Dutch news? What channel its on?

@Mark: Yeah you are right, i think i will wait a bit untill i upload the new charts. Some things might change and keep changing from now on. Thanks USA!!

It was on the "NOS journaal" Mukrenim.

As has been said by most on these forums it'll be very interesting to see what charges stick as a result of these arrests.

Whatever the outcome may be it's certainly huge news, we've had some fairly extensive coverage even on our side of the pond so I can only imagine what the news channels are like in the States. Over the coming days though i'm sure we'll receive less coverage so please keep this topic updated! I'd hate to miss anything.

With regards to some of the earlier posts about the possible end of the Colombo family that may be a bit extreme in my opinion, i've no doubt they'll suffer as a result of these arrests but it would be naive to assume that this would end a family (Just my opinion though). Obviously I could be wrong, and usually am and we'll not know for sure until people have actually been charged but bear in mind the time and effort that has been put into this case by the FBI, this only shows how active these families must still be, if it were the end of one of the five families as we know it rest assured that one of the then remaining 4 would soon be in a position to strengthen as a result of the loss of the other or could allow an entirely new faction to become active.

Another video of the bust

http://www.wpix.com/news/wpix-fed-mafia-arrests,0,6169611.story

Thanks Sonny..
I am surprised that Ligambi isnt mentioned, everyone thought he had it coming soon before 2011 even. So he still maintaints stability there, thats good.

Thanks for the video Ivy.

It isn't all that surprising. The Philadelphia family is so small and it's much harder to penetrate a tight knit group like that. It becomes especially hard when you got a boss like Ligambi. It's obvious they don't have anything substantial on him. He might even be able to get through the next three years without any problems. But if anyone can throw a monkey wrench in his program, it's Skinny Joey Merlino and he'll be out in a few months. We'll see what happens.

Alright fellas,

I stumbled across this site whilst looking for information on the latest arrests (great site by the way).

Thanks for all the info so far, I just wanted to echo Englishman's words and ask that you keep the info comming for those not in the states (im sure you all will anyway even without me asking). There have been a few newspaper bits over here but nothing like the coverage you guys have.

Welcome to the forums Mr Adams.

Out of 127 indicted, what do you think the over/under should be on plea bargains?

I say at least 100.

I have grown to become almost fascinated w the Philly Mob. There is extensive coverage on these guys with George Anastasia posting videos every week. Every week he has a video of the current status and new updates for the Philly Mob. I have grown to become a huge fan of Uncle Joe. I would like to get a chat going regarding Merlino and why the Ligambi crew hasnt been taken down yet

What will Merlino do? I personally think hes always going to be a cowboy and will look to take the spotlight again..

For yrs now Ligambi and his crew were suppose to get taken down. Is this ever going to happen? Seems like they dont have anything good and may never until mby Merlino comes around again.. I happen to like Merlino as well..

Merlino's not a kid anymore. If he's matured while he's been away, and he's willing to truly accept a subordinate spot under Ligambi, maybe he can make a go of it. He's certainly proven that he's a standup guy.

He'll be under intense FBI scrutiny when he gets out, so I wouldn't expect anything too dramatic right off the bat. It should be interesting.

I agree law enforement makes it so difficult for these guys to just jump back in the life after being released. Over the last decade some major new england guys have been released and a lot of them did not resurface and the ones who did usually waited some period of time. In my opinoin merlino will probably resurface but it may take a few years

I agree. I bet that no one in named in those indictments (which I didn't read so I don't know how serious they really are) serves over 8 years. Just a guess. Kinda reminds me of Operation Old Bridge from a few years ago. Most of those guys besides Nick Corrozo who were swept up in that are getting out soon if they arn't out already. That Dragonetti guy , supposedly Corrozo's son-in-law, was named in the Operation Old Bridge indictment as an associate... now he's named in this new indictment as a Soldier. Interesting

Uncle Joe may be the most successful boss in quite some time as well.

As for Merlino, alot of his guys are not happy with the amount of money their making. At Anthony Staino's wedding, the alcohol was flowing and many Merlino guys were talking.. They claim they made alot more with Merlino around. Im sure Ligambi could care less what these guys think.. It will be interesting though bc im sure his crew will back him once hes around. There are rumors that he is going to Florida.. I dont buy this one bit.. He loves this life too much.. In my opinion, Merlino will come out n become prob Consiglere. Staino is the underboss and Ligambi's most trusted guy. I dont see Staino moving unless he does Uncle Joe a favor..

