Mobsters: Coming face-to-face with a hit man

It was a haven for mobsters and corruption beginning in the Strip’s early years through the 1980s. By the time Saturday’s speaker, Frank Cullota, co-author of his autobiography Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster and Government Witness, moved to Las Vegas from Chicago, the Strip was lined with casino/hotels, mostly under the control of the mob. There were a myriad of rackets in the city, and murder was the final payoff for those who didn’t follow the code.

Bugsy Siegel once famously said of Syndicate members, “We only kill each other.” Then he was murdered in 1947.

The Mob Chronicles is a new series of talks featuring real stories from the people who lived them. The subject and design of the show holds a morbid fascination for many, and Las Vegas is a ripe source of personalities and stories. Because there is a certain mystique, a curious romance attached to these things, the general public wants to hear what was behind the glamorized accounts in books and movies.

Those who lived it will tell you that the glitz surrounding such a life had a dark underbelly. The reality could mean being arrested, doing time, even killing lifelong friends or being murdered by them yourself. It was a life that was mostly dangerous, but also had humorous moments.

Frank Cullotta told the audience how he grew up in a life of crime, embarking along the path his father walked when he was only ten. He reeled off the crimes he had committed like a grocery list: 300 burglaries, 50 armed robberies, arson and then the chiller—2 murders and 2 attempted murders. As he spoke in a flat voice, devoid of emotion, it was obvious that to him it was just business.

He said he and Tony “the Ant” Spilotro became boyhood friends in Chicago. After Tony learned who Cullotta’sfather was, an unbreakable bond was created. Apparently Cullotta’s father had once saved Spilotro’s father’s life. Photographs flashed on the screen as he spoke, starting from the time they were boys until Cullotta moved to Las Vegas at Spilotro’s request and became the infamous mobster’s lieutenant. He headed a cartel of swindlers, arsonists and killers known in town as the Hole in the Wall Gang. One of the captions on the screen said it all… Tough guys grow up fast. http://www.examiner.com/x-24363-Las-Vegas-Writing-Examiner~y2010m5d10-Coming-facetoface-with-a-hit-man

Mafia godfather takes revenge on uncle after wife leaves

Mafia gang destroyed a bowling alley and amusement arcade after a godfather's wife left him.
Giuseppe Palumbo, 34, ordered the raid after his wife went to stay with an uncle, the owner of the premises.

Customers cowered as the six-strong gang, wearing crash helmets and carrying guns, pushed over gaming machines and then poured petrol on to bowling lanes before setting them on fire.

Police released the footage of the raids at Giugliano and Pozzuoli near Naples, home of the southern Mafia known as the Camorra.

A spokesman said: “Palumbo was furious because the uncle had been given the money by him to set up the premises and he viewed it as an offence to his honou

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23827140-mafia-godfather-takes-revenge-on-uncle-after-wife-leaves.do

James Caan, Anthony Fiato, Joe Pesci

James Caan once ordered a Mafia-type investigation on fellow actor Joe Pesci after the star refused to pay a hotel bill, according to new reports. Caan called on mobster Anthony Fiato,'The Animal', to "take care" of Joe Pesci after learning about an $8,000 bill that wasn't paid after Pesci stayed with Princess Diana's late lover Dodi Fayed at a pal's Miami, Florida, hotel in 1982..

Caan's spokesman Arnold Robinson has blasted Fiato's claims, made to the tabloid National Enquirer, insisting his client and Pesci are the best of friends, but mobster Anthony Fiato points out that FBI tapes he has given to the publication can't be wrong.

Fiato says, "Jimmy can say he's a friend of Pesci's now. But he can't deny that at one time he tried to hurt him. It's on tape."
In an extract from the tapes, printed in the new issue of the Enquirer, Caan seems delighted when Fiato admits, "We'll get to him (Pesci)," stating, "Good, good." The actor later adds, "We're gonna make him pay."
The FBI tapes, featuring Fiato's conversation with James Caan, were produced a decade ago when the mobster testified during a murder trial.

Italy: Police seize €500 mln euros in mafia assets

Rome, 20 August (AKI) - Italian Anti-Mafia tax police seized nearly half a billion euros worth of assets generated by Mafia organised crime activities and money laundering in the first half of 2009. According to figures released by police on Wednesday, tax authorities seized more than 475 million euros worth of assets, as well as 431 kilogrammes of illicit drugs.The tax police also arrested 141 people, while another 533 others are under investigation."The results were achieved as a result of co-ordinated and persistent action and analysis of criminal activities and economic and financial activities, carried out in collaboration by several departments and a number of national and international institutions," the tax police said in a statement."Using the latest advanced computer applications they are able to have at their disposal a geographical map of criminal organisations, to identify areas of influence of mafia groups in the region."

