March 21, 2019
This Week in Gang Land
Bonanno Boss Dons Some Teflon: A Gotti-style Acquittal Leaves The Feds Fuming
In
a stunning defeat for the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office, acting
Bonanno crime family boss Joseph (Joe C) Cammarano was acquitted last
week of racketeering conspiracy charges. The verdict made him only the
second New York Mafia boss to beat the government in a racketeering case
— and the first to do so in more than 30 years.
The jury that decided the fate of the late John Gotti in 1987 deliberated for a week before it acquitted him and six others. The panel that weighed the charges against Cammarano and consigliere John (Porky) Zancocchio needed just a day of thinking about it before finding the two men not guilty of a racketeering conspiracy that the government had claimed lasted from 2012 until January of 2018.
Cammarano, 59, and Zancocchio, 61, were also acquitted of being part of a long-running shakedown of a major New York demolition company that began in the 1980s. Zancocchio also beat the rap on an assault "in aid of racketeering" — even though his own lawyer admitted that in 2014 Porky had "slapped around" the mob turncoat who fingered him from the witness stand.
The
Mob War That Wasn't
From the tabloids to cable news to the New York Times, the hype machines went on overdrive last week after a little-known, high-ranking Gambino wiseguy was gunned down in front of his Staten Island home. The click-hungry media was only too happy to encourage the notion that it was 1985 all over again: Fear Mob War! Gotti Takeover Bid Suspected! screamed the headlines.
A
Big Stretch For Benny the Blade
After two years in a federal lockup in Brooklyn, Battista (Benny The Blade) Geritano was sent back to Green Haven prison in Stormville, New York last week. The tantrum-prone gangster who says he now practices yoga to cool himself out will have plenty of time to stretch while he's there. He owes the state at least five more years of his 12 year sentence for a 2012 barroom stabbing, assuming the state lets him out at his first scheduled parole hearing in 2024. After that, he's looking at nearly six more years in a federal can.
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.
