-turning misogyny?

Of all genres, it is the gangster drama that most often attracts hero-worship of this troublingly hardline variety. Moviegoers have revered the gangster archetype since the dawn of Hollywood: these were the days when a pug-faced character actor like Edward G. Robinson could be a legitimate leading man so long as the role was a snarling heavy and Bogart was still playing the B-movie hood, an unsavory image he never entirely shed and which was indelibly emulated and further solidified by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. Viewers, mainly but not solely male, cling to these types as movie-certified masculine ideals, building a bridge that connects Bogie, Cagney, and Robinson to Scarface, The Untouchables, and the lad-land crime comedies of Guy Ritchie’s early oeuvre, not to mention the holy troika of Coppola's Godfathers.

But of all these films—many great, other less so—it’s Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese’s majestic mob masterpiece about real-life hood turned Witness Protected informant Henry Hill, that has gained the most unsettlingly off-base appreciation from some of its most avid loyalists, the type who know every named mobster’s nickname and can recite them in the order they’re introduced.
Goodfellas is one of my favorite films, a stylish, daring, and endlessly engaging tour de force that maybe isn’t Scorsese’s finest masterpiece — and with a résumé like that, who’s complaining? — but which nonetheless draws me in and reveals a little more of its nasty, hypnotizing self with each and every new viewing. ButGoodfellas is also the Scorsese masterpiece whose enduring pop cultural legacy leaves me the most frustrated, as many of its (loudest) fans continue to regard it as something like a pure comic diversion, which it occasionally is, but often connotatively so, as in that brilliantly sick non-sequential opening sequence, which acquires deeper, darker, and sharper significance once we catch up to it within the chronological frame of the film. Even worse than the straight-out comedy label, though, is the irksome tendency to view Goodfellas as nothing more than an “ultimate male fantasy.”

At least that’s the attitude that was assumed by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, who back in June penned an infuriating piece entitled — and, honestly, I feel my eye twitch just thinking about this title — “Women are not capable of understanding ‘Goodfellas.’”Excusing the fact that the film was actually cut and shaped by awoman (that would be Scorsese’s longtime collaborator and editing legend Thelma Schoonmaker), Smith’s article basically suggests that what Sex and the City was for women (i.e. escapist, wish-fulfillment art, which it wasn't), Goodfellas represents for men, a dunderheaded argument so hoarily out-dated that I’m pretty sure it would make a caveman groan. It’s not a novel opinion and — to an extent — I understand it. What could be more desirous to the standard male viewer than a glitzy-gritty vision of virile power involving guns, gals, and an endless cascade of cash, unencumbered by care or consequence?
That’s an entertaining movie, but it’s also not Goodfellas, which fans like Smith seem intent on branding, with misplaced nostalgia, as some sort of “OG male buddy flick,” as though Goodfellas were a precursor to The Hangover or Scorsese had made Diner, but with whackings and wiseguys. Smith enthuses that, to guys, Goodfellas’ central trio of conspirators — Ray Liotta’s Henry, Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway, and Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito — are “heroes” and “[rulers] of the roost,” buying into the myth of lawless heroism that these men ascribe to themselves rather than what is being suggested with more subtlety by the filmmakers. This is Bad Fan Behavior 101. When it comes to reactions like Smith’s, one must always inevitably wonder if the director (or showrunner) is to blame for these dubious takeaways, as Breaking Bad mastermind Vince Gilligan recently had to answer for when actress Anna Gunn become the target of death threats over her intensely divisive performance as Skyler White, or when Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev claimed that the show had taught him to, among other things, successfully dispose of a body.
In instances like these, it’s hard to blame an artist like Gilligan, whose show never fully fed into the outlaw adulation that its fans so passionately projected on to Walter White and who can hardly be accused of creating a violent provocation, much less a criminal instruction guide. Scorsese, too, doesn’t warrant the blame for the chauvinistic vein in which Goodfellas’ bad fans have appropriated the film’s legacy to fit the superficially cool story they’d like it to be. (And between Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese has infamously seen his share of director-shaming misinterpretations.) Scorsese is, quite simply, far too talented and too intelligent a filmmaker to have made the movie Goodfellas is labeled as. In his eyes and in the eyes of those searching for more than just compulsive entertainment, which Scorsese provides in spades, Goodfellas is — in its most basic form — a gutsy and rigorous immersion into the life of a desperate, cantankerous man who continually goes to great and often dangerous means to achieve his all-consuming desire of money, power, and glory, which is a narrative that could be applied to any number of American movies, from Citizen Kane to Birdman.
There has always been a certain level of ornamental excess toGoodfellas and Scorsese’s filmmaking in general (that tracking shot! that soundtrack!) that often threatens to gloss over the ethical decrepitude that dwells at the film’s core with pop-colored, bullet-riddled grandeur. But Goodfellas isn’t a party. As Roger Ebert, who "got" Goodfellas and Scorsese better than almost any critic and famously trumpeted the film over The Godfather as a different but more accomplished depiction of organized crime, noted in his originalreview, “[The] camaraderie is so strong… But the laughter is strained and forced at times, and sometimes it’s an effort to enjoy the party…”
Even as Goodfellas coats a glittering sheen over most of Michael Ballhaus' marvelously multilayered images, Scorsese delves pretty deeply into the foolishly warped mind of Henry Hill, whom he pegs almost instantly as a craven, class-A manipulator. Liotta, who is truly the unsung hero of Goodfellas' success, is Scorsese’s invaluable accomplice in this regard. There is far too much bugginess in Henry’s eyes and too much flop sweat that accumulates on Liotta’s forehead throughout the film to make Henry a hero, not to mention the fact that he’s an abusive and unfaithful husband to his persistent wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), who isn’t merely the emasculating “ball-buster” that Smith pins her as, but rather a spunky, idealistic woman who unravels under her husband’s carelessness before realizing that blithe ignorance and casual culpability are her only possible options. Meanwhile, Henry’s relentless pursuit of criminal aims allows him to become the type of made man he deified as a boy, a transformation that is firmly rooted in the heroic images of his departed youth, when he was initially recruited into mob society. In many ways, Henry is the prototypical Goodfellas bad fan.
From there, Scorsese and co-writer Nicholas Pileggi are ultimately less interested in creating heroes than in deconstructing Henry and his friends. Tommy, the volatile live-wire immortalized by an Oscar-winning Pesci, has become Goodfellas’ iconic character, for better and for worse. Pesci’s classic “Funny how?” interrogation can be recited with stunning alacrity by any number of fans, who quote it like a comic routine when it’s a really a self-conscious tantrum.
Pesci’s character is always cited as “unpredictable,” but Scorsese and Pileggi patently delineate Tommy’s violent outbursts (the aforementioned monologue, the murders of Billy Batts and “Spider”) as excessive defense mechanisms against potentially humiliating forces that seek to call his authority into question. “Jimmy the Gent” is one of De Niro’s most understated characters, whom we too often misremember as a coolly elegant portrait of gangsterdom, even though Jimmy’s clearly enough of a frantic creep to gutlessly set up Karen near the film’s finish. And Liotta gets saddled with what has to be one of the most pathetic sights in cinema history, as Henry and Karen shrilly sob on their bedroom floor after the latter throws out some leftover cocaine that was their only source of profit. It’s an extended scene that Scorsese makes purposely uncomfortable, forcing an audience tempted to root for Henry to see what such “heroism” looks like in the harsh light of reality.
Scorsese possesses and expresses razor-sharp ideas about his characters and their riskily illicit circumstances, their despicable behavior, and their frequently self-imposed stresses, but he has never been a filmmaker particularly interested in passing decisive judgment on his characters, or, more specifically, gravely moralizing their actions so as to make his story totally edifying or disciplinary, which perhaps explains why so many viewers have frequently latched onto Goodfellas’ surface appearance, ignoring the ironic value beneath it all. In an essay appreciation of Pietro Germi’s Divorce, Italian Style, in which Marcello Mastroianni’s Sicilian sad sack attempts to off his suffocating wife, Scorsese described Germi's pitch-black comedy of errors, manners, and re-marriage as “a very moral film, but there’s nothing superior about it because it’s criticizing a whole culture rather than an individual,” a particularly trenchant task that Scorsese’s film also boldly tackles.
Underneath the polished photography and jukebox palette ofGoodfellas, lies a penetrating critique of the extremes of estrangement, chauvinism, cruelty, criminality, erotomania, and regression that certain communities, cultures, and countries will allow their men as they ceaselessly chase after their own selfish desires. It’s a brutally urgent analysis that I suspect will continue to be ignored by the film’s biggest and most oblivious admirers. Then again, maybe they aren't oblivious at all to the movie's permeating message. Maybe they’re just unnerved by how true it still rings.


