Joey Merlino is back in town

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Cheech
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

Post by Cheech »

Mikeymike12 wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:21 pm
Cheech wrote: Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:02 am At 19:25 he clearly says “that other motherfucker Pennissi”
Nope I’m not on Patreon, what’s the Title say on Patreon ? Cause On his YouTube Channel the Video says “ Episode 29 rat of the month Anthony Persiano “
That’s literally the title of the video Above were it says 33k views in 2 days .
Yeah I heard him say Pennisi too, but the video is titled Persiano .So either Merlino didn’t pronounce the name right or the video is titled wrong.
Idk what to say man. They talked about different people. They had tapes on Pasqua and played them too. The title didnt say Pasqua and Persiano. He clearly is talking about Pennissi but whatever buddy. Smh.
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TommyGambino
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

Post by TommyGambino »

Pennisi in PC for a lot of his sentence is interesting. We know he tried to commit suicude, must have had a tough time
johnny_scootch
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

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SonnyBlackstein
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

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johnny_scootch wrote: Sun Mar 24, 2024 10:38 am https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/my-d ... -9tn032w3r


Sunday Times article on Merlino.
Paywall. Can you post?
Cheers.
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JeremyTheJew
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

Post by JeremyTheJew »

Tonyd621 wrote: Wed Mar 20, 2024 8:00 am
JakeTheSnake630 wrote: Mon Mar 18, 2024 7:11 am Has anyone brought up that Kevin Connolly, E from Entourage, whose company Action Park Media platforms Joey's podcast is in big trouble. Apparently they have scammed the podcasts that signed with them out of huge money. I wonder if Joeys show will be effected, or if didn't get scammed because of who he was/is. There is a bunch of lawsuits coming. I guess Matthew Stanford's wife is one of the people bringing a lawsuit against APM.
Stafford... the QB for the rams for those that do not know...
Smh … he’s from Detroit … he’s a DETROIT RAM lol
HANG IT UP NICKY. ITS TIME TO GO HOME.
CornerBoy
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

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Mikeymike12 wrote: Thu Mar 21, 2024 10:07 pm It’s shocking that Philly made Persiano when he has checked in PC at every Place he was it. How did No one not know that..??? Did they not ask around because he was already supposedly made with the Lukes ? Wonder why the Lucchese released him in the first place and what crew was he in ?( anyone know ????)
Heard the guy is a scumbag .... just shocking how No one heard or called it out that he checked in PC dozens of times
he was made w L crew and philly?
ee
and he checked in to PC as a made guy?

Wherre is he from? crew?
Q: What doesn't work when it's fixed?
A: A jury!
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

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Dinner with Skinny Joey, the mobster turned hit podcaster

Joe Merlino, the alleged former head of the Philadelphia mafia, reveals why he’s cracking open the omerta — and that police now pull him over to say they’re fans of his show


At about 6.30pm on Thursday evening, Gianna, a waitress wearing four-inch stilettos and a black dress, who would have made Federico Fellini re-cast La Dolce Vita, weaved through the crowd of diners at The Saloon in Philadelphia carrying a platter of splayed langoustines and “clams Pavarotti” to Joey Merlino’s table.

For the man who was rumoured to be the head of the Philadelphia mob until recently, there is nowhere better to eat in the city. Not least because everybody knows him.

“Been coming here 50 years,” he said through the garlic-tinted haze, beads of condensation glinting on the martini glasses. “The best.”

It’s a far cry from the Sunday gravy — tomato and garlic sauce — his friend Fat Angelo used to make for him and the other guys in prison. Merlino, born and raised in south Philly, one-time jockey and teen gambler turned alleged mob boss and Elton John fan, has for decades been the city’s most prominent wiseguy, and spent a total of 20 years behind bars for racketeering charges (built around gambling, loan sharking and extortion) and conspiracy to assault.

He’s survived assassination attempts — including being shot — faced down murder charges and been suspected, though never convicted, of involvement in at least a dozen shootings.

Now he’s breaking open the omerta, a little at least, with a hit podcast: The Skinny with Joey Merlino, which features the lupine 62-year-old discussing prison cooking, gambling and run-ins with the justice system with family friend Joe “Lil Snuff” Perri, who is 30 years younger (“he was a rotten f***ing kid”).

Since the first episode was released, Perri says, getting around Philly has been a nightmare: cops keep pulling them over to tell them how much they like the podcast. Despite the impenetrable accents and opaque references to Philly sports betting, it is also big in the UK: after the east coast cities, they say, most of their listeners are British.

Not everyone is happy that south Philly’s alleged Don Corleone has, as his podcast bio claims, embraced “storytelling in the digital space”. George Anastasia, an author and retired journalist who covered the Philadelphia mob for 35 years, said that some of the old-school wiseguys weren’t impressed.

“I think the conventional wisdom from law enforcement is that up until least a couple of years ago, Merlino was the boss, and his foray into podcasting may have diminished his standing in the underworld,” he said.

Merlino, who was nicknamed Skinny by the cops to differentiate him from his more rotund cousin, Fat Joe Merlino, denies knowing anything about the mob. He says he’s doing the podcast to raise awareness of the wrongfully imprisoned (of which he naturally considers himself one) and to provide a counter-narrative to the “rats”, or informants, who have been hogging the limelight.

Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, a one-time underboss of the Gambino crime family who confessed to his involvement in 19 murders, has a podcast too, as do a bewildering array of others.

“All these rats, lying rats, are doing podcasts,” said Merlino. “All they do is talk about guys who are in jail — there’s innocent guys in jail, believe me — and just make up lies.”