Greg Scarpa sr.Witness: FBI used mob muscle to crack ’64 case

The FBI used mob muscle to solve the 1964 disappearance of three civil rights volunteers in Mississippi, a gangster’s ex-girlfriend testified Monday, becoming the first witness to repeat in open court a story that has been underworld lore for years.
Linda Schiro said that her ex-boyfriend, Mafia tough guy Gregory Scarpa Sr., was recruited by the FBI to help find the volunteers’ bodies. She said Scarpa later told her he put a gun in a Ku Klux Klansman’s mouth and forced him to reveal the whereabouts of the victims.
The FBI has never acknowledged that Scarpa, nicknamed “The Grim Reaper,” was involved in the case. The bureau did not immediately return a call for comment Monday.

Schiro took the stand as a witness for the prosecution at the trial of former FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, who is charged in state court with four counts of murder in what authorities have called one of the worst law enforcement corruption cases in U.S. history.
Prosecutors say Scarpa plied DeVecchio with cash, jewelry, liquor and prostitutes in exchange for confidential information on suspected "rats" and rivals in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Scarpa died behind bars in 1994.
Mob loreThe notion that Scarpa strong-armed a Klan member into giving up information about one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era has been talked about in mob circles for years.
It supposedly happened during the search for civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were beaten and shot by a gang of Klansmen and buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss. The case was famously dramatized in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”
Investigators struggled for answers in the early days of the case, stymied by stonewalling Klan members.
In 1994, the New York Daily News, citing unidentified federal law enforcement officials, reported that a frustrated J. Edgar Hoover turned to Scarpa to extract information. The Daily News said the New York mobster terrorized an appliance salesman and Klansman already under suspicion in the case and got him to reveal the location of the bodies.
Schiro testified Monday that she and Scarpa traveled to Mississippi in 1964 after he was recruited by the FBI. She said they walked into the hotel where the FBI had gathered during the investigation, and the gangster winked at a group of agents. She said an agent later showed up in their room and handed Scarpa a gun.
She said Scarpa helped find the volunteers’ bodies by “putting a gun in the guy’s mouth and threatening him.” She said an unidentified agent later returned to the room, gave Scarpa a wad of cash, and took back the weapon.
Civil rights turning pointThe killings galvanized the struggle for equality in the South and helped bring about passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Seven people were convicted at the time, but none served more than six years.
Mississippi later reopened the case, winning a manslaughter conviction against former Klansman and part-time preacher Edgar Ray Killen two years ago. He is serving a 60-year prison sentence.
Schiro’s remarks about the Mississippi episode were only a brief part of her full day of testimony.
Schiro, 62, started dating Scarpa at age 17 after meeting him in a bar. She said she had been around mobsters most of her life, so his boasts that he had been involved in 20 gangland murders didn’t frighten her.
“I was impressed,” she said.
She said she was more surprised when the Colombo crime family captain told her about his ties to the FBI. “I said, ‘What do you mean, you’re a rat?”’ she recalled. “And he said, ‘No, I just work for them.”’
DeVecchio became the informant’s “handler” in 1978, and Schiro said she was allowed to sit in on weekly meetings at the couple’s apartment. She said that when Scarpa offered stolen jewelry to the agent, he took it and put it in his pocket.
'I'll take care of it'

The girlfriend was gunned down at a mob social club a few days later.
Defense attorneys have sought to portray Schiro — who testified that prosecutors were paying her $2,200 a month for living expenses — as an opportunist who framed DeVecchio at the behest of overzealous prosecutors.
They have also accused her trying to improve her chances for a tell-all book deal about Scarpa.

