by willychichi » Sun May 17, 2015 3:47 am
During Prohibition, it was booze. Then gambling, racketeering and cocaine. But today, the New York mob makes big money from an unlikely product — marijuana.
And the godfather of ganja is from one of the storied names in Mafia lore: Eboli. Silvio Eboli, 44, is the grandson of Tommy Eboli, who ruled the Genovese crime family from 1969-72, and grandnephew of Patsy Eboli, a Genovese capo and head of the what the family called the Greenwich Village Crew. Tommy Eboli was killed, his family believes by Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, a k a the “Oddfather,” who replaced him as boss of the Genovese. Patsy, the family tells me, figured he was next, so he fled to Lagos, Nigeria, then made his way over land and by boat to Sicily, where he lived in exile.
But the Ebolis were already part of the pop-culture mafia before their fall. Actor Al Lettieri — whose sister, Jean, married Patsy — played Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo in “The Godfather.”
Lettieri had to ask Tommy Eboli for permission to take the role, and during filming, the cast and crew came over to Patsy’s house in Fort Lee, NJ, for dinner. Legend has it Al Pacino leaned over into the crib of infant Silvio and kissed the ring finger of the “little Don” as a joke.
It was a bit of foreshadowing. In 2013, during the Feast of San Gennaro, Silvio took over what was left of the Eboli crime family — forging his own enterprise outside the Genovese.
Silvio Eboli has been steadily building his marijuana-delivery empire since the 1980s. He started at the bottom, “muling” bud in from Jamaica strapped to his legs. When Rudy Giuliani cracked down on street dealing in the mid- 1990s, the rise of the marijuana home-delivery market began.
Read more:
http://nypost.com/2015/05/17/mafia-scio ... ng-of-nyc/During Prohibition, it was booze. Then gambling, racketeering and cocaine. But today, the New York mob makes big money from an unlikely product — marijuana.
And the godfather of ganja is from one of the storied names in Mafia lore: Eboli. Silvio Eboli, 44, is the grandson of Tommy Eboli, who ruled the Genovese crime family from 1969-72, and grandnephew of Patsy Eboli, a Genovese capo and head of the what the family called the Greenwich Village Crew. Tommy Eboli was killed, his family believes by Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, a k a the “Oddfather,” who replaced him as boss of the Genovese. Patsy, the family tells me, figured he was next, so he fled to Lagos, Nigeria, then made his way over land and by boat to Sicily, where he lived in exile.
But the Ebolis were already part of the pop-culture mafia before their fall. Actor Al Lettieri — whose sister, Jean, married Patsy — played Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo in “The Godfather.”
Lettieri had to ask Tommy Eboli for permission to take the role, and during filming, the cast and crew came over to Patsy’s house in Fort Lee, NJ, for dinner. Legend has it Al Pacino leaned over into the crib of infant Silvio and kissed the ring finger of the “little Don” as a joke.
It was a bit of foreshadowing. In 2013, during the Feast of San Gennaro, Silvio took over what was left of the Eboli crime family — forging his own enterprise outside the Genovese.
Silvio Eboli has been steadily building his marijuana-delivery empire since the 1980s. He started at the bottom, “muling” bud in from Jamaica strapped to his legs. When Rudy Giuliani cracked down on street dealing in the mid- 1990s, the rise of the marijuana home-delivery market began.
Read more: http://nypost.com/2015/05/17/mafia-scion-is-marijuana-king-of-nyc/