Jul 13 2007
Angiulo’s parole request granted
As FBI agents cuffed Boston Mafia leader Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo and hauled him out of Francesco’s Restaurant in the North End on Sept. 19, 1983, he yelled, “I’ll be back before my pork chops get cold.” Continue Reading »
Jul 10 2007
ROME – Police in southern Italy arrested 60 people on Tuesday in a swoop on the local mafia known as the ‘Ndrangheta, suspecting them of crimes ranging from smuggling drugs and illegal immigrants to national insurance fraud. Continue Reading »
Jul 06 2007
Producer Joseph Isgro nails the rights to a legendary mobster’s life story.
BEFORE Tony Soprano or Don Corleone or Tony Montana there was Lucky Luciano — the real-life patriarch of modern organized crime.
Luciano was the Sicilian immigrant who rose to power in the Mafia in the U.S. in the 1920s and transformed it into a flourishing enterprise based on legitimate economic models. He ordered gangland killings, consolidated warring crime factions and began laundering profits from narcotics and prostitution through lawful businesses. Continue Reading »
Jul 05 2007
A Former Cleveland Police Chief Finally Tells The Whole Story
The meeting went down at Burke Lakefront Airport in 1978. A small prop-engine plane owned by the Maryland State Police was parked on the tarmac. Inside was a sergeant from Maryland and “The Old Man,” a professional hitman-turned-rat who was working with Maryland police in sting operations. Cleveland Police detective Ed Kovacic climbed into the plane and sat next to The Old Man. Continue Reading »
Jul 05 2007
Media baron Conrad Black’s fate is hanging in the balance, as the jury consider whether he is guilty of fraud and what the US authorities call “racketeering”. Continue Reading »
Jul 05 2007
Who Is Lou Sciortino? Ottavio Cappellani Picador, 227pp, £14.99
In April 2006, Italian police captured a 73-year-old man they found hiding in a run-down farmhouse outside the Sicilian town of Corleone. Dressed in jeans and a pullover, he may have looked harmless to the untrained eye, but this man was in fact Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, wanted for a string of murders. For years, Provenzano had evaded capture, communicating with his family through a system of handwritten notes and a network of underlings. It’s this mix of the scarily powerful and the banal that drives Ottavio Cappellani’s farcical tale of Mafia life in modern-day Sicily. So much so, in fact, that there’s a character who appears to be modelled on Provenzano: Jacobbo Maretta, who hides from police in an underground bunker. “Whenever he has to go out, he takes a tractor as far as the village, where a yellow Fiat 127 is waiting to take him to a dealer in garden statues in Ispica. There he gets on a truck, changes inside it, and when he gets out, usually at Catania airport, he’s all spruced up.” Continue Reading »
