La Borgata

28/03/2023

Ernie Boy Abbamonte, a Gambino soldier, was ariving uptown one afternoon moving a three-pound package of he**in. Narcotics detectives who had him under surveillance stopped the car‚ searched it, and found the stuff along with two pistols and a shotgun. Ernie Boy was brought to the 25th Precinct station house in East Harlem, but he wasn't arrested. Instead, Ernie Boy was told to have his people bring ransom money to the squad room. In a few hours, the Pleasant Avenue he**in dealers had sent in seventy thousand dollars to the detectives. Once they had their ransom money, the detectives told Ernie Boy that he could leave with his three pounds of he**in—but no guns.

Ernie Boy protested. “I can't go out on the street with three pounds of stuff and no guns. Somebody will rip me off for the stuff, and my people wont like that after they sent over all that money.” The detectives thought it over. Seventy thousand was nice money, and they didn’t want any trouble from Abbamonte’s people. When Ernie Boy left, he left with the he**in and one gun. Sometime later a narcotics detective who worked East Harlem told me, “That’s all bu****it, David. What do you mean seventy thousand. It wasn’t seventy. It was fifty thousand.”

Anecdote by David Durk, a NYPD detective who teamed up with Frank Serpico, to expose corruption on the police force.

19/03/2023

Arnold Ezekiel "Squiggy" Squitieri (1936-2022) was an American former acting boss and underboss of the Gambino crime family. He was also known as "Zeke", "Bozey", and "Squitty".

On August 18, 1970, Squitieri shot garment cutter Desiderio Caban five times on a street in East Harlem. Two New York Police Department (NYPD) officers heard the shots, chased Squitieri by car for six blocks, until Squitieri finally stopped. Getting out of his car, Squitieri approached the officers and told them:

“Don't worry about it, he's only shot in the arm. Let me go; the boys will take care of you.”

A week later mobster Alphonse Sisca met with one of the officers and offered a $5,000 bribe to the policemen. They accepted the deal and removed Squitieri's name from the crime report for the Caban killing. Later on, after the bribery was discovered, the officers were indicted and Squitieri became a fugitive from justice. In January 1972, Squitieri surrendered to authorities.

In 1973, while awaiting trial for the Caban murder, Squitieri and his wife Marie were charged with failing to file U.S. federal income tax returns for three years. The couple had concealed $200,000 in income in bank accounts under false names. For the tax charges, Squitieri would serve four years in prison.
On March 14, 1973, Squitieri pleaded guilty to first degree manslaughter in the 1970 Caban murder. Squitieri was later sentenced to eight years in state prison.

In May 1981, Squitieri was released from prison and soon began selling narcotics for the Gotti crew in New Jersey. In 1982, Squitieri was being supplied with he**in by Angelo Ruggiero and Gene Gotti. In 1986, after John Gotti replaced Paul Castellano as Gambino boss, Squitieri was inducted into the family. He did 11 years [in prison] for he**in trafficking and didn't buckle, so they made him a capo when he got out," said a law enforcement source. "You do 11 years for the family and don't cooperate [with authorities], I guess you earn your credit that way."

"He was a gambling and drinking buddy of Gotti's, and he's a tough guy," said Bruce Mouw, former supervisor of the FBI's Gambino squad. "That's why John liked him - he's a stone-cold killer," Mouw said. "He's done a lot of bad things for these guys. He's done murders for John Gotti."

In 1988, Squitieri was convicted in Camden, New Jersey of conspiring to distribute he**in and was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. In 1999, boss John Gotti promoted Squitieri to underboss. On March 13, 1999, Squitieri was released from prison. In 2002, after the arrest of Gambino acting boss Peter Gotti, Squitieri became the new acting boss.

While on parole from prison, Squitieri received a flat panel television as a gift from undercover FBI agent Joaquín "Jack" García. One evening, Squitieri was watching the TV series about the Cosa Nostra, The Sopranos (All Happy Families...). On the show, family boss Anthony Soprano wants to have a troublesome family member returned to prison. To do this, he sends the mobster a stolen TV set. Soprano then arranges for a parole officer to visit the man and arrest him for possessing stolen property. When the show was over, a frightened Squitieri gave away the TV and purchased his own.