↧
↧

RECIPES WE WOULD DIE FOR: Italian Meatloaf

September 22, 2015, 5:55 pm
↧

Two from Lucchese Crime Family Sentenced For Criminal Gambling Enterprise

October 2, 2015, 12:28 pm
$
0
0

By Paul Nichols
Thursday, Oct 01, 2015

Acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman announced that Matthew Madonna, a ruling boss of the New York-based Lucchese crime family, was sentenced to state prison as a result of Operation Heat, an investigation by the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice that uncovered an international criminal gambling enterprise that transacted billions of dollars in wagers, primarily on sporting events, and relied on extortion and violence to collect debts.
 Madonna, 79, of Seldon, N.Y., a member of the three-man ruling panel of the Lucchese crime family, was sentenced yesterday, Sept. 30, to five years in state prison by Superior Court Judge Salem Vincent Ahto in Morris County.  Madonna pleaded guilty on June 17 to a charge of second-degree racketeering.  Madonna controlled the family’s gambling operations and other criminal activities from New York. A second member of the crime family’s ruling panel, Joseph DiNapoli, 80, of Scarsdale, N.Y., allegedly controlled those operations and activities with him.  Charges are pending against DiNapoli.
 The former New Jersey underboss for the Lucchese crime family, Martin Taccetta, 64, of East Hanover, N.J., also was sentenced yesterday.  Judge Ahto sentenced Taccetta to eight years in state prison.  Taccetta already was serving a sentence of life in state prison plus 10 years as a result of a Division of Criminal Justice prosecution in the 1990s.  He pleaded guilty to first-degree racketeering on June 17.
 Four other Lucchese crime family members, including the top New Jersey capo, Ralph V. Perna, pleaded guilty to first-degree racketeering on June 17 and are awaiting sentencing. Perna, 69, of East Hanover, N.J., faces a recommended sentence of eight years in prison; his sons Joseph M. Perna, 45, of Wyckoff, N.J. and John G. Perna, 38, of West Calwell, N.J., face recommended sentences of 10 years in prison; and John Mangrella, 72, of Clifton, N.J., faces a recommended sentence of eight years in prison.

Assistant Attorney General Christopher Romanyshyn, Deputy Director of the Division of Criminal Justice, is prosecuting the defendants for the Gangs & Organized Crime Bureau.
 “Through our far-reaching investigation into this multi-billion dollar criminal gambling enterprise, we built a racketeering case that extended to the top bosses of the Lucchese crime family in New York,” said Acting Attorney General Hoffman. “By putting Madonna in prison, we send a powerful message that we are committed to combating organized crime in the most effective way possible, which is to target the leadership ranks and disrupt the command structure of these criminal organizations.”
 “Sending this New York-based mob boss to New Jersey State Prison represents another major milestone for the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice in its decades-long tradition of fighting organized crime,” said Director Elie Honig of the Division of Criminal Justice.  “As long as these crime families maintain their corrosive presence in New Jersey, we’ll investigate them and put them behind bars.”
 Judge Ahto has scheduled sentencing for Ralph Perna, Joseph Perna and John Perna for Jan. 7, 2016.  Mangrella had been scheduled for sentencing yesterday, but he is being rescheduled.
 The defendants were initially charged and arrested in Operation Heat in December 2007.  The investigation uncovered an international criminal enterprise that, according to records seized, transacted an estimated $2.2 billion in wagers, primarily on sporting events, during a 15-month period.  The gambling operation received and processed the wagers using password-protected websites and a Costa Rican “wire room” where bets were recorded and results tallied.
 The gambling operation involved agents or “package holders,” each of whom brought in bets from a group of gamblers. The enterprise and all of its packages involved hundreds or even thousands of gamblers. Records showed that one high-rolling gambler wagered more than $2 million in a two-month period.  The illicit proceeds were divided by the package holders and the members they worked under, such as the Pernas and Tacetta, who in turn made “tribute” payments to the New York bosses, including Madonna and DiNapoli.  Collection operations at times took the form of threats or acts of violence.
 The investigation also uncovered a scheme in which a former New Jersey corrections officer and a high-ranking member of the Nine Trey Gangsters set of the Bloods street gang entered into an alliance with the Lucchese crime family to smuggle drugs and pre-paid cell phones into East Jersey State Prison.
 The prison smuggling scheme allegedly involved inmate Edwin B. Spears and a former corrections officer at East Jersey State Prison in Woodbridge, Michael T. Bruinton.  Spears was at East Jersey State Prison at the time of the alleged conduct.  It is charged that Edwin Spears, an admitted “five-star general” in the Nine Trey Gangsters set of the Bloods, formed an alliance with Joseph Perna and another defendant from the Lucchese crime family, now deceased, to smuggle drugs and cell phones into East Jersey State Prison through Bruinton.  The alliance allegedly extended beyond smuggling.  In one instance, Joseph Perna sought assistance from Spears to stop an individual associated with the Bloods from extorting money from a man with ties to the Lucchese family.  The charges are pending against Spears and Bruinton.  Several other defendants were charged in that scheme.

 Assistant Attorney General Romanyshyn and former Assistant Attorney General Mark Eliades presented the case to the state grand jury.  Deputy Chief of Detectives Christopher Donohue and Detective Patrick Sole of the Gangs & Organized Crime Bureau were lead detectives for the case, under the supervision of Chief of Detectives Paul Morris.  Sgt. Noelle Holl was the principal detective for the financial portion of the case. Acting Attorney General Hoffman also credited former Acting Supervising State Investigator James Sweeney and the following Detectives: Sgt. Audrey Young, Ho Chul Shin, Lt. Brian Bruton, Mario Estrada, Richard DaSilva, and John Delesio.  He credited the New Jersey State Police Intelligence Section for their assistance.  He further thanked Auditor Thaedra Chebra of the Division of Taxation’s Office of Criminal Investigation, Detective Andrew Varga of the New York City Police Department and members of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office who provided assistance.
↧

Alleged Toronto-area Mafia leaders named as suspects in massive Italian crime probe

