Gangland November 14th 2024

[Dr031718]

Gang Land Column Sparked Big New Book — And Spooked A Rising Gang Land Star

Former FBI Agent Mike Campi says the warning that turncoat gangster Michael (Cookie) D'Urso gave the Genovese family to think twice before seeking revenge against him in a Gang Land column nearly five years ago was the genesis of his blockbuster Mafia book that will be published next week. But the January 9, 2020 column triggered a more immediate reaction from family wiseguys, including one who was convicted — and later absolved — of plotting to kill D'Urso, Gang Land has learned.

"They became even more close-mouthed than normal," said a law enforcement source whom Gang Land spoke to this week about the crime family's reaction to DUso's open letter to the mob. D'Urso penned the missive after he learned that "individuals" at an Upper East Side bar had discussed his "new identity" and where he "might be living."

"People started paying close attention to the people around them," the source said. "Watch what you say to anyone," was a common refrain, the source continued. "They were saying, 'You can't trust anyone; you can't trust your son; you can't trust your brother.'"

There was a serious "concern," according to a second law enforcement source, that a member of "the Genovese crime family was cooperating with law enforcement" and that was how D'Urso, who had flipped more than 20 years earlier and helped convict two family bosses, had learned about the crime family's continued interest in the turncoat's whereabouts.

In Mafia Takedown, The Incredible True Story of The FBI Agent Who Took Down The New York Mob, Campi details the FBI's astounding three year-long undercover operation that was fueled by thousands of taped talks that Cookie D'Urso recorded from June of 1988 until April of 2001 and ended with the takedown of scores of mobsters and associates from the Five Families.

Along the way, Campi discloses — and as D'Urso has told Gang Land — that FBI agent Joy Adam, whose name is blacked out in the book, coerced D'Urso into having a sexual relationship with her that began shortly after he cooperated and ended when the arrests were made in the case.

"She demanded to have sex every time we met," D'Urso has told Gang Land, an assertion that Adam, who has never been charged with any wrongdoing, has denied. "She'd get there early before everybody and we'd have sex," said D'Urso. "It became a mandatory routine. And if it couldn't be before, it had to be after. She wouldn't let me go."

But the mobsters he had betrayed posed a much more lethal threat. In a January 9, 2020 Gang Land column, D'Urso warned potential troublemakers that he was "ready, able and willing to defend" his family and himself. He warned that he had "very capable ex-law enforcement friends with gun permits" who were with him "all the time," adding that he would never again be off his guard, allowing himself to get shot in the head and left for dead – as he was by gangsters from his own crime family in 1994.

In his rant, he didn't mention the mobster he hates the most, Carmelo (Carmine Pizza) Polito, who was one of those who left him for dead back in 1994. A capo and big earner for family boss Liborio (Barney) Bellomo, Polito is scheduled to be sentenced next month for racketeering charges stemming from a "lucrative illegal gambling operation" that the Genovese and Bonanno families ran out of a Lynbrook ice cream parlor for 10 years.

Polito was convicted in 2003 of racketeering charges for ordering the attempted murder of D'Urso and the killing of his cousin Sabatino (Tino) Lombardi over a $60,000 debt, when Carmine Pizza was a debt-ridden, degenerate gambler and bank robber.

In 2004, his conviction was reversed by a federal appeals court which ruled that Cookie's shooting and his cousin's murder had nothing to do with the Genovese crime family. In an even more stunning 2007 decision, Polito was acquitted of all charges that stemmed from the bloodshed at a November 30, 1994 late-night card game at the San Giacinto Social Club in Williamsburg.

By January of 2020, Carmine Pizza's star had risen. He was an acting capo, had moved from Astoria to Whitestone, owned millions of dollars in property, and was a major target of a probe by the Nassau District Attorney's office. The gangster had been tape recorded in October of 2019 ordering a cohort to tell a deadbeat gambler whose "face" Polito had previously threatened to "break" that he was "going to put him under the fucking bridge."

And on the morning of January 10, when The New York Post reprinted Gang Land's column about D'Urso's warning, Polito, 65, read the story and was heard discussing the column and what it meant with family associate Michael Sellick, according to a snippet of the discussion obtained by Gang Land.

"What does that tell you," Polito asked and answered for Sellick, a son-in-law of 87-year-old wiseguy Anthony (Rom) Romanello, now serving two years for his one punch extortion assault of Manhattan restaurateur Bruno Selimaj back in 2017.