During the early and mid 2000s Squitieri had to contend with ethnic Albanian gangs’ involvement with the gambling rackets in Queens. One particular threat was with the Rudaj Organization (or "The Corporation"), run by mobster Alex Rudaj. At first, Gregory DePalma was able to solve minor disputes, but the Corporation became less cooperative over time.

In September 2005, Squitieri arranged a meeting with Rudaj at a gas station in New Jersey. When the Corporation mobsters arrived, 20 armed Gambino men confronted them.[7] FBI undercover agent known as Jack Falcone stated in his book that Squitieri told the Corporation mobsters, "You took what you took and that's it or there's gonna be a problem." The Gambinos outnumbered the Corporation 20 to 6. Rudaj ordered one of his men to shoot a gas tank if a gunfight ensued. Rudaj eventually listened to advice and stopped interfering with Gambino operations.

On March 9, 2005, Squitieri was arrested on charges of extorting money from construction companies in Westchester County, New York, Mineola, New York, and New Jersey. On June 15, a tearful Squitieri pleaded guilty to conducting an illegal gambling operation and to tax evasion. On June 28, 2006 Squitieri was sentenced to just over seven years in federal prison.

Squitieri was incarcerated at the Devens Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Massachusetts. He was released on December 7, 2012.

Squitieri died on January 27, 2022, aged 85.

18/02/2023

Sonny Black had dead-straight black hair, a square jaw and a Roman nose, Pistone recalled that he had a dry sense of humor and was always challenging Donnie Brasco to arm wrestling matches and losing. (He once spat in Brasco’s face right as they began, just so he could beat him.) But Sonny Black was no gutter gangster: besides the odd glass of French liquor, he was neither a hard drinker nor a degenerate gambler. And unlike Pistone’s close mob associate, Lefty Guns Ruggiero, who never stopped talking about the elusive big score, Sonny Black left his business behind once the workday was done.

“Sonny was a stone-cold killer,” ‘he recalled, “but you could also sit and talk to him just normally.” Black wasn’t freewheeling or flashy. To this day, the only reason he's remembered is because he was the hapless captain who allowed an agent to burrow into his family—a mistake for which he paid with his life. The question of who killed Sonny Black remained unanswered for more than twenty years after his death. Not until 2004 was it revealed that the man who ordered his murder was Joseph Massino.

17/02/2023

14/02/2023

Frank Abbandando Jr. Born on October 17, 1935, who was a Gambino crime family associate, murdered in Florida on December 22, 1995. The 60-year old mobster was run over as he crossed Biscayne Boulevard in front of Party Girls a run down strip club he frequented in North Miami Beach by Rocco Napolitano, the brother of Aniello Napolitano, a small time drug dealer who might have been executed on the orders of Aovandando Jr. After running him down, Napolitano fired several shots into Abbandando as he lay on the ground.

Napolitano told police that he had shot him out of revenge for his brother. He was sentenced to life in prison. Abbandando Jr. was buried in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn.

He was the son of Frank Abbandando (July 11, 1910 — February 19, 1942), nicknamed “The Dasher”, a New York City contract kilier who committed many murders as part of the infamous Murder, Inc. gang. His preferred killing method was to stab nis victims through the heart with an ice pick. After a trial and conviction for murdering a Brooklyn loan shark, he was executed In the electric chair at Sing Sing on February 19, 1947

22/01/2023

On October 4, 1961, the President Street garrison lost its first man to the enemy, in a skirmish at Fourth Avenue and Union Street at five o'clock in the afternoon. It was quite unpremeditated. Chafing from inaction, Joe Magnasco, a hot-tempered cousin of Tony Shots, persuaded the Regina brothers and Punchy Illiano to join him for a cruise around town. They were unarmed, for Joey had issued strict orders that no one was to take any unnecessary risk of getting picked up and put away for violating the Sullivan Law. They had gone barely a mile from President Street when they saw Harry Fontana and his bodyguard standing on the corner. Fontana was Profaci’s capo in charge of the Red Hook district, and the Gallos had long felt he should have supported them in their claims for a better deal.

