February 14, 2019
This Week in Gang Land
Colombo Associate Hands Feds Keys To Mob-Linked Valet Parking Industry
Bonanno
capo Joseph (Joe Valet) Sabella and Colombo associate Anthony Preza have
known each other for 30 years. Each man is 53 years old. They are former
business partners. Each man owns his own company in the booming valet
parking industry. Once, they were close friends, but the friendship
soured about seven years ago over $25,000 that Sabella felt Preza owed
him.
That tale of two gangsters lies at the heart of a Mafia racketeering conspiracy trial that begins next week.
The feds say the unpaid "debt" so infuriated Joe Valet that he and his violent mob supervisor, capo Peter (Petey B.S.) Lovaglio, decided to kill Preza. They later downgraded the murder plot to a brutal beating, one that Sabella himself allegedly gave his old pal outside a Staten Island restaurant. That assault will be a major element of the evidence presented against Joe Valet in Manhattan Federal Court.
Joe Valet's lawyer has a very different take on the dispute. It was a "misdemeanor-class assault" in a "two-sided confrontation" that was resolved years ago, says attorney Joseph Corozzo. The duo are competitors, he says, but are still friends. Their families know each other; their "companies work in conjunction" and even "share employees" during busy times when one is pressed for drivers or valet car parkers for a gig with a major client.
After
Challenging Trump's BOP Cutbacks, Little Nick Will Soon Be Half-Way Home
He won't be getting out of stir as soon as he wanted, but his federal prison jailers have agreed to release the incarcerated 78-year-old Gambino capo Nicholas (Little Nick) Corozzo from the Allenwood federal prison and into a halfway house sometime this year, perhaps as early as June.
Ask
Andy: Married To The Mob
The Godfather opened with an elaborate wedding reception for Vito Corleone's daughter Connie. The nuptials didn't turn out well. Her husband was garrotted to death after he led Sonny Corleone into a fatal ambush. Connie bounced around with various suitors before becoming a deadly, dedicated advisor to brother Michael. Not all mob marriages are so dramatic and deadly, but some are.
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.