Ligambi probably is a pretty good guy for mafia standards. But to say he's the most successful boss goes too far. The Philly mob is nowadays no more than a street gang.

Bruno will always be the most successful boss Philly had. Not that I'm such a fanboy, but I feel like it's a big shame he was killed.

I would lay good odds that about 25 of them fully cooperate and start singing. This generation doesn't want to spend one night behind bars let alone 5 to 10 years minimum. The Feds better get a lot of cheese ready...the rats will be hungry after flipping.

Damm 25 is quite a big number, I would agree with you if there were more murder charges that were spread out against multiple guys but the crutch of these indictments are gambling,loan sharking, etc i say less than 10 guys flip, a few of them being some colombos given that so many of themn were arrested

i saw this new article that said this sweep has left the colombos with only around 50 made guys on the streets!!

Our favorite reformed mobster (pun intended)

Michael Franzese was on CNN talking about the recent bust, his first Captain Andrew Russo, Russo's sons who were made with/around him, Sonny Franzese, why the feds have been so effective, whats the real deal with the life...

http://ow.ly/3Ib2R

http://ow.ly/3IdCZ

so, is the colombo family dead now since their head is basically cut off.

They were saying the same thing about the big Gambino bust back in 2008. Even for the younger guys, unless they are facing stiff charges such as murder, they can and do usually plead out and only have to serve a fraction of the time.

Unless I just completely missed them yesterday, a number of "detention memos" have been included among the various indictments. There is A LOT of information in them, often even more than the indictments themselves. Check 'em out at the link below.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/lacosanostra.htm

Yeah, I was checking it out they just added those memos recently.

One of them talks about a Walter Samperi a Colombo Associate that was stabbed in an altercation by someone from the Gambino family. The Colombos settled the dispute at a sit down and got a cash payment from the Gambinos. Apparently it was agreed that if the Colombos didn't retaliate, the Gambinos would give up $150,000 - $100,000 of which would come from their stake in the Figli di Santi Rosalia feast in Brooklyn. Looks like Andy Russo was upset with his guys for having a sit down first. He thought they should have retaliated and then reach out.

In the Russo detention memo, it states the Colombos are using firearms in the making ceremonies. Interesting, I remember Basciano wanting to bring that back to the family as they stopped doing it under Massino for fear of being raided and found with weapons. It's funny, the associate who is about to be made complains about being embarrassed at having to bring his own firearm to his own making ceremony. It says the Colombos made 6 guys in January 2009 and then attempted to make 4 more in December 2010 but that one was canceled due to surveillance.

Our notoriously crappy,but very popular, newspaper The Sun had a full page on these aressts yesterday but seemed to get their facts a bit askew. They were more concerned about talking how the DeCalvacantes were the basis for the Sopranos and how Nicky Scarfo was the notorious leader of the Lucheses???????????

Epic Fail?

Structure Keeps Mafia Atop Crime Heap
Strict Hierarchy and Ability to Recruit Have Enabled La Cosa Nostra to Survive Challenges From Other Organizations
By DEVLIN BARRETT and SEAN GARDINER
January 22, 2011

Over the past three decades, Russian mobsters, Chinese gangsters, Mexican cartels and a host of other groups have all grabbed slices of the criminal activity traditionally dominated by the mafia.

But none have come close to exerting the kind of wide-ranging influence still enjoyed by La Cosa Nostra, as the Italian-American mob is known.

That is partly because of how the different gangs have organized themselves. The mafia has a strict hierarchical structure, law-enforcement officials said, and it has proven capable of finding new soldiers. Even after imprisonment of senior leadership, it survives, and in some places thrives, though most experts agree that its operations are now largely confined to its traditional bases in the Northeast and Chicago.

This week's round-up of more than 100 suspected mob members and associates is unlikely to stop the mafia's core businesses: extortion, loan-sharking, fraud and theft. Yet the arrests also indicate how difficult it is these days to be a mafia leader—paranoid about informants, afraid of telephones and dreading the early-morning knock on the door.