Magnasco told Punchy to stop the car. He jumped out, stormed over to Fontana and began to berate him furiously for his shortcomings. Punchy, Chico and Big Tony looked at each other, shrugged and climbed out to join him. Getting no response from Fontana beyond a bored stare, Magnasco grabbed him by the lapels to underline his complaint, but Fontana's bodyguard obviously mistook his intentions because he backed off a pace, pulled a .32 from his coat and, in full view of sixty or seventy people, shot Magnasco three times, through the shoulder, chest and leg. He then pointed the gun at Punchy and his companions, who prudently turned tail, ran for their car and drove off in a hurry. Satisfied they now had the field to themselves, Fontana nodded to his bodyguard, who threw the gun over a fence and disappeared in the crowd, and then drove away in the opposite direction.

By a wild coincidence, Tony Shots’s wife Lucille came up from the subway entrance on the corner at that moment and saw Magnasco on the sidewalk, his face masked with blood from the chest wound. “My God,” she said. “It's Cousin Joe.” When the police arrived, they could find only one witness, who later changed her mind.

21/01/2023

“If you're a newcomer with a long sentence, there's a certain period everybody watches you to see whether you have control of the situation. It’s usually a period of about three or four years before you see whether the man is in shock and whether he will come out of it, Usually you can't tell if a guy is in shock on a big bit because he's been In shock since the day he was arrested, and he’s able to function and do everything. You might think he was normal, but when you find out is when he pops out of this shock. Then you see the real person, and that's when the s**t is in the fire, because if he's wacky, it comes out then.” Dr. Bruce had seen Joey Gallo in Attica at around the three-year mark in his “big bit,” when the s**t was truly in the fire and everybody was watching to see if he would come out of it, but it had been a while longer before the question was finally answered in Green Haven.

Just how close Joey had come to disaster was afterward explained to the New York Post by “a white ex-con,‚” Pete W., who Dannemora to Auburn Knew him in Dannemora. Having brought their Concept of “territory” with them, the inmates had been allowed to institutionalise it in a system of “courts.” These were small plots of ground in the yard where they could raise vegetables, cook and mix with whom they pleased. “There are just so many courts, and they’re registered in the names of certain individuals that have been there a long time, and you can accept anybody yon want on your piece of property. The reason for that is there’ less fights. You can stay with who you want and keep away from people you don’t like, just stay with people you have something in common with.

“Gallo wasn't accepted by anyone. So, in other words, you walk the middle of the yard. He started hanging around with Puerto Rican and black guys. In Dannemora, the white inmates, the Italians, have a word for blacks. They call them tuzune or melanzane, the word for eggplant. And they used to call Joe Gallo a melanzane-lover and a tuzune-lover. They used to antagonize him all the time.” At first, the blacks and Puerto Ricans had merely tolerated him. “They tolerated him because he was spending like $40 a month in the commissary and getting a big package from home —salamis, tomato paste, ci******es, fruit and things like that. But apparently he didn't get along with some of them for a while because he had about four or five fights with black and Puerto Rican inmates, and they probably figured it out logically, Well, he’s not being protected by anybody; his own people don't want him,’ so he really was a target within the prison.

“He was a small guy—Joe Gallo’s about five-six. He's a very wiry guy. I'd say he weighs about 140. If you have to say a word, I'd say agile—he's very agile. He held his own. He probably won a few and lost a few, but he had heart. After a while, they accepted him because they couldn't rough him over. He'd figût back. He wasn't a patsy. Probably if he didn't fight back, then they would ve taken everything from him,” With acceptance came a measure of authority. “He used to talk out of his cell to all the black cons, and he used to tell them about how all the crime in Harlem and the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy could be theirs if they had enough heart, All of us used to overhear it. But at the beginning, I think he really didn’t believe what he was saying. It was just a way to belittle the Italian guys. He was saying that white guys bleed the same way as them, and they had to take a little heart and take what was theirs.

But, like I said, I think he was just trying to get back at the Mafia inmates for outlawing him.” With authority came a measure of protection. The hostility of the white inmates was hardly diminished, but they left him alone after that, although Joey was several times in trouble with prison officials for fighting and possession of weapons. “By the time he left Dannemora, he was being accepted by the black guys because they wanted to get ahead in their so-called operations, and he could get them ahead. I mean, if I was a black guy and I met a guy like Gallo, I'd want to get tight with him, too. In prison, everybody wants to be a Mafioso. It's like playing minor-league ball until you get to the big leagues.”