"It tells you two things," Polito said. "Number one, he's scared shit, all right, that's number one. And number two, whoever was at that dinner, there's somebody there that's, uh, no good, you know?"

"Exactly," said Sellick, 68, who took part in two early morning armed robberies of Manhattan jewelry stores of $1.6 million in gems last year and is serving a nine-year sentence.

Campi and D'Urso, who remained friends for years after working with prosecutors and other agents to put Bellomo, the late boss Vincent (Chin) Gigante and scores of others behind bars after a three-year probe, each told Gang Land they did not know that Polito had been overheard talking about Cookie's warning that mobsters looking for him should be armed because "a knife and a bat won't help you."

In Mafia Takedown, Campi wrote that after "film and television figures, along with Hollywood agents" read D'Urso's "open letter to the Mafia" in a "two-page spread" in The Post in January of 2020 and pressed them to tell "D'Urso's story, our lives, and how we had retained a relationship over the decades," the duo began working on a book about the case for Skyhorse Publishing.

They worked on the book together for two years. But their partnership ended when Campi voted thumbs down on a D'Urso proposal for the book that the ex-agent wrote in a preface of the book was "a betrayal of our rela­tionship." Campi wrote that after several stops and starts, he completed the book on his own.

Since then, the former FBI agent and ex gangster each told Gang Land this past week that they have patched up their friendship.

While they were still feuding though, Campi wrote that "D'Urso's cooperation was epic and unprecedented" and that Mafia Takedown is "the untold story of my work fighting the Mafia, culminating in me and my team developing the remarkable and unparalleled Cookie D'Urso case."

Wiseguy: 'I Didn't Get A Fair Shake;' Wants Do-Over In Naked City Loansharking Trial

John (Bazoo) Ragano says he deserves a new trial. The Bonanno soldier, convicted last month of trying to use extortion to collect a $150,000 debt, claims he was robbed of a fair hearing when he was barred from introducing evidence to rebut what he calls a "highly misleading" closing argument by the prosecutor. Bazoo says that even though jurors acquitted him of three counts, an improper closing argument allowed them to find him guilty of the loansharking count.

At his hoped-for re-trial, Ragano wants jurors to see a text message that the key government witness, mob associate Vincent Martino, sent to FBI agents bragging that he "could get this fucking guy heated." The message was sent two weeks before Martino succeeded in doing just that on July 5, 2023 by accusing Ragano of being a cooperating witness against him.

Brooklyn Federal Judge Hector Gonzalez had ruled that the text, and others in which Martino and the agents joked that they'd have to rescue the slightly built witness from an assault by the "350-pound gorilla," did not attack "the credibility" of Martino. "At most," the judge said, the message was "irrelevant" hearsay about the "investigative techniques employed by the government."

Ragano's lawyers Joel Stein and Ken Womble assert that the text went "to the credibility" of Martino, since, they claim, he "falsely testified" at the trial that he had heard "on the street" that Ragano had cooperated. That was why Martino blurted out: "You fucking snitched on me bro," when he confronted Ragano on July 5 last year. They note that an FBI case agent "resoundingly put the lie to Martino's testimony" when he told the jury that Bazoo had not cooperated with the feds.

Judge Hector GonzalezThe text between Martino and the agents is a "well-founded basis for suspicion of his veracity" and the decision by Gonzalez to preclude that "evidence usurped the jury’s function as the judges of witness credibility," and mandates a new trial, the lawyers wrote.

The lawyers argued that prosecutor Andrew Reich, who knew about Martino's texts, had "improperly sought to exploit Martino's testimony in a "highly misleading rebuttal summation" to the jury. They cited a lengthy excerpt from the prosecutor's closing where Reich poo-pooed the notion that Martino was purposely seeking to provoke Ragano.

"And this idea that Martino and the FBI were trying to come up with evidence and that Martino was trying to lure John Ragano into committing crimes is even more desperate and it's completely contradicted by the actual evidence in the case," said Reich.

"First of all," Reich added, "you heard Martino testify that he did, in fact, think that John Ragano had cooperated with the Government on the marijuana scheme. It wasn't something that he sat around and concocted in order to provoke John Ragano."

Martino, Reich argued to the jury, had been truthful. "He told you he believed [that Ragano had been a cooperator] because he heard it on the street. That wasn't a lie. But it doesn't matter when you think about the actual series of events on that day and the actual elements of the crimes that John Ragano is accused of here in this case. What matters is John Ragano's actions."

