January 20, 2022
This Week In Gang Land
Good News Out Of Brooklyn For The Gambino Crime Family
Gambino
capo Andrew (Sonny) Campos isn't slated to be sentenced for the racketeering and
bribery scheme that generated millions of dollars of cash for his crime
family and their minions until next month. But he got good news this week
from Brooklyn Federal Court, where he'll be facing the music for
orchestrating a ripoff of more than $1.5 million from a major New York
construction company and the IRS.
Mark (Chippy) Kocaj, a reputed Albanian gangster and a major player in the scheme who served as a middleman between a corrupt executive for a Manhattan real estate developer and Campos in the racketeering scheme, and who also pleaded guilty to a separate extortion and faced up to 21 months behind bars — the prison term prosecutors sought — received a sentence of a mere nine months.
Kocaj's below-guidelines sentence — his low end number was 16 months — is the second one that Judge Ann Donnelly has doled out since taking over the case from senior judge Frederic Block. In July, the judge gave John (Johnny Si) Simonlacaj, the $650,000 a year executive of HFZ Capital Group four months for his tax evasion, instead of the 10 months he agreed to accept, and what prosecutors had urged.
Feds To Judge: Fine Wiseguy Up To 250K Because He Had The
Money To Hire Six 'High-Profile' Mob Lawyers Who Helped Him Beat A Murder
Case
The feds have reluctantly agreed not to accuse John (Johnny T) Tortora of murder at his sentencing. But it's no surprise they want the Genovese wiseguy to get a maximum seven year prison term when he faces the music for gambling and obstruction of justice.
'Dangerous' Colombo Mobster Still Behind Bars; Feds Say He
Got Better Care In Recent Covid Crush At MDC Than Many New Yorkers
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn contend that Colombo mobster Michael Uvino is a dangerous gangster who should remain locked up until he goes to trial. That's the same claim they made 15 years ago when Uvino was busted for racketeering charges that included a savage beating of two mem in a mob social club.
Read this week's column
Unless you get really lucky, and find a copy squirreled away in the
wrong section of your local bookstore, you won't be able to get a
first printing of Mob Boss: The Life Of Little Al
D'Arco, The Man Who Brought Down The Mafia. But there
are still some second print versions of the hardcover available
as gifts or for your own reading pleasure.
Because of the heavy demand, Thomas Dunne Books went to the well again for a second printing of Mob Boss, the book that The New York Times called a "gripping, novelistic biography — a bulls-eye."
The mass market, paperback version was published in 2015. It is available online and at your favorite bookstores for about eight bucks. You still should be able to pick up a copy of the hard cover at your favorite bookstore, or, as Claude Raines might say to Humphrey Bogart, from any number of the usual online suspects: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and BooksAMillion, as well as an independent book seller near you.
See why Mob Boss has been praised by Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Nicholas Pileggi, Mister District Attorney Robert Morgenthau — as well as readers everywhere.
Mob Boss is also available in a special BIG PRINT edition. And for those who would rather hear every word of the 406 page book read to them, Mob Boss is also available on an MP3 CD from Tantor Audio.
