Thanks Giving Gangland News

[John W]

Did anyone post last weeks Gangland News that came out on Thanks Giving because I don't remember seeing it posted or did I miss it?

Kind Regards

John W

[Cheech]

November 24, 2016 This Week in Gang Land
Rudy Giuliani's declaration that "there's probably nobody that knows the Justice Department better than me" (and his apparent desire to be President-elect Trump's Secretary of State) calls to mind the piece that Tom Robbins and yours truly wrote for a 2005 book, America's Mayor: The Hidden History of Rudy Giuliani's New York. The book featured 18 articles by New York-based news reporters about the prosecutor-turned-politician, and a preface by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jimmy Breslin. Our piece was entitled Prosecution. In a 2007 reprise edition, it was adroitly titled, Modesty.

By Jerry Capeci & Tom Robbins

Rudy Giuliani: I Was The Best There Ever Was; And I Still Am!

Gang Land Exclusive!Rudy GiulianiHe was the nation's top mob-buster, so it was perfectly okay for Rudy Giuliani to tour America doing stand-up imitations of Marlon Brando's Vito Corleone. His shoulders hunched and his jaw jutting out like the aging Don in The Godfather, Giuliani got the marbles-in-the mouth mumble down to a tee. "It's nice for all of youse to be here tonight," the shtick would begin. "You've come from many places. And now it's time to make the peace."

It was the perfect icebreaker for audiences, he said. He brushed aside complaints from spoil-sport Italian-American officials who said the routine only reinforced negative stereotypes. He was the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, for crying out loud. He'd sent more bigtime mobsters to prison than anyone else. He invented RICO for the mob. So if anyone deserved a pass from the nattering guardians of political correctness, it was he.

It makes for a great gig for the quintessential law and order Republican. Problem is, like many Giuliani boasts, the "I beat the mob" claim is vastly inflated.

The Mafia-busting moniker has always been a fundamental ingredient of the Giuliani resume. From 1983 to 1989, he was the leading federal prosecutor in New York's Southern District of New York, the flagship office of the U.S. Department of Justice. On his watch, dozens of mafiosi were convicted of major crimes. No one would deny his accomplishments in that realm. But many people in the know, including current and former prosecutors, judges and defense lawyers, wince every time Giuliani claims credit either for "taking down the mob," or for hatching the plan to use the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes to do it.

Rudy GiulianiThose are claims he makes loudly and often. In his 2002 book, Leadership, the ex-mayor put in writing a story he had told admiring journalists many times about how he came to use RICO against the mob.

"I dreamed up the tactic of using the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act," he wrote. "No one thought it could work," he added later in his book. The idea had come to him, he went on, as he was reading the autobiography of Joe Bonanno, one of New York's most venerable gangsters. "I realized that Bonanno's description of how the families were organized provided a roadmap of precisely what the RICO statute was designed to combat."

The way Giuliani used to tell the story, as repeated in the 2000 Wayne Barrett biography, Rudy!, he was reading Bonanno's book at home at night when he turned to wife number two, Donna Hanover. '"Look at this," Rudy said to Donna in amazement. "This is a RICO enterprise."'

Rudy Giuliani may well have had just such an epiphany. But so did several other people, some even before he did.

Paul CastellanoOne of those people wasn't even a lawyer but he was in a unique position to recognize the threat posed by Bonanno's big mouth. Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano — Big Paul to his loyal cadre — was the most powerful member of the Mafia commission in the early 1980s, and, as such, a prime target of law enforcement efforts. The FBI, working with Giuliani's counterparts in Brooklyn in the Eastern District of New York, had succeeded in planting a bug in Castellano's palatial home on New York's Staten Island. In 1983 — the same year Giuliani became U.S. Attorney — the Godfather was heard on the listening device talking about Bonanno's heretical book. The same light bulb had gone on for Big Paul, and the shock of recognition was caught on tape. "They're gonna make us one big conspiracy," he was heard bemoaning.

On the other side of the law enforcement fence, the idea of making the mob "one big conspiracy" had been under discussion for years. Notre Dame University professor G. Robert Blakey, a former rackets investigator and primary author of the racketeering statutes, which were approved by Congress in 1970, spoke early and often about using them as a legal hammer against the mob. By 1983, when Giuliani took over the Southern District, major mob racketeering cases were underway in Boston, Florida, Cleveland. The notion of using RICO against the Mafia Commission was alive in the Southern District prior to Giuliani's arrival.

