January 21, 2021
This Week in Gang Land
Gambinos Go Guilty In Massive Construction Industry Fraud
Five
Gambino family wiseguys and seven mob associates pleaded guilty last week to
being part of a huge labor racketeering scheme that generated millions of
dollars in cash for crime family members and their minions as they ripped
off at least $1.5 million from a major New York construction company and the
IRS.
The key players in the scheme were mob capo Andrew (Sonny) Campos, and John (John Si) Simonlacaj, the fired executive of real estate developer, HFZ Capital Group. The duo was at the heart of a construction bribery scheme that bilked hundreds of thousands of dollars from HFZ during the building of a still-to-be completed $2 billion dollar luxury condo and hotel complex called the XI in Chelsea near the High Line.
Campos and Simonlacaj, who are both 51-year-old Scarsdale residents, were part of a "global plea deal" in which all 12 defendants obtained plea agreements with the feds that call for prison terms that appear to be reasonable, by Gang Land standards. But as you might expect, the disgraced developer's plea deal is a bit more reasonable than the one the mobster was able to wangle.
Baby-Faced Wannabe Wiseguy Pleads Guilty To Arson
Peter Tuccio, the baby-faced wannabe wiseguy who shadowed Philadelphia mob boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino everywhere while he was on trial in New York three years ago, pleaded guilty last week to torching the car of a Queens businessman in order to extort a $5000 payoff from him for a Gambino crime family capo.
Wiseguy Richard Martino: Guilty With An Explanation — A
Long One
Richard Martino had a lot to say as he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice last week and agreed to make a $100,000 restitution payment as part of his plea deal. As Martino rambled on for six long minutes, you could almost hear John Gotti's tape-recorded words to his Administration in 1990 that the crime family was "gonna be really proud" we inducted guys like Martino who've "done more than killing."
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.
