December 5, 2019
This Week in Gang Land
Mad Dog And The Il Mulino Shakedown
A
Chin-wagging wiseguy with the crime family of the late Mafia boss
Vincent Gigante and a corrupt union official were fingered on an FBI
tape recording of conspiring to shake down the owners of Il Mulino,
a classy Italian ristorante acclaimed by both presidents and mobsters.
The original Il Mulino, a legendary eatery located on West Third Street in Greenwich Village, was long a favorite of the late Genovese crime boss, whose Triangle Social Club was located around the corner. Other illustrious fans of the restaurant's veal dishes, shrimp scampi and rib eye steaks include former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who dined there together in 2009.
A few years after Chin's death in 2005, the restaurant's original owners, brothers Fernando and Gino Masci, who hailed from Abruzzo, Italy, sold the restaurant, along with their trademark name. Current owners have expanded the franchise to about a dozen new outlets, including one on Manhattan's upper East Side. That spot, on East 60th Street and Park Avenue, was the target of wiseguy Steven (Mad Dog) Arena, according to a recording played last week at the trial of Genovese soldier Frank (Frankie G) Giovinco.
Judge
To Sallie D: Happy Thanksgiving
Judge Kiyo Matsumoto didn't use the exact words. But the mild sentence she dished out last week to longtime mobster Salvatore (Sallie D) DeMeo could have had "Happy Thanksgiving" written all over it, along with a nice helping of sweet cranberry sauce on the side.
Frankie G
Guilty; Feds Earn A Clean Sweep In The Vincent Esposito Case
The jury was finished by lunchtime. Three hours was all the jurors needed to reach a verdict on the fate of Genovese wiseguy Frank (Frankie G) Giovinco. It was this: Guilty as charged.
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.
