Frank ‘the Enforcer’ Nitti”

Mars Eghigian’s book about gangster Frank Nitti came out in 2006.

Because of it, Mars, a mild-mannered financial planner from Belleville, will appear in an A&E TV biography on the Chicago mob boss who was associated with the infamous Al Capone.

“I got a call out of the blue from Towers Productions,” said Mars. “They had been contracted to do six biographies of gangsters. One was Frank Nitti. They said, ‘You wrote the book. You

Rudy Fratto Jr. Courtesy the Chicago Sun Times.

December 2, 2009 (CHICAGO) BY: Chuck Goudie and Barb Markoff (WLS) — An admitted tax cheat and reputed boss of the Outfit’s feared Elmwood Park crew won’t have quite as much time as he thought to pack for his upcoming stay in the Crossbar Hotel.

Mario Rainone

mario Rainone, 54, pleaded guilty to residential burglary during a hearing before Lake County Associate Judge George Bridges.

 Jake Lingle  spent lavishly and hung out with the city’s elite, including Al Capone. His murder in a passageway under Michigan Avenue outraged the city, until the truth emerged—that he was corrupt to his core.

Though Jake Lingle, in the words of one colleague, “never mastered the art of writing,” he was a star of the Tribune newsroom thanks to his well-placed connections—including both Al Capone and Chicago’s chief of police. 

former Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose

Just after former Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose was sentenced to four years in prison Tuesday for leaking secrets to the Chicago Outfit, I left the federal building to look for Bill Guide, Ambrose’s father figure and corrupt ex-cop.

My young colleague Wings and I drove out along Archer Avenue, to Guide’s Sports Club & Banquet.

A fading sign painted on a brick wall advertised pizza by the slice, meatballs and chicken. Jets from Midway Airport climbed overhead. Inside it was dark, two TVs going, two geezers at the end of the bar, a nice afternoon crowd.

I’ll check if he’s here,” said the bartender, Doreen, a friendly woman pushing a hard middle age, long black wig curling past her shoulders, heavy pink smeared on her lips.

ex U.S. Marshal  John Ambrose

CHICAGO — A judge in Chicago has sentenced a federal deputy marshal to four years in prison for leaking information about a witness in a major organized crime case.

John Ambrose was convicted in April in what prosecutors say was the first security violation in the history of the government’s Witness Security Program.

Guidelines called for an 18-month sentence at most, but Judge John Grady increased the time on Tuesday, saying he wanted to deter officials from ever leaking secret information again.

The information concerned admitted mob man Nicholas Calabrese (KAL’-uh-brees), who became the government’s star witness in the FBI’s landmark Family Secrets mob trial.

murdered  Spilotro  Brothers

John Drummond
BENSENVILLE, Ill. (CBS) ―   For 23 years, it’s been a mystery just where Chicago mob boss Tony Spilotro and his younger brother, Michael, were killed.

CBS 2’s John “Bulldog” Drummond got the very first look at a home in unincorporated Bensenville where neighbors and others believe the Spilotros may have met their violent end 

Anne and Michael Spilotro

Illinois state Sen. James DeLeo

CHICAGO – Reputed suburban Chicago mobster Rudy Fratto pleaded guilty Tuesday to evading thousands of dollars in federal income taxes.  

Chicago  Outfit

Chuck Goudie

October 8 2009 (CHICAGO) (WLS) — The I-Team has learned that the Chicago Police Department’s renowned gambling unit has been disbanded. It’s a decision that some call a bad bet.

Here we are at the height of the football wagering season with the Bears on a roll and the Chicago Police Department has given up on its famed gambling unit.   

The end of the line for the storied gambling squad came in a shake-up of the vice control unit six months ago. But only when the I-Team started asking questions was it revealed to the public.

Dial the number listed for the Chicago Police

 Scarface Capone

WAUSAU, Wis. — Chicago mobster Al Capone’s former hideout in northern Wisconsin, complete with guard towers and a stone house with 18-inch-thick walls, was sold for $2.6 million Thursday to the bank that foreclosed on it. 

John “No Nose” DiFronzo

Reputed mobster Rudy Fratto has been charged with tax evasion in a new federal case, the IRS Criminal Investigation Division announced today.

Fratto, 65, of Darien, has previously been identified by authorities as a lieutenant in the mob’s Elmwood Park street crew.

New criminal information filed in federal court alleges that Fratto failed to report nearly $200,000 in income in 2005. Fratto allegedly used the bank account of a defunct business, J.F.F. Inc.,  to hide his income, authorities said, and used the account to pay personal expenses and withdraw cash.