But Ragano's lawyers claim that Martino testified falsely, and admitted trying to provoke Ragano in the text message. They note that the jury acquitted him of a loansharking conspiracy from November of 2022 through July of 2023, even though Martino gave him three $1000 payments before July 5, 2023, and acquitted Bazoo of harassing or intimidating him at any time, including on July 5.

The defense attorneys insist that jurors were swayed wholly by the dramatic audio recording in which Ragano threatened to "slap the shit out of" Martino when the two men met at a demolition yard last year. Adding to the drama was Bazoo's demand that Martino strip naked. "That demand, while undoubtedly attention getting, is not evidence of extortion," they argue, but "demonstrative of the essential nature of this encounter, who was recording who(m), and not about an extortionate attempt to collect the loan."

They argue that their client's reference to "money" in his statement "you give me my fucking money and we'll call it even" must be "understood in the context of the entire encounter and not fall victim to cherry-picking isolated snippets to be evaluated in a vacuum."

Ragano then told Martino: "Bring me some fucking proof that I told on you mother fucker." A few days later Bazoo surrendered to begin serving his 57-month prison term for an earlier 2022 loansharking conviction involving the same $150,000 loan. Still, the lawyers wrote, "there was no attempt to collect the loan."

"Contrary to the common refrain, 'it's all about the money,'" Stein and Womble argue, "it was all about the 'snitching.'"

DeNiro, President Trump, Roy Cohn, Sammy Bull, And Martin Scorsese's Irishman*

Even if he wasn't getting raves for his role in Martin Scorsese's new mob epic, The Irishman, Gang Land would be inclined to give a shout out to Robert DeNiro. That's because, as part of the rollout for the three and a half hour film, DeNiro used the opportunity to call President Trump "a gangster." Here's what he said on CNN's Reliable Sources the other day:

"This guy should not be president, period," said DeNiro, a longtime critic of Trump. "We are in a moment in our lives in this country where this guy is like a gangster. He's come along, and he's said dumb things — over and over again. This is terrible. We're in a very terrible situation. And this guy just keeps going on and on and on without being stopped."

DeNiro's oft-stated words are newsworthy, not only because of the efforts by Democratic leaders to impeach Trump, but also because they come on the heels of the release of Where's My Roy Cohn?, a critically acclaimed movie about Trump's mentor, Roy Cohn, the disgraced and disbarred New York mob lawyer, and former key aide to Senator Joe McCarthy.

The title of the Sony Pictures Classic film is what Trump reportedly asked White House aides whenever then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself from overseeing the Justice Department's probe of the 2016 election, refused to automatically do Trump's bidding.

"Trump had learned a different lesson from Cohn" wrote Baltimore Sun columnist Bill Press, "that there are no limits, that anything goes, as long as you win." The documentary "goes a long way in explaining how we got to the dark side of American politics today" and that Cohn, who died in 1986 of AIDs, "has to be one of the most evil men who ever walked the face of the earth," Press wrote.

"Roy Cohn isn't dead," wrote Press. "He still lives today — the same amorality, the same cruelty, the same evil. Roy Cohn lives today in the monster he created. Except for the hair color, Donald Trump is Roy Cohn."

Okay, we know some knowledgeable Gang Land readers will vocally disagree with the above, especially with DeNiro, who plays gangsters in the movies but isn't the real thing. But we point out that someone who knows The Life as well as anyone, none other than Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, agrees with DeNiro on the Trump as gangster subject.

Sammy Bull, a 1980s contemporary of Trump the builder when the Gambino wiseguy oversaw the crime family's construction industry rackets, trumpeted President Trump's gangster bonafides as the POTUS last year.

"The country doesn't need a bookworm as President, it needs a mob boss," Gravano told Gang Land after fired FBI Boss James Comey compared the Prez to Sammy Bull in Comey's book.

"Truthfully speaking now," said Gravano, "if you're gonna deal with the guy who runs North Korea, or the people who run Iran, or the Russian president, do you want a fucking bookworm to deal with them? Or do you want a gangster? You don't need a Harvard graduate to deal with these people. These guys are real gangsters. You need a fucking gangster to deal with these people."

"I don't want this to sound like I'm tooting Trump's horn," said Sammy Bull. "I'm saying you need a guy like me. A real gangster. No matter who it is. When you deal with people on that level, you gotta be a gangster," he said.

Speaking of gangsters, The Irishman is about a real but controversial gangster, Frank Sheeran, whose self-confessed exploits of killing Jimmy Hoffa AND Crazy Joe Gallo have been panned by numerous recognized mob pundits, including Gang Land's own Andy Petepiece.

