November 15, 2018
This Week in Gang Land
FBI Agent: Even When A Gangster Says 'No,' We Can Still Get Him On Drug Charges
Back
in 2014, a slow witted mob informer who was helping the feds build a
racketeering and murders case against a bunch of Luchese gangsters
forgot to turn off his recording device. As a result, Gang Land has
learned, the turncoat recorded some embarrassing comments from an FBI
undercover agent that were never supposed to see the light of day.
The snitch, mob associate Robert Spinelli, recorded himself telling the FBI agent that one of the targeted gangsters had repeatedly refused to take part in a drug deal that Spinelli was pushing. The gangster, Spinelli is heard telling the agent, told him that he had sworn off cocaine trafficking years earlier.
"That's okay," the undercover G-man, using the name "Pete," is heard telling Spinelli, according to court records. "We can facilitate him to do it. This is like playing a chess game. We'll plant the seed, the seed will grow," he said. "Pete," sources say, was playing the role of a trucker with loads of stolen jewelry to sell who was also eager to get into the drug smuggling business.
Forgetful
Mob Turncoat Teaches The Drug Business To Undercover G-Man
Mob turncoat Robert Spinelli behaved like a dullard when he forgot to shut down his recording device at the end of a long work day back on August 14, 2014. But, despite his modest intellectual abilities, Spinelli is clearly a knowledgeable guy when it comes to drug dealing, according to a snippet of the conversation he had about the topic with an undercover FBI agent.
New
Book By Our Man Andy Opens A Window On The Mob's Ruling Body
Using the historic Commission case as his linchpin, Andy Petepiece, our resident mob historian and author of our monthly Ask Andy feature, has published The Mafia Commission, A History of the Board of Directors of La Cosa Nostra, a new book about the ruling body of the American Mafia that was set up back in 1931 to oversee and rule the nationwide criminal organization.
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.
