December 13, 2018
This Week in Gang Land
Emissaries For Chin Gigante's Son Got To The Woman Assault Victim Just In Time
A
tenacious NYPD detective tried his best to nail Vincent Esposito, the
then-21-year-old son of Mafia boss Vincent (Chin) Gigante, for a bloody
1989 assault in which he allegedly bashed an innocent woman over the
head with a chair, Gang Land has learned. But by the time the detective
had lined up enough information to seek an arrest, the Queens woman
opted not to press charges.
Her decision, as Gang Land reported last week, came after an attorney and private investigator working for the Gigante family visited the woman at her home in the Rockaways. On June 4, 1989, in exchange for a $7,000 payment, the victim was persuaded to settle the case civilly, rather than proceed with a criminal prosecution of her attacker.
But in an exclusive interview, Robert Salafia, the detective who investigated the alleged assault in a Chinatown restaurant, told Gang Land that he had obtained enough circumstantial evidence to satisfy himself that Esposito was the culprit within weeks of the May 14, 1989 incident and was set to move forward with the case when the victim told him to forget about it.
Wiseguy
Learns Valuable Lessons In Class Behind Bars, But Keeps Them To Himself
Anthony Grado is a drug-abusing Luchese mobster with 15 convictions on a state and federal rap sheet that began in 1989. But while behind bars for his last crime – selling 270,000 oxycodone pills – he seemed to turn his life around during a 12-week self-help class, according to the Focus Forward Project, a non-profit group that teaches the course in the city's two federal lockups.
Detective
Bounced From Federal Mob Case For Link To Prostitution Ring
An NYPD detective who was part of a joint task force in the racketeering case against acting Bonanno capo Joseph (Joe C) Cammarano and nine other mobsters was implicated in a multimillion dollar-a-year prostitution and gambling ring, Gang Land has learned.
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.
