It started on the Brooklyn waterfront. A long shoreman’s son raised in the shadow of the docks, learning early that power belonged to the men who could enforce it. His name was Anthony Casso. By the 1980s, he was the underboss of the Lucay’s crime family, ordering murders, arranging bombings, and corrupting police detectives…
The cell block at United States Penitentiary in Maran, Illinois was loud on the evening of March 18th, 1997. Wednesday night, basketball game on the television in the common area, Bulls versus Knicks. But most inmates weren’t watching the game. They were playing their own game, numbers, the prison gambling ritual that happened…
The meeting was set for 2 p.m. on October 14th, 1983 at a diner in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Russian territory. Michael Franesi, 32 years old, captain in the Columbbo crime family, arrived with two associates. Across the booth sat Marat Balagula, 42, one of the most powerful Russian mobsters in New York. With him…
been off of work for like two months. So, on call and it’s kind of slow and I need some money. >> This is Sonia Owens. She’s >> Las Vegas has always been packed, but in 2026, something unexpected happened. Hotel bookings dropped, tourists stopped coming, and the city built on visitors took a…
Chicago, 1938. While Al Capone was rotting in federal prison and the city was still rebuilding from the depression, a boy was born on the near west side. George Davis. No headline, no announcement, just another black kid in a neighborhood the rest of Chicago had already decided didn’t matter. But here’s what you…
January 21st, 1986. Kansas City, Missouri. A federal courtroom on the fourth floor of the Charles Evans Whittaker United States Courthouse. The jury filed back in after deliberating for four days. Five men sat at the defense table. Joseph Joey Dove’s Aiuppa, 78 years old, acting boss of the Chicago Outfit. Jackie the Lackey…
April 12th, 1878. The Lello Street Jail, Lower East Side of Manhattan. A man who once owned every judge, every cop, every ballot box in New York City lay dying on a prison cot. His name was William Majir Tweed. He weighed close to 300 lb, but the pneumonia had hollowed him out. His…
In 1930, a black immigrant woman from the Caribbean sat down in Harlem and did something no gangster in America had ever done. She placed a paid advertisement in the New York Amsterdam News. In it, she published the names of every police officer >> >> she had bribed, the exact dollar amounts she…