October 2, 2015, 12:29 pm
$
0
0

 ADRIAN HUMPHREYS 

Alleged leaders of some of the strongest Mafia clans in the Toronto area are named as suspects in a large-scale drug, guns and money-laundering case in Italy, with prosecutors saying the mobsters – the “elite” of the underworld – also dealt in softer commodities: tulips and chocolate.
More than a dozen current or former residents of Canada are named as suspects by prosecutors in Italy in their sweeping international investigation revealed Monday and hailed as “historic.”
“This investigation is important because it involves the richest ’Ndrangheta families that are able to work at the same level compared to the American Mafia and have control of ’Ndrangheta organizations in Canada, especially in Toronto,” said Nicola Gratteri, a prosecutor in Italy.
“We are speaking about the most powerful ’Ndrangheta families,” he told reporters in Italian. “We are dealing with the ’Ndrangheta elite. We are really speaking about the true ’Ndrangheta.”
More than 50 people were arrested or are wanted for arrest in Italy for alleged involvement.
Prosecutors filed detention orders against the accused in Rome and in Reggio Calabria, the capital of the southern Italian region where the ’Ndrangheta, the proper name of the Mafia there, was born.
There were no immediate signs that anyone in Canada was being arrested as a result of the probe, sources say.
Prosecutors in Italy said their investigation focused on several key clans, all of whom have a long and strong influence in Canada: Commisso, Aquino-Coluccio and Crupi clans. They are often referred to by police in Canada as “the Siderno Group” because of the proximity of their homes to Siderno, a picturesque town on the Ionian coast.
Several of the men linked to the current case were named in 2010 in a National Post investigation on the alleged Mafia presence in Ontario. At the time, Italian authorities revealed they tracked seven primary ’Ndrangheta families in the Toronto area, each with its own presumed boss.
The new allegations name four of those seven alleged bosses: Cosimo Figliomeni, 50, of Vaughan; Antonio Coluccio, 45, formerly of Richmond Hill; Angelo Figliomeni, 52, of Vaughan; and Domenico Ruso, 70, of Brampton. None could be reached for comment late Tuesday.
Also named is a man currently in custody in Canada and his son: Carmelo Bruzzese, 66, is challenging in court his deportation order to Italy for immigration violations and Italian authorities list him as a “fugitive” in prosecution documents; his son, Carlo Bruzzese, 30, is also listed as wanted and said to be living in Canada.
Carmelo Bruzzese has previous denied being a mobster, saying: “This is a big lie.”
Rocco Remo Commisso is also named. He has, for decades, been named as a part of the mob in Canada. He was convicted in 1981 of three counts of conspiracy to commit murder and in 1984 for involvement in a bombing in which one person was killed.
Others named as wanted but living in Canada by Italian authorities are: Nicola Coluccio, born in 1944; Antonio Crupi, born in 1995; Francesco Commisso, born in 1956; Francesco Commisso born in 1948; and Francesco Crupi born in 1992.
Also named are three brothers who lived in Canada before returning to Italy: Antonio Coluccio, Giuseppe Coluccio and Salvatore Coluccio.
 “There are definite links to Canada,” said an Italian government source. “It is a very complex operation. There is more than one project in Italy and they joined them together because they discovered that different prosecutors were investigating the same groups.”
European prosecutors say the organization was dealing in a variety of commodities, including the flower market in the Netherlands and about 250 tonnes of Lindt chocolate previously stolen in Italy.
Gratteri told reporters that in a previous investigation, the clans around Siderno, in southern Italy, were found to have 500 gunmen ready to take up arms.
The investigation continues and those arrested have not had a chance to mount a defence to the accusations or their detentions.

National Post
↧
↧

Why Do We Admire Mobsters?

October 2, 2015, 12:29 pm
$
0
0
Why Do We Admire Mobsters?

BY MARIA KONNIKOVA

In 1947, when Elaine Slott was sixteen, she travelled with her mother and sister to visit her aunt and uncle in Florida. The day after they arrived, however, Elaine and her aunt boarded another plane by themselves. Elaine soon found herself speeding to Cuba, where the family had business interests. Elaine remembers that night well. After they landed, she and her aunt left Havana and drove for several hours into areas that seemed increasingly remote. It was very late and very dark when they finally arrived at a stately house. Along with a few guests, a number of family members, including Elaine’s uncle, had gathered there for a dinner party. Their host, who had been cooking pasta, emerged from the kitchen wearing a white apron. He introduced himself to Elaine as Charlie.
Over dinner, Charlie was charming. He personally brought out and served all of the food. After appetizers came the pasta, and Elaine found herself staring down at a plate she had assumed was meant to be shared by everyone at the table. “I could never eat all this!” she declared. Charlie laughed and proposed a wager: he’d give her two dollars if she ate it all. Another guest immediately joined in: another two dollars for the girl. Elaine had no pocket money, and wanted to buy some souvenirs for her sister, who was still back in Florida. So she ate the whole plate. There were cheers. She was paid in full. On her way home, she bought the souvenirs. She didn’t give it another thought.
Several weeks later, a photograph in a newspaper caught her eye. It showed a man who seemed intriguingly familiar. Above it was a headline about the infamous Charles “Lucky” Luciano. He’d been captured in Cuba and was being deported to Italy. “Ma, why didn’t you tell me who it was?” Elaine demanded. “It’s not important that you know everything,” her mother replied. Elaine shouldn’t have been too surprised: the uncle she visited in Florida was Meyer Lansky. That night, he’d sent his niece and his wife to see his best friend.
A few weeks ago, Slott, a diminutive, delicate octogenarian, recalled those days wistfully over steak at the première of AMC’s “The Making of the Mob,” a docu-drama about the early years of organized crime, when Lucky, Meyer, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel ruled the land. She remembers Charlie as a gentleman and her uncle as a charismatic, loving person who cared deeply for his family. Meyer Lansky’s grandson, Meyer Lansky II, a fifty-eight-year-old former casino operator who was sitting at the same table, said that he felt the same way. He remembers walking with his grandpa on the beach in Miami and listening to his business advice. His granddad was a kind, peaceful man—and, Lansky II is quick to stress, he never got his hands dirty. (Or so it’s said.)
It’s no surprise that family members paint idyllic pictures of their mobster ancestors. Every mobster was also a father, brother, uncle, or grandfather, and—at least theoretically—his villainy didn’t spill over into those roles. The real question is why so many other people feel the same way. We don’t glamorize all violent crime; no one holds the Son of Sam or Charles Manson in high regard. (It’s hard to imagine their descendants gathering for a celebratory dinner at a steakhouse.) So why are Al Capone, Lansky, Arnold Rothstein, Luciano, and their ilk held up as mythic figures, even heroes of a sort, not just by their families but by the general public? Why are members of the Italian mafia treated more like celebrities than unsavory criminals?
Part of the answer is historical. According to James Finckenauer, an emeritus professor at Rutgers University and the author of “Mafia and Organized Crime: A Beginner’s Guide,” the glamorization of the mob started with Prohibition. In the early years of the twentieth century, mobsters were just small-time operators. Then came the Volstead Act, which outlawed alcohol. “One of the side effects was to solidify organized crime and create a real, international organization out of what was, in essence, small criminal groups,” Finckenauer told me. Because Prohibition was hugely unpopular, the men who stood up to it were heralded as heroes, not criminals. “It was the start of their image as people who can thumb their noses at bad laws and at the establishment,” Finckenauer said. Even when Prohibition was repealed and the services of the bootleggers were no longer required, that initial positive image stuck. Books like Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” communicated the idea that mobsters were men who cared about the happiness of their communities and who lived by their own codes of honor and conduct, impervious to the political whims of the establishment.
The specific immigrant identities of the original mobsters also made them easier to admire. With the significant exceptions of Meyer Lansky and Arnold Rothstein, the original high-profile mafiosos were, by and large, Italians. And, even as late as the nineteen-twenties, Italians and Italian-Americans were often considered “other” by much of the rest of the country. In fact, many people subscribed to what criminologists call the alien conspiracy theory of organized crime—the idea, as Finckenauer puts it, that “Southern Italians came to us with evil intent to create criminal enterprise on our shores.” (Today, Donald Trump advances a similar theory about immigrants from south of the border.) That outsized sense of Italians’ otherness, combined with the idea that the mob’s rigid rules precluded the involvement of outsiders, made mobsters less threatening. “By and large, people are under the impression that if they don’t have any dealings with stuff the mob deals with—no drugs, no borrowing money, no illegal gaming—they have nothing to fear from organized crime,” Finckenauer said. Because their violence seemed directed at their own communities, not anyone else’s, it was easy to romanticize.
Social psychologists have long distinguished between “in-groups” and “out-groups.” Out-groups come in different guises. There are some with whom we feel absolutely no affinity; often, we separate ourselves from them by putting them down. But other out-groups are enough like our in-group that, although their identity remains separate from ours, they seem like less of a threat, It is to this second category that the mafia belongs. People who see themselves as “all-American” can be fascinated by Italian mobsters, and even admire them, without worrying that their lives will come into contact with mobsters’ lives. It’s no coincidence that the other glamorized mob figures in the U.S. are Irish: from “The Departed” to the forthcoming Whitey Bulger biopic “Black Mass,” they’re presented as similar enough for sympathy, yet different enough for a false sense of safety to creep in. For reasons of language, culture, and race, members of the Chinese and Russian mob have proven harder to romanticize.
Ultimately, the mob myth depends on psychological distance, a term coined by the New York University psychologist Yaacov Trope to describe the phenomenon of mental distancing that takes place when we separate ourselves from events, people, emotions, or concepts. In some cases, that distance comes naturally. As painful events recede into the past, our perceptions soften; when we physically remove ourselves from emotionally disturbing situations, our emotions cool. In other cases, we need to deliberately cultivate distance—to “gain perspective.” Trope likens it to the old cliché of missing the forest for the trees: you can wander around in the trees forever or, through training or external intervention, realize that you need to step back to see the full vista.
Once attained, psychological distance allows us to romanticize and feel nostalgia for almost anything. It provides a filter, eliminating some details and emphasizing others. We speak of the good old days, hardly ever of the bad. Psychological distance is, among other things, a coping mechanism: it protects against depression and its close cousin, rumination, which pushes us to dwell too long on unpleasant details from the past instead of moving forward. When, instead, we smooth the edges of the past, remembering it as better than it was, we end up hoping for an equally happy future.
But psychological distance doesn’t require time. Under the right conditions, it can flourish in the moment. The psychological distance provided by “otherness” mimics the distance provided by time. It’s not a phenomenon unique to the mafia. It’s easy to glamorize warfare when there is no draft, or to idealize anyone whose life style seems risky and edgy without putting you, personally, at risk—spies and secret agents, rebels without a cause, the beatniks of Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road.” As long as there isn’t an easy-to-recall, factual reminder that brings us down out of the clouds of romanticism, we can glamorize at will. The lives of serial killers offer those concrete reminders: they lurk in neighborhoods like ours, threatening people who could be us. The mob is more abstract: it’s a shadowy, vague “organization” whose illicit dealings don’t really impinge on us. Abstraction lends itself to psychological distance; specificity kills it.
We grant mobsters dignity because we enjoy contemplating the general principles by which they are supposed to have lived: omertà, standing up to unfair authority, protecting your own. Those principles are what you see and hear when you watch Lansky and Luciano’s golden years reënacted in the “The Making of the Mob,” or when you follow Whitey Bulger’s takeover of Boston in “Black Mass.” In the same way, when Meyer II or Elaine Slott speaks to me about the past, I hear echoes of greatness—of lofty ideals and grand ambition, of important principles that the cold world didn’t always uphold. That dinner in Cuba is recalled as an illustration of friendship and family: Lucky was just a man making good, torn from the people he loved so the U.S. could make a political statement. Because they’re related to him, Lucky Luciano’s familiars see him as a principled man worthy of our admiration instead of a criminal deserving of our disdain. Psychological distance allows us to see him this way, too. It makes us part of the family.