20/01/2023

There was a rule in the Colombo family— not one that everybody lived by, but one that a lot of people died by— that you don’t deal in junk. If you did, you suffered the consequences. Sometimes it was murder, sometimes—as in the case of Odorisio—the loss of your assets. Odorisio was caught by police on Long Island with a planeload of ma*****na. While the Suffolk District Attorney sent him to the pokey, the mob put him in virtual bankruptcy.

They took over all his shylock books, and in my case, they wrote off a twelve-thousand-dollar loan. I had worked a twenty-seven-thousand-dollar loan down to twelve thousand dollars, and because he played with drugs didn’t owe him a dime. Mike Bolino came to me one day after his bust and said, “Joey . . . forget about the loan. You don’t have to pay Marty no more, he got caught with a load of grass.”

The key was that those rules went for some and not for others. When they caught Persico’s son-in-law dealing in drugs in Florida and threw him in jail, he didn't lose a dime of what he had because what he had were assets of Persico’s. The same for Little Allie Boy Persico, Carmine’s son. The mob didn’t penalize him for dealing in drugs because they couldn’t—he was the boss's son.

-Joe Cantalupo-

18/01/2023

There was nothing Joe Colombo liked more than a good fight, a good street brawl, especially when the odds were stacked in his favor, and that was almost always. I remember particularly one event in 1967 when Colombo didn’t hesitate to get into a brawl with a couple of guys. It all started when one of our salesmen got a call that there was for sale and the seller needed a real estate office to handle the sale. So the salesman, whom I’ll call Tony, went with another salesman to look at the house. Now Tony was sort of a showman, a good-looking guy who made the best of every situation. The best of this situation was two good-tooking women in the house, both of them married, whom he played up to while looking the house over.

In fact, he not only played up to them, but he entertained them with his piano-playing talents and, I suppose, some other talents. Later that afternoon, two big guys come to the office, slam the door, and start yelling . .. looking for Tony. Colombo was in his office and heard them, and came outside to see what was going on. “You Tony?” shouted one of the guys at Colombo. “What if I am?” he said, winking at Rocky Miraglia. Then let's step outside,” the loudmouth shouted. “I want a few words with you.” So Joe, the boss of Brooklyn, steps outside, and motions to Tony to stay where he is, not to move. While Tony and I watch, Colombo and Miraglia walk up to these two, and the next thing I know Colombo hauls off and belts the loudmouth.

Rocky, who is an animal when it comes to violence, knocks out the second guy and comes running back into the office to grab a cigarette stand. He runs back outside and begins pounding this unconscious guy lying on the ground with this metal cigarette stand until he’s bleeding like a pig. Finally, Colombo stops him and they come back inside. The two bleeding guys were cops. They had come looking for Tony because he had made a play for their wives. They took a terrible beating, but nothing happened. There wasn’t a whisper from the cops‚ and the FBI agents who were always hanging around were nowhere to be seen. No one filed any charges, and the two cops stumbled away without any help, licking their wounds. And Tony, he kept on doung his thing with females he thought he could come on to.

Anecdote by Joe Cantalupo. Rocco Miraglia, image.

17/01/2023

After Colombo died, there were a number of changes in the family leadership. At first Vinnie Aloi was named the temporary boss. Then he went to jail, and Carmine Persico took over. When Persico was dropped on a hijacking case, Thomas DiBella, an old man Persico could control, took over while Persico’s brother Allie Boy (Alphonse Persico) became the consigliere or adviser before taking over as the acting boss. There were some people who didn’t like that arrangement, and one of those people was Anthony (Abbe) Abbatemarco, an old-time capo with a lot of influence in high places.

Peewee Campagna, however, was a survivor. He did what he was told, followed orders, and kept out of trouble. His job was to work the garment center and answer weekly on action to Sally Albanese, a family soldier, and his boss, Abbatemarco. Peewee sat back and shook his head. “They were stupid . . . very stupid,” he said. “Whaddaya mean?” I asked. “They were upset over the way Allie Boy was running the family,” he explained. “They thought he was too greedy, and they wanted a piece of the pie, so they went over his head ... they went to the Commission. Abbe had some friends there . . . or so he thought. “So Abbe presents his story to the Commission, and the Commission questions Allie Boy, who, you gotta remember, sits on the Commission when Junior (Carmine Pergico) isn’t around.

