Gangland - 8/18/16

[Chucky]

This Week in Gang Land
By Scott M. Burnstein

FBI: Three Motor City Mobsters May Hold The Keys To The Hoffa Case

Gang Land Exclusive! FBI agents in Michigan believe that the Detroit mob killed Jimmy Hoffa at the home of a local wiseguy, and that three aging Motor City mobsters may have first-hand knowledge about the infamous murder of the iconic union leader that took place 41 years ago last month. To the great dismay of a parade of investigators, the case has never been solved, and Hoffa's remains have never been found.

Investigative sources say the crime family's 76-year old reputed consigliere, Anthony (Tony Pal) Palazzolo, along with two older family wiseguys who have long been suspected of possible involvement in the slaying, are thought to be the only surviving members of the tightlipped syndicate who may know exactly what happened to the fiery Hoffa that fateful day in the summer of 1975.

Palazzolo, as well as soldier Frank (Frankie the Bomb) Bommarito, still active at 86, and Antonino (Tony the Exterminator) Ruggirello, Jr., 82 and semi-retired, were all questioned in the early phases of the investigation, and all deny any involvement.

Hoffa was 62 when he vanished from a restaurant parking lot in a ritzy Detroit suburb on the afternoon of July 30, 1975. He had been squabbling with the same mob powers whose support he rode to the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters two decades earlier.

After relinquishing his post while serving a prison term for bribery, fraud and jury tampering, Hoffa, who was incredibly popular with the rank and file, maneuvered to take back his throne upon his release in 1972 (aiming for a re-election in 1976). He met resistance from his old Mafia pals, however, who were content with his replacement, the much-easier-to-manage Frank Fitzsimmons, his former vice president.

Both Hoffa and Fitzsimmons lived in Detroit and rose through the Teamsters ranks together. Authorities say the attempted murder of Fitzsimmons and his son in a bombing of the son's car in front of Nemo's Bar, a popular Detroit watering hole for Teamsters in early July of 1975, "fast-tracked" the murder contract against Hoffa. Authorities say many mob leaders blamed him for the Fitzsimmons car bomb, and the Mafia Commission authorized the hit and assigned it to the Tocco-Zerilli clan because Hoffa "belonged to the Detroit mob."

At the time, Giuseppe (Joe Uno) Zerilli, the Motor City's legendary don, who took over the crime family in the 1930s with his brother-in-law, William (Black Bill) Tocco, held sway with the Mafia Commission. Zerilli would die of natural causes two years later.

Bloomfield Township home where Hoffa was killed.Sources in the FBI and in the crime family say Hoffa was taken from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant and driven up the road to the home of Detroit soldier Carlo Licata less than five minutes away, and slain in Licata's garage as he got out of the car. Licata was Black Bill's son-in-law and his house (680 West Long Lake Rd., Bloomfield Township, Michigan) had been used for sit downs between Hoffa and two brothers long suspected of having roles in the hit, Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone, and Vito (Billy Jack) Giacalone, according to Michigan State Police surveillance records.

Exactly six years later, on July 30, 1981, Licata was found dead there with two gun-shot wounds to the chest. His death was ruled a suicide, but since the weapon that killed Licata was found 20 feet away from his body, and was wiped clean of fingerprints, many in law enforcement and the underworld suspect otherwise. Some have speculated Licata's continued silence about the hit was in doubt. Others suspect it might have been retribution by a Hoffa loyalist. Still others that it was punishment for mistreating Black Bill's daughter. Everyone agrees, however, it wasn't suicide.

Zerilli's eventual successor and acting boss at the time of the Hoffa hit was his nephew Giacomo (Black Jack) Tocco. The crime family was headed by a Zerilli or Tocco from 1931 until 2014, when Jack (Jackie The Kid) Giacalone, Billy Giacalone's son, took over as boss.

A year earlier, Joe Uno's son, Anthony (Tony Z) Zerilli, who was in prison when Hoffa was clipped, informed the FBI that Tony Jack Giacalone, a Joe Zerilli protégé who has always been suspected as the wiseguy who coordinated the details of the Hoffa hit, told him that Tony Pal Palazzolo and two now-deceased mobsters had whacked Hoffa.

Zerilli, who was family underboss when Hoffa was whacked, fingered Tony Pal and captains, Peter (Bozzi) Vitale and Raffaele (Jimmy Q) Quasarano as the hit team that kidnapped and killed Hoffa. Tony Pal was Vitale's driver and bodyguard. Vitale and Quasarano, both dead more than 15 years, were followed by the FBI to New York days after Hoffa's slaying and were reportedly seen meeting with Genovese family mobsters.

