There is a version of Maria Felix’s life that begins in a darkened movie theater. A young woman and her husband arriving after the film has started, settling into their seats once the lights are already down, >> [music] >> and leaving before they come back up, before any other pair of…
September 14th, 1987, 9:15 on a Monday night, a quiet street in Biloxi, Mississippi. Judge Vincent Sherry sat at the desk in his home office working on legal files under a single lamp. His wife Margaret was in the back bedroom on the phone laughing with a friend. The doorbell rang. Vincent…
December of 1989, a house in Howard Beach, Queens. A man 49 years old dying of the cancer that had been spreading through his lungs for years in a neighborhood he had known his entire life waiting for a visit that was not coming. The man who would not come had been…
There is a moment in the history of American organized crime when everything that mattered about loyalty, power, and the architecture of criminal enterprise came down to the sound of a voice on a recording. The voice belonged to John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino Crime Family, the most powerful criminal…
November 12th, 1941. 6:45 in the morning. The Half Moon Hotel, Coney Island, Brooklyn. Room 623, 6th floor. Abelis, 34 years old, 5’2 in tall, built like a fire hydrant, was found broken on the kitchen extension roof below his window, bed sheets knotted together. a wire from a radio, a body…
There’s a barber shop on Bath Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn that looks exactly like a hundred other barber shops in New York City. Three chairs, a row of mirrors, the smell of talcum powder and barbside, a TV mounted in the corner playing whatever game was on, a red, white, and blue…
What was life really like inside the Gambino crime family’s infamous Ravenite social club? Let’s check it out. I’m James Gladwish and welcome to OC Shorts, bringing you detailed historical snapshots of the Mac Mafia and other organized crime. Feel free to subscribe if you like that sort of thing. Social clubs…
John Sebastian Loraca was born in Sicily in 1901, entering a world defined by poverty, tradition, and upheaval. As a teenager, he left the Mediterranean island behind and arrived in the United States, settling in the Pittsburgh area during a period of massive Italian immigration. Like thousands of others, Loraca sought opportunity…
February 27th, 1999, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Tony Siko walked onto the set of The Sopranos wearing a tracksuit and gold chains, ready to play Paulie Walnuts. But here’s what most people don’t know. Sir wasn’t acting. He’d lived this life. 28 arrests, 7 years in prison, bullet wounds, armed robbery, extortion. This wasn’t…
March 18th, 1980. Howard Beach, Queens. Late afternoon. It was a Tuesday. Frank Gotti was 12 years old. He had made his school football team that morning. The kind of news a 12-year-old boy carries around all day feeling it in his chest. He could not wait to tell his friends. After…
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