Gangland October 24th 2024

[Dr031718]

Genovese Hitman Was Ready to Whack Sinatra If Fat Tony Didn't Forgive His Transgressions

Genovese mobster George Barone once put a gun to the head of a then mid-level union official named Harold Daggett. But he was just looking to scare the current president of the International Longshoremen's Association who recently won a 62% raise for dockworkers following a brief strike — not to kill him. A few years earlier, however, according to a new-tell-all book about the mob, Barone was ready to pull the trigger on someone much higher on the social scales: Frank Sinatra.

Barone, who testified at two trials that he killed so many people for acting boss Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno that he couldn't recall how many, was poised to whack Old Blue Eyes at a meeting in East Harlem if Fat Tony had given him the word, according to a sensational new book by former FBI agent Mike Campi who debriefed Barone about his life of crime.

"According to Barone," Campi wrote in Mafia Takedown, The Incredible True Story of The FBI Agent Who Took Down The New York Mob, "Sinatra was becoming too friendly with other crime families." Campi writes that "Salerno summoned Sinatra to a meeting in Harlem" and instructed Barone "to be there before Sinatra’s arrival."

Fat Tony had told Barone that whether Sinatra lived or died on that fateful day depended on the "outcome" of the meeting that Sinatra had with Salerno, according to Mafia Takedown. "Sinatra begged for his life, was reprimanded, and committed not to violate his relationship with the Genovese" crime family and "his life was spared," Campi wrote.

Campi asserts that Barone provided him those "details of Sinatra's affiliations with the Genovese family," which Mafia Takedown notes go back to 1946 when the singer allegedly "delivered a suitcase stuffed with cash to Lucky Luciano in Cuba," in one of the numerous "personal" discussions he had with Barone in 2001 and 2002.

Their talks took place following Barone's arrest in the same racketeering indictment in which the crime family's current and former leaders, Liborio (Barney) Bellomo and Vincent (Chin) Gigante, and scores of other gangsters were arrested after a three-year-long undercover investigation pulled off by turncoat gangster Michael (Cookie) D'Urso, a high-wire act supervised at the time by Campi.

As Gang Land reported a year ago, Mafia Takedown also relates the astounding accusation by D'Urso that FBI agent Joy Adam coerced him into having frequent sexcapades with her during the three years that he worked undercover for the feds tape-recording thousands of conversations with mobsters and associates from the Five Families.

The blockbuster 266-page book includes dozens of surveillance photos and mug shots of wiseguys as well as a foreword by Gang Land's former Daily News colleague, Tom Robbins, who also spent many hours chatting with Barone years later and has written about those talks for Gang Land.

But the name Joy Adam, who retired after 27 years as an agent in 2017 and who was one of four FBI agents who were praised for their work on the case by then Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf, and who was in court in 2003 when Chin Gigante pleaded guilty, does not appear in Mafia Takedown. The book goes on sale November 19.

She is identified as Jane, "a female agent" on Campi's squad. Her name, and D'Urso's allegations against Adam, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing, are "blacked out" in the chapter entitled, Second Shock to The System. Through her attorney, Andrew Seewald, Adam has denied allegations that she ever "withheld or threatened to withhold" living expenses for him and his family if he refused to have sex with her.

D'Urso told Gang Land years before Campi began writing his book that Adam "demanded to have sex every time we met" from mid-1998 to April of 2001 while he was working undercover in the case. "She'd get there early before everybody and we'd have sex," he said. "It became a mandatory routine. And if it couldn't be before, it had to be after. She wouldn't let me go."

"Whenever I resisted," D'Urso said, "she'd stop approving the funding for living expenses that we needed to survive because I couldn't keep any of the money from scores I was making with Sammy (Genovese capo, Salvatore Aparo) and (wiseguy) Joe Zito because the FBI was keeping that as evidence. I really had no choices."

Campi declined to discuss the name of the "female agent" or the book's blacked out passages. The book notes that as "a former FBI employee," the author was required to submit the book for a "prepublica­tion review" by the FBI which decided that some "passages were not releasable to the public" and redacted them. Campi and publisher Skyhorse Publishing say they "disagree" with that decision but have "elected to keep the redactions in the text and blacked out."