Fratto earlier this year was among the targets in a civil racketeering claim filed by Joseph Fosco, son of the late Teamsters treasurer Armando Fosco, who alleged that Fratto,  reputed Chicago Outfit figure John “No Nose” DiFronzo and others tried to extort $400,000 from him. Lawyers for the men have contested the suit.

An attorney for Fratto was not immediately available Tuesday to address the new criminal case.  

The anonymous jury that decided the Family Secrets case was exhausted.

After methodically working through stacks of evidence to convict four mob figures and a former Chicago police officer of racketeering conspiracy, jurors had become bogged down during a second round of deliberations.

For the first time in three months, personality conflicts flared and jurors snapped at one another as they tried to decide if the four mobsters could be blamed for 18 gangland slayings stretching back decades.

“There were times when we all looked out the window for a while and no one talked to each other,” one juror recalled.

Two years after the landmark Family Secrets mob trial gripped Chicago with its lurid details of mob mayhem, jurors who sat in judgment have finally broken their silence.

Two of the jurors — a man and a woman — spoke last week to a Tribune reporter at a Loop restaurant, insisting their identities remain secret out of continued concern for their safety.

Even two years after the summerlong trial in 2007, few of the jurors know the names of one another, they said. Their identities had been publicly concealed to protect them from possible retaliation by the Chicago syndicate and to shield them from the news media.
Instead, jurors addressed one another by nicknames. Some took on names of characters in the trial, while others won monikers that might have been passed on by the mob itself. A tall juror became “Shorty” and another was called “Puzzles” because he often sat solving them during trial breaks.

As they began their deliberations, jurors pored over their notes — one juror filled 16 pads of paper — and sorted through carts of prosecution evidence — documents, photos and even ski masks worn by hit men.They wrote questions on large “post-it” notes and stuck them to the wall. When they ran out of space, jurors took down decorative pictures to make more room for their notes.
read more     Jeff Cohen Full Story

Mayor  Goodman  John L Smith Writes

Antoinette “Mafia Princess” Giancana

  Mayor Oscar Goodman

Chicago Outfit boss, Sam “Momo” Giancana,

Chicago  Outfit  Alfonso “Al” Tornabene dead

A longtime resident of Stickney, Mr. Tornabene, 86, died of complications related to peptic ulcer disease Sunday, May 17, in MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn.

Mr. Tornabene opened Villa Nova Pizzeria in Stickney in 1955. The pizzeria has expanded to Orland Park, Lockport and Michigan City, Ind., and is now owned by his daughter and her husband.

“Al was a fairly nice guy,” said a neighbor, Raymond Mirous. “He kept to himself and never bothered nobody.”

The book identified Mr. Tornabene as a lieutenant for the West Side Crew, which at that time was run by Anthony Centracchio, according to the commission.

In testimony at the 2007 Family Secrets trial, a mob informant told federal authorities that Mr. Tornabene helped run the Outfit while James Marcello was imprisoned from 1992 until 2003.

Court records also showed that Mr. Tornabene presided over a 1983 ceremony that made several mobsters full members of the Outfit, including Frank Calabrese Sr. and his brother, Nick, who later was the star witness in the Family Secrets trial.

In September 2007, James Wagner, then head of the Chicago Crime Commission, told the Tribune that Mr. Tornabene, whose nickname was “the Pizza Man,” at that time was behind Outfit activities in the south suburbs.

Survivors include a daughter, Mary Adamczyk, a sister, Concetta “Teena” Donofrio, and a granddaughter. His wife, Betty, died in 1988.

Services were held.  thanks  Bob Goldsborough

Mafia scheme to steal from Wall Street investors in ’90s exposed in new book

 

 Chicago Outfit  street boss  Tony  Spilotro and  lawyer

A member of Nevada’s list of ecluded persons better known as the Black Book, Masterana was born in Canton, Ohio Jan. 26, 1929, and moved to Las Vegas to work for “Doc” Stacher in the early 1950s.   read more 

Arrests in Naples as Italian police seek to weaken organized crime

Italian police have arrested at least 41 alleged members of a mafia-like crime ring in the southern city of Naples

Several bosses from the Sarno clan, a top local crime family, and dozens of other suspects were arrested Wednesday and charged with drug trafficking, extortion and illegal weapons possession.

The group forced businesses to pay protection money, or pizzo, and sold cocaine smuggled from Spain, according to Angelo Mazzagatti, of the Carabinieri paramilitary police.

The suspects were also accused of creating a mafia-like association.

Mazzagatti described the Sarnos as a “very invasive” clan, adding that they had exerted control in the city “not with a mafia war but with strategic alliances.”