↧

Was Goodfellas the Last Truly Great Mobster Film?

October 2, 2015, 12:30 pm
$
0
0
Was Goodfellas the Last Truly Great Mobster Film?

Twenty-five years later, Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece is unequaled in its understanding of the horrifying realities—and dark appeal—of a life of organized crime.

•           DAVID SIMS
 Goodfellas, released 25 years ago today, might be the last great mob film: Not only did it help redefine the genre, but it also spawned many worthy successors (and many more pale imitators). Even Martin Scorsese’s follow-ups in the genre,Casino and The Departed, bear obvious debts to his 1990 masterpiece, which upended every concept of nobility and honor in organized crime without undermining its appeal. When Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) tells the audience he “always wanted to be a gangster,” it’s easy to understand why. But as much fun as the movie is, viewers also understand why they don’t want to be gangsters: because they’re merciless, violent crooks.
Scorsese was drawn to the true story of mobster-turned-informant Hill, and the biography written by Nicholas Pileggi, because he thought it captured the life of gangsters better than any filmed depiction. The Mafia’s cinematic language was steeped in The Godfather movies and their knock-offs: stately, operatic, bound up in codes of samurai-like honor. Then came Goodfellas: a story of a Mafia hanger-on, a wise guy who hustled drugs and hijacked trucks, hung out playing cards in Queens clubs, and helped bury the corpses created by the psychopaths he hung out with. There was no sense of honor outside of asking permission to kill certain people. And yet that cinematic world was still alluring, which is what makes a film about unrepentant monsters such a blast to watch again and again, 25 years on.
There’s almost no part of Goodfellas that hasn’t been analyzed to death since 1990. There’s Liotta’s hilariously self-satisfied narration, which offers no apology or remorse as the bodies pile up. There’s the kinetic, disconnected approach to plotting, zipping between vaguely related scenes with an intensity that belies its 140-minute running time. Contrast that with The Godfather films, which were intricately plotted and ended in epic crescendos of violence. Instead,Goodfellas simply follows Henry and his pals Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) as they hang out, occasionally rip off truck and airplane shipments, and attack people, either for business or nothing at all.
Pesci, who won an Oscar for his role, is Goodfellas’s most memorable actor—so much so that nearly every line he speaks has passed into total cliché. But it’s remarkable how all of the film’s dramatic tension is centered around his character Tommy, who can snap at a moment’s notice. Though there are larger stories told in Goodfellas (the most notable being the famed Lufthansa heist), they don’t really matter to Henry’s life and safety. Even when he goes to jail for four years, he eats like a king (who can forget the clove of garlic sliced with a razor blade), and he ends up arrested not because of the millions earned in the Lufthansa heist, but for a cocaine-dealing business he ran on the side.
Henry is the closest thing audiences get to an anti-hero: His mild shock at every pointless murder feels like moral outrage in the mobster world.
It’s all so gloriously pointless, and yet Scorsese makes the mobster’s life feel like that of a god among men. Liotta has probably never been better—wormy (his braying laughter at Tommy’s bad jokes is wonderfully hideous) and yet somehow sympathetic. Perhaps because he’s placed alongside two truly cold-blooded men, Henry is the closest thing the audience gets to an anti-hero in the film: His mild shock at every pointless murder feels like moral outrage in the mobster world. That’s a dynamic David Chase understood when laying out the world of his TV show The Sopranos (the only true Mafia masterpiece produced since Goodfellas): By making his protagonist Tony a slightly more reasonable person than his violent, thick-headed associates, the character seemed infinitely more relatable.
Scorsese has since come back time and again to the world of crime. The Departed, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director (Goodfellas was nominated but lost to Dances With Wolves), has the same energetic storytelling style but applies it to a more intricate plot of triple agents and informants. The Wolf of Wall Street comes closest to Goodfellas’s fascinatingly blurry territory of depiction vs. endorsement, and stirred up debate in 2013 for making the life of a homophobic, misogynistic, and heartless white-color criminal look like a luxurious commercial. Goodfellas has the same dark heart, understanding that even as the audience watches on with horror, there’s some tiny part of them that has completely surrendered to the madness and the fun. That was Goodfellas’s original genius and, even in retrospect, it seems impossible to equal.



