Mafia News

The ‘Mafia Summit’ stakeout

Robert Croswell at home in Vestal, with newspaper articles about his dad, Edgar Croswell, a state police sergeant who broke up the largest meeting of mobsters on November 14, 1957, in Apalachin, New York. (Times Herald-Record/MICHELE HASK)

Apalachin — Fifty years ago today, this hamlet on Exit 66 off Route 17 was like Woodstock for mobsters. But the party came to an abrupt end because of a native son of Woodstock, a state police sergeant named Edgar Croswell.

Matter of fact, you could say that when Croswell rousted Mafia bosses with names like Joseph Bonnano and Joseph Profaci; Carlo Gambino and Russell Bufalino, the Mafia began sliding into oblivion. Up until then, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had soft-pedaled the presence of the mob, but the stones that Croswell kicked over at Apalachin led to investigations galore, the passage of new state and federal racketeering laws and the fabled code of silence being broken in pieces by Mafia songbirds like “Sammy the Bull” Gravano. Continue Reading »

Don / Boss
Interchangeable terminology for the leader of a family. All major decisions are made by the boss and money made by the family ultimately flows to him. Continue Reading »

Impact of event remains vivid for former prosecutor, reporter

Five decades ago this week, a police raid sent Mafia bosses, their underbosses and capos running through the woods of Apalachin — and into American history and popular culture.

Carlo “Don Carlo” Gambino - N.Y. Gambino Family Boss (Brooklyn, N.Y.)

Some of the most famous names in the Mafia — Carlo Gambino, Michael Genovese, Russell Bufalino (later crime boss of northeastern Pennsylvania), Joseph Profaci (the model for Don Corleone of “The Godfather” fame) — were in town Nov. 14, 1957, ostensibly for a steak roast at the Tioga County estate of ailing local mobster and Endicott soda distributor Joseph Barbara. Continue Reading »

The government has opened an old treasure trove of information on some 800 gangland goons who wielded power during the Mafia’s Golden Age - a virtual Social Register of the worst sociopaths to have packed a silenced pistol, wielded an ice pick or driven a getaway car in a sharkskin suit. Continue Reading »

Ian Thomson reviews The Force of Destiny: a History of Italy since 1796 by Christopher Duggan

Christopher Duggan, a distinguished Italophile and professor of Italian history, describes the Mafia as a grotesque parody of Mediterranean family life. Cosa Nostra clans are known as cosche, after the Sicilian dialect term for artichoke leaves: the clans fit snugly inside each other, overlapping tightly. Continue Reading »

David Flusfeder reviews The Havana Mob: Gangsters, Gamblers, Showgirls and Revolutionaries in 1950s Cuba by T J English

Charles “Lucky” Luciano

One of the great pleasures in reading any chronicle of the Mafia is the rough street poetry of the names. In the pages of T J English’s enjoyable – yet morally uncertain – account of the rise and fall of the Mob’s Caribbean empire of gambling, pleasure, sin, murder and profit, we come across such figures as Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, William “Lefty Clark” Bischoff, and Nicholas “the Fat Butcher” di Costanzo. Continue Reading »

Hit inspired Pesci role in gangster flick Casino

MOBSTER Tony “The Ant” Spilotro met a grisly end because he broke the Mafia code - by having an affair with another gangster’s wife.

Spilotro, said to be the inspiration behind Joe Pesci’s chilling character in the gangland movie Casino, was buried in a cornfield along with his brother. Continue Reading »

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 »

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Nigel Jones reviews The Mafia at War by Tim Newark - The two things that almost everyone once knew about Italy’s Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, were that he made Italian trains run on time, and that he, uniquely among Italian rulers, successfully, if temporarily, crushed the Sicilian Mafia. Never forgetting a slight, the Mob, so the legend goes, ate their revenge cold years later when they handed over their Sicilian heartland without a shot being fired, lock, stock, and non-smoking barrel to the invading Allies.

Not having investigated Italian railway timetables between 1922-43 I cannot report on the veracity of the first claim, but Tim Newark has exhaustively examined the second, and establishes beyond doubt that any notion that it was the Mob that won Sicily for the Allies is a myth. Continue Reading »

As the world news focused on the death of former Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, following a heart attack, on Sunday December 10, 2006 at the venerable age of 91, Sicily lamented unexpectedly the death of Cardinal Salvatore Pappalardo, Archbishop Emeritus of Palermo who passed away during the early hours of that same day at the age of 88. Continue Reading »

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