Investigative sources put much stock in the mobsters Tony Z credited with the hit, but his account of where the murder took place doesn't jibe with other confidential info, and the FBI never found any physical evidence that Hoffa was killed where Zerilli said it happened.

Hoffa, according to Zerilli's account, was picked up in the Red Fox parking lot by Palazzolo, Vitale and Quasarano in a maroon-colored 1975 Mercury Marquis owned by Joseph (Joey Jack) Giacalone, Tony Jack's son, and driven by Palazzolo. From there he was transported to a farm once owned by Tocco in Oakland Township, Michigan and bludgeoned to death.

Joey Giacalone's vehicle is the only piece of physical evidence ever recovered in the case — Hoffa's DNA was found in the backseat and trunk. Zerilli claimed Hoffa was killed with a shovel by Palazzolo and buried in a barn. A spring 2013 search of the property by the FBI was fruitless.

Tony Z died in Florida in March 2015, firmly convinced that the FBI didn't dig in the right place.

Palazzolo was convicted in 1994 for running a money laundering business, tripped up by an undercover sting launched in tandem by the FBI in Detroit and the Royal Canadian Mountain Police in nearby Windsor, Canada, mob territory Tony Pal reputedly oversees. In a recorded conversation, Palazzolo boasted to an undercover RCMP officer posing as a Canadian drug dealer that he grinded up Hoffa's body in his sausage auger.

"We took Hoffa here and ground him into sausage…that was the end of it," Palazzolo told the Mountie pointing to his sausage auger at the Detroit Sausage Factory. The place is described in federal court filings as "an homage to the mafia with organized-crime mementos and pictures of famous mobsters adorning the walls and a mounted pair of crossed shotguns greeting visitors as they walk through the building's foyer."

The FBI suspects that Tony Ruggirello or Frank Bommarito may have been used in the "clean-up" after the murder. But investigators don't dismiss the possibility that either could have been in on the kidnapping and murder as well, according to sources with knowledge of the ongoing inquiry. Both have been tied to murder conspiracies in the past.

Ruggirello was convicted in 1977 for trying to kill a numbers runner with a car bomb for refusing to pay him tribute. He remains the No. 1 suspect in the disappearance of his first wife Judy, who was last seen alive in the hours after she informed him she was filing for divorce in August 1968. Federal records related to the Hoffa case describe Tony The Exterminator as "a trusted enforcer for Tony Giacalone and Jack Tocco," at the time Hoffa was rubbed out.

Tony Jack and Ruggirello co-owned Atlas Pest Extermination, a reason for Ruggirello's ominous nickname.

Ruggirello's Timberland Game Ranch, a high-end hunting lodge he owned in Dexter, Michigan has been considered as a possible Hoffa burial site, but the FBI has never been able to get a court order to search the place. The ranch is where Jack Tocco was officially voted in as don on June 11, 1979, a ceremony attended by a slew of Detroit mob dignitaries whose pictures were snapped by the FBI and used at Tocco's 1998 racketeering trial.

Bommarito was convicted in 1984 for trying to kill an FBI informant. He was the right-hand man to Billy Jack Giacalone, whom the FBI is pretty sure was present to make sure the Hoffa murder went as planned. Billy Jack, a feared mob capo in his own right, evaded FBI surveillance units the entire day Hoffa went missing and could provide no alibi for his whereabouts, opposed to Tony Jack, confirmed to be at his headquarters, the Southfield Athletic Club, the whole day.

Informants told the FBI that Bommarito was Billy Jack's conduit to a "goon squad" of Teamsters Union members that was created in the months preceding Hoffa's killing to physically intimidate him into not entering the 1976 election for Teamsters president. A series of Hoffa loyalists were attacked or targeted for attack throughout the first half of 1975.

Underworld sources say Billy Jack and the colorful Frankie the Bomb would joke about their knowledge of what happened to Hoffa by referring to it as the "secret recipe."

"Billy would look at Frankie the Bomb and say, 'Everyone's looking for that god damn secret recipe,' and the Bomb would look back and say 'Yeah, well they're never gonna get it,' and they'd break out laughing" recalled one source.

Tony Jack died of kidney failure in 2001. Billy Jack succumbed to old age in 2012, leading Bommarito, who had been running his crew since the late 1990s, to be demoted by Giacalone's son and then-street boss Jack (Jackie the Kid) Giacalone, from capo to soldier.

It's hard to fathom that the FBI — or anyone else — will ever have definitive answers about the mysterious disappearance and death of Jimmy Hoffa, but the fascination and intrigue surrounding the Hoffa case has kept it in the headlines and in the public Zeitgeist 41 years later with a seemingly-never ending string of news stories, digs, false leads and rumors.