He has more time for Donald Trump, who is facing the same type of racketeering charges that put Merlino behind bars. Though he doesn’t know Trump, he’s seen him a few times, including playing golf in Florida, and once took a photo with him.

Trump, who delights in comparing himself to mob bosses like Capone, and sells cigars with his own mug shot printed on them, would — Merlino thinks — do well enough in prison, if he was ever sent down. “You got to do the time, not let the time do you,” he tells me.

Still, ask Merlino what the mob is and his eyes will lock on you. “I don’t know about that,” he tells me, icy over the lobster francaise.

Neither does he remember much of The Godfather, nor does he like Robert De Niro (“he’s a fake half Italian, he’s only a quarter Italian”), though he does enjoy Joe Pesci in Casino.

But around the Italian market in south Philly, a strip of stalls and shops selling sausage meat and prosciutto, the names of the merchants — Cappuccio, Cannuli, Fiorella, straight from Sicily and Abruzzo — they know very well who he is.

Around here, Merlino is publicly feted for his charitable acts, including handing out thousands of frozen turkeys and children’s bicycles to poor families every year, and for a vague sense that he used to keep a lid on things.

At the Rim café, a haven to mob memorabilia, René Kobeitri, the mysteriously accented proprietor who came here from Nice 20 years ago, had just finished blowtorching a large cannolo when I asked him about Merlino. “There’s good mafia and bad mafia,” said Kobeitri, 72. “He is the best. You’ll never hear something bad about the guy.”

Salvatore Scavetti, 55, a construction manager who has known Merlino his whole life, jumped in. “He helped a lot of people,” he said. “Straightened s**t out.”

In the glory days, from the 1950s to the early 1980s, the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra was a parallel state which ran businesses and made money while holding a tight grip on society. Most bosses stayed in the dark: some, like Al Capone in Chicago and John Gotti in New York devoured the limelight. Merlino came after.

Their business was racketeering, gambling, the occasional hit on an armoured car. The point was to make money, quietly. Yet there was also terrible violence.

In 1989, on Halloween night, a masked gunman carrying a trick or treat bag walked into an Italian restaurant in south Philly. He pulled out a machine gun and opened fire, hitting Nicky Scarfo Jr, son of a mob boss, with six bullets. Scarfo survived his assassination attempt.

Rumour was that Merlino had pulled the trigger (he denies this). Then the next rumour started: that Scarfo Sr had put a $500,000 price on Merlino’s head to avenge his son. A news crew tracked him down in south Philly and asked him right out if it was true. “Give me half a million dollars, I’ll shoot myself,” he said.

It was pitch perfect. But over the decades, the Philly underworld was taken over by new forces, new nationalities. It exists, but it is, according to Anastasia, the journalist, “very much in demise”. Gang wars and prosecutions decimated the organisation. Who needs illegal gambling dens and loan sharks when betting is legal and you can borrow money online?

The Italian migrants who founded the Philly mob, said Anastasia, were smart, entrepreneurial, working outside a system that didn’t accept them. When their children grew up, the smart ones became doctors and lawyers. Today, he said: “the mob is scraping the bottom of the gene pool.”

Nowadays, Merlino spends most of his time at home in Boca Raton, Florida, only coming to Philly to see his friends and record occasional episodes of his podcast. One of his daughters works in digital marketing, the other is a lawyer. To all his old enemies, the ones who wanted to see him dead or in prison, he has a message: he’s still alive, and he won’t let the rats do the talking.
johnny_scootch
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

Post by johnny_scootch »

CornerBoy wrote: Mon Mar 25, 2024 4:48 am
he was made w L crew and philly?
ee
and he checked in to PC as a made guy?

Wherre is he from? crew?
He was around Nicky Scarfo Jr., as it was said in an earlier post a few guys got made illegally by the Scarfos and since it was an unrecognized ceremony through Scarfo Jrs influence the Luccheses made them official members but when Scarfo Jr fell out of favor with the Luccheses at some point they agreed to release these guys back to Philly.
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SonnyBlackstein
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

Post by SonnyBlackstein »

Thanks Scootch!
Don't give me your f***ing Manson lamps.
johnny_scootch
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

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SonnyBlackstein wrote: Mon Mar 25, 2024 12:25 pm Thanks Scootch!
You're welcome, notice they're really pushing the 'former boss' angle.
monarch
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

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Image

https://twitter.com/skinnyjoeym/status/ ... 3312535858

Yikes! I don't know how to make this image smaller.
Cheech
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

Post by Cheech »

NickyEyes1 wrote: Thu Oct 19, 2023 4:49 pm Just watched the episode... Hilarious lol. Merlino saying he lost 14k betting the gumball color out of the machine haha classic
Which episode was this. Do you recall?
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NickyEyes1
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

Post by NickyEyes1 »

Cheech wrote: Wed Mar 27, 2024 12:55 pm
NickyEyes1 wrote: Thu Oct 19, 2023 4:49 pm Just watched the episode... Hilarious lol. Merlino saying he lost 14k betting the gumball color out of the machine haha classic
Which episode was this. Do you recall?
I'll get back to ya
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NickyEyes1
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

Post by NickyEyes1 »

Cheech wrote: Wed Mar 27, 2024 12:55 pm
NickyEyes1 wrote: Thu Oct 19, 2023 4:49 pm Just watched the episode... Hilarious lol. Merlino saying he lost 14k betting the gumball color out of the machine haha classic
Which episode was this. Do you recall?
https://youtu.be/1hxY1UCq2uQ?si=NINZU1K1zkLms40G

Here's the episode it's like halfway through
Cheech
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Re: Joey Merlino is back in town

Post by Cheech »

Thanks homie!
Salude!
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