Readers should have little trouble deciphering the import of the blacked out passages that Cookie D'Urso has told Campi regarding his forced interactions with Adam, however. They mirror the accusations that the turncoat gangster related to Gang Land during the same time frame — a few years after D'Urso was rewarded with a "time served" sentence back in 2007.

She allegedly seduced him, Campi wrote, and D'Urso told Gang Land, after they had a meal and a few drinks at a hotel near Newark Airport a few weeks after he flipped, and Adam said: "Hey, you wanna get laid tonight? I've been listening to your conversations for years and I've grown attracted to you."

"I was shocked," D'Urso said. "She was not my type. I did not want to, but I knew that would be tough to admit. I said to myself, 'What do I do? If I say no, is she going to hold it against me. Her husband is the supervisor on the squad. She can make it 10 times worse for me. Nobody's going to believe me over her, so do I bang her and try to have an ally, or do I say no."

He said, "Yes," until April of 2001, when he told Campi he hated Adams and never wanted to speak to her again, without telling him why, for about 10 years.

In the preface of the book, Campi praised D'Urso for "risking his life on a daily basis and showing spectacular courage" for his work in "one of the largest and most decimating mob takedowns ever," while at the same time rising "so far up the criminal ranks that his superiors openly compared him to John Gotti and discussed him becoming the future Genovese boss."

The G-man and the ex-gangster remained friends for years. They would speak on the phone, and get together on occasion. They began working on a book after The New York Post reprinted a Gang Land column on January 10, 2020 in which D'Urso warned mobsters in an "open letter to the Mafia" who he heard were still looking for him that they better have a gun if they find him because "a bat and a knife won't help you."

Their book project began, Campi wrote, after "film and television figures, along with Hollywood agents" read the story, under the headline, Former Mob Rat Michael “Cookie” D’Urso Writes Open Letter to Mafia, and pressed them about a book, movie, and TV show about "D’Urso's story, our lives, and how we had retained a relationship over the decades."

"In fits and starts, these discussions continued for two years" until "everything changed" when Cookie asked Mike "to include one thing in the book that was blatantly false," Campi wrote.

"The intended falsehood" was "a betrayal of our rela­tionship and I was disappointed that he wanted me to coauthor a book where my name would stand behind something untrue," Campi wrote. "He was clearly trying to manipulate me," Campi wrote, "based on his inaccurate belief that I was inter­ested in a movie or multiyear TV series. I immediately severed my relationship with D'Urso."

Barone, a cagey pirate from the docks on Manhattan's West Side, also confided in the FBI agent. Campi stated that he "was able to bond with Barone around small but significant things," but his contact with the former member of The Jets, the New York street gang made famous in the 1961 movie classic, West Side Story, ended quickly. His superiors — he called one a "liar," said another "lacked credibility" and wrote that several of them were "empty suits" — transferred him from the Genovese squad to one involving public corruption.

As a result, Campi, who focused his queries to Barone — he died in 2011 at the age of 86 — on the dozens of arrested gangsters in his case, including Bellomo, Gigante, and his son Andrew, and didn't push him for specifics about the day in the 1970s that he and Frank Sinatra were both in East Harlem.

If he was there before Sinatra appeared in the famous backstage photo at the Westchester Premiere Theatre with Carlo Gambino and a bunch of Gambinos on April 11, 1976, or after, and if Fat Tony had given him the high sign, there's little doubt that Barone would have pulled the trigger, as he had done many times before.

A few years later, in 1980 though, when Barone placed a loaded gun to Daggett's head in the back of an East Harlem fruit stand and told him, "I will blow your fucking brains all over the room," he was only trying to shake him up, the gangster testified.

In the most dramatic moment in the 2005 trial when Daggett was acquitted of extorting millions of dollars from dock workers in New York, New Jersey and Florida from 1997 through October 2004, Daggett wept on the witness stand as he recalled the incident and testified he was so terrified that he wet his pants as Barone shouted, "This is my fucking local. I'll kill you and your wife and children if you take my local away from me."

Barone had testified that he had ordered Daggett to the meeting after he heard that Daggett was involved in a plot to kill him and to take over the Florida ILA local that he ran.

"We had a very strong berating of Mr. Daggett," recalled Barone. "He was definitely afraid of what was about to happen to him."

