http://fivefamiliesnyc.blogspot.com/2010/04/wiseguy-slams-wiseguy-in-prison-row.htmlDon’t let that jolly happy face fool you. The guy behind the big smile, Lucchese mobster John Baudanza, is quick with his fists. And he can get downright nasty and ornery when you start badmouthing his relatives, who just happen to belong to the same crime family as Baudanza.
Colombo soldier Vincent (Chickie) DeMartino learned that the hard way a few weeks ago during a brief but violent encounter the men had at the Allenwood federal prison in White Deer, Pennsylvania when DeMartino up and accused Baudanza’s father-in-law and brother-in-law of being “turncoat rats,” just like that, sources tell Gang Land.
“From what I hear,” said one knowledgeable source, “Chickie took a pounding. He’s lucky it happened where it did. If it was outside, the beating would have lasted much longer. It could have been much worse.”
The dustup took place in a common area of the medium security facility at the prison complex early last month. Sources say Baudanza, 39, became enraged when DeMartino, 54, said that Baudanza’s father-in-law, capo Domenico (Danny) Cutaia and his son, Salvatore, were rats, and immediately went after the Colombo mobster.
Baudanza has been at Allenwood since December, following plea deals that resolved racketeering charges against him and the Cutaias, who are housed at other Bureau of Prisons facilities. BOP officials declined to discuss the fight, but sources say the hot-tempered Lucchese pugilist, whose prison stretch for two separate raps in four years won’t end until 2015, was sent to the hole to cool off for the next six months.
Adding insult to injury, Chickie, who’s no slouch when it comes to using his hands, is also licking his wounds and figuring out his next move in a similar dungeon-like cell, sources say. Convicted of shooting rival Colombo mobster Joseph (Joe Camp) Campanella in an attempted rubout in 2001, DeMartino has been behind bars since 2003. He’s been at Allenwood for three years, and is due for release in 2025.
Back in the early 1990s, Baudanza was a rough-and-tumble, up-and-coming Colombo associate. He and DeMartino, were on the same team of family rebels aligned with acting boss Victor (Little Vic) Orena in a bloody two-year-long losing effort to depose family boss Carmine (Junior) Persico and his choice to take over the family, his mobster son Alphonse.
In the mid 1990s, however, love drove both men to new stations in the life, and their ultimate confrontation a few weeks ago.
Baudanza, whose father Carmine is a Colombo associate, and whose uncle Joe is a family capo, fell in love with Danny Cutaia’s daughter and married her. After he joined that family, Baudanza was later inducted into the family business, as a made member of the Lucheses.
DeMartino, who was hit with Colombo war related racketeering charges and jailed, suspected Campanella of making moves on his wife, and complained to their mob supervisor, the late William (Wild Bill) Cutolo. After Cutolo sided with Joe Camp, Chickie gravitated away from Wild Bill, and closer to Allie Persico, who enlisted DeMartino in the 1999 murder plot against Cutolo and another one two years later against Campanella, according to court documents.
