November 19, 2020
This Week in Gang Land
Prolific Mob Killer Files Longshot Motion For Compassionate Release
Anthony
(Gaspipe) Casso, the former Luchese crime family underboss who bragged of
holding a shovel in the mouth of a wounded young drug smuggler as he buried
him alive in the Florida Everglades, is seeking a compassionate release from
prison.
Casso, who is 78 years old, received a life sentence in 1998 for 14 of the three-dozen mob murders he has admitted to committing in a long string of brutality that shocked many hard-nosed fellow wiseguys from New York and New Jersey.
In a decidedly longshot motion, Gaspipe is seeking his freedom under the First Step Act of 2018 that allows aging and ailing inmates serving life sentences to win their release for "extraordinary and compelling reasons."
Feds Drop The Insurance Fraud Charges, But Joe Fish Gets
Flushed Again
He hung tough for a year, and finally got the feds to drop a silly, hard-to-believe insurance fraud charge for calling a mob connected plumber to fix an overflowing toilet bowl in a Brooklyn home that he owns. But the final solution for Colombo associate Joseph (Joe Fish) Marra wasn't a great one.
Former Gambino Associate Finds Trouble In The City Of
Brotherly Love
For years, Antonio (Anthony Mortgage) Ambrosio avoided serious trouble with the law. This sometimes took some doing since he was a bodyguard-chauffeur for Salvatore Romano, the stock swindler who made millions of dollars for the Gambino family before he flipped in 2004. Alas, since hooking up with wiseguys from Philadelphia though, Ambrosio hasn't been quite so lucky.
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.
