Mob-tied building inspectors in bribe & drug scandal

AT LEAST six city building inspectors -- some with ties to a powerful crime family -- were videotaped taking bribes at construction sites, and some were seen dealing cocaine and prescription pills while on duty, The Post has learned.
The corrupt Department of Buildings workers -- who lined their pockets by ignoring violations or expediting construction and building work permits -- will be arrested later this month, along with about two dozen Luchese crime-family captains, soldiers and associates, sources said

"This is going to be big," a well-placed source said.
Among the other startling revelations:
* Two of the crooked city employees are known by law enforcement as full-blown Luchese associates.
* The investigation included several landlords who own buildings in Manhattan and The Bronx -- with at least one facing certain arrest, sources say.
* About 50 search warrants were executed in city offices, mob-run social clubs, wire rooms and wiseguys' homes.
The nearly two-year probe grew out of a 2007 New Jersey case involving a Luchese faction that ran a staggering $2 billion-a-year gambling operation and supplied drugs and cellphones to Bloods gang members in state prisons.
That probe -- which netted 32 wiseguys -- soon spread across the Hudson River into the family's Big Apple hierarchy, prompting surveillance and wiretapping by the NYPD and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office, the sources said.
The probers, who made hundreds of hours of recordings, quickly found mobsters taking bets and conducting loan-sharking operations worth tens of millions of dollars.
On one of the recordings, their targets discussed a normally forbidden topic -- the names of people selected to become made members of the mob.
The eavesdroppers had hoped to discover where an induction might occur so they could take the unprecedented step of bugging the location and recording the fabled omerta oath of undying allegiance.
Instead, something more sinister emerged -- a thug said he knew a corrupt building inspector who could help with "violations" dogging an undisclosed construction site.
"I know a guy over here who can take care of it," the hood said.
Probers soon began following inspectors on their rounds and eavesdropping on their conversations with building representatives and hoods.
As the weeks passed, they captured crooked city workers taking mere $50 and $100 payoffs to ignore violations that had the potential to halt construction at several sites, most of them in The Bronx.
"They were compromising the city and their jobs for nickels and dimes," said one source familiar with the case.
Probers also watched in amazement as several inspectors brazenly sold the prescription drugs OxyContin and Vicadin -- along with small amounts of cocaine -- while on duty.
Two of the inspectors are now said to be cooperating in the investigation, the sources said.
This will be the latest scandal to rock the city's Department of Buildings, which is still reeling from its failures at the doomed Deutsche Bank tower that contributed to the deaths of two city firefighters in August 2007.

Who's Who Now In The Philly Mob

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PHILADELPHIA - A newly released organizational chart made headlines in an Atlantic City courtroom this week, providing a who's who on Philadelphia's organized crime family.
As Fox 29's Dave Schratwieser and the Inquirer's George Anastasia report, there are a few surprises in the details.

This rooster never ratted

I never understood why the Mafia didn’t whack Whitey Bulger before he went on the lam.