According to John S. Martin, who was Giuliani's predecessor as the Southern District's U.S. Attorney who later served as a federal district judge, the notion of a grand racketeering case, tying up New York's five crime families, was suggested to him by FBI officials in the early 1980s.

John S. Martin"I remember meeting with them [FBI agents] and they said they would like to put together a commission case through cases they had ongoing against each of the families," recalled Martin. "I think at the time I left the U.S. Attorney's office we had at least three such cases under wiretap."

Those cases, against the Colombo, Gambino, and Bonanno families, were also pressed under the powerful RICO statutes, which allow prosecutors to use past bad acts, including murder, to compound conspiracy charges and tie together individuals involved in a joint enterprise. The Bonanno crime family case was based on the now-famous undercover mission of FBI agent Joe Pistone, played by actor Johnny Depp in the movie, Donnie Brasco. That case went to trial in 1982 — a year before Giuliani took over — and resulted in convictions of four Bonanno family wiseguys. The prosecutors in that case also went on to higher things: Barbara Jones became a federal judge in Manhattan; Louis Freeh was named a judge and then served as FBI director under President Clinton.

The Gambino case was aimed at a crew of murderous car thieves in Brooklyn who killed 75 persons during a decade-long span of mayhem in the borough. Prosecutor Walter Mack, then the head of the organized crime unit in the district, was ultimately able to indict Castellano himself in the case, charges for which the mob boss was standing trial when he was assassinated as he stepped from his limousine at Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan in December, 1985.

Carmine PersicoThe Colombo case had started during Martin's reign and was also based on undercover work, in this case a male and a female FBI agent who posed as lovers aboard a luxurious yacht docked in Staten Island. Among the gangsters snared in the "loveboat" sting were many top guns of Colombo boss Carmine "Junior" Persico.

Those cases were already well afoot when Giuliani took office. And other help came in the door shortly after he received the appointment. One of the most productive — and ingenious — penetrations of the Mafia's secret world came in 1982, when investigators for the New York State Organized Crime Task Force succeeded in planting a bug under the dashboard of a black Jaguar sportscar belonging to Salvatore "The Golfer" Avellino, a millionaire captain in the Luchese crime family who controlled virtually all of the private sanitation business on Long Island. Avellino frequently used the car to chauffeur his Mafia boss, Antonio "Tony Ducks" Corallo, who was also a Commission member. The bug was remarkably helpful and picked up Avellino and Corallo talking about the mob's interests in the carting trade, as well as the garment and construction industries. They were also heard to talk about the Commission, the Mafia's secret superstructure since 1931.

The Jaguar tapes, as they came to be known, yielded much solid information and spun off many juicy tidbits. But many cops and investigators with the local law enforcement agencies that were doing the grunt work — manning the many bugs and wiretaps and following wiseguys around the metropolitan area — were hard pressed to grasp the full sweep of the case.

Walter MackResponsibility for explaining the case's significance fell to Ronald Goldstock, then the chief of the state's Organized Crime Task Force, who had to answer to members of the New York City, Nassau and Suffolk county police departments, and the Nassau County District Attorney. Goldstock, along with his two top aides, Martin Marcus, and Fred Rayano, held a meeting in 1982 on Long Island to try and give all the participants the "big picture" as to how all the elements in the disparate case would ultimately fit together. In his pep talk, Goldstock told those in attendance that there existed the possibility of forging a bigger case than anyone had ever made. "Look," Goldstock told the investigators, "we're getting conversations about the Commission meetings. We might just be able to indict the members of the Commission."

But state authorities didn't yet have the RICO laws at their disposal, so the next year, after Giuliani took office, Goldstock, Marcus and Rayano went to see the new U.S. Attorney. They even brought flipcharts to emphasize the different rackets that were shared by the Mafia Commission. Giuliani liked what he saw. "This is great," he told the investigators. "I'd love to do it."

There was one problem: Many of the crimes fell under the jurisdiction of the separate U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District, covering the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island. "If you'll be on my side, we can do it," Giuliani said.

Ronald GoldstockSnatching cases from different districts is a favorite sport among federal prosecutors in New York, and the Eastern District, located just across the Brooklyn Bridge from the lower Manhattan offices of the Southern District, is more often than not the victim. In Giuliani's case, according to several people involved in the time, he wasted no time getting permission from allies in the Justice Department — where he had been working prior to coming to New York — to take over the cases he wanted.