"We aggressively attack them…and the sentences are very large, but they continue to roll the dice," said David Shafer, who heads the Organized Crime Branch in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York Office, which also has squads dedicated to Russian and Asian gangs.

The mob has evolved in part by outsourcing, contracting out some of its criminal work to motorcycle gangs, according to Howard Abadinsky, a professor at St. John's University who writes about organized crime. The so-called Outlaws gang has done a lot work in recent years with the Chicago mob, while the Hell's Angels are used by New York City's mafia families. Philadelphia mobsters use a gang called the Pagans.

Russian gangsters were once feared as the next criminal superpower. But their looser structure, which helps them avoid detection by law enforcement, has also kept them from growing into an organization able to recruit the number of members needed to challenge the mafia.

The Russian networks tend to come together briefly for particular criminal plots and then disband, according to Michael Vecchione, who heads the rackets division at the Brooklyn district attorney's office.

Mr. Shafer, the FBI official, said some Russian crooks also realized there were great profits to be made in white-collar crime, such as scams involving insurance or medical fraud, "so why do the extortion or gambling?"

Most Asian gangs, meanwhile, tend to victimize only members of their own immigrant group and therefore remain small compared with much larger mafia families, experts who study the groups said.

In the late 1980s, Chinese and Vietnamese gangs such as the Ghost Shadows, Born to Kill and Flying Dragons were operating in New York City's Chinatown, engaging in gambling, drug-trafficking, prostitution, robbery, extortion and other crimes, including murder.

A series of racketeering prosecutions effectively dismantled the most dangerous of those groups, according to Mr. Shafer, reducing them to smaller, less ambitious groups that he said were more akin to "roaming wolf packs" than true street gangs.

But the true breadth and penetration of some ethnic gangs isn't entirely clear. For instance, Russian criminal networks are particularly difficult to crack because of the foreign-language expertise required, experts said.

One area dominated by the newer gangs is the U.S. drug trade, where Mexican cartels are now challenging the Colombians for supremacy, said John Gilbride, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's New York Office.

The shift in power began in the mid-1990s when the Colombian drug lords started paying the Mexican cartels—whose members transported the cocaine and heroin into the U.S. in tractor trailers and vehicles with hidden traps—with drugs instead of money.

But Mr. Abadinsky said the big drug cartels were "one-trick ponies" and didn't participate in non-drug-related crime since nothing else was as profitable.

So while the days of John Gotti—the "Dapper Don" whose swagger and scheming made him the most wanted mobster of his time—are long gone, the Italian-American mob remains the most powerful criminal enterprise in the U.S., mafia observers say.

A former mobster, who first joined a New York crime family 25 years ago, said: "The mob is still around but the education to it ain't there."

But he said the mob always had a comeback. "It will regroup. Everybody will lay low and see what happens. Then all of a sudden, little by little, they'll come out and they'll start regrouping. They gotta. There's too much money, and you gotta remember their egos won't let them walk away."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704115404576096392318489246.html

Listening to that video it almost sounds like Michael is still in contact with Andy Russo. I'd bet you a million dollars that if somebody from the Russo cam approached Michael and asked him for help, he wouldn't even think twice about it.

No doubt.

There are rats, and then there are rats. In the big scheme of things, Michael Franzese never really hurt anyone. And if he didn't still have a few friends, I doubt he'd be living such an open lifestyle.

Third that. I think his own father would have consented to having him whacked if he had really raised a shitstorm. In the end, what? He went to jail, I'm not even sure he brought anybody down and he spends his time addressing Christian groups. Out of view, no trouble being caused. I think the guy could never betray his father anyway.

good article here...


http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/family_health_plan_MPCyrekysDF2hbRsPo0RYM

Colombo Crime Family on brink of Mob War?