Didn’t they notice that while Whitey and so much of the Irish mob skated, the feds led procession after procession of guys with vowels on the end of their names off to jail?
Then it dawned on me: Those Mafia guys weren’t rocket scientists.
Besides, the Italians were probably ratting as much as the Irish. They just didn’t get as good a deal.
Not everybody was a rat. Jerry Angiulo didn’t rat on anybody, and he spent 24 years as a guest of the nation to prove it.
Jerry died Saturday at Mass. General. Cause of death was old age and just plain meanness.
Jerry considered the fact that he got to spend the last two years of his life at home in Nahant, surrounded by his ever-patient wife, Barbara,and long-suffering son, Jason, a major coup, a flip of his fingers under his chin to a government that used more than one corrupt FBI agent to lock him up.
If Ted Kennedy was the last lion of the Senate, Jerry Angiulo was the last rooster of the Mafia. Everybody who followed him was a pretender to the throne. Raymond Patriarca - the father, not the goofy kid who ran the family business into the ground - made Jerry underboss without Jerry having the requisite hit under his belt because Jerry did something Patriarca considered far more important than producing corpses: Jerry sent lots of cash down I-95 to Providence.
That doesn’t mean Jerry didn’t have people murdered. Jerry would whack you in a heartbeat if he thought you wouldn’t stand up before a grand jury, or, like the late if not especially lamented Angelo Patrizzi, you went around town saying you were going to kill Jerry’s friends.
Murder aside, Jerry was king of the bookmakers in a day and age when everybody played The Number, when the Record-American printed the daily handle from Hialeah racetrack in Florida because that’s what the mob based The Number on.
I was a cub reporter at the Herald in 1983, when I first met Jerry Angiulo. The feds had lugged him out of Francesco’s before he could take a bite of his pork chops the night before. He had slept in a cell at the police station on New Sudbury Street, his clothes were rumpled, his white hair a disheveled mop of bedhead, he needed a shower, and he wasn’t too happy. He apparently had been allowed to read the papers because as he waited for his arraignment in federal court to begin he asked aloud, “Is there a Mr. Cullen from the Herald here?’’
Sitting right behind him, I put up my hand and said, “That would be me, sir.’’
He turned around, looked me up and down, thrust out his chin with that Mussolini pout of his, and said, with dismissive contempt, “Useless.’’
A few weeks later, he was standing at the elevators in the old Post Office Square courthouse, on his way to the Marshals lockup during a recess, and as I walked by he asked, “Your mother still living on Linden Avenue in Malden?’’
It wasn’t a threat. He just wanted me to know he knew.
Jerry didn’t like the government. The feds took away his freedom, and the Lottery took away his business.
I sent him a letter in the can once, asking if he’d like to talk about the way the FBI spent millions taking down the Angiulo brothers while Whitey and the Winter Hill Gang murdered with impunity. Jerry was no dummy. He saw through my obsequiousness, offering a two-word reply, the second word of which was “you,’’ the first word being unprintable.
Of all those Angiulo brothers, only Frankie is left. Frankie had the unenviable task of collecting from the bookies, and being berated long and loudly by Jerry if he didn’t get all the money. He lives alone in the building at 98 Prince St. where, 28 years ago, Jerry Angiulo boasted of murder and mayhem and money within earshot of FBI bugs.
Prince Street is a mausoleum now. A mausoleum for the mob.

In Italy, Godmothers taking over from Godfathers

The Italian-American Mafia continues to dominate organized crime. Anti-Mafia police in Italy say women in the underworld crime scene are rising in rank as Godmothers in a break from its male-dominant past. Godmothers are gradually replacing Godfathers as mob leaders in the Camorra, a crime organization that controls Naples, much like the Mafia in Sicily. Camorra has been the target of police crackdowns recently. "There is a growing number of women who hold executive roles [in the Camorra]," Gaetano Maruccia, commander of the Carabinieri paramilitary police in the Naples area told The Associated Press. The paramilitary police say these women are filling in places left vacant by the leaders, who are often their husbands. Anti-Mafia raids have seen a large number of Mafia bosses arrested. It is believed that these women are as deadly as their spouses and take part in all kinds of activities ranging from blackmail to murder, according to a BBC correspondent in Italy. Eleven women were arrested in a drug bust by police last month, but officers say it is impossible to guess how many women are involved in the organized crime rings as they often take on roles such as preparing and packaging cocaine and heroine. Detained Maria Licciardi is one the most powerful female Mafia leaders in Naples. Police believe she is still controlling the crime cell from behind bars.

Dominick Dunne, Hollywood crime author

Crime author Dominick Dunne, who told stories of shocking crimes among the rich and famous through his magazine articles and best-selling books including "Another City, Not My Own," about O.J. Simpson's murder trial, died Wednesday in his home at age 83.Dunne's son, Griffin Dunne, said in a statement released by Vanity Fair magazine that his father had been battling bladder cancer. But the cancer had not prevented Dunne from working and socializing, his twin passions, The Associated Press reports.

In September 2008, against his doctor's orders and his family's wishes, Dunne flew to Las Vegas to attend Simpson's kidnap-robbery trial, a postscript to his coverage of the football great's 1995 murder In the past year, Dunne had traveled to Germany and the Dominican Republic for experimental stem cell treatments to fight his cancer. Afrim Kupa, Albert (Albee) Crisci, Anthony "the Animal" Fiato, Anthony Fiato, anthony Fiato-hollywood goodfella, anthony tony the Animal Fiato, bank robbers, banks, Brookly bank robber, Brooklyn, Chris Paciello, crime, federal charges, gambino crime family, hollywood goodfellla, home invasion, law and justice, Lulzim kupa, Mafia, mob, mob rats, mobsters, new york, New York crime, New York crime family, new york news, organized crime, Richmond, Staten Island
Afrim Kupa,He wrote that he and actress Farrah Fawcett were in the same clinic in Bavaria but didn't see each other. Fawcett, a 1970s sex symbol and TV star of "Charlie's Angels," died in June at age 62, CNS News informstrial, which spiked Dunne's considerable fame. Read More

Edward Maiani aka Eddie Miami

associate of the Winter Hill Gang. In the early 1970’s, a new FBI agent in Boston named John Morris decided to recruit Eddie Miami as an informant – by planting a fake bomb under his car and then phoning in an anonymous tip to the local cops. After the cops removed the “bomb,” Morris approached Eddie Miami and told him his fellow members of the Winter Hill Gang was trying to kill him. Eddie Miami suspected skullduggery, and told Morris to bleep off. A few years later, Eddie Miami was sent away on drug charges. Morris, meanwhile, went on Whitey’s payroll, eventually collecting $7,000 for his services on behalf of organized crime.