Giuliani, who previously had been an associate attorney general in Washington for the Reagan Administration, had clout and resources allocated especially to him by President Ronald Reagan's then-Attorney General William French Smith. As a result of his inside connections at the Justice Department, Giuliani was able to bigfoot the smaller jurisdiction across the river into letting his office to use a significant part of the Colombo case which had been put together by an undercover Internal Revenue Service agent. Giuliani's initial gambit to the Organized Crime Strike Force, which operated out of Brooklyn's Eastern District, was to conduct a joint investigation. Later, when the Manhattan aspect of the case floundered, according to former prosecutors who worked on it, Giuliani persuaded Smith to give him control of the entire case.

Jackie DeRossGiuliani had the Colombo case wrapped up and ready to be announced in the fall of 1984. The case featured Persico and several of his top lieutenants in a string of crimes. Among the lieutenants was Jackie DeRoss, a Colombo family member who doubled as a leader of a corrupt restaurant workers union. Also included, much to the surprise of several prosecutors involved in the investigation, was the head of another union local that represented the city's hotel workers union. The evidence against union big Vito Pitta was shaky, Giuliani was told, and likely to result in an acquittal. But the prosecutor insisted. Including Pitta in the case would enable Giuliani to declare at a news conference that he had nailed the leaders of both unions who represented hotel and restaurant workers.

An announcement of the indictment — the first major mob case on Giuliani's watch — was delayed so that Attorney General William French Smith could come to New York City to join Giuliani at the press conference. The timing was politically favorable as well, since the press conference was held two weeks before the general election in which Smith's boss, Reagan, was seeking a second term. It didn't hurt that Pitta, the union official sandwiched into the case, was a big contributor and supporter of Democratic candidates. The charges against Pitta generated a second stream of stories as embarrassed Democratic politicians were queried about their ties to Pitta.

Rudy Giuliani & Michael ChertoffA year later, just as the case was going to trial, Giuliani agreed to sever Pitta from the other defendants, after Pitta's lawyer argued persuasively that there was little evidence against his client. Shortly thereafter, Giuliani, without comment, quietly dropped charges against Pitta altogether. Unlike the indictment which garnered headlines, the dismissal got almost no press.

The big case against the leaders of the five families finally came together in early 1985. Giuliani made multiple television appearances prior to the press conference. It was "a great day for law enforcement," he said, "but a bad day, probably the worst ever, for the Mafia." Giuliani had insisted he was going to try the case himself, but later handed it off to an assistant, Michael Chertoff, who won across-the-board convictions. (Chertoff became Secretary of Homeland Security in 2005.)

"Things always seemed to fall right for him," said one former top prosecutor who served contemporaneously with Giuliani. "When he came in, there were plenty of mob cases in the pipeline. He came in at the right time."

But not everything worked out exactly as planned. Among those convicted in the Commission case was a New York legend: cigar smoking Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, who was charged as the boss of the Genovese crime family. Several years later, however, it emerged from mob informants that Salerno was nothing of the sort — he was a front for the real boss, a mumbling ex-prizefighter named Vincent Gigante from Greenwich Village.

The job of convicting Gigante, who claimed to be mentally incompetent, fell to the oft-neglected Eastern District where, without the hoopla of the Giuliani press media assault, prosecutors quietly carried out what many believe were the most significant mob cases of the era. At the top of the list was John "The Teflon Don" Gotti, the Gambino family boss who engineered the murder of his predecessor, Castellano, and then replaced him.

John GottiThe man who put away Gotti, the dapper, strutting gangster whose face appeared on the cover of Time magazine was Andrew Maloney, who served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District from 1986 to 1992. Although the conviction took place outside Giuliani's district three years after he had left office in 1989 to run for mayor, many people still assumed that it was Giuliani who had engineered it. Maloney never blamed Giuliani for that. By 1992, the prosecutor-turned politician had already developed a larger-than-life persona. Yet it must have rankled when, in the same year as the Gotti conviction, Maloney attended a conference of U.S. attorneys, where, even amongst his peers, people came up to tell him what a good job Giuliani had done in taking down Gotti.

Connie Bruck, a writer, took a long hard look at Giuliani's record for American Lawyer magazine. Among the areas she questioned him about was the mob cases. In Giuliani's account, he had to go up against a hidebound, recalcitrant system to convince people to take on the mob.