↧

Russian Mafia Gangster: Russian Whistleblower ‘May Have Been Murdered by S...

October 2, 2015, 12:32 pm
↧
Search

The Wee Book of Irish-American Gangsters: Spanish cops cracking down on Irish Costa criminal...

October 2, 2015, 12:33 pm
↧
↧

The New England Mafia: Mobster Frank "Whitey" Bulger's ties to Las Vegas

October 2, 2015, 12:35 pm
↧

The New England Mafia: SALES OF 'WHITEY' BULGER MEMORABILIA RISE WITH FIL...

October 2, 2015, 12:36 pm
↧

Yakuza Wars.

October 2, 2015, 1:17 pm
$
0
0

Turf war between struggling yakuza groups
Under growing pressure due to legal changes, Japan's organized crime groups are now facing a backlash from the public and companies that used to provide their "earnings." Julian Ryall reports from Tokyo.
The manager of a pair of gambling halls in southern Japan is keeping a low profile and wants no publicity, but he may have dealt a severe blow to Japan's already struggling underworld groups.
The man, who has not been named, has sought advice from Japan's Public Safety Commission about protection money he has been paying to the Kudo-kai yakuza organization over the past 15 years. The businessman estimates that he has paid the gang 40 million yen ($332,809). But with many businesses feeling the pinch of Japan's extended economic problems, he is now looking for the support of the authorities to stop paying protection money.
Police will see the man's appeal for assistance as a victory for a change in the law that was pioneered by the Fukuoka Prefecture in 2010, but copied across the country the following year.
"2011 was the big year for the clampdown on the yakuza here, with new laws going into effect that make it illegal for regular citizens to facilitate the activities of gangsters," said Brett Bull, editor at The Tokyo Reporter, which covers crime and culture in Japan.
Illegal to pay protection
"In essence, that means it is now illegal for the operators of legitimate businesses to pay protection money to the yakuza. So the case with the owner of the 'pachinko parlors' in Kitakyushu City reflects exactly what the police hoped would happen," he told DW.
If this case leads to more small-scale shops and companies similarly seeking advice and protection from the police, then the yakuza may face a devastating reduction in their income sources. That, in turn, may have a more worrying outcome.
Japanese police have stepped up preparations for a possible outbreak of violence between gangs after the nation's largest underworld group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, split in late August.
Shinobu Tsukasa, the 73-year-old head of the organization, ousted five subsidiary gangs from beneath its umbrella and placed eight more on suspension. Tsukasa, who has served three prison terms for a variety of crimes, including involvement in the murder of a rival gang boss, has been accused of favoring certain factions within the organization and of being heavy-handed in his management.
Expanding interests
Some of the factions operating mainly in the western Japanese traditional heartland of the Yamaguchi-gumi were concerned about Tsukasa's plans to expand the organization's interests - primarily loan-sharking, protection rackets, drugs, gambling and prostitution - into the more lucrative Tokyo market.
This also caused friction with the gangs that have made Tokyo their base of operations, and ultimately triggered a schism within the Yamaguchi-gumi. "He ruffled a lot of feathers," Bull admits. "This is a seismic shift in the underworld here, but it is not unprecedented, and that is one reason the police are concerned again."
The authorities remember the civil war that erupted between different factions when the Yamaguchi-gumi went through a spell of internal upheaval in 1984. The violence lasted three years, saw 25 killings - including a police officer and an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of one shoot-out - as well as 70 injuries in incidents across Japan.
The gangs that were excommunicated by Tsukasa have swiftly banded together, named themselves the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, and announced that they are doing business as usual in the western Japanese city.
The announcement did not go unnoticed by the authorities, who acted quickly to let the new splinter group know that it was on a very short leash. Just days after the gang set up shop, 50 officers from Hyogo Prefectural Police - including a number in full riot gear - raided their offices. Officially, the police were looking into suggestions that the gang had fraudulently set up bank accounts, but the visit served as a warning.
A fractious underworld
And this may be the authorities' best weapon in dealing with a fractious and shifting underworld, believes Jake Adelstein.
"The message is that the police now have the ability to label any one of these groups an 'anti-social force,' which gives them the right to move in and close down their offices," said Adelstein, author of "Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan" and an expert on Japan's underworld groups.

Japan's police braces for gang violence over Yakuza split
Japan's biggest crime syndicate is facing a rift, government officials have said. The police was placed on high alert due to an expected spike in gang violence, according to the local media. (29.08.2015)
Organized crime poses major threat to Asia-Pacific nations
Yakuza membership shrinks to record low
Japan prepares to take a gamble on casinos
"And they will exercise that option just as soon as any violence breaks out," he added. "And that is obviously bad for business as it means the gangs cannot go about their business, and hence will lose money. None of them want that."
A second fear among the gangs' leaders will be falling foul of what amounts to employer liability laws if one of their underlings kills or injures another gang member or, by accident, a regular citizen.
"A mob boss can now be held personally responsible for anything that a low-level member of their gang does," he told DW. "And, not surprisingly, they have no wish to be hit with multimillion dollar compensation suits."
The financial pressure on gangs that see themselves as businesses is not decreasing.
"These outfits are suffering just like other businesses have struggled in recent years," said Bull. "For the authorities, the challenge is to get their tentacles out of all the aspects of everyday life that they have taken hold of, and that is something that is only going to be achieved slowly."