GOTTI BID NIXED

John "Junior" Gotti yesterday lost a bid to delay his racketeering retrial over new murder charges the feds added to his indictment earlier this month.
Manhattan federal Judge Kevin Castel said the additional counts -- which cover two drug-related slayings in Queens in 1988 and 1991 -- required only a minor change in "defense strategy " because they were already mentioned in Gotti's indictment.

STEVEN SEAGAL AND THE MOB

It could have been a scene from The Sopranos except that it was for real. It took place on February 2, 2001, and the feds caught it all on audio tape. Two made members of the Mafia and an associate had met to discuss the shakedown of a Hollywood movie star. The actor was a martial artist who specialized in playing tough-guy heroes on the big screen. Throughout his career, the star had made several claims of real-life heroics, including black-ops jobs for the CIA and encounters with organized crime figures around the world. The actor also apparently had a fixation with urban Italian-Americans, claiming at one time to be half-Italian when in reality his mother was Irish and his father Jewish. In one of his films, he played an Italian-American detective with close ties to the old neighborhood and the hoods who infested it. In one scene, the hero sits down for espresso with the local boss, showing him the same respect that any of his soldiers would.

Perhaps this is why the real mobsters at the wiretapped meeting were having a good chuckle as they recounted a visit that a couple of them had paid on action-star Steven Seagal. On the FBI tape, they say that the tough-guy actor was "petrified." At this meeting Anthony "Sonny" Ciccone, an alleged capo in New York's Gambino organized-crime family, and his "right-hand man," Primo Cassarino, joked with Vincent Nasso about Seagal's less than heroic reactions to their shakedown attempts. The whole situation brought out the "Paulie Walnuts" in Cassarino. "I wish we had a gun on us," he says on the tape, "that would have been funny

READ MORE True Tv

JOSEPH MASSINO--Bonanno crime family

--Massino became the first sitting boss in Mafia history to turn informant. The longtime head of the Bonnano family, Massino was notoriously security conscious, instructing his subordinates to refer to him merely by tugging on their earlobe.
Things started to go bad for Joe when his brother-in-law and underboss, Salvatore “Good Looking Sal” Vitale, testified against him. Shortly after his 2004 conviction on racketeering charges that would have put him in prison for life, Massino decided to become an informant. He taped his underlings in prison threatening to kill a prosecutor.Read more:

Mobster Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano is threatening to play lawyer at his own death penalty murder trial - possibly cross-

Hollywood actor, Tony Sirico

Sirico was born in Midwood, Brooklyn to Sicilian parents. Sirico has played gangsters in a number of films, including Mob Queen, Gangsters, Love and Money, Fingers,

The Last Fight, Goodfellas, Innocent Blood, Bullets Over Broadway, The Pick-up Artist, Mighty Aphrodite, Gotti, Cop Land, and Mickey Blue Eyes. He also played policemen in the films Dead Presidents and Deconstructing Harry.in goodfellas, as ray liotta's henry hill sees his future wife (lorraine bracco) charging at him



Before turning to acting, Sirico was reportedly a mob associate of the Colombo crime family serving under Carmine "Junior" Persico and had been arrested twenty-eight times.

There is a Sopranos reference to this fact when Paulie says "I made it through the seventies by the skin of my balls when the Colombos were goin' at it."[2] In 1967, he was sent to prison for robbing a Brooklyn after hours club, but was released after serving thirteen months.

In 1971, he pled guilty to felony weapons possession and was sentenced to an "indeterminate" prison term of up to four years, of which Sirico ended up serving twenty months. According to a court transcript, at the time of his sentencing, he also had pending charges for drug possession.
He currently lives alone in Brooklyn, New York. His mother died in 2003. Sirico's brother, Robert Sirico, is a priest and co-founder of the free-market Acton Institute. But looking back I realize that because it made sense for it to win, it should have come in with “Goodfellas.” Hollywood has ...