In his most recent piece on ticklethewire.com, Petepiece states flat out that Sheeran lied about killing Gallo in Umberto's Clam House in 1972. Using NYPD and FBI files, the accounts of witnesses, including Gallo's wife, his sister, and his bodyguard, as well as mob turncoat Joe Luparelli, Andy leaves no doubt that Sheeran concocted his tale about killing Crazy Joe.

That claim, as well as Sheeran's boast to have killed Hoffa, first appeared in I Heard You Paint Houses, a June 2004 book by Charles Brandt. Gang Land likes and admires Brandt, an ex-prosecutor who wrote a good book, We're Going To Win This Thing, about former FBI agent Lin DeVecchio.

But it's pretty clear that this one placed Sheeran in roles he couldn't possibly have played and made some silly mistakes. As Petepiece first noted in July of 2004, the book says the Irishman Sheeran was a member of the Mafia Commission; it also has Crazy Joe Gallo at a 1966 gathering of Mafia leaders including Joe Colombo and Carlo Gambino at La Stella Restaurant in Queens where he never appeared.

The Irishman may not be based on real stuff about organized crime. The storyline, according to IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, states: "A mob hitman recalls his possible involvement with the slaying of Jimmy Hoffa." But what can be bad about a three and a half hour Scorsese movie starring DeNiro and Al Pacino and a supporting cast that includes Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano and famed ex-NYPD detective Richard (Bo) Dietl.

* First printed on October 3, 2019, three years into The Donald's first stint as POTUS

[JohnnyS]

Thanks for posting.

Could do without the rehashed Trump articles, Jerry.

[Ivan]

Weird to see Capeci questioning I Heard You Paint Houses given that he described Sheeran's claims as credible-sounding and having "the ring of truth" in the updated version of his Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia from around 2005.

[NorthBuffalo]

Looking forward to that book - Cookie D'Urso always sounded like the real deal. What a f'd up situation with the female FBI agent - that said, not sure how a female is abusing a stone cold gangster like that - guaranteed Cookie was doing that for something else. Some other benefit.

[DonPeppino386]

Thanks for posting!

[Ivan]

Weird to see Capeci questioning I Heard You Paint Houses given that he described Sheeran's claims as credible-sounding and having "the ring of truth" in the updated version of his Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia from around 2005.

Also Capeci doing this and then discrediting the guy in this column by citing Ask Andy.

[SonnyBlackstein]

Would've loved to have been a fly on the wall at DeNiro's on the 5th

[Pogo The Clown]

Would've loved to have been a fly on the wall at DeNiro's on the 5th

It probably looked something like this.


https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5Kw9LtgzwYo

[Amershire_Ed]

If it came out that a male FBI agent forced a female cooperator to have sex with him on demand, there would be a massive investigation and people would be calling for him to be charged with rape.

[SonnyBlackstein]

Would've loved to have been a fly on the wall at DeNiro's on the 5th

It probably looked something like this.


https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5Kw9LtgzwYo

Hopefully he had Kimmel over for dinner.

[AntComello]

Would've loved to have been a fly on the wall at DeNiro's on the 5th

That would have been amazing to watch the absolute meltdown he had.

[Ivan]

Would've loved to have been a fly on the wall at DeNiro's on the 5th

That would have been amazing to watch the absolute meltdown he had.

The meltdowns have been pretty muted this time around compared with 2016. I've mostly seen a kind of sullen resigned acceptance (with some spectacular exceptions here and there). Popular vote victory probably has a lot to do with this.

[Doobeez]

Would've loved to have been a fly on the wall at DeNiro's on the 5th

It probably looked something like this.


https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5Kw9LtgzwYo

Hopefully he had Kimmel over for dinner.

-Thanks for putting up this week's column, Dr..

[TSNYC]

Weird to see Capeci questioning I Heard You Paint Houses given that he described Sheeran's claims as credible-sounding and having "the ring of truth" in the updated version of his Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia from around 2005.

Also Capeci doing this and then discrediting the guy in this column by citing Ask Andy.

Ha was thinking same thing. Promoting that dipshit’s awful books

[Blunts]

Thanks for posting.

Ragano has a point with not being able to produce those texts as evidence. It was essentially a form of entrapment. He went there to get Ragano to react as violently as possible. Best way to do that in the life is accuse someone of being a rat. That will always provoke the most drastic response and they use that as evidence he was a violent guy. At the very least the jury should be given that evidence to consider themselves. Rigging the case that he almost beat.