A Yakuza War Is Brewing in Japan — And the Police Are Taking Sides
By Jake Adelstein
Earlier this month, Japan's National Police Agency held an emergency meeting to discuss what they believed was a looming crisis. The country's largest organized crime group, the 24,000-member Yamaguchi-gumi, had just split apart. And police feared the kind of violence that might follow.
"There has never been a gang war with drones available to drop bombs into the offices of rivals," a detective with the Hyogo Police Department told VICE News on condition of anonymity. "In recent years, there have been successfully made 3D guns that are capable of doing lethal damage. So even if a gang has no weapons on hand, they just need the right equipment. Print, kill, melt the gun. Those new guns will be hard to trace…. Escalation could be very fast and very bloody."
Thirty years ago, a power struggle in the Yamaguchi-gumi led the group's second-in-command to form a new organization called the Ichiwa-kai. After a gunman for the splinter group killed the leader of the Yamaguchi-gumi at his lover's apartment, a war erupted during which gang members were arrested in Hawaii for attempting to buy handguns, machine guns — and rocket launchers.
The Ichiwa-kai dissolved and the war ended in 1989 after the Yamaguchi-gumi began luring Ichiwa-kai members back — with, in part, a generous pension plan. Today, a top-level boss can reportedly retire with half a million dollars.
Financial considerations may be the only thing preventing the yakuza from starting a war. Under civil law in Japan, a yakuza boss can be held financially responsible for the crimes of his underlings. In 2012, former boss Tadamasa Goto settled with the family of a real estate agent his men killed by giving the family $1.2 million.
To the yakuza, money is more important than blood. But even money may not be able to erase the decades of bad blood among the Yamaguchi-gumi.
Twenty-one different organizations make up Japan's yakuza, but the Yamaguchi-gumi was the gang whose power the police most feared. More than half of the organized crime in Japan was directly or indirectly under the group's control.
The organization was founded as a labor brokerage in Kobe in 1915 by a group of dockworkers, but it quickly expanded into criminal activity. In 1946, Kazuo Taoka formally took over the group and rapidly expanded it. What had been a 30-member organization grew nationwide, absorbing other syndicates and eventually setting up its own talent agency, construction companies, and other fronts. Taoka famously instructed his gangsters, "You all need to have a legitimate job."
The yakuza are regulated and monitored — the organizations themselves are not illegal. The addresses of their headquarters are listed on the National Police Agency website, the top bosses have business cards with corporate logos, and there are two monthly fanzines dedicated to the yakuza in addition to comic books and video games.
The yakuza claim to be humanitarian groups promoting traditional Japanese values, and in times of need, they're typically quick to provide supplies and aid. However, most of the members derive their income from blackmail, extortion, racketeering, trafficking, gambling, and fraud.
After the war ended in 1989, Yoshinori Watanabe of the Yamaguchi-gumi's Yamaken-gumi faction became the organization's leader. The faction, which currently has 2,000 members, remained the most powerful until 2005, when Tsukasa Shinobu of the Kodo-kai faction took over from Watanabe. The Kodo-kai proceeded to do what they could to weaken the Yamaken-gumi.
The rule of the Kodo-kai has not been good for the other 71 factions in the sprawling organization, especially the Yamaken-gumi. There have long been complaints of having to pay high association dues, and former bosses say that lower-ranking yakuza groups have been forced to buy supplies from headquarters at extremely high prices. This was one way the Yamaguchi-gumi was able to effectively launder money and shore up its accounts.
The US is also no fan of the Kodo-kai, having singled the group out for special sanctions last April.
It was the Yamaken-gumi faction that led the rebellion, creating a new organization called the Kobe Yamaguchi in late August with 12 other factions. The spark appears to have been a rumor that Tsukasa was going to retire this year and turn the organization over to another Kodo-kai leader.
The Yamaguchi-gumi called an emergency meeting on August 27 and summarily expelled the 13 bosses and their factions from the group. The depth of their anger became clear this week when they issued a statement via their web-page, condemning the rebellion.
"It is only a matter of time," the statement read, "before the good and bad of those who have mistaken their way is corrected."
* * *
The majority of Japanese police are tacitly supporting the breakaway Kobe Yamaguchi, police sources and those close to the new group tell VICE News. In fact, the rebels delivered a notice to the Hyogo Police Department before breaking away from the Yamaguchi-gumi, and cops began guarding their headquarters before the split was even formalized. Police have been trying to destroy the Kodo-kai since 2009, when the head of the National Police Agency openly declared war on the faction, stating, "We will obliterate them from public society."
The Kodo-kai has been a notably anti-authoritarian faction of the Yamaguchi-gumi, actively challenging both the police and the Japanese government while implementing a set of rules known as the "three no's": No members should confess to crimes. No cops can visit the offices. No cooperation with police is allowed.
This may not sound like unusual gang behavior, but in Japan it is. Organized crime detectives would often visit the offices of the yakuza groups they were monitoring to drink tea, chat, and keep up to date. The exchanges were cordial. If there was gang violence, the yakuza would offer up someone for arrest. Before police raided yakuza offices, they often made an appointment. In turn, the yakuza made sure there were documents to be carried out in boxes so that reporters outside photographing the raid had something to shoot.
The Kodo-kai rejected that system.
There are a large number of Korean-Japanese members in the faction, and much of Japan, including the police, maintains a thinly veiled anti-Korean sentiment. In a rare interview withSankei Shimbun in 2011, Tsukasa explained that, "We provide refuge for those marginalized by Japanese society — the outcasts, the Korean-Japanese, those from broken families who face discrimination. We make them strong and keep them from bothering ordinary people."
The Kodo-kai have also been vocal critics of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, accusing him of pushing the nation toward fascism. However, behind closed doors, the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Abe administration maintain some strange ties. One yakuza associate who helped fund the Kodo-kai's successful sex shop empire also founded a political support group for Hakubun Shimomura, Japan's minister of education and science. Earlier this year, it was revealed that Shimomura had received political donations from a Yamaguchi-gumi front company, and that he was closely connected to a mob financier.
Shimomura is best known in Japan for promoting "moral education."
The Yamaguchi-gumi split could become a major headache for the Abe administration. When gangsters feel it's to their advantage, they've been known to rat out their political allies. Though the Kodo-kai appear to have friends in the Abe administration, the Kodo-kai are reviled by police. So the breakaway factions and the police are working together.
* * *
In an article published earlier this month in Nikkan Gendai, a member of the rebel group claims that there will be no bloodshed because police will attack the Kodo-kai for them. Their weapon of choice? Charges of tax evasion. And authorities may be able to obtain the evidence they need to prosecute the Kodo-kai from the rebel factions.
Among the 13 groups that split from the Yamaguchi-gumi is the Takumi-gumi, headed by Tadashi Irie. For years,  he was the Yamaguchi-gumi's chief of headquarters — the No. 3 man in the organization, and the one who controlled the money. A Yamaguchi-gumi insider told Nikkan Gendai, "We have the banker on our side. He knows where all the money comes from and goes. We give the police the information, and they get to destroy the Kodo-kai. They'll bust Tsukasa for tax evasion — the end."
A senior member of the National Police Agency who was not authorized to speak on the record would tell VICE News only that, "We don't play favorites or make deals. We didn't encourage the split, but obviously we consider the Kodo-kai the most troublesome faction of the Yamaguchi-gumi. This is an opportunity to take them out."
In Japan, the police aren't unified in their thinking. While the National Police Agency considers the Kodo-kai a problem, the Osaka Police have a long-standing dislike for the Yamaken-gumi, the breakaway faction that heads the rebels. Police searched the Kobe headquarters of the Yamaken-gumi on September 9 on charges of fraud — the first police raid since the group was founded.
he raid allowed the police to gain information on the new group, and also served as a reminder to the world that the rebels are hardly the noble outlaws they claim to be. Still, the Hyogo Police are maintaining cordial relations with the rebels — a chance to seriously weaken the Yamaguchi-gumi is too good to pass up.
There is, however, one problem with the idea that the police can go after the Kodo-kai for tax evasion. Irie, the man who once controlled the Yamaguchi-gumi's finances, is planning to retire, according to some sources. He is well known for being a relatively honorable and loyal mobster in a world of double-dealing thugs. So Irie is unlikely to talk — which would make proving tax evasion difficult. And if the police can't dissolve the Kodo-kai with criminal charges, then the rebel factions may attempt to do it with violence.

Follow Jake Adelstein on Twitter: @jakeadelstein
↧

RECIPES WE WOULD DIE FOR: Osso Buco

October 3, 2015, 1:13 pm
↧
↧

The Life and World of Al Capone: Meriden-made silver cocktail shaker owned by Al Ca...