"The whole thing's still a big headache all these years later," said one Detroit mobster. "We should have left him lying in the middle of the road."

Editor's Note: Scott M. Burnstein, a Detroit-based freelance news reporter has written four true crime books about the mob, including Detroit True Crime Chronicles - Murder & Mayhem in The Motor City; Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in the City of Detroit, and Family Affair: Greed, Treachery and Betrayal in the Chicago Mafia.

Joe The Hood Guilty In Beating Of Restaurant Rival; Baby Brother Mimmo Gets A Pass

Giuseppe (Joe the Hood) D'Anna, a Detroit mob captain with familial ties to the Sicilian Mafia, has copped a plea deal to cover the vicious 2011 beating of a neighboring restaurant owner who refused to pay him a street tax to operate across from his then-headquarters, the now-shuttered Tirami Su Ristorante in Shelby Township, Michigan.

The 63-year old D'Anna pleaded guilty this spring to federal racketeering and extortion charges in the brutal baseball bat assault in which fellow Sicilian immigrant Pietro Ventimiglia suffered a fractured skull in a beating in his restaurant, right across the street from D'Anna's eatery. Originally facing 20 years in the can, D'Anna was sentenced to three years behind bars last month.

In exchange for his guilty plea, prosecutors have agreed to drop the same charges against his younger sibling, and reputed family button man, Girolamo (Mimmo) D'Anna. Girolano, 52, stood watch at the door while Joe The Hood pounded Ventimiglia 11 times in the face, head, neck and torso on April 28, 2011, according to court papers.

This is the second time the D'Anna brothers were prosecuted for assaulting Ventimiglia.

Three weeks after the attack, the D'Anna brothers were indicted for attempted murder in Macomb County Circuit Court. After they pleaded guilty to assault charges, the D'Annas were each sentenced to serve only 90 days in county jail (two years of supervised release). Their light punishment drew the ire of the feds and in 2013 the brothers were hit with federal charges.

On the day of the assault, Joe D'Anna flanked by Mimmo, stormed into Ventimiglia's Nonna's Italian Kitchen, and beat him unconscious with an aluminum baseball bat, which put the restaurateur in the hospital for more than two weeks. As he swung wildly at his victim, according to court records, Joe The Hood screamed at Ventimiglia, "What did I tell you? Don't you know who I am?" and "I'll kill you and your entire family back home (in Sicily)."

The 40-year old Ventimiglia opened his restaurant in 2009. Before he welcomed his first customer, he received a visit, and his first of many threats about the location of his restaurant from Joe D'Anna, whose first cousin is Sicilian mafia don Salvatore D'Anna and whose great uncle is deceased Detroit mafia power Anthony (Tony Cars) D'Anna.

Ventimiglia testified about the encounter to a federal grand jury.

"He said, 'What are you doing here? I don't think you understand, before you start to do something you should ask. It's not right, ask your dad in Sicily, he knows you need to ask and who you got to talk to before you do something like this. You don't get to just open here; you're trying to do something without saying nothing to nobody. You still have time (to do what's right), though. Do what's right or leave and don't open the place."

Ventimiglia resisted a number of other threats and tribute demands from D'Anna over the next two years until D'Anna attacked him. While D'Anna shut his Shelby Township Tirami Su Ristorante location down last year, moving his base of operations to his other Tirami Su outlet across town in Northville, Michigan, Ventimiglia's Nonna's Italian Kitchen remains open and has become quite popular.

Outfit's Bobby Pinocchio Hangs Tough; Big Paulie Doesn't, Takes 18 Years

Chalk one up to the law in its long-running battle with the Chicago Outfit's Grand Avenue Westside crew.

Longtime mob associate Paul (Big Paulie) Koroluk has pleaded guilty to state racketeering charges for running an Outfit robbery crew that favored ripping off drug dealers and Hispanic and African-American street gang members. The half-Polish, half-German Koroluk, 57, was sentenced to 18 years in June.

Big Paulie's longtime partner-in-crime, Chicago mafia lieutenant, Robert (Bobby Pinocchio) Panozzo, has rejected a plea bargain, and is awaiting trial on charges that include kidnapping, armed robbery, arson, narcotics trafficking, prostitution and insurance fraud. Panozzo, 56, is alleged to have chopped the ear off of one of their armed-robbery victims with a samurai sword.

Panozzo is also facing federal racketeering charges in a separate case tied to loan sharking. Sources claim he has rejected a number of law enforcement attempts to get him to cooperate against his mob cohorts in the past year and a half.