“The next meeting of the Commission, they have Allie Boy there, and Sally and Abbe and the other Commission members. They've listened to the story, now they hand down the ruling. The ruling is that Allie Boy is the acting boss of the family, and if Allie Boy wants to take the whole pie, he can take the whole pie. If he wants to take a piece, he can take a piece, and if he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t have to. He's the boss. You, Sally, and you, Abbe, you do what vou are told. So now you shake hands, you kiss and make up, and you forget the whole thing.”

“What happens now, Joe,” Peewee continues, “is that Allie Boy is in the position that if these guys do the slightest thing wrong, they go.” Then he gives me an example. If Sally Albanese is at a table with Allie Boy and he's drinking black coffee and he spills a drop, that would be enough of an excuse for Allie Boy to use to get rid of him ... and that's what happened to Sally. Allie Boy got rid of him.” Peewee didn’t say that about Abbatemarco, who, as I said, had friends in high places. Abbatemarco just disappeared. A lot of people thought he had been killed, but he wasn't. He was allowed to disappear—make himself scarce, change his name, move someplace. know that up to a year ago the FBI knew where he was.

The Commission had given Allie Boy a license to kill by backing his hand . . . and kill he did.

Anecdote by Joe Cantalupo.

14/01/2023

With all this new competition, the American Mafia also went back home. From the late 1960s on, Sicilian immigrants—called zips— entered the United States, legally and otherwise, and joined ItalianAmerican gangs. Cesare Bonventre, well connected through two uncles in the Bonanno family, came over in 1968 and rose quickly by killing up to twenty people. He was too ambitious, though, offending more-assimilated Mafiosi, and in 1984 was murdered, chopped in pieces, and stuffed into three oil drums. The zips did expedite dope deals such as an elaborate operation that smuggled in $1.65 billion worth of he**in over five years and distributed it through pizza joints around the country.

But the Sicilians, because of their drugs and bumptious foreignness, further disrupted the diminishing level of trust within the beleaguered American Mafia. “You can't trust those bastard zips,” Lefty Ruggiero of the Bonannos warned an associate. “Greaseballs are motherf**kers. When a zip kisses, forget about it. They hate the American people. . … You cannot give them the power. They don't give a f**k. They don’t care who's boss. They got no respect. There's no family.” As of the late 1980s, none of the new organized crime groups yet enjoyed the entrenched connections of the Mafia in America. new gangsters had no power in labor racketeering, and few lines to crooked politicians or lawmen. Their turfs were smaller and more precarious. Taken together, though, they threw the underworld into chaos, a degree of disorganized contusion not seen since the early days of Prohibition.

The new groups dealt mainly in drugs, and those volatile commodities wiped out all the old rules. Anyone who deals in junk,” said Gennaro Angiulo, “will tell the feds anything they want to hear.” Coked-up gangsters would kill anyone, including cops and uninvolved women and children. That made lawmen even angrier and more intent on the chase. Riven from within, besieged by the new criminal gangs, and pursued by waves and waves of federal prosecutions, Mafiosi faced difficult times, the worst they had known. The one-two punch of electronic surveillance and flipped wiseguys meant the effective end of omertà, the ancient code of silence toward the law. If authorized bugs and taps did not directly record the embarrassing evidence, someone high in the Mafia—Angelo Lonardo of Cleveland, Frank Bompensiero of San Diego, Vincent Cafaro of the Genovese—would come forward to sing and inform, to buy mercy for himself and send away his old comrades instead.

"People don’t train their people no more,” lamented Aniello Dellacroce of the Gambinos. “There's no more respect. There’s no more nothing.” The acids of modernity ate away at everyone, even the antimodern Mafia. The younger Mafiosi were bound together mainly by fear and self-interest, no longer by kinship, culture and tradition. That was not enough. “My Tradition has died in America,” said Joe Bonanno, himself the author of a revealing autobiography. “The way of life that I and my Sicilian ancestors pursued is dead. What Americans refer to as ‘the Mafia is a degenerate outgrowth of that life-style.“ Degenerate, maybe, but not dead. For years, hopetul observers had been announcing premature obituaries of the Mafia. According to theories of ethnic succession in organized crime, Italian gangsters should have disappeared by the 1980s.

