August 13, 2020
This Week in Gang Land
Paulie Tickets Skunks His Fraud Victims; FBI Doesn't Do Much Better
No
one except his lawyer had the audacity to suggest that lowlife mob associate
Paul (Paulie Tickets) Mancuso, a scam artist who stole $10 million from
dozens of elderly pensioners from 2008 to 2013, would ever fork over even a
thin dime of the $3,266,250 he was ordered to repay. The attorney,
naturally, was wrong; everyone else, including his federal judge, was right.
Some 15 months after he got out of prison, Mancuso, 53, owes his 25 listed victims $3,302,617. For those without a calculator app, that's $36,367 more than he owed when he was released from prison on May 28, 2019. That's because he hasn't made any restitution payments and the new total includes interest and late fees.
Mancuso had gotten a break on his restitution — and his prison term, 51 months — at his September 21, 2016 sentencing. Prosecutors had sought a prison term of 63 months, a year longer than called for in sentencing guidelines. But the judge didn't want to grant Paulie Tickets the hearing that would have been required in order to give him a longer stretch behind bars, since that would have delayed his sentencing and the start of his incarceration.
New Federal Judge Hits Mob Star's Hubby Hard In Her
First Time At Bat
Rachel Kovner, the newest member of the federal judiciary in Brooklyn, introduced herself to the defense bar with a bang last week — in particular to lawyers who represent reputed organized crime defendants. The judge's dramatic intro came at the sentencing of longtime mob associate Lee D'Avanzo, the hubby of former Mob Wives reality TV star, Drita D'Avanzo.
Money Got In The Way When Stevie Wonder Stood Ready
To Face The Music
Luchese underboss Steven (Stevie Wonder) Crea surely wasn't happy about it. But he was ready to face the music and be sentenced last week to spend the rest of his life behind bars for ordering the murder of former Purple Gang leader Michael Meldish. But the hook-up for the remote session didn't cooperate. As a result, they couldn't get it done within two hours, so they're planning to finish what they started in two weeks.
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.