Koroluk and Panozzo, who did prison time for running a burglary ring in the 2000s, are part of the Outfit's Grand Avenue regime headed by reputed Westside capo Albert (Albie the Falcon) Vena. Vena, 67, who is described by federal informants as "the most dangerous man in Chicago," has been the primary target of high-priority investigations launched by the FBI, DEA and the Chicago Police Department in the last three years, according to law enforcement sources in Chicago.

Bobby Pinocchio's driver and bodyguard, Jeff Hollingshead, a first cousin of Vena's reputed second-in-command, Christopher (Christy the Nose) Spina, flipped in December 2013 while in custody awaiting trial on a separate kidnapping and home invasion case.

That and the discovery that Panozzo had allegedly tried to solicit the murder of a witness in Hollingshead's case months earlier, sent the probes into Vena's crew into overdrive, and spurred rumors and fears by Westside wiseguys last year that an indictment against Vena and his Grand Avenue troop was imminent. But those rumors and fears proved untrue — at least so far.

"We want Albie bad, he knows that…it's just a matter of time," said a Windy City mob-buster involved in the investigation.

Sources say Vena, a multiple-time felon with a convictions for extortion, assault and kidnapping — he was acquitted at trial for a 1992 gangland-style slaying — has been the Outfit's day-to-day street boss for the last several months, relaying orders for reputed 77-year old acting boss Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis. The Outfit's 88-year-old Godfather, John (Johnny No Nose) DiFronzo, has stepped down, according to sources.

Dating back to the early 1980s, Big Paulie Koroluk has held the reputation as one of the best thieves in Chicago and for putting fat envelopes of cash into the pockets of a succession of Westside mob chiefs. Big Paulie was known for pulling intricate, high-end burglaries, a departure from the more brutish nature of his current conviction.

Koroluk's wife, Maria Vargas Koroluk, 55, pled guilty to criminal trespass charges in a plea agreement in which the feds dropped all other charges against her. She was given probation.

Panozzo's son Robert Jr., 24, was hit with drug conspiracy charges in the case and is hanging tough with his dad, ready to fight the charges in court. Both Panozzos face prison sentences of 15-to-60 years if convicted.

[Cheech]

Fucking Capeci? Detroit

[Cheech]

I emailed him and told him he is wasting everyones time

[Bruno187]

Obvious he's farming out the writing of these articles to different people.
If he doesn't want to do it, he should just give it up. Fucking hump.

[mike68]

This is the Gangsterreport.com guy

[Five Felonies]

thank god someone finally bolded the separate headlines in the article, saves my fucking eyes a ton of grief!

i guess 3 years is better than 90 days, but it's still a disgrace of a sentence as far as i'm concerned for such a serious assault!

[phatmatress777]

I found it interesting... Although I find Detroit interesting Scott and this other guy al profit have a lot of good docs about many different subjects of Detroit ... Always nice to read about a nice old school baseball batting ... I can do with out the Hoffa shit... One of the few mob subjects that has been beat more then gotti


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[Cheech]

I get it but its a week adter the biggest byst in years with big players. Weird timing to me.

[SonnyBlackstein]

I get it but its a week adter the biggest byst in years with big players. Weird timing to me.

This.

Half the post can be found on Scotts website anyway and the other pails into absolute insignificance compared to the Genovese/Philly (etc) bust. D'Anna getting three years vs the boss of a west coast family indicted along with three Westside Capos, made men from FOUR families etc etc.
Farcical.

Capeci has officially checked out.

[phatmatress777]

I get it but its a week adter the biggest byst in years with big players. Weird timing to me.

This.

Half the post can be found on Scotts website anyway and the other pails into absolute insignificance compared to the Genovese/Philly (etc) bust. D'Anna getting three years vs the boss of a west coast family indicted along with three Westside Capos, made men from FOUR families etc etc.
Farcical.

Capeci has officially checked out.

I can finally agree with you 110 percent. Capeci should be bringing us the inside info from that bust. Hell if he was going to farm out his articles he should have Atleast gave it to George and let him go wild with merlino info.... It was interesting to see a little about Detroit but the timing of it was uncalled for. Capeci is pretty lazy nowadays.... It's been rumored before that for the last 3 or so years he was just letting interns write his articles.


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[B.]

Scott mentioned that Zerilli took over the Detroit family in the 1930s, not "founded" the family like he has said previously. Nice to see him correcting some of those details since I know that was pointed out to him last time he was on here.

[moneyman]

what else is there to report on the merino bust? unless he's got a transcript of a wiretap or an FBI guy telling how shit is going to do down, but that is pretty unlikely at this point...

[JeremyTheJew]

Its funny one of toccos nephews is the CO in mcomb county jail thst rats out the other COs.

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