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Five-Family Feuds: N.Y. Mafia Tales

Yithian

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There have been a few big stories coming from the top of the Mafia tree lately. There's been a bit of a shake-up all round.

First, Carmine 'The Snake' Persico, boss of the Colombo family since the 1970s died after serving 33 of 139-year sentence:
The former boss of a major New York crime gang has died, after serving 33 years of a 139-year prison sentence. Carmine Persico's lawyer said he died of complications arising from diabetes. He leaves a wife, two children and 15 grandchildren.
The 85-year-old was known as The Snake, a nickname he reportedly hated.
He is thought to have continued running his criminal organisation from behind bars, making his one of the longest-running mob leaderships in history.
Persico was born in Brooklyn in 1933, the son of a law firm stenographer. Before his teens were over, he had been arrested for murder. A high school dropout, he became the leader of a street gang and was 17 when he was arrested for the fatal beating of another young man in a park fight. The charges were dropped. He advanced in the Colombo organisation, one of five crime "families" in the Italian-American Mafia in New York at the time, and eventually reached leadership in the 1970s, after internecine strife with other gang leaders.
It was through a landmark 1986 case, led by Rudy Giuliani, later a mayor of New York and presently President Donald Trump's lawyer, that the crime boss was finally put in jail.
Source:​
NY Times Obituary:​

Second, Joseph Cammarano Jr. and John Zancocchio, boss and consigliere of the Bonanno crime family were (surprisingly) acquitted of racketeering and conspiracy to commit extortion.

Their lawyers played an inspired 'millennial defence':

Gina Castellano, the lead prosecutor, had said in her opening statement that Mr. Cammarano, 59, of Long Island, and Mr. Zancocchio, 61, of Staten Island, had “worked together and with other members of the mob to commit crime after crime — extortion, loan-sharking, drug dealing, assault and fraud.”
“These two men led a sophisticated criminal organization that took whatever they wanted from whoever they wanted through intimidation,” she said.
But defense lawyers had argued that the Mafia no longer existed, and their clients merely looked and sounded like Italian mobsters portrayed in film. “Looking like he stepped out of central casting in a mob movie doesn’t make you part of one of these groups,” said Jennifer Louis-Jeune, one of Mr. Cammarano’s lawyers, during her opening statement.
During the trial, the defense several times suggested that the police had stereotyped the defendants. John Meringolo, one of Mr. Zancocchio’s lawyers, for instance, pressed a New York Police Department detective on whether cultural differences in body language led to an incorrect analysis of a surveillance videotape.
Full Article (an interesting read):​

Last and most dramatically, it emerged hours ago that Francesco 'Frank' Cali, head of the Gambino family has been gunned down by parties as yet unknown:

The reputed head of New York's Gambino crime family, Frank Cali, has been killed outside his home, say the city's police. Cali, 53, was shot several times in the Todt Hill district of Staten Island on Wednesday evening and died later in hospital. The unidentified killer fled the scene in a blue car, witnesses said.
New York media say it is the first targeted killing of a mob boss in the city since 1985. The Gambino operation is said to be one of the five historic Italian-US mafia families in New York.
Witnesses said Cali's killer shot him at least six times and then ran him over before fleeing the scene. Family members were seen to rush into the street and sit crying next to his body.
Police said the motive was not known.
"There are no arrests and the investigation is ongoing," a statement said.
Continued:​
Alternative report:
Francesco "Frank" Cali, the reputed leader of the Gambino crime family, was shot to death outside his house in Staten Island on Wednesday night, in a killing that echoes Mafia murders of the 1980s.
The New York Police Department says that at 9:17 p.m. ET, officers received a 911 call reporting an assault in progress in front of Cali's house.
"Upon arrival, officers found a 53-year-old male with multiple gunshot wounds to the torso," the police said in a statement sent to NPR. Cali was taken to Staten Island University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
No arrests have been made in the shooting, police said.
Photos from the scene showed officers working around Cali's SUV on Wednesday night, with shell casings marked by overturned plastic cups. Witnesses told New York media outlets that they heard a number of shots before a blue pickup truck fled the area.
Cali was commonly known as either Frank or "Franky Boy." He was believed to have had deep ties to the Mafia in Italy: As Staten Island Live reports, Cali "was born in Brooklyn and married into the Inzerillo family of Palermo and cultivated close ties with members of the Siderno cartel in Italy."

Continued:​
 
An arrest has been made in the third story, although few details of how he came to be discovered have been released.

Sounds like a well-planned operation--even if the getaway was not:

A 24-year-old man has been taken into custody in connection with the shooting death of reputed New York crime boss Francesco "Frank" Cali, the New York Police Department said Saturday.
Anthony Comello is being held in a New Jersey jail and will formally charged with murder when he's extradited to the borough of Staten Island, where the killing happened, NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said at a news conference.
"While we believe we have the shooter in custody for this incident, the investigation is far ... from over," he said. "The investigation will turn to were other parties involved in this, gathering future and additional evidence and working on the motive for this particular crime."
[...]
Cali was home with family members when a truck hit a car outside the residence, Shea said earlier in the week at a news conference. He went out to see what happened and the suspect pulled out a gun and began shooting, Shea said.
When Cali tried to take cover behind his car, the pickup truck drove into it and "rocked" it significantly, Shea said.
Cali was taken to Staten Island University Hospital North, where he was pronounced dead.
It's "quite possible" that the incident was staged to draw Cali outside and into a confrontation with the suspected shooter, Shea said.
Detectives have recovered a truck they think was involved but not the firearm used in the shooting, Shea said.
Source:​
 
New light on an historical case:

America’s notorious Gambino crime familysent an explosives expert to Sicily to help Cosa Nostra blow up a crusading anti-mafia investigator, a turncoat has told Italian prosecutors.
Giovanni Falcone was killed 27 years ago this week, on May 23 1992, when the car he was travelling in was blown to bits by a bomb planted in a culvert beneath a stretch of motorway outside Palermo, Sicily’s regional capital. His wife and three police bodyguards were also killed.
[...]​
The killing was followed a few months later by the assassination of another high-profile anti-mafia investigator, Paolo Borsellino, who was a close friend and collaborator of Falcone.
It is now claimed that Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, received training with the bomb and its remote-controlled detonator from an American “man of honour” sent from New York by John Gotti, the notorious head of the Gambino family who was known as ‘the Dapper Don’ for his expensive suits.
“The foreigner arrived in the first few months of 1992,” Maurizio Avola, a convicted mafia killer who became a ‘pentito’ or turncoat in 1994 after confessing to around 80 murders, told investigators recently.
Continued:​
 
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