Current Chicago Players 2020

[PolackTony]

Thanks a 1000 times for all of the additional names Cavita and PolackTony and ill add them to the list, but you have to tell me which crews they belong to right?

@Polack, i already have one Tony Buttitta...any relations? Also do you have any good evidence that Nick wasnt related to the Roti clan? Dont get me wrong but many of their members from the past were never caught doing something illegal, except for being labeled in newspapers...

I have many more names that I will have to look for when I get home tonight as I'm out of town. I have some guys' names and the crews they belong to as well as a few that I don't know who they're under.

Thanks again bud and take your time

I have many many more names than the following but I don't have the time to type them all and their birthdates, etc. but here are a few:


Bobby Abbinanti
Angelo Cassano
Dominic Cassano
Gino Cassano
Vito Cassano
Salvatore DeCesare
Anthony Dote
Carl Dote
Tom Forliano
Pete Labelestra
Santino Colella
Vito Pesoli
Natale Saraceno
Nick Sarillo
Joe Volpe
Joe Bastone
James Bastone
Ronald DeRosa
Mike Petruzzi
John Capodice
Robert Dinella
Dominic Mangiamele
Joe Mangiamele Vincenzo Ercolino Tom Giuliano Chris Giuliano Salvatore Molose Gil Valerio Frank Adamo

I've heard for years that Pietro "Pete" LaBalestra has a crew of "zips" operating in the western burbs around Addison. I've been told they're involved in drugs as well as real estate, construction, and dirty contracting (not sure what industries specifically but I would guess construction related). I was told that Sicilians operating in the west burbs were at least partly responsible for the big opioid issue in the local area, which ironically seems to have hit younger Italian guys hard and thus further depressed the potential Outfit recruitment pool. I've been told this now by a couple different people, so maybe there's something to it. The story is that LaBalestra and his crew own strip malls and other properties where they run and hang out in non-descript soccer clubs and social clubs which shut down and move periodically.

People here may recall the "Operation Espresso" case in 1994 where LaBalestra and some of his guys were popped for running gambling operations out of a bunch of Sicilian social clubs/cafes in Addison and Bloomingdale. Charge along with LaBalestra were Giuseppe Vicari and Ottavio Volpe. These guys were all in their 30s back then.

Any word, confirmation, or elaboration on any of this? Also, Villain has LaBalestra under Elmwood/Grand. What exactly are his ties to them? Was he under Andriacchi or someone else before? I wonder at this point if him and his guys are indeed still active if they're basically running their own crew out there.

This is what's been confounding me regarding Chicago's alleged zips. We all know in Rockford in the late 1960s and early 1970s underboss Frank Buscemi made a concerted effort to import many Sicilians and their families, set them up in business in pizzerias and later had them distribuing narcotics through those businesses. This Rockford network was tied into Buffalo, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Sicily and beyond. Frank Buscemi had a a history in Chicago from the 1930s until he moved to Rockford in late 1958. Rockford was represented nationally by Chicago on the Commission but they were pretty much left to their own devices. Some have said Rockford was absorbed by Chicago in the 1980s but what keeps bothering me is this- if Rockford was working with all these other entities in narcotics in the 1980s and 1990s (in the Pizza Connection and Iron Tower cases) it was very much out in the open and in violation of Chicago's narcotics "ban." If they were working independently with the other entities it must have been in conjunction with Chicago and perhaps some of these zips in the suburbs.

I'm continuing to look for a more solid connection to Chicago regarding narcotics and distribution but have yet to find any. The search goes on in future FBI files to be requested.

Thanks for the info on Buscemi and Rockford. I'm glad that you're continuing to look into it and look forward to hearing back if and when you find more. At this point I think it's clear that the notion that Chicago had a consistently enforced blanket ban on narcotics has been both overstated and simplistic. As I'm sure you're aware, @Villain has contributed a lot of good info laying out the connections to the narcotics racket over different periods in Chicago. The main thing is that the administration was concerned with insulating itself from the repercussions of narcotics trafficking and keeping it at arms length, so you see I think over the broader arc evidence of contradictory or hypocritical policy on this and periodic purging of Outfit associates involved in narcotics. Involvement also of course varied by crew. We know already some of the earlier connections of Heights guys like Roberto to Sicilian drug trafficking, and during the '60's and '70's Alderisio and his guys -- most prominently Nicoletti -- were clearly involved in narcotics trafficking, likely partnered to some degree with large black organizations responsible for street-level distribution operations such as the Vice Lords and Black P Stones. Ovid Demaris discusses Nicoletti overseeing narcotics, and listed Johnny DeBiase as one of his partners, leading me to suspect that Lombardo was also likely involved (and we already know that the Spilotro brothers were involved in drugs). A question here would be whether Alderisio, Nicoletti, et al. had any direct links to Sicilian trafficking operation in this period, or as seems most likely they were being supplied by other US families (Lucchese, Bonnano, maybe Detroit?). There are indications also that at least during the '90's Grand Ave had some degree of oversight of narcotics operations under Lombardo's direction, farmed out to the C-Notes and Spanish Cobras and other Latin Folks organizations (see John Hagedorn's work on this). @Villain I believe has additionally documented apparent drug connections between Outfit guys and the Maniac Latin Disciples, who have had very close affiliations to Mexican cartels and Puerto Rican trafficking operations since the '70's.