Wednesday’s arrests are part of larger crackdown conducted over the last few months targeting the Sarno, ‘Ndrangheta, and the Amato-Pagano clans.

hf/AFP/AP  thanks rob mudge

Anti-mafia sentiment has led to demonstrations in Naples

 

Mobs unseen Victims

John Kass: “Murder isn’t just between the killer and target, especially Outfit murders. The victims are found among living survivors, legitimate folk spaced apart, often unknowing, as if on a vince reaching back 

The 1997 killing of Sam Annerino touched the life  of U.S. Marshal  John Amberose .

The Mobs unseen Victims

Mafia Cops    thanks  JL  S mith  http://www.lvrj.com/news/43962692.html

Crazy Horse “rogue’s gallery” (L to R) Greg Liosi, Bobby D’Apice,
           Joe Blasko, Ray Randazzo, Mo McKenna, Vinnie Faraci

Mafia Coppers

John L Smith writes

Las Vegas has always been an attractive place for the hail-fellow, the hustler, and the man on the make

With its shadowy history, seductive setting and proximity to a limitless river of cash, it brims with dreamers, scufflers and schemers. It’s a spot where a guy who knows a guy can make a good living.

It was perhaps the ideal spot for the FBI to turn a man like Stephen Corso loose with a recording device. By all accounts, Corso was the street-wise guy Las Vegas tourists fantasize about and most locals rarely experience, the one who exists in dimly lighted bars and nondescript strip mall offices

Corso was an accountant by training, a salesman by calling, and a high-rolling degenerate gambler by compulsion when he got caught swiping clients’ money to feed his blackjack Jones and penthouse lifestyle. He spent $5 million that didn’t belong to him and was on his way to a prison stretch when he began cooperating with the FBI in 2002.

From what I’ve pieced together from public documents and street sources, the smooth-talking accountant found his true calling as an undercover informant. Reliable sources say Corso worked his way into the local mob scene and pulled the pants off some very experienced wiseguys.

According to a federal document from the Eastern District of Virginia, where Corso’s efforts helped nail securities attorney David Stocker on a “pump and dump” stock manipulation scheme with connections reaching into the Securities and Exchange Commission, the accountant was a one-man La Cosa Nostra census worker.

He provided information related to the activities of individuals with ties to several LCN organized crime families to include: the Chicago Outfit, Lucchese LCN, Bonanno LCN, Genovese LCN, Colombo LCN, Philadelphia LCN, Decavalcante LCN, and Gambino LCN,” the document states. “Corso was also instrumental in providing FBI agents with information on individuals with ties to Russian organized crime, Youngstown, Ohio gangsters, and the Irish Mob which exists in the Boston, Mass. area.”

Sounds like the guy did everything but dig up Jimmy Hoffa. Corso back-slapped his way into the Las Vegas underworld, then used his accounting and tax preparation skills to give the wiseguys a financial endoscopic treatment.

He played an integral role in sealing the deal in the lengthy “Mafia Cops” case, in which Las Vegas residents and former NYPD detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were found guilty of acting as contract killers for the Lucchese crime family. Corso’s work in Las Vegas proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Mafia Cops continued their criminal conspiracy years after leaving New York.

“Corso’s testimony was critical to the … conclusion that the conspiracy continued into the limitations period,” one government document states.

It’s as simple as this: No Corso, no Mafia Cops conviction.

And it will be intriguing to see whether the government gets a victory in a related drug case involving Eppolito’s son, Anthony Eppolito, and Guido Bravatti now that Corso has been sentenced to a year and a day for his own transgressions.

It’s also been reported Corso worked in connection with the Crazy Horse Too investigation. I imagine former Crazy Horse official Bobby D’Apice, who now resides at government expense, won’t be sending his former tax consultant, Corso, a letter of reference.

At his February sentencing in Connecticut, U.S. District Judge Janet Hall seemed almost apologetic. Although she called Corso’s crime “an extraordinary violation of trust,” she admitted, “I can’t find the words to describe the value, at least in my judgment, of this cooperation.”

The feds have a long tradition of going to embarrassing lengths to help their most effective informants. Not this time. Corso, the accountant, will serve longer than some informants with murder convictions.

Who could blame him if he told the government to get stuffed?

The FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Connecticut credit Corso with generating at least seven arrests, 20 convictions, and $4.2 million in seizures and forfeitures.

And it isn’t over.

“The LCN is well known for its tradition of seeking retribution against those who cooperate with law enforcement,” a federal memo states. “Corso knew of the danger, but continually put himself in harm’s way for the benefit of the government.”

So much for loyalty.

Now all Stephen Corso has to do is watch his back the rest of his life.