May 13, 2021
This Week in Gang Land
NJ Businessman Charged In Home Invasion Assault Of Former Reality TV Star Dina Manzo
The
messy and tangled lives of the Real Housewives of New Jersey got
even messier on Tuesday when Thomas Manzo, the embattled ex-husband of
former Housewives star Dina Manzo, was arrested and charged with
armed robbery and the violent home invasion of his ex-wife's domicile in
2017.
The new charges are more bad news for the high-powered Garden State businessman who is already waiting trial for hiring a Luchese soldier to assault his ex-wife's then-boyfriend David Cantin in 2015.
Manzo, who is being held in a Monmouth County jail pending a detention hearing on Friday, allegedly stalked Ms. Manzo and her husband-to-be as they moved through two New Jersey counties during the time frame when both violent assaults occurred, between 2015 and 2018, according to the new indictment that was filed by county prosecutors. Manzo, 56, is charged with the 2015 assault in Newark Federal Court.
Gang Land Exclusive: The Mafia Doesn't Do 'Work' On
Mother's Day, Said Lefty Guns
It was the day before Mother's Day 1981, and Bonanno mobster Benjamin (Lefty Guns) Ruggiero was explaining the Mob Rules of the Road to an ambitious jewel thief named Donnie Brasco: The Mafia, Lefty Guns instructed him, never works on Mother's Day.
The Father Went Into The Program; The Son Now Faces The Music
His father was a Gambino mobster who turned on the mob 16 years ago and left his wife and kids to shift for themselves to escape an 11-year sentence. Today, the feds say that the son, Primo Cassarino Jr., is a mob associate who deserves up to 27 months in prison for loansharking and gambling and his ties to a powerful Colombo capo and a second family wiseguy.
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.