The role (both in terms of narcotics and the exact nature of their connections to the Outfit hierarchy and crew structure) of the West suburban "zips" remains a mysterious and I think very important one for understanding the post-1986 Outfit. As I've mentioned before, I've found descriptions of a CPD intelligence unit bust in the late 1980's of what was alleged to be a narcotics ring of "newly arrived immigrants from Sicily and mainland Italy". As Villain and I noted in another recent thread, there were a bunch of Outfit related drug operations busted in the late '80s'. Some of this stuff could've been going on for awhile, or maybe it was started or ramped up under Carlisi, who knows. This could've also had some relation to the folding of Rockford under Chicago as you've noted. Or it could be something else.


FWIW I've been told that there was some sort of Italian police report (I'm not sure which agency exactly, but was told that the report was published in Rome) from some time in the last decade or so apparently claiming that Chicago was among the US families importing the largest numbers of Italian OC operatives. Important if true. We already have evidence of Sicilian involvement in Chicago via LaBalestra and his guys, and as I noted above Aldo Cardelicchio seems to have been connected to Pugliese OC. Given DiFronzo's close family ties to Bari and the fact that Cardelicchio was operating in EP territory, this makes me wonder about potential associations with regional Italian OC groups based on familial and personal connections to Chicago. Lots we don't know, and lots that remains very murky.

[cavita]

I'm continuing to look for a more solid connection to Chicago regarding narcotics and distribution but have yet to find any. The search goes on in future FBI files to be requested.

Are you talking past, present, or both?

Past. I'd like to start from the beginning of their cooperation if there ever was one.

[Villain]

Thanks a 1000 times for all of the additional names Cavita and PolackTony and ill add them to the list, but you have to tell me which crews they belong to right?

@Polack, i already have one Tony Buttitta...any relations? Also do you have any good evidence that Nick wasnt related to the Roti clan? Dont get me wrong but many of their members from the past were never caught doing something illegal, except for being labeled in newspapers...

I have many more names that I will have to look for when I get home tonight as I'm out of town. I have some guys' names and the crews they belong to as well as a few that I don't know who they're under.

Thanks again bud and take your time

I have many many more names than the following but I don't have the time to type them all and their birthdates, etc. but here are a few:


Bobby Abbinanti
Angelo Cassano
Dominic Cassano
Gino Cassano
Vito Cassano
Salvatore DeCesare
Anthony Dote
Carl Dote
Tom Forliano
Pete Labelestra
Santino Colella
Vito Pesoli
Natale Saraceno
Nick Sarillo
Joe Volpe
Joe Bastone
James Bastone
Ronald DeRosa
Mike Petruzzi
John Capodice
Robert Dinella
Dominic Mangiamele
Joe Mangiamele Vincenzo Ercolino Tom Giuliano Chris Giuliano Salvatore Molose Gil Valerio Frank Adamo

I've heard for years that Pietro "Pete" LaBalestra has a crew of "zips" operating in the western burbs around Addison. I've been told they're involved in drugs as well as real estate, construction, and dirty contracting (not sure what industries specifically but I would guess construction related). I was told that Sicilians operating in the west burbs were at least partly responsible for the big opioid issue in the local area, which ironically seems to have hit younger Italian guys hard and thus further depressed the potential Outfit recruitment pool. I've been told this now by a couple different people, so maybe there's something to it. The story is that LaBalestra and his crew own strip malls and other properties where they run and hang out in non-descript soccer clubs and social clubs which shut down and move periodically.

People here may recall the "Operation Espresso" case in 1994 where LaBalestra and some of his guys were popped for running gambling operations out of a bunch of Sicilian social clubs/cafes in Addison and Bloomingdale. Charge along with LaBalestra were Giuseppe Vicari and Ottavio Volpe. These guys were all in their 30s back then.

Any word, confirmation, or elaboration on any of this? Also, Villain has LaBalestra under Elmwood/Grand. What exactly are his ties to them? Was he under Andriacchi or someone else before? I wonder at this point if him and his guys are indeed still active if they're basically running their own crew out there.

This is what's been confounding me regarding Chicago's alleged zips. We all know in Rockford in the late 1960s and early 1970s underboss Frank Buscemi made a concerted effort to import many Sicilians and their families, set them up in business in pizzerias and later had them distribuing narcotics through those businesses. This Rockford network was tied into Buffalo, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Sicily and beyond. Frank Buscemi had a a history in Chicago from the 1930s until he moved to Rockford in late 1958. Rockford was represented nationally by Chicago on the Commission but they were pretty much left to their own devices. Some have said Rockford was absorbed by Chicago in the 1980s but what keeps bothering me is this- if Rockford was working with all these other entities in narcotics in the 1980s and 1990s (in the Pizza Connection and Iron Tower cases) it was very much out in the open and in violation of Chicago's narcotics "ban." If they were working independently with the other entities it must have been in conjunction with Chicago and perhaps some of these zips in the suburbs.

I'm continuing to look for a more solid connection to Chicago regarding narcotics and distribution but have yet to find any. The search goes on in future FBI files to be requested.

If you ask me, Chicago had zip crews involved in narcotics since the early 1950s

[PolackTony]

Thanks a 1000 times for all of the additional names Cavita and PolackTony and ill add them to the list, but you have to tell me which crews they belong to right?

@Polack, i already have one Tony Buttitta...any relations? Also do you have any good evidence that Nick wasnt related to the Roti clan? Dont get me wrong but many of their members from the past were never caught doing something illegal, except for being labeled in newspapers...

