February 25, 2021
This Week in Gang Land
Feds Confused About The Date Of The Taped-Philly Induction Ceremony
For
years, the Philadelphia mob has been called the most dysfunctional Mafia
family in America. Credit award-winning author George Anastasia for tagging
his hometown mobsters with the handle: He used the phrase in The Last
Gangster, his 2004 book about turncoat capo Ronald (Big Ron) Previte.
And he used it in a 2001 Gang Land column about the racketeering and murder
trial of then-and-still boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino.
But if the wiseguys in the City of Brotherly Love tend toward screw-ups, so do the G-Men and women who chase them. That's the only conclusion to draw from the inability of the FBI and the Philadelphia U.S Attorney's office to agree on the date of the tape-recorded induction ceremony of the crime family that is the linchpin of the racketeering case against underboss Steven (Handsome Stevie) Mazzone and 14 others.
The seven-count indictment states that the "making ceremony" involving Mazzone, his brother Salvatore and capo Domenic (Baby Dom) Grande took place in South Philadelphia on October 15, 2015. But a government transcript of the induction rite that was obtained by Gang Land states clearly in two places that the ceremony took place four days earlier, on October 11.
Editor's Note: Updated Februay 26, 2021
Reformed One-Man Crime Wave Back Behind Bars For Threats To
Ex-Girlfriend
Gene Borrello, a former one-man crime wave who got a "time served" sentence after flipping against Bonanno crime family mobsters and who has been a co-host of a podcast about the mob for the past year, is back behind bars for threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend and her husband.
Lovesick Staten Island Capo Closing In On Plea Deal
A lovesick 63-year-old capo who triggered the arrests of 20-mob connected defendants by placing a GPS tracking device on his girlfriend's car is negotiating a plea deal that will likely keep him locked up for much of the decade, Gang Land has learned.
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.