October 4, 2015, 11:37 pm
↧

Reisman: For Sale in Yonkers — Flegenheimer's House

October 8, 2015, 8:14 am
$
0
0


Yonkers home of Dutch Schultz is for sale (Photo photo by Phil Reisman)

 Phil Reisman, preisman@lohud.com

Psst… Flegenheimer slept here.
You are no doubt asking, what is a Flegenheimer?
Crime buffs know that Flegenheimer — Arthur S. Flegenheimer to be exact — was the real name of Dutch Schultz, a cold-blooded bootlegging kingpin of the Prohibition era who may have been responsible for as many as 136 gangland murders over a 10-year span.
Schultz was a sociopathic killer, but he evidently had a domestic side to his nature. For a brief time lived in a prim, four-bedroom, center hall colonial home at 65 Hudson Terrace in Yonkers.
The house is still there — and it is for sale. The asking price is $549,000.
Built in 1923, the house has a commanding backyard view of the Hudson River and the Palisades. That’s a selling point all by itself, but Better Homes Realty of New York is betting that the Schultz connection gives the property a certain je ne sais quoi.
“Own a piece of history,” the online listing says.
Cathy Clavel, the listing agent, said, “I think the story is going to sell the house. It’s an amazing house.”
In his heyday, Schultz controlled the illegal booze market in the Bronx and Harlem, a status he ruthlessly enforced with an army of goons. His other lucrative enterprises included running numbers and providing “protection” for restaurants.
When one of his henchmen was caught skimming $20,000 from the extortion racket, Schultz personally shot him in the head. A witness said later, “Dutch Schultz did that number just as casually is if he were picking his teeth.”
Legend has it that Schultz owned the Yonkers Brewery, which was located about a block from City Hall and was put out of the beer business in 1919 when the 18th Amendment banned the manufacturing and sale of alcoholic beverages. The brewery was reduced to making ice cream and non-alcoholic near beer.
Prohibition, of course, created a huge market for illegal booze — and Schultz and other mobsters gladly met the demand.
The story goes that Schultz, using dummy corporations as a cover
took ownership of Yonkers Brewery and began producing real beer that was pumped to underground to Speakeasy bars through an elaborate underground hose system.
Lawmen cracked down on the saloons and put the brewery under a heavy watch. Anticipating a raid, Schultz on the night of Sept. 17, 1932, supposedly ordered his men to dump $50,000 worth of suds into the Nepperhan River. It was said that part of Yonkers reeked of beer.
There are all kinds of stories about Dutch Schultz. Some of them are undoubtedly true.
Bob Walters, a longtime Yonkers resident and the director of the Science Barge on the Hudson, told me recently that Schultz owned a pet monkey, which accompanied him on his rounds. He’d take the little ape into one local establishment and let him walk on the bar.
“In those days, monkeys didn’t wear diapers!” Walters said.
No one had the courage to object to the whims of the Dutch man.
Westchester County Legislator Sheila Marcotte, R-Eastchester, said Schultz is part of the lore of Tuckahoe as well.
It was rumored that the mobster lived with his wife and two children at 225 White Plains Road at the top of Winter Hill Road in the village, a property now owned by Concordia College.
Marcotte said there is no proof that Schultz ever resided at that address — nor is it likely that an old well located across the street was the entrance to a secret tunnel used by Schultz. However, she did find a newspaper story from the 1930s, which reported that Tuckahoe cops were tipped off that Schultz was hiding out with friends who owned the house.
The tip proved to be false.
“I give many historical trolley tours each year and 225 White Plains Road is a favorite stop,” Marcotte said in an email. “The tour goers are fascinated by the folklore and legend — and yes — we still tell people that Dutch Schultz once lived there.”
On Oct. 23, 1935, Schultz was fatally shot in the men’s room at the Chop House Palace in Newark, N.J. He was 34 years old and was worth about $7 million — a least that’s what he said on his deathbed. Where that money wound up is anybody’s guess.
Anybody interested in buying the house on Hudson Terrace should know there’s no hidden stash of cash on the property. Clavel, the real estate agent, said the man who owns the house only found some liquor bottles when a retaining wall was rebuilt, and all but one of the bottles was broken. Yonkers home of Dutch Schultz is for sale (Photo: photo by Phil Reisman)
Jewish by birth, Schultz converted to Roman Catholicism. A priest gave him last rites.
Today he has a permanent residence that no one may dispute. It is the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla.

The headstone says, “Flegenheimer.”



↧
Search

Gotti family wedding like a scene from ‘The Godfather’

October 9, 2015, 9:21 pm
$
0
0

By Ian Mohr and Mara Siegler

Minimum wedding gift for John Agnello and Alina Sanchez was $5,000, left in a birdcage
The lavish wedding of John Gotti’s grandson would have made the Dapper Don proud: Guests were shaken down for minimum gifts of $5,000 and gangsters had to stagger their appearances to avoid unlawful contact with fellow criminals, the New York Post has learned.
In a scene straight out of “The Godfather,” well-wishers arriving at John Agnello’s wedding last weekend deposited their envelopes in an “elegant birdcage” by the door, sources said.
With about 500 people attending the event at the swanky Oheka Castle on Long Island, the former “Growing Up Gotti” star and bride Alina Sanchez raked in $2.5 million.
That haul puts to shame the $350,000 that Agnello’s uncle, mob scion John “Junior” Gotti, pocketed at his lavish, $1,000-a-plate wedding reception at the Helmsley Palace in 1990.
Sources said Agnello and Sanchez’s around-the-clock wedding began at 5 p.m. Friday and lasted until 1 p.m. Saturday, and included a multi-course meal at midnight and breakfast at 7 a.m.
The lengthy bash allowed certain guests to come and go at intervals, much like Vanity Fair’s annual Oscar party.
But unlike the mag’s tiered invites to A-listers and wannabes, legal considerations drove the timing at the Oheka Castle, where politically connected owner Peter Melius was shot in the face during a still-unsolved ambush last year.
“Felons can’t consort together,” one source said.
“You have to stagger the felons. That’s standard mob procedure.”
Sources also said there was “enough security to guard an army.”
The groom’s father, Carmine “The Bull” Agnello, showed up with two law enforcement officers who stood guard at the doors, one source said.
The elder Agnello had to get a judge’s approval to travel from Cleveland, where he’s awaiting trial on racketeering charges in an alleged scheme to weigh down junked cars with sand and dirt before selling them for scrap metal.
He also blew his stack when he saw ex-wife Victoria Gotti — the groom’s mom — with her boyfriend, former soap opera star Jack Scalia, and “was yelling on the grounds before the ceremony,” a source said.
Guests included John Travolta, who is set to portray the late John Gotti in a planned biopic, and his actress wife, Kelly Preston, as well as “Entourage” actor Kevin Connolly, who was recently tapped to direct the oft-delayed flick.
John Gotti, once head of the Gambino crime family, pictured in 1990. He died of cancer in 2002 while in prison.
A team of feds also kept watch outside the gates, according to a law enforcement source.
“We want to gather some intel on which mobsters are still hanging around,” the source said.
Sources also said that the wedding was listed under the name “Sanchez,” and that staffers at Oheka Castle had to sign confidentiality agreements.
A spokesman for Victoria Gotti said, “I think whomever is creating these stories has watched ‘The Godfather’ one too many times.”
↧

Lucchese crime boss sentenced for role in gambling ring

October 9, 2015, 9:22 pm
$
0
0


By S.P. Sullivan |

TRENTON — Matthew Madonna, an alleged ruling boss of the New York-based Lucchese crime family, was sentenced to five years in state prison for his role in a multi-billion dollar gambling ring, authorities said.
Madonna, of Selden, N.Y., controlled the organized crime family's gambling operations and pleaded guilty in June to racketeering charges. He was sentenced to five years in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton by Superior Court Judge Salem Vincent Ahto in Morris County.
Acting Attorney General John Hoffman said in a statement Thursday the charges stemmed from a 2007 investigation by the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice dubbed "Operation Heat." The investigation uncovered an "international criminal gambling enterprise" that saw $2.2 billion in wagers shuttled between password-protected websites and a Costa Rican "wire room," authorities said.
They claim Madonna is a member of the "three-man ruling panel" of the Lucchese operation.