I have many more names that I will have to look for when I get home tonight as I'm out of town. I have some guys' names and the crews they belong to as well as a few that I don't know who they're under.

Thanks again bud and take your time

I have many many more names than the following but I don't have the time to type them all and their birthdates, etc. but here are a few:


Bobby Abbinanti
Angelo Cassano
Dominic Cassano
Gino Cassano
Vito Cassano
Salvatore DeCesare
Anthony Dote
Carl Dote
Tom Forliano
Pete Labelestra
Santino Colella
Vito Pesoli
Natale Saraceno
Nick Sarillo
Joe Volpe
Joe Bastone
James Bastone
Ronald DeRosa
Mike Petruzzi
John Capodice
Robert Dinella
Dominic Mangiamele
Joe Mangiamele Vincenzo Ercolino Tom Giuliano Chris Giuliano Salvatore Molose Gil Valerio Frank Adamo

I've heard for years that Pietro "Pete" LaBalestra has a crew of "zips" operating in the western burbs around Addison. I've been told they're involved in drugs as well as real estate, construction, and dirty contracting (not sure what industries specifically but I would guess construction related). I was told that Sicilians operating in the west burbs were at least partly responsible for the big opioid issue in the local area, which ironically seems to have hit younger Italian guys hard and thus further depressed the potential Outfit recruitment pool. I've been told this now by a couple different people, so maybe there's something to it. The story is that LaBalestra and his crew own strip malls and other properties where they run and hang out in non-descript soccer clubs and social clubs which shut down and move periodically.

People here may recall the "Operation Espresso" case in 1994 where LaBalestra and some of his guys were popped for running gambling operations out of a bunch of Sicilian social clubs/cafes in Addison and Bloomingdale. Charge along with LaBalestra were Giuseppe Vicari and Ottavio Volpe. These guys were all in their 30s back then.

Any word, confirmation, or elaboration on any of this? Also, Villain has LaBalestra under Elmwood/Grand. What exactly are his ties to them? Was he under Andriacchi or someone else before? I wonder at this point if him and his guys are indeed still active if they're basically running their own crew out there.

This is what's been confounding me regarding Chicago's alleged zips. We all know in Rockford in the late 1960s and early 1970s underboss Frank Buscemi made a concerted effort to import many Sicilians and their families, set them up in business in pizzerias and later had them distribuing narcotics through those businesses. This Rockford network was tied into Buffalo, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Sicily and beyond. Frank Buscemi had a a history in Chicago from the 1930s until he moved to Rockford in late 1958. Rockford was represented nationally by Chicago on the Commission but they were pretty much left to their own devices. Some have said Rockford was absorbed by Chicago in the 1980s but what keeps bothering me is this- if Rockford was working with all these other entities in narcotics in the 1980s and 1990s (in the Pizza Connection and Iron Tower cases) it was very much out in the open and in violation of Chicago's narcotics "ban." If they were working independently with the other entities it must have been in conjunction with Chicago and perhaps some of these zips in the suburbs.

I'm continuing to look for a more solid connection to Chicago regarding narcotics and distribution but have yet to find any. The search goes on in future FBI files to be requested.

If you ask me, Chicago had zip crews involved in narcotics since the early 1950s

Working with DePietto and his crew (who IIRC were bringing in Mexican heroin), or was this something else, from the pre-Giancana Accardo era?

[Moscone65]

Thanks a 1000 times for all of the additional names Cavita and PolackTony and ill add them to the list, but you have to tell me which crews they belong to right?

@Polack, i already have one Tony Buttitta...any relations? Also do you have any good evidence that Nick wasnt related to the Roti clan? Dont get me wrong but many of their members from the past were never caught doing something illegal, except for being labeled in newspapers...

I have many more names that I will have to look for when I get home tonight as I'm out of town. I have some guys' names and the crews they belong to as well as a few that I don't know who they're under.

Thanks again bud and take your time

I have many many more names than the following but I don't have the time to type them all and their birthdates, etc. but here are a few:


Bobby Abbinanti
Angelo Cassano
Dominic Cassano
Gino Cassano
Vito Cassano
Salvatore DeCesare
Anthony Dote
Carl Dote
Tom Forliano
Pete Labelestra
Santino Colella
Vito Pesoli
Natale Saraceno
Nick Sarillo
Joe Volpe
Joe Bastone
James Bastone
Ronald DeRosa
Mike Petruzzi
John Capodice
Robert Dinella
Dominic Mangiamele
Joe Mangiamele Vincenzo Ercolino Tom Giuliano Chris Giuliano Salvatore Molose Gil Valerio Frank Adamo

I've heard for years that Pietro "Pete" LaBalestra has a crew of "zips" operating in the western burbs around Addison. I've been told they're involved in drugs as well as real estate, construction, and dirty contracting (not sure what industries specifically but I would guess construction related). I was told that Sicilians operating in the west burbs were at least partly responsible for the big opioid issue in the local area, which ironically seems to have hit younger Italian guys hard and thus further depressed the potential Outfit recruitment pool. I've been told this now by a couple different people, so maybe there's something to it. The story is that LaBalestra and his crew own strip malls and other properties where they run and hang out in non-descript soccer clubs and social clubs which shut down and move periodically.

People here may recall the "Operation Espresso" case in 1994 where LaBalestra and some of his guys were popped for running gambling operations out of a bunch of Sicilian social clubs/cafes in Addison and Bloomingdale. Charge along with LaBalestra were Giuseppe Vicari and Ottavio Volpe. These guys were all in their 30s back then.

