January 24, 2019
This Week in Gang Land
Hobbled By Trump's Shutdown, The Bureau Of Prisons Bars A Family From A Father's Death Bed
When
Harold (Harry) Thomas was sentenced to two years for loansharking and
for selling bootleg cigarettes, the low-level mob associate apologized
to everyone he'd hurt, especially his wife Rosalie. He also thanked
Manhattan Federal Judge Richard Sullivan, and told the jurist that he
had "not been treated unfairly in the entire process" that began with
his arrest back in 2016.
After a year behind bars, Thomas, 73, would change his tune, and his tone, if he could. But he can't. He's in a coma, on life support, and not expected to live much longer. His family says that negligent medical care at his prison hospital put him on his death bed, and now the officially shutdown federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) won't let family members see him before he dies.
Rosalie Thomas and their son Guy – and their lawyers – say the only real information the Thomas family gets these days about the dying inmate comes from Duke University Hospital. That's where the Federal Medical Facility (FMC) at Butner, North Carolina moved Thomas two weeks ago when prison doctors felt they could no longer provide him adequate care.
Feds:
What's Good For The Government Goose Isn't Good For The Defense Gander
When it helps to make the case, airing old dirty laundry is a long-favored tactic for lawyers on both sides of the aisle in criminal cases. For instance, in the upcoming racketeering trial of five Luchese gangsters charged with the 2013 gangland-style slaying of former Purple Gang leader Michael Meldish, prosecutors want the right to tell a jury all about crimes and other bad acts committed by defendants going back as far as 45 years.
Meldish
Murder Five: Feds Sandbagging Us
Defense lawyers for the Meldish Murder Five yesterday accused prosecutors of "sandbagging them" and asked the judge for "at least a three-month adjournment" of the trial because the defense still hasn't gotten thousands of hours of tape recorded conversations by four cooperating witnesses, including its controversial key witness, Frank Pasqua III.
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.