The general levels of education, income, and white-collar status of ItalianAmericans were now at or beyond national norms. Italians could no longer be described as a marginal group, poor and ignorant, needing crime as a way out. Yet the Mafia remained the strongest group in the underworld, the only one with truly national scope and six decades of continuity and killing reputation behind it. In fact, higher education and economic mobility did not necessarily turn younger Italians away from organized crime. Some of the Mafia's rising stars in the 1980s—Sal Testa of Philadelphia, Vincent Ferrara of Boston, Michael Franzese of the Colombos— were college educated, with the skills and discipline to make ther way through the upperworld. Mafia fathers still hoped their sons would follow family tradition.

Joseph Pistone, an FBI undercover agent, spent six years among the Bonannos and Colombos. “Their children were all involved in the Mafia,” Pistone told the Nunn committee in 1988. “They were all well aware of what their fathers were doing, and they were all thieves in their own right. I did not find anyone that I dealt with that tried to steer their sons away from a life of crime.” It came down to this: underworld life was still too easy, plush, and thrilling for some people to resist. Greg Scarpa, a Colombo capo, dressed and spoke well, like any good citizen of brains and privilege. “He is very, very bright,” said his former attorney in 1986. “He could have been a lawyer probably, or run any big business. But it would be no fun to him.”

Fun: the pleasures of deference and opulence, without the bother of working hard and earning them, kept organized crime attractive no matter how perilous the attention of racketbusters became. “As a wiseguy, Lefty Ruggiero exulted, “you can lie, you can cheat, you can steal, you can kill people—legitimately. You can do any goddamn thing you want, and nobody can say anything about it. Who wouldn’t want to be a wiseguy?”

09/01/2023

Both Castellano (Gambino) and the Fat Guy (Genovese) were acting in concert to rid the West Side of both Irish factions, considering them too wild, unmanageable and bad for business. Their “game plan” was: once the small number of “old-timers” were dispatched, then both families would focus their attention on the Westies, specifically Jimmy C. and a half dozen other “thinkers.”

Eddie Cummiskey got the handle “The Butcher”, not from the fact that he had learned to be a meat cutter during a short stint in Attica Prison in the 1960’s, but more so for the state-of-the-art manner in which he applied those newly learned talents upon his numerous victims. It was common knowledge that he enjoyed his “work” and approached it with the gusto of a ghoul. It is supposed that it was he whom Jimmy Coonan studied under, and learned the art of dismembering the unfortunate. “Pickling pricks” or keeping some bums head in a freezer for months on end to “goof on” when things were slow was a good indication of their psychopathic mindset. But then, some might say that that's like the pot calling the kettle black, I understand.

Taking out “The Butcher” was like an instant replay of the Devaney job over on Lexington Avenue, and many others: the same modus operandi down to the minutest of details. It amazed me how guys living the lives they did, with so many skeletons in their closets, would fall so easily into these death traps, exposing themselves like sitting ducks. J.J. was worried about Cummiskey, but to me he was just another guy whose skull would shatter upon the impact of a .38 hollow nose slug like everybody else's--always serving to make me more aware of my own vulnerability and mortality. The qualifying difference between myself and this breed of predator, the difference that served as my saving grace, was that I was not greedy and had no hunger for power in any sense. My demons were personal ones whom I was well on my way to exorcising in an inconventional manner.

As I sat, once again unnoticed, at the far end of the bar studying Cummiskey , felt both a sense of empathy and anger because in him I saw so much of myself. I wondered how many more times I would have to kill myself before the demons were appeased. As I began to walk towards “The Butcher” and the door, he said the most eerie thing. “Had a great day yesterday. Cant say let's do it again next year, cause any day someone might walk through the door and blow my brains out, right?” he guffawed. “That’s right, buddy,” I whispered silently, seeing the short dark hairs on the back of his neck as I pointed the short snub-nosed barrel above his right ear and squeezed off. I watched the bright red fruit of my labor paint the bar’s side wall, as the roar of the gun seemed to thunder Its approval.