"Through our far-reaching investigation into this multi-billion dollar criminal gambling enterprise, we built a racketeering case that extended to the top bosses of the Lucchese crime family in New York," Hoffman said.
The investigation led to charges for 32 people ranging from racketeering and money laundering to weapons possession and tax evasion related to the gambling scheme.
It also uncovered an operation involving a former state corrections officer and a member of the Bloods street gang, who conspired with the Lucchese family to smuggle drugs and pre-paid cell phones into East Jersey State Prison, authorities said.
Another alleged Lucchese underboss, 64-year-old Martin Taccetta, was also sentenced yesterday for his role in the scheme, receiving eight years in state prison. But Taccetta is already in prison, serving a life sentence on a 1993 racketeering conviction, records show.
He pleaded guilty to charges in the Operation Heat scheme on June 17.
Madonna's attorney, John Weichsel, declined to comment on the sentence, though he said his client does not plan to appeal.

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
↧
↧

Italy: Police Crack Down on 'Cosa Nostra-backed Credit Card Hackers'

October 9, 2015, 9:22 pm
$
0
0


Italian authorities have arrested 24 people they suspect of involvement in a cloned credit card scam that allegedly netted about € 3 million (US$ 3.36 million).
The Tuesday swoop was the culmination of the police operation dubbed "Free Money", launched after the director of an unnamed bank spotted an attempt to use a cloned credit card and tipped off the authorities.
The 24 arrested people are suspected of using cloned credit card codes and money laundering.
Police say the group set up fictitious car rental companies and used hacked credit card information to run the businesses in the name of the victims.
The victims were mostly United States citizens, some of whom have individually been the subject of identity theft and fraud amounting to thousands of dollars.
To harvest the card details needed for the scam, the group allegedly worked with hackers based in Russia, Ukraine and Romania.
While the alleged organized crime group is based in Palermo, police say it also counts members in other locations in the rest of Sicily and in the Lazio region.
Police say some of those arrested are thought to have links to the brutal Cosa Nostra organized crime group, a fact that hints to credit card fraud as a new, previously unprobed channel of the Italian Mafia's funding.



↧

Police raid offices of yakuza gangs over street parades

October 9, 2015, 9:23 pm
$
0
0

Police raided the offices of two rival yakuza gangs in Toyama Prefecture on Tuesday over suspected violation of road traffic laws after they paraded in the streets in a downtown area in a show of power in late September.
The Haga-gumi, affiliated with Japan’s largest crime syndicate the Yamaguchi-gumi, and the Hongo-gumi under the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, which recently split from the main gang, allegedly occupied some roads in the city of Toyama on the Sea of Japan coast without obtaining prior permission.
The police believe the Hongo-gumi gangsters drove about a dozen cars in the downtown area with about 100 gang members marched alongside in a display of power on the night of Sept 25.
To intimidate those linked to the Kobe Yamaguchi-gumi, the Haga-gumi is also suspected to have taken similar action, driving cars and having about 100 members walk through the area known for its pubs, bars and restaurants on the night of Sept 28.

A restaurant manager who witnessed the parades said it was intimidating suddenly to see a convoy of luxurious black cars on the streets.
↧

Suspected Mafia boss deported in renewed push from Canada and Italy against the mob

October 9, 2015, 9:24 pm
$
0
0

ADRIAN HUMPHREYS 
| 
For two years from inside a Canadian prison, Carmelo Bruzzese denied being a Mafia boss from Italy who was a link between powerful criminal clans in both countries, but his appeals ended Friday with an unappreciated flight to Rome where Italian police were waiting to arrest him.
That ending is now called a new beginning; authorities say the case is a successful test of enhanced cooperation and a renewed push by Canada and Italy against mobsters who work as if the ocean and borders don’t exist.
It comes at a time when links between the Mafia in both countries are more pronounced, revealing they are two working parts of the same machine.
“There was a strong will by the Canadian government and good cooperation with Italian authorities to solve the problem. We started with Mr. Bruzzese, maybe we continue with others,” said an Italian government source familiar with the case. “There are others similar.
“I think the times are changing.”
Bruzzese, 66, denies being a mobster, saying everything he knows about the Mafia he learned from newspapers.
“This is a big lie,” he earlier told the National Post.
However, evidence against him was accepted by the Immigration and Refugee Board as the more likely truth and his emergency motion to the Federal Court of Canada to delay his removal was rejected Tuesday.
Bruzzese was escorted onto a plane in Toronto Friday and arrested by Italian police after landing at Leonardo da Vinci airport in Fiumicino, a suburb of Rome.
His lawyer in Canada, Barbara Jackman, said details of his removal were kept secret from her and even the court.
Jackman said Bruzzese should not have been taken before his court appeals had been heard.
“The judge, on the interim motion to let him stay until a judge fully considered his arguments of unfair treatment, said there were serious issues about the unfairness of the process but still decided removal could occur before any of those issues were fully decided,” she said.
If Bruzzese wins his case in Canada, no Canadian judge is able to order his release from an Italian prison, she said.
In Italy, Bruzzese is named as one of the most important bosses among the ’Ndrangheta, the proper name of the Mafia in Italy’s Calabrian region.
Authorities say he is an important link between powerful clans in Italy and in Canada.
Born in Italy, he came to Canada in 1974 and married a Canadian woman in 1976. He became a permanent resident here but not a citizen and returned to Italy in 1977.
He then travelled back and forth between countries, maintaining close ties in each.
In Canada he was “living in the shadows,” the IRB found.
In Italy authorities say he is the crime boss of Grotteria. The neighbouring towns along Italy’s Ionian Coast are home to some of the most historically important mob clans, all of which have strong connections to Canada.
When police in Italy raided Bruzzese’s home looking for him, they instead found a sophisticated bunker hideout in his basement. It allowed someone to slip inside through a sliding wall behind a bar and stay for long periods with stocked food, water and an air-filtration system.
But Bruzzese wasn’t there.
At the time, he was living in Vaughan, Ont., with his Canadian wife. That’s where Canada Border Services Agency officers found him on Aug. 23, 2013. He was not charged criminally here, instead deemed a non-Canadian inadmissible on grounds of organized criminality and jailed pending his removal from the country.
Bruzzese accused the government of doing a back-door extradition — sending him to Italy to be arrested on charges that he would not normally be extradited for.
The case showed smoother cooperation between Canada and Italy than has often been the case.
During IRB proceedings — despite objections by Bruzzese’s lawyers — a police officer from Italy testified extensively over the telephone about Bruzzese, the case against him in Italy and about the Mafia in general.
“He assumed the most important roles and decisions. He gave the orders,” Major Giuseppe De Felice, a commander with the Carabinieri, a national paramilitary police force, told the IRB. “The ’Ndrangheta is a global phenomena. It is a huge organization. In Canada there are many families from Calabria that belong to the ’Ndrangheta.”
The lifeblood of ’Ndrangheta, De Felice said, is “cocaine, cocaine, cocaine.”
Adding to Bruzzese’s woes, he was also named last week in Italy as a wanted fugitive after a large probe targeting the Mafia “elite” — some of the strongest and wealthiest mob clans involved in drugs, weapons and financial crimes as well as black market deals in tulips from the Netherlands and chocolate from Switzerland, prosecutors said.
On Tuesday, the Post revealed 12 men in Canada were among those wanted for arrest in the probe, including Bruzzese and his son, Carlo, 30, one of Bruzzese’s five adult children.
The CBSA did not respond to requests for comment Saturday.
National Post
ahumphreys@nationalpost.com

Twitter.com/AD_Humphreys
↧
Viewing all 718 articles
Browse latest View live
Search