Any word, confirmation, or elaboration on any of this? Also, Villain has LaBalestra under Elmwood/Grand. What exactly are his ties to them? Was he under Andriacchi or someone else before? I wonder at this point if him and his guys are indeed still active if they're basically running their own crew out there.

This is what's been confounding me regarding Chicago's alleged zips. We all know in Rockford in the late 1960s and early 1970s underboss Frank Buscemi made a concerted effort to import many Sicilians and their families, set them up in business in pizzerias and later had them distribuing narcotics through those businesses. This Rockford network was tied into Buffalo, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Sicily and beyond. Frank Buscemi had a a history in Chicago from the 1930s until he moved to Rockford in late 1958. Rockford was represented nationally by Chicago on the Commission but they were pretty much left to their own devices. Some have said Rockford was absorbed by Chicago in the 1980s but what keeps bothering me is this- if Rockford was working with all these other entities in narcotics in the 1980s and 1990s (in the Pizza Connection and Iron Tower cases) it was very much out in the open and in violation of Chicago's narcotics "ban." If they were working independently with the other entities it must have been in conjunction with Chicago and perhaps some of these zips in the suburbs.

I'm continuing to look for a more solid connection to Chicago regarding narcotics and distribution but have yet to find any. The search goes on in future FBI files to be requested.

Thanks for the info on Buscemi and Rockford. I'm glad that you're continuing to look into it and look forward to hearing back if and when you find more. At this point I think it's clear that the notion that Chicago had a consistently enforced blanket ban on narcotics has been both overstated and simplistic. As I'm sure you're aware, @Villain has contributed a lot of good info laying out the connections to the narcotics racket over different periods in Chicago. The main thing is that the administration was concerned with insulating itself from the repercussions of narcotics trafficking and keeping it at arms length, so you see I think over the broader arc evidence of contradictory or hypocritical policy on this and periodic purging of Outfit associates involved in narcotics. Involvement also of course varied by crew. We know already some of the earlier connections of Heights guys like Roberto to Sicilian drug trafficking, and during the '60's and '70's Alderisio and his guys -- most prominently Nicoletti -- were clearly involved in narcotics trafficking, likely partnered to some degree with large black organizations responsible for street-level distribution operations such as the Vice Lords and Black P Stones. Ovid Demaris discusses Nicoletti overseeing narcotics, and listed Johnny DeBiase as one of his partners, leading me to suspect that Lombardo was also likely involved (and we already know that the Spilotro brothers were involved in drugs). A question here would be whether Alderisio, Nicoletti, et al. had any direct links to Sicilian trafficking operation in this period, or as seems most likely they were being supplied by other US families (Lucchese, Bonnano, maybe Detroit?). There are indications also that at least during the '90's Grand Ave had some degree of oversight of narcotics operations under Lombardo's direction, farmed out to the C-Notes and Spanish Cobras and other Latin Folks organizations (see John Hagedorn's work on this). @Villain I believe has additionally documented apparent drug connections between Outfit guys and the Maniac Latin Disciples, who have had very close affiliations to Mexican cartels and Puerto Rican trafficking operations since the '70's.

The role (both in terms of narcotics and the exact nature of their connections to the Outfit hierarchy and crew structure) of the West suburban "zips" remains a mysterious and I think very important one for understanding the post-1986 Outfit. As I've mentioned before, I've found descriptions of a CPD intelligence unit bust in the late 1980's of what was alleged to be a narcotics ring of "newly arrived immigrants from Sicily and mainland Italy". As Villain and I noted in another recent thread, there were a bunch of Outfit related drug operations busted in the late '80s'. Some of this stuff could've been going on for awhile, or maybe it was started or ramped up under Carlisi, who knows. This could've also had some relation to the folding of Rockford under Chicago as you've noted. Or it could be something else.


FWIW I've been told that there was some sort of Italian police report (I'm not sure which agency exactly, but was told that the report was published in Rome) from some time in the last decade or so apparently claiming that Chicago was among the US families importing the largest numbers of Italian OC operatives. Important if true. We already have evidence of Sicilian involvement in Chicago via LaBalestra and his guys, and as I noted above Aldo Cardelicchio seems to have been connected to Pugliese OC. Given DiFronzo's close family ties to Bari and the fact that Cardelicchio was operating in EP territory, this makes me wonder about potential associations with regional Italian OC groups based on familial and personal connections to Chicago. Lots we don't know, and lots that remains very murky.

Lots of Barese descended mobsters in Chicago so what you are saying is very interesting. Seems to me the Barese and sicilians are the main groups of Italians in Chicago, opposes to nyc which has a shit ton of Napolitani, or Toronto which has a lot of calabrese.

[UTC]

I guess I could have asked the same questions about any Outfit intersection with People Nation.

Again, just to be clear, the "People Nation" isn't an actual organization as such. It's an alliance formed in the prison system of distinct and separate organizations around 1978. The Outfit has had ties historically with several gangs affiliated with the People alliance. As already noted above, the Cicero crew is connected to the 12th St Players, who were an historically white/Italian gang formed in Berwyn and Cicero.The TSPs began recruiting Mexican members as well in the 80s due to changing demographics in their territory, and joined the People alliance along with their more numerous allies the Latin Kings and Almighty Popes. Paulie Carparelli notoriously is/was a TSP.