Most men seem to freeze in such moments of horror. The exception will react instinctively, as did one of “The Butchers boys, “What da f**k?” a squat, barrel-chested gorilla snorted lowering his head to charge. I cocked the gun, still backing towards the door. “Take just one step and you'll join your friend,” I commanded quietly, but the words resounded thunderously in the bars deadly stillness. Backing out onto the sidewalk, I looked both ways casually then began my home-run trot towards 11th Avenue. The questions never changed, as once again I slid into the passenger's seat breathless. “You got him? Hes gone? “Yeah, he's gone, He's gone.” Each time with a great deal less enthusiasm than had the wide-eyed knave who began this descent into hell. Once again, that night, a short blip on the radio identified the assailant as a Hispanic of medium build and complexion, with an Afro!

Anecdote by Joseph ‘Mad Dog’ Sullivan.

06/01/2023

In prison, Danny Grillo met James Coonan, an ambitious young Westie with a lingering grudge against the long-time boss of the gang. After Danny and Coonan were paroled, they had regular reunions in Gemini Lounge-type bars on the West Side. This was how Danny learned that Coonan and some followers had dreams of becoming the most important Westies. He told Roy the group was ruthless but underfunded. Where Danny just saw intrigue, Roy saw opportunity; if he bankrolled Coonan and helped him take over, Coonan would have to share underworld power on the West Side with the Gambino family. Roy saw a new vein of riches for Paul—and a button for himself. ‘Let’s meet this kid,’ he said. ““Maybe we got business.”

Several meetings were held in a trailer near a sewage treatment plant on Wards Island, an outcrop in the East River where New York had also placed the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane. A Westie employed at the plant told Roy that the underwater currents swirling around the island were so swift that if a body was properly “opened up’’—stomach and lungs punctured—it would sink and sail past the southern tip of Manhattan and then on out to sea without ever popping to the surface—perpetually and deeply asleep ‘with the fishes.’ Unlike his followers, but like Roy, thirty-year-old Jimmy Coonan came from a respectable middle-class family; his father was a Hell's Kitchen tax accountant. He told Roy that the Westie leadership was in shambles because of the semiretirement of one Mickey Spillane; besides having the same name as the Brooklyn-born writer of copsand-robbers books, Mickey Spillane was the Irish equivalent of Carlo Gambino in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Coonan hated Spillane because Mickey had slapped his father around when Coonan was nineteen years old. He had vowed to kill Spillane but got caught trying to murder someone else and went to prison. In the interlude, Spillane began slowing down; at age fiftythree, he even moved out of Hell's Kitchen. Many former associates began going their own way; nobody was steering the ship. Roy saw that it was going to be easy to strike a deal with Coonan. Coonan was still unsure of himself and plainly awed just to be having meetings with associates of the Gambino family. In prison, Coonan was friendly with many Italian inmates and came to the notion that Irish criminals would be a lot more effective if they had a tradition like the Mafia, with its secret oaths, rules, and rituals. With embarrassing reverence, he told his little band that they could dominate the West Side by making an alliance with “the Italians from BrookIyn.”’

Roy loaned Coonan fifty thousand dollars so Coonan could make some impressive loans in West Side bars. Then they and a few others from each of their crews hijacked a tractor trailer load of newfangled videocassette recorders, at the time worth about a thousand dollars each—and split the profit. Money paved the way for the alliance; blood sealed it. Just as Roy bound himself to Nino by murdering blue-movie distributor Paul Rothenberg, Roy would bind Coonan to him by murdering the man who slapped the young Westie's father around years before— Mickey Spillane. The ambush-murder occurred at night on a Friday the 13th in May. Roy hid behind a first-floor staircase in a Queens apartment building and waited for the old Westie to come down from the second floor to talk to an acquaintance—Danny Grillo, who had just rung Spillane’s doorbell.

As the victim walked out the door, Roy came from behind and both he and Danny opened up with silencerequipped pistols. Spillane started running, but they followed him into the street and shot him several more times. Chris Rosenberg and Henry Borelli were parked in a nearby car, the Gemini twins in another, in case they were needed, but the second volley did the job. Spillane was left on the street so everyone would know he was dead and believe that Jimmy Coonan had taken his revenge. Danny called Coonan. “Congratulations,” Danny said, we got you your birthday present a little early this year.”