"Prior to the victory in the Colombo case," he told Bruck in the piece, published in 1989, not long after he left the U.S. Attorney's office, "there was a very different attitude toward organized crime. There were questions about whether you could use the word Mafia, whether the Mafia existed, whether we could win a case like that — it was too big, too powerful, these people always got acquitted before."

Andrew MaloneyThe article prompted his predecessor, John Martin, to write Giuliani a private letter saying that his quotes in the story just didn't match the reality of the situation. Martin, then sitting on the federal bench, said he wasn't anxious to embarrass Giuliani so he didn't send it as a letter to the editor. He just wanted him to correct the public record the next time he was asked about. He never did. For whatever reasons, the myth had captured the man, and he wasn't about to change the story, even if it didn't gibe with the facts.

"A long time thereafter, I got a letter from him saying that his claim was true," said Martin.

"He was a very bright and able guy, with a lot of able people working for him," said Martin. "But he did not invent the world."

By Jerry Capeci

A Thanksgiving Day Message: Where There's Life, There's Hope

Ralph RiveraThe two inmates were each sentenced to life in prison, but more than two decades after they went to trial together as alleged major league drug dealers in the notorious Blue Thunder heroin case, Thanksgiving Day dinner behind bars today will be a lot different for Ralph Rivera than it is for onetime Bonanno boss Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano .

That's because today is the last Thanksgiving Day that the 54-year-old Rivera will spend in prison. Last year, the life sentence he got for his 1994 drug trafficking conviction was cut to 30 years by Manhattan Federal Court Judge Loretta Preska, and his mandatory release date is September 19, 2017.

In her ruling, Preska agreed with the legal argument by appeals lawyer Harlan Protass that Rivera's sentence was "illegal per se" because the judge gave him life imprisonment for crimes that called for terms of 20 years or less, as well as the compassionate argument that Rivera, who had been a model inmate since 1991, deserved to receive 30 years behind bars for his drug conviction — not life — at his resentencing.

Vincent BascianoBureau of Prisons guidelines permit inmates to be placed into a halfway house a year before their release date, but the warden at the prison hospital in Ayer Massachusetts has a policy of waiting until six months before their release date, so he's very likely to be released in four months.

But recently Judge Preska pushed the warden to reconsider Rivera's case, writing that it was the "court's view, in light of the lengthy period of Mr. Rivera's incarceration, he would benefit by a period of 10 to 12 months in a community correction facility."

The Judge's unusual recommendation — which the warden can reject — came following a hand-written appeal to the judge by Rivera, who thanked her for "allowing me to fulfill the saying, 'Where there is life, there is hope.'" The inmate stated that a longer halfway house stay would give him a better chance for a "successful re-integration into society."

That hasn't happened yet, but no matter what, Rivera's situation is much better than that of former codefendant Basciano, who was acquitted of drug charges at the same trial, walked out of court a free man, and was able to continue his criminal activity as he moved up the ladder in the Bonanno crime family hierarchy.

The 57-year-old wiseguy is currently in the 12th year of a life sentence he received for the 2004 murder of a low level mob associate he had whacked in November of 2004. His appeals to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals — and all but one before his Brooklyn Federal Court Judge, Nicholas Garaufis — have been rejected.

Mathew MariBut despite his very gloomy situation, Basciano, according to attorney Mathew Mari, is in better spirits than he was during the first 11 years of his incarceration, now that he has been transferred out of the Supermax federal prison in Colorado to a high-security prison in Eastern Kentucky called Big Sandy.

The lawyer said that Basciano, who had been using a jailhouse lawyer to help him file pro se challenges to his convictions for racketeering and murder at three trials for the last five years, recently retained Mari and appeals specialist Anthony DiPietro to represent him in his uphill fight for freedom.

"I'm thankful that Vinny Basciano is still in good spirits and optimistic about the future, despite all he's been through in the last decade," said Mari, stating that his client's confinement in solitary for allegations that he had plotted to kill Judge Garaufis and trial prosecutor Greg Andres "were bogus, simply not true."

Asked how his client could possibly be "optimistic" with three convictions hanging over his head, Mari said that Basciano is "just an amazing guy. He is hopeful of walking out of prison, sooner or later."

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[Cheech]

There u go kid

[Hailbritain]

It was actually the worst gangland news of all time, no wonder nobody posted it ha

[Pogo The Clown]

There u go kid

There you go. You big mouth fuck.


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zeuJeBGXdos