Tales Of Wiseguys & Fourth Warders In The NY Post's Old Neighborhood

The New York Post was located for many years in what The Paper of Wreckage — a rollicking oral history about the tabloid — dubs the "Armpit of The World."

Yours truly toiled for the newspaper for 20 years, most of them while it was at that same lower Manhattan location. And while we don't recall the odor as offensive, there's no question that the neighborhood was filled with more than a few intriguing characters, and many of their stories are told in this often fascinating book.

In the chapter about its location on the East River on the edge of Knickerbocker Village titled Armpit of the World, Life and Crime Around 210 South Street, you'll learn that "back in the day," when "The Post didn't print on Sundays," neighborhood wiseguys — no names given up — who most likely allegedly worked at the paper, "used to have sit-down meetings in the cafeteria on Sundays."

Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, two former Page Six editors who penned the huge 568-page book, complete with an index, of course, plucked that nugget and the chapter title from Dominick Marrano, an old pal from the 'hood who was at The Post 37 years and was the chief paginator when he retired in 2008. As Big Dom Marrano, he wrote one story for the paper, a tongue in cheek bit about his quest to land a role on The Sopranos during a public casting call.

Lots of interesting things happened there on Sunday. "One Sunday I came in the back entrance and right outside were two guys with a truck and a van," recalled Mulcahy, who edited Page Six from 1978-to-1985. "They were taking TVs out of the truck and putting them in a van. They looked at each other, then at me, and one says, 'You want one?' I said, 'No, thank you."

One day, reporter-columnist Charlie Carillo, (1978-1993), "had a notebook full of notes," when a guy "whose car was filled with boxes" and who'd "come right from the airport," said, "Hey kid, I got Armani suits here. What are you? 40? 42? 42 long?" Carillo also said no thanks. But every step he took "toward the paper, the price went down. 'One twenty-five, $50.' He had to get rid of the swag and I really should have bought a suit. My mother would have liked that."

"I once saw a guy across the street right by the (Knickerbocker Village) buildings," recalled Peter Tocco, who worked sports makeup, 1970-2013. "There was a truck. Obviously the truck had been hijacked. He took out a pistol and blew the lock off and opened it up. It was 12:30 in the afternoon."

And right next door to The Post, where the paper was conceived, constructed and printed from 1970 to 1995, was the Post Mortem, a bar and alleged restaurant.

"They had the veal Parmesan special on Wonder Bread," said Carillo. "It was not to be missed if you were young and single and didn't know anything about food. You could eat and drink there for about five dollars. Geraldine serving, Charlie at the stick. It was terrific and seedy, the pressman and the truck drivers."

From 1979-1981, when Dave Banks was the night managing editor, the Post Mortem was where the irreverent, irascible reporter-columnist, (to be very kind to my late boss for a few years) Steve Dunleavy, who was then working the desk at night, would borrow the money he needed to send a reporter to cover a late breaking story at 2 AM through "an arrangement" he had with Geraldine and Charlie.

"It was very much a cash economy in those days," said Banks. "If you had to get a guy to Kennedy to get on a plane to fly out of state, you needed money" and the Post Mortem was "the only place Dunleavy was going to pick up four or five hundred dollars to fund the reporter."

"It was at a usurious interest rate," said Banks. "If he'd borrowed $500 it would be $30 or $40 interest when the account department opened" the next morning. "It was very short-term cash. I think it was mob money, frankly. If Rupert had realized that he was taking advantage of Mafia money to run his newspaper, he probably would have been appalled."

Ken Chandler, who had two stints at The Post, 1978-1986, 1993-2002, as editor-in-chief and publisher, wasn't so sure about that. "If she was mobbed up, I don't even think [Murdoch] would think about it for a minute. Well, if he was confronted with it by the district attorney, maybe he'd bother about it, but otherwise it's just a way of doing business, right?

Asked if Geraldine was mobbed up, Ed Burns, a retired NYPD sergeant, said: "You could use that metaphor for the entire neighborhood. It was an old-fashioned, hardworking Italian neighborhood."

Attorney Mathew Mari, who hailed from Knickerbocker Village — he likes to refer to it as The Fourth Ward — and who has met and defended more than a few wiseguys over the years, told Gang Land that he never heard that they were connected.