Heads will roll.
The Colombo crime family rats whose taped conversations led to last week’s massive federal bust of 127 gangsters will likely touch off a bloodbath in the family to avenge the betrayal.
“I think they’re going to kill people, because the guys running around making the tapes were made members of the family,” a high-ranking source close to the investigation told The Post.
“I’ve heard that people are looking to retaliate.”
The FBI arrests took down the entire leadership of the Colombo crime family, two top Gambino family figures, and 34 made members of New York’s five crime families — Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Luchese — and families in New Jersey and Rhode Island.
Arrests like that of alleged street boss Andrew 'Mush' Russo and associate Angelo Spata ( second from left) have left the Colombos in disarray. But unlike the old days, it's informants, not hits, that hurt the mob most.
The Colombo turncoats included two “well-positioned” made members — above the rank of soldier — and one associate, the source said.
Made men take an oath of omerta, or silence. They are expected to do anything for the family — including murder.
“I think people in the Colombo family are very much in shock over what happened,” the source said. “That Colombo leadership is a dangerous bunch — they’re reckless killers, and sometimes it doesn’t take much for them to decide someone has to go.”
The first targets of revenge would be the informants, and then guys who brought them into the family. The biggest-ever Mafia sweep hit the Colombos hardest, leaving around 40 made guys on the street, the source said.
Another law-enforcement source, an expert on the Colombo family, said the most important arrest was the de facto leader Andrew “Mush” Russo — which leaves the family rudderless.
“Nobody knows who will take over,” the source said. “There’s nobody left.” Russo, well-liked by the family, was convicted of jury tampering in 1999.
For fellow Colombo Anthony “Big Anthony” Russo, who is not related to Andrew Russo, violence was as easy as spreading butter on bread. In one of the taped conversations by a mob rat, the capo boasted that mobsters “were the only guys willing to go to war.”
In another tape, Big Anthony was getting itchy, telling a confidant he suspected “a rat real close to us.” He swore that when he found the snitch, he would “chop his head off.”
While on parole for a prior racketeering conviction, Anthony Russo was inducted as a made man and soon was promoted to capo. He’s now accused of murder, extortion and loan sharking, among other charges. He faces life in prison.
The relatively unscathed Genovese family, which had only 13 members charged in the bust, is now dominant, said a former law-enforcement official.
“They remain a very powerful group,” agreed Jack Garcia, a legendary FBI undercover agent who posed as moneyman Jack Falcone to infiltrate the Gambino family for three years beginning in 2002. The Gambinos have dropped to No. 2, he said.
“In the Genovese family, you really don’t have that many defectors. They’re still very entrenched in the unions and construction industry,” Garcia said.
The snitches and turncoats who aided investigators underscore a dramatic transformation of the city’s mob from the old days, agents and informants say.
“There have never been so many informants as in the past 10 years, They talk big, but they can’t do the time,” said Joe Pistone, an undercover FBI agent who penetrated the Bonanno crime family as jewel thief Donnie Brasco in 1976.
“With the young guys today, it’s the ‘me generation,’ ” Pistone said. “They want to make their money now and this why so many have gone into the drug business.
“They don’t have the wherewithal to cultivate the politicians and judges. Most of these guys couldn’t point out Italy on a map,” Pistone said.
Former Gambino soldier Andrew DiDonato, who is now living “in Middle America” under a different name, said shaking down drug dealers was a steady source of income in the ’80s and ’90s.
He would approach dealers in Canarsie, Mill Basin and Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, and demand a regular kickback, telling them: “You got one of two choices: We kill you right here, or you pay us weekly.”
And the process of becoming a made man is now just a straight numbers game, decreasing the importance of honor and experience in favor of earning power.
According to Garcia, killing used to be mandatory before induction into La Cosa Nostra. “They felt you would never betray them, because you were dirty yourself,” he said.
Now all “they really want are guys who will make money for the family,” added Garcia, who was invited to be a made man in 2005 simply because he was a “big earner.”
Mob bosses have also rejected the late John Gotti’s flamboyance and public bravado, becoming more secretive.
Gotti held meetings each Wednesday with all his capos at the Ravenite Social Club in Howard Beach, which helped investigators piece together their criminal enterprise.
“We realized that social clubs and gathering together brought unnecessary heat, and law-enforcement an opportunity to identify the players,” said DiDonato, who turned state’s witness in 1997 and blew the whistle on a double murder and other crimes.
DiDonato said more goodfellas are either becoming snitches or leaving the life entirely to avoid hefty prison sentences. Most fear being double-crossed — or killed — by their own mob families.
“The respect in the mob only goes up the ladder — it does not come back down,” he said.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/ope...M#ixzz1BssTxCiN