June 17, 2021
This Week in Gang Land
FBI Snitch: My Dad Didn't Kill Mike Meldish, But We Were There When He Was Whacked
Frank Pasqua III, the drug-abusing Luchese turncoat who somehow managed
to wrongly finger his father for the gangland-style slaying of mob associate
Michael Meldish, has a new version of events, Gang Land has learned.
Prosecutors say his first version was just an honest mistake. But now Pasqua
claims he was there when Meldish was murdered, and was even able to say
goodbye to his old friend minutes before he was killed.
In a Johnny and Gene show podcast that went missing shortly after it was produced a year ago, Pasqua also places his mobster father Frank Pasqua Jr. on the scene when the former Purple Gang leader was executed in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx, according to an exclusive Gang Land viewing of the year-old podcast.
"I was on the street when he was killed; my father drove me there," said Pasqua. "We stopped at one of our nightclubs" on the way, Pasqua told co-hosts John Alite and Gene Borrello. "We met a guy who gave us a different car, because we all had brand-new Mercedes," he said. "They all had GPS and shit. So we swapped for like a kind of late model foreign car that didn't have any GPS," Pasqua continued. "We drove out there, and we were on the street. We went to see Mike. I got to see my friend a few minutes before he died, you know?"
Turncoat: Lucheses Gave Me No Respect, But They Asked Me To Kill The
Bonanno Boss
Frank Pasqua III says he was born into The Life and that thanks to "thousands of years of evolution" he had qualities that made him "the perfect fit for being a gangster." But he got no respect from Luchese crime family leaders even though they considered him to be an "important" gangster.
Mobster Takes 30 Months For Assaulting Ex-Wife Of New Jersey
Restaurateur Tommy Manzo
Luchese mobster John Perna was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars last week for assaulting the boyfriend of former reality TV star Dina Manzo. It is the first known time in Gang Land history where the reward for a beating contract was a discount on a wedding reception. But that's exactly what Perna got in payment, according to prosecutors: a reduced price for his big wedding bash — 330 guests — at the Paterson New Jersey Banquet Hall owned by Manzo's ex-husband, Tommy Manzo.
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.