"They were typical Fourth Warders," he said. "You can expect anything to happen around them. They had a golden touch for starting up bars, and getting them going, and then turning them into a hell hole. It wasn't a place that Mathew Mari, who goes to the lowest places, would go," he said, except to find a client. "I got four or five cases out of the place, before they shut it down."

"Geraldine and Charlie were anything but America's most loving couple," Mari told the Paper of Wreckage. "They had many verbal arguments — like every day — and many knockdown, drag out physical fights in the street and at the bar. Geraldine won most of those battles but Charlie fought like a man and held his own."

In the same chapter, Mulcahy and DiGiacomo quote yours truly on John Gotti's first courtroom appearance after the assassination of Paul (Big Paul) Castellano and how The Post coined the term "Dapper Don." They also have a few choice words about Gotti and yours truly from turncoat Gambino underboss Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, words we'll let Gang Land readers discover on their own.

Meanwhile, The Paper of Wreckage has 27 other highly readable chapters about the Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wonkers and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media.

Mob Turncoat: I Flipped Because I Didn't Want To Go To Jail, Or To Hell

They probably didn't need him, but prosecutors unveiled Andrew Koslosky, a former church singer they used to nail six Colombo family mobsters for racketeering, as their leadoff witness at the Brooklyn Federal Court loansharking trial of John (Bazoo) Ragano, the hot-headed Bonanno soldier.

Ragano was convicted after he was tape recorded demanding his money back and telling his deadbeat loanshark customer that he was going to "slap the shit out of him." The tape recordings and testimony by mob asscoiate Vincent Martino were more than likely enough to convict Bazoo, but perhaps the feds wanted to give their turncoat witness a chance to croon.

Koslosky has known capo Vincent (Vinny Unions) Ricciardo for 15 years. He was arrested by the FBI for picking up and delivering ammunition for Vinny Unions in April of 2021. At Ragano’s trial, he testified that he had two reasons for deciding pretty quickly to cooperate after the arresting agents raised the subject with him.

"I didn't want to go to jail and I don't want to go to hell," said Koslosky, 66, a renowned tenor for more than 30 years who has been a featured soloist at many U.S. churches, including St. Patrick's Cathedral, and who is also a former teacher for a Catholic elementary school on Long Island.

Pressed about that relationship on cross examination, Koslosky insisted that while he had known Colombo mobsters for many years he had begun committing crimes with Ricciardo and Ragano in 2020. He testified he was telling the truth "because I don't want to go to jail and because I don't want to go to hell."

To make sure that the jury knew that Koslosky, who admitted involvement in drug dealing, fraud, and in a scheme to steal health and welfare benefit funds from a union, was sincere about his redemption, prosecutor Andrew Reich raised the issue again on re-direct.

"Referring to your cooperation with the government," said Reich, "if you hadn't been doing that, would you still be in touch with Mr. Ragano?'
A No.
Q How come?
Andrew KosloskyA I think I made a mistake and I'm trying to rectify that now. And I realize that I shouldn't have been involved in all that stuff.
Q. When did you stop associating with the Mafia?
A April of 2021.
Q And why did you stop associating with the Mafia?
A Because I was arrested.
Q Would you still be associated with the Mafia today if you hadn't been arrested?
A No, sir.
Q Why is that?
A Because I have faith that I would have figured out that what I was doing was wrong. I was never that much involved in it, and so, I believe that my faith would have straightened me out.

Koslosky testified that the crimes that he pleaded guilty to call for up to 80 years behind bars. The ex-mob associate, who no longer lives in New York, hopes he won't have to go to prison when he faces the music for his crimes. He probably won't.

[Amershire_Ed]

Thanks for posting.

[Juice Terry]

Anybody heard that Sinatra story anywhere else?

[Tonyd621]

Thank for posting. So, let me get this straight, Campi and D'Urso who remained friends for years and keep in touch; stopped being friends because D'Urso wanted to make a movie/show and Campi didn't? Sounds like bullshit to me. There has to be another story behind them two that neither of them wants to share. For one, it seems like a trivi. al not to be friends and two) Campi is on djvlad and doing all types of other shameless promotional things.
And Durso complaining about a woman waiting for him in a hotel room to suck his d*ck, tough life.

[Dr031718]

I was looking forward to this books release last year. Sounds like A lot of the good info on modern folks, Barney etc, will be redacted or removed with the year delay

[SonnyBlackstein]

Thanks for the post