September 12, 2019
This Week in Gang Land
Cardboard Thief: Wiseguys From Two Crime Families Beat Me Up
If
you managed to catch any of Made In Staten Island, the short-lived
reality TV show featuring the granddaughter of Salvatore (Sammy Bull)
Gravano, you may have spotted Neil Devito, a little-known Luchese
associate. Devito was "Uncle Neil" to co-star Kayla Gonzalez, who had a
reputation for "never backing down from a good Staten Island fight" and
was often in the middle of the action.
But Uncle Neil Devito was seen but never heard on the show. And he never got a chance to relate some of his best stories: About the brutal beatings he endured from wiseguys and their underlings, or about how he swiped cardboard from Walmart and Sam's Club stores and then made a killing selling it for more than $100,000.
Devito was all set to tell those tales to a different audience — as a government witness at the racketeering and assault trial of Bonanno soldier Albert (Al Muscles) Armetta in Manhattan this year. But the case never made it to a court room, so Gang Land will fill you in.
The
Movie Was Better: Last U.S. Gangster Snared By Stool Pigeon In
Videotaped Induction Pleads Guilty
The video that captured a 2015 Mafia initiation rite was pretty sensational. The resulting prosecutions? Not so much.
As
A Mechanic On the Docks, He's Tops; But He's Got Lousy Taste In Pals,
Says Judge
Vincenzo Randazzo, a longshoreman who has had a nice job on the Staten Island docks for 15 years as a mechanic with a special talent for fixing and maintaining refrigerated containers and other cooling equipment, was ordered bounced from the waterfront this week. His problem? Lack of talent in picking friends, along with some sticky-fingered shopping episodes.
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.
