Jerry Capeci NYT
Quote:

Jerry Capeci was trying to get his mitts around an international tale written in blood, a case that put together a Mafia boss in Montreal and murders in Brooklyn and Acapulco, Mexico. Mr. Capeci hoped to get to the bottom of it. He has been chronicling the Mafia for nearly four decades, first for two New York tabloids and now for his own website, ganglandnews.com. He has also produced half a dozen gangster-themed books, including a new one about a big-time informer — “Mob Boss: The Life of Little Al D’Arco, the Man Who Brought Down the Mafia” — written with the estimable columnist Tom Robbins.

But his pursuit of the three-nation affair had hit some hurdles, and Mr. Capeci let frustration show during a recent lunch at an Italian restaurant in Corona, Queens.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s me,” he said, “but it seems that prosecutors and agents and cops, more and more, have the Rudy Giuliani attitude.”

Meaning what? It did not sound like praise.
“Meaning ‘I’m not going to tell you anything,’ ” he said. “The government seems to make you go through hoops to gather what normally is public information. It seems to be a trend that began, in my view, when Rudy was U.S. attorney in the Southern District.” That was in the 1980s, before Mr. Giuliani was elected mayor.

Pre-Rudy, Mr. Capeci said, “there was less of an us-versus-them attitude when you dealt with law enforcement.” What too many officials ignore, he said, is that they are, at best, temporary custodians of public information, not its proprietors.
We invited Mr. Capeci (pronounced kuh-PEA-see) to a meal out of curiosity. How does one go about tracking the five Mafia families of New York? The public’s fascination with the subject seems endless. At the very least, the mob never falls out of the news for long...


"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives."
Winter is Coming

Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.