The Outfit has also had ties historically with Latino and black organizations in the People alliance. Chuckie English apparently had ties with the LKs and Chuck Nicoletti with the Vice Lords on the Westside. CPD intelligence linked Caesar DiVarco and Joe Arnold to the Mickey Cobras in the Near Northside/Cabrini-Green area. Outfit guys on the Southside likely had connections as well to the Black P Stones (formerly Blackstone Rangers/El Rukns).

Different Outfit guys/crews have had ties to various different organizations centered on street level drug distribution operations over the years.

What about the Gaylords of the People and the Outfit?

There was some Gaylords that worked with the Outfit, especially the earlier members but a majority of gaylords that graduated to the big time became Outlaws. I do recall one Gaylord that was murdered by the Outfit for robbing the wrong place if I recall correctly. I do not know of any gaylords that became outfit members or top associates.

Thank you.

[PolackTony]

Thanks a 1000 times for all of the additional names Cavita and PolackTony and ill add them to the list, but you have to tell me which crews they belong to right?

@Polack, i already have one Tony Buttitta...any relations? Also do you have any good evidence that Nick wasnt related to the Roti clan? Dont get me wrong but many of their members from the past were never caught doing something illegal, except for being labeled in newspapers...

I have many more names that I will have to look for when I get home tonight as I'm out of town. I have some guys' names and the crews they belong to as well as a few that I don't know who they're under.

Thanks again bud and take your time

I have many many more names than the following but I don't have the time to type them all and their birthdates, etc. but here are a few:


Bobby Abbinanti
Angelo Cassano
Dominic Cassano
Gino Cassano
Vito Cassano
Salvatore DeCesare
Anthony Dote
Carl Dote
Tom Forliano
Pete Labelestra
Santino Colella
Vito Pesoli
Natale Saraceno
Nick Sarillo
Joe Volpe
Joe Bastone
James Bastone
Ronald DeRosa
Mike Petruzzi
John Capodice
Robert Dinella
Dominic Mangiamele
Joe Mangiamele Vincenzo Ercolino Tom Giuliano Chris Giuliano Salvatore Molose Gil Valerio Frank Adamo

I've heard for years that Pietro "Pete" LaBalestra has a crew of "zips" operating in the western burbs around Addison. I've been told they're involved in drugs as well as real estate, construction, and dirty contracting (not sure what industries specifically but I would guess construction related). I was told that Sicilians operating in the west burbs were at least partly responsible for the big opioid issue in the local area, which ironically seems to have hit younger Italian guys hard and thus further depressed the potential Outfit recruitment pool. I've been told this now by a couple different people, so maybe there's something to it. The story is that LaBalestra and his crew own strip malls and other properties where they run and hang out in non-descript soccer clubs and social clubs which shut down and move periodically.

People here may recall the "Operation Espresso" case in 1994 where LaBalestra and some of his guys were popped for running gambling operations out of a bunch of Sicilian social clubs/cafes in Addison and Bloomingdale. Charge along with LaBalestra were Giuseppe Vicari and Ottavio Volpe. These guys were all in their 30s back then.

Any word, confirmation, or elaboration on any of this? Also, Villain has LaBalestra under Elmwood/Grand. What exactly are his ties to them? Was he under Andriacchi or someone else before? I wonder at this point if him and his guys are indeed still active if they're basically running their own crew out there.

This is what's been confounding me regarding Chicago's alleged zips. We all know in Rockford in the late 1960s and early 1970s underboss Frank Buscemi made a concerted effort to import many Sicilians and their families, set them up in business in pizzerias and later had them distribuing narcotics through those businesses. This Rockford network was tied into Buffalo, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Sicily and beyond. Frank Buscemi had a a history in Chicago from the 1930s until he moved to Rockford in late 1958. Rockford was represented nationally by Chicago on the Commission but they were pretty much left to their own devices. Some have said Rockford was absorbed by Chicago in the 1980s but what keeps bothering me is this- if Rockford was working with all these other entities in narcotics in the 1980s and 1990s (in the Pizza Connection and Iron Tower cases) it was very much out in the open and in violation of Chicago's narcotics "ban." If they were working independently with the other entities it must have been in conjunction with Chicago and perhaps some of these zips in the suburbs.

I'm continuing to look for a more solid connection to Chicago regarding narcotics and distribution but have yet to find any. The search goes on in future FBI files to be requested.

Thanks for the info on Buscemi and Rockford. I'm glad that you're continuing to look into it and look forward to hearing back if and when you find more. At this point I think it's clear that the notion that Chicago had a consistently enforced blanket ban on narcotics has been both overstated and simplistic. As I'm sure you're aware, @Villain has contributed a lot of good info laying out the connections to the narcotics racket over different periods in Chicago. The main thing is that the administration was concerned with insulating itself from the repercussions of narcotics trafficking and keeping it at arms length, so you see I think over the broader arc evidence of contradictory or hypocritical policy on this and periodic purging of Outfit associates involved in narcotics. Involvement also of course varied by crew. We know already some of the earlier connections of Heights guys like Roberto to Sicilian drug trafficking, and during the '60's and '70's Alderisio and his guys -- most prominently Nicoletti -- were clearly involved in narcotics trafficking, likely partnered to some degree with large black organizations responsible for street-level distribution operations such as the Vice Lords and Black P Stones. Ovid Demaris discusses Nicoletti overseeing narcotics, and listed Johnny DeBiase as one of his partners, leading me to suspect that Lombardo was also likely involved (and we already know that the Spilotro brothers were involved in drugs). A question here would be whether Alderisio, Nicoletti, et al. had any direct links to Sicilian trafficking operation in this period, or as seems most likely they were being supplied by other US families (Lucchese, Bonnano, maybe Detroit?). There are indications also that at least during the '90's Grand Ave had some degree of oversight of narcotics operations under Lombardo's direction, farmed out to the C-Notes and Spanish Cobras and other Latin Folks organizations (see John Hagedorn's work on this). @Villain I believe has additionally documented apparent drug connections between Outfit guys and the Maniac Latin Disciples, who have had very close affiliations to Mexican cartels and Puerto Rican trafficking operations since the '70's.