'Gomorrah' is gripping and powerful

The bleakly violent, true-life-based "Gomorrah" isn't your

father's crime saga "Gomorrah

Gomorrah" is a fictionalized adaptation of an Italian crime exposé, but it plays like an angry cinema vérité document of mob life.
Roberto Saviano's riveting bestseller tore the lid off Naples' murderous Camorra crime family, the cousin of Sicily's Cosa Nostra. It was quite a piece of journalism -- unglamorous, viciously unsentimental, and now the author lives under 24-hour police protection. In the hard-boiled film version, professional actors mingle with local kids and actual Camorra thugs, several of whom have since been arrested for crimes like those they perform onscreen. To say the film has an aura of authenticity is understating it. It's gripping, occasionally terrifying, but unlikely to be anyone's favorite movie. Is there such a thing as too real?
Writer/director Matteo Garrone's film records daily life under a brutal crime regime as dispassionately as an X-ray revealing cancer. This is a "slice of life" movie made of raw, impressionistic scenes, not a plot. Garrone throws us into the thick of things without a road map, insisting that we stay alert, connect the dots, work things out for ourselves, sink or swim.
The film opens in a surreal blue glow as a few Camorristi bake at a tanning salon. They're shockingly shot dead in a twist on the old gangster-film barbershop rub-out. The who and why of the scene matters less than the brutally realistic depiction of the murders. Mob wars have been going on for generations; this is just today's tally. "Gomorrah's" body count is high, but the killings never feel routine. Each death comes as a moment of horror with huge emotional impact.
The story is a constant, bloody struggle for money and power set in a prison-like housing project, scrubby public parks and garment industry sweatshops. Here we encounter a half-dozen men trying to get into the mob, survive it or escape it. Marco and Ciro are loose cannons with a taste for chaos who wave guns, shout Al Pacino's lines from "Scarface," and stage impulsive robberies. Don Ciro, a Camorra bag man, doles out payoffs to families of jailed Mafiosi, a once-routine clerking job growing increasingly dangerous. University student Roberto becomes a junior executive, applying his chemical training with a mob toxic-waste subsidiary that is poisoning his hometown. Pasquale, a master tailor for mob-controlled couture clothing factories, risks his life by secretly teaching workers in a Chinese competitor's facility. Toto, a grocery delivery boy from the projects, takes up drug dealing as unselfconsciously as is it were skateboarding. The characters' stories don't intersect, and the episodic narrative allows little character development, but the film evokes a panorama of greed and betrayal.
The Italy we see looks like a Third World viper pit at worst, drab and banal at best. Travel-poster vistas appear only in a brief scene when Roberto accompanies a smoothly tailored Camorra businessman to Venice for a corrupt poison-control deal. "We'll be traveling a lot," the older man says, a tossoff remark that reverberates with menace.
Garrone's world view is dark and disconcerting, but not hopeless. Several characters move away from lives of mob control. Others die, soon to be replaced by eager new opportunists. "Gomorrah" is stark and powerful filmmaking, a welcome alternative to romanticized American mob melodramas.

The mobster who died in pink pajamas

By Paul Lieberman
The Gangster Squad got to Jack Dragna by bugging his mistress' bed.Dealing with him was the flip side of dealing with Mickey Cohen. Sure, Mickey ranted about the Los Angeles Police Department in public, but if squad members drew stakeout duty outside his Brentwood home on a hot day, his wife, Lavonne, would send out beers or invite them in for slices of chocolate cake.
With Dragna, icy distance was the rule when the squad members camped outside his banana warehouse or the Victory Market, where he held meetings in a concrete-walled back room. The squad's bugging expert, Con Keeler, did once get in between the rounds of a night watchman, but he didn't have time to fully conceal his bug. Dragna's men found it, carried it outside and smashed it on a curb.Dragna was cautious to a fault -- that's how he'd remained unscathed for decades, despite being branded the "Capone of Los Angeles"by Gov. Earl Warren's crime commission. A native of Palermo, Italy, he had arrived in California in 1914 and generally lay so low that one bookie was said to have asked, even in the 1940s, "Who the hell is Jack Dragna?"He was imprisoned once for extortion but won his freedom on appeal. By mid-century, his record was eight arrests, no convictions.
He knew how to go on the offensive, too, like after the 1950 dynamiting of Cohen's house, when the Gangster Squad hauled in Dragna's entire inner circle, and well as his son Frank, who had gone to USC and lost an eye in the war. The son then filed suit against the head of the squad and the "John Doe" officers who rousted him, seeking $350,000 for false arrest and humiliation, the latter for inviting photographers into the lockup.The younger Dragna's suit was pending in 1951 when the squad bugged the bed of his father's mistress. She was a secretary for the dry cleaners union, in which the mob had its hooks. If a dry cleaning shop didn't sign up, Dragna's men would send over suits with dye sewn inside so all the clothes in its vats turned purple or red.The secretary had a wooden headboard with a sunburst pattern. While she was out, Keeler picked the lock to her apartment and hid a mike in the center of the sun. Amid the pillow talk, the bug picked up occasional mentions of mob business, including plans for a new casino in Las Vegas. But that wasn't what the police used against the 60-year-old Dragna. Their ammunition came from other bedroom goings-on. If they couldn't get him for ordering hits on Cohen and his men, why not for "lewd/vag," lewd conduct and vagrancy?Dragna's lawyers could argue that the police didn't have a warrant to eavesdrop, but to no avail -- back then authorities could use illegally obtained evidence. The misdemeanor case earned Dragna a mere 30-day sentence, but how and where he was bugged stood to cost him respect in the mob. More significantly, the morals conviction could get him sent back to Italy.Indeed, Dragna was still fighting a deportation order when he died in 1956. They found his body in a Sunset Boulevard motel, in pink pajamas, with $986 in cash and two sets of false teeth nearby, his Cadillac parked outside. In his luggage was a small statue of Jesus and a newspaper clipping about his son's lawsuit, which had been dismissed.Paul Lieberman is a Times staff writer