The role (both in terms of narcotics and the exact nature of their connections to the Outfit hierarchy and crew structure) of the West suburban "zips" remains a mysterious and I think very important one for understanding the post-1986 Outfit. As I've mentioned before, I've found descriptions of a CPD intelligence unit bust in the late 1980's of what was alleged to be a narcotics ring of "newly arrived immigrants from Sicily and mainland Italy". As Villain and I noted in another recent thread, there were a bunch of Outfit related drug operations busted in the late '80s'. Some of this stuff could've been going on for awhile, or maybe it was started or ramped up under Carlisi, who knows. This could've also had some relation to the folding of Rockford under Chicago as you've noted. Or it could be something else.


FWIW I've been told that there was some sort of Italian police report (I'm not sure which agency exactly, but was told that the report was published in Rome) from some time in the last decade or so apparently claiming that Chicago was among the US families importing the largest numbers of Italian OC operatives. Important if true. We already have evidence of Sicilian involvement in Chicago via LaBalestra and his guys, and as I noted above Aldo Cardelicchio seems to have been connected to Pugliese OC. Given DiFronzo's close family ties to Bari and the fact that Cardelicchio was operating in EP territory, this makes me wonder about potential associations with regional Italian OC groups based on familial and personal connections to Chicago. Lots we don't know, and lots that remains very murky.

Lots of Barese descended mobsters in Chicago so what you are saying is very interesting. Seems to me the Barese and sicilians are the main groups of Italians in Chicago, opposes to nyc which has a shit ton of Napolitani, or Toronto which has a lot of calabrese.

I'd say that Chicago likely has the most prominent contingent of Baresi members of any US crime family. Primarily from the Grand Ave and Elmwood Park areas, though there were a couple of them scattered around Taylor St and other areas.

There actually have been quite a few Calabresi as well in the Outfit as well. just off the top of my head, Roti, Bertucci, Spina, Jelly Cozzo, Andriacchi, Buddy Ciotti, Dom Roberto, Frank Laporte, and Jim Emery were Calabresi.

What's also interesting is the large number of Lucani in the Outfit, given the large migration from Potenza to Chicago. Buccieri, Torello, Cerone, Tony Capezio, Jim Adducci, Smokes Aloisio, Joe Colucci, Dom Senese, Joe Spadavecchio, Albie Vena, Fred Pascente, and Mikey Swiatek were all either of full or half Lucano ancestry from Potenza. I've heard it said that Basilicata was historically too poor to have a Mafia, but due to its extreme poverty whole villages basically relocated to Chicago. Migrants from Trivigno were so well represented in Chicago Italian communities people used to call them by the nickname "Trivies".

The Outfit was a phenomenon deeply embedded in Italian Chicago, and the makeup of different crews represented a selection of whatever migrants made up the communities that they recruited from and the social networks tied to OC.

[Moscone65]

Interesting info, thank you. I believe Rudy fratto is calabrese also. Any idea where Jimmy inendino’s family is from in Italy?

[PolackTony]

I'd add to the above that prominent earlier Outfit heavyweight James Belcastro was also Calabrese, while Rocco Fanelli, Rocco DeGrazia, and Rocco Potenza were Lucani (from Potenza). Alderisio was of at least partial Lucani ancestry as well, but from Matera (and of course born in NY).

On the subject of Napolitani -- Aside from the well known cases of the Capone's, Fischettis, Ricca, and Nitto, Lefty Campagna, Frank Maritote, Frank Rio, Johnny DeBiase, Potatoes Daddono, Willie Messino, Louie Eboli, Sam Ariola, Cowboy Morro, and Legs D'Antonio were of Napolitano or Campanese ancestry.

These lists aren't exhaustive of course, just guys who I can think of at the moment who I've been able to confirm ancestry on.

[PolackTony]

Interesting info, thank you. I believe Rudy fratto is calabrese also. Any idea where Jimmy inendino’s family is from in Italy?

Not sure about Rudy, but Luigi "Lew" Fratto was born in Chicago to a father from Catanzaro, Calabria and a mother from Lazio.

On their paternal lines of descent at least, both Inendino and DeLaurentis go back to Napoli.

[Patrickgold]

Bari social club is right on Belmont about 7800 block I think. Spilotro’s family was from Bari

[Moscone65]

Interesting info, thank you. I believe Rudy fratto is calabrese also. Any idea where Jimmy inendino’s family is from in Italy?

Not sure about Rudy, but Luigi "Lew" Fratto was born in Chicago to a father from Catanzaro, Calabria and a mother from Lazio.

On their paternal lines of descent at least, both Inendino and DeLaurentis go back to Napoli.

Thank you. I knew that delaurentis was napoletan because he said something about it on his Facebook a while back.

[Villain]

Thanks a 1000 times for all of the additional names Cavita and PolackTony and ill add them to the list, but you have to tell me which crews they belong to right?

@Polack, i already have one Tony Buttitta...any relations? Also do you have any good evidence that Nick wasnt related to the Roti clan? Dont get me wrong but many of their members from the past were never caught doing something illegal, except for being labeled in newspapers...

I have many more names that I will have to look for when I get home tonight as I'm out of town. I have some guys' names and the crews they belong to as well as a few that I don't know who they're under.

Thanks again bud and take your time

I have many many more names than the following but I don't have the time to type them all and their birthdates, etc. but here are a few:


Bobby Abbinanti
Angelo Cassano
Dominic Cassano
Gino Cassano
Vito Cassano
Salvatore DeCesare
Anthony Dote
Carl Dote
Tom Forliano
Pete Labelestra
Santino Colella
Vito Pesoli
Natale Saraceno
Nick Sarillo
Joe Volpe
Joe Bastone
James Bastone
Ronald DeRosa
Mike Petruzzi
John Capodice
Robert Dinella
Dominic Mangiamele
Joe Mangiamele Vincenzo Ercolino Tom Giuliano Chris Giuliano Salvatore Molose Gil Valerio Frank Adamo

I've heard for years that Pietro "Pete" LaBalestra has a crew of "zips" operating in the western burbs around Addison. I've been told they're involved in drugs as well as real estate, construction, and dirty contracting (not sure what industries specifically but I would guess construction related). I was told that Sicilians operating in the west burbs were at least partly responsible for the big opioid issue in the local area, which ironically seems to have hit younger Italian guys hard and thus further depressed the potential Outfit recruitment pool. I've been told this now by a couple different people, so maybe there's something to it. The story is that LaBalestra and his crew own strip malls and other properties where they run and hang out in non-descript soccer clubs and social clubs which shut down and move periodically.

People here may recall the "Operation Espresso" case in 1994 where LaBalestra and some of his guys were popped for running gambling operations out of a bunch of Sicilian social clubs/cafes in Addison and Bloomingdale. Charge along with LaBalestra were Giuseppe Vicari and Ottavio Volpe. These guys were all in their 30s back then.

Any word, confirmation, or elaboration on any of this? Also, Villain has LaBalestra under Elmwood/Grand. What exactly are his ties to them? Was he under Andriacchi or someone else before? I wonder at this point if him and his guys are indeed still active if they're basically running their own crew out there.

This is what's been confounding me regarding Chicago's alleged zips. We all know in Rockford in the late 1960s and early 1970s underboss Frank Buscemi made a concerted effort to import many Sicilians and their families, set them up in business in pizzerias and later had them distribuing narcotics through those businesses. This Rockford network was tied into Buffalo, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Sicily and beyond. Frank Buscemi had a a history in Chicago from the 1930s until he moved to Rockford in late 1958. Rockford was represented nationally by Chicago on the Commission but they were pretty much left to their own devices. Some have said Rockford was absorbed by Chicago in the 1980s but what keeps bothering me is this- if Rockford was working with all these other entities in narcotics in the 1980s and 1990s (in the Pizza Connection and Iron Tower cases) it was very much out in the open and in violation of Chicago's narcotics "ban." If they were working independently with the other entities it must have been in conjunction with Chicago and perhaps some of these zips in the suburbs.

I'm continuing to look for a more solid connection to Chicago regarding narcotics and distribution but have yet to find any. The search goes on in future FBI files to be requested.

If you ask me, Chicago had zip crews involved in narcotics since the early 1950s

Working with DePietto and his crew (who IIRC were bringing in Mexican heroin), or was this something else, from the pre-Giancana Accardo era?

Pre-Giancana era....i have to do a little more research since i think there were guys who pushed Sicilian heroin but didnt belong to any family at the time, nor they were constant residents of any city.

Btw you ever heard of Jacob Klein? He was born in 1903 in Brooklyn, New York and by the mid 1930’s, he was sent to Chicago by Luciano. In fact, Klein worked with almost every narcotics trafficker from both the Chicago and New York areas.

[PolackTony]

Bari social club is right on Belmont about 7800 block I think. Spilotro’s family was from Bari

Only their dad. Their mom was Sicilian-American. Same as the Calabrese Bros.

[funkster]

Thanks a 1000 times for all of the additional names Cavita and PolackTony and ill add them to the list, but you have to tell me which crews they belong to right?

@Polack, i already have one Tony Buttitta...any relations? Also do you have any good evidence that Nick wasnt related to the Roti clan? Dont get me wrong but many of their members from the past were never caught doing something illegal, except for being labeled in newspapers...

I have many more names that I will have to look for when I get home tonight as I'm out of town. I have some guys' names and the crews they belong to as well as a few that I don't know who they're under.

Thanks again bud and take your time

I have many many more names than the following but I don't have the time to type them all and their birthdates, etc. but here are a few:


Bobby Abbinanti
Angelo Cassano
Dominic Cassano
Gino Cassano
Vito Cassano
Salvatore DeCesare
Anthony Dote
Carl Dote
Tom Forliano
Pete Labelestra
Santino Colella
Vito Pesoli
Natale Saraceno
Nick Sarillo
Joe Volpe
Joe Bastone
James Bastone
Ronald DeRosa
Mike Petruzzi
John Capodice
Robert Dinella
Dominic Mangiamele
Joe Mangiamele Vincenzo Ercolino Tom Giuliano Chris Giuliano Salvatore Molose Gil Valerio Frank Adamo

I've heard for years that Pietro "Pete" LaBalestra has a crew of "zips" operating in the western burbs around Addison. I've been told they're involved in drugs as well as real estate, construction, and dirty contracting (not sure what industries specifically but I would guess construction related). I was told that Sicilians operating in the west burbs were at least partly responsible for the big opioid issue in the local area, which ironically seems to have hit younger Italian guys hard and thus further depressed the potential Outfit recruitment pool. I've been told this now by a couple different people, so maybe there's something to it. The story is that LaBalestra and his crew own strip malls and other properties where they run and hang out in non-descript soccer clubs and social clubs which shut down and move periodically.

People here may recall the "Operation Espresso" case in 1994 where LaBalestra and some of his guys were popped for running gambling operations out of a bunch of Sicilian social clubs/cafes in Addison and Bloomingdale. Charge along with LaBalestra were Giuseppe Vicari and Ottavio Volpe. These guys were all in their 30s back then.

Any word, confirmation, or elaboration on any of this? Also, Villain has LaBalestra under Elmwood/Grand. What exactly are his ties to them? Was he under Andriacchi or someone else before? I wonder at this point if him and his guys are indeed still active if they're basically running their own crew out there.

This is what's been confounding me regarding Chicago's alleged zips. We all know in Rockford in the late 1960s and early 1970s underboss Frank Buscemi made a concerted effort to import many Sicilians and their families, set them up in business in pizzerias and later had them distribuing narcotics through those businesses. This Rockford network was tied into Buffalo, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Sicily and beyond. Frank Buscemi had a a history in Chicago from the 1930s until he moved to Rockford in late 1958. Rockford was represented nationally by Chicago on the Commission but they were pretty much left to their own devices. Some have said Rockford was absorbed by Chicago in the 1980s but what keeps bothering me is this- if Rockford was working with all these other entities in narcotics in the 1980s and 1990s (in the Pizza Connection and Iron Tower cases) it was very much out in the open and in violation of Chicago's narcotics "ban." If they were working independently with the other entities it must have been in conjunction with Chicago and perhaps some of these zips in the suburbs.

I'm continuing to look for a more solid connection to Chicago regarding narcotics and distribution but have yet to find any. The search goes on in future FBI files to be requested.

Thanks for the info on Buscemi and Rockford. I'm glad that you're continuing to look into it and look forward to hearing back if and when you find more. At this point I think it's clear that the notion that Chicago had a consistently enforced blanket ban on narcotics has been both overstated and simplistic. As I'm sure you're aware, @Villain has contributed a lot of good info laying out the connections to the narcotics racket over different periods in Chicago. The main thing is that the administration was concerned with insulating itself from the repercussions of narcotics trafficking and keeping it at arms length, so you see I think over the broader arc evidence of contradictory or hypocritical policy on this and periodic purging of Outfit associates involved in narcotics. Involvement also of course varied by crew. We know already some of the earlier connections of Heights guys like Roberto to Sicilian drug trafficking, and during the '60's and '70's Alderisio and his guys -- most prominently Nicoletti -- were clearly involved in narcotics trafficking, likely partnered to some degree with large black organizations responsible for street-level distribution operations such as the Vice Lords and Black P Stones. Ovid Demaris discusses Nicoletti overseeing narcotics, and listed Johnny DeBiase as one of his partners, leading me to suspect that Lombardo was also likely involved (and we already know that the Spilotro brothers were involved in drugs). A question here would be whether Alderisio, Nicoletti, et al. had any direct links to Sicilian trafficking operation in this period, or as seems most likely they were being supplied by other US families (Lucchese, Bonnano, maybe Detroit?). There are indications also that at least during the '90's Grand Ave had some degree of oversight of narcotics operations under Lombardo's direction, farmed out to the C-Notes and Spanish Cobras and other Latin Folks organizations (see John Hagedorn's work on this). @Villain I believe has additionally documented apparent drug connections between Outfit guys and the Maniac Latin Disciples, who have had very close affiliations to Mexican cartels and Puerto Rican trafficking operations since the '70's.

The role (both in terms of narcotics and the exact nature of their connections to the Outfit hierarchy and crew structure) of the West suburban "zips" remains a mysterious and I think very important one for understanding the post-1986 Outfit. As I've mentioned before, I've found descriptions of a CPD intelligence unit bust in the late 1980's of what was alleged to be a narcotics ring of "newly arrived immigrants from Sicily and mainland Italy". As Villain and I noted in another recent thread, there were a bunch of Outfit related drug operations busted in the late '80s'. Some of this stuff could've been going on for awhile, or maybe it was started or ramped up under Carlisi, who knows. This could've also had some relation to the folding of Rockford under Chicago as you've noted. Or it could be something else.


FWIW I've been told that there was some sort of Italian police report (I'm not sure which agency exactly, but was told that the report was published in Rome) from some time in the last decade or so apparently claiming that Chicago was among the US families importing the largest numbers of Italian OC operatives. Important if true. We already have evidence of Sicilian involvement in Chicago via LaBalestra and his guys, and as I noted above Aldo Cardelicchio seems to have been connected to Pugliese OC. Given DiFronzo's close family ties to Bari and the fact that Cardelicchio was operating in EP territory, this makes me wonder about potential associations with regional Italian OC groups based on familial and personal connections to Chicago. Lots we don't know, and lots that remains very murky.

Heard the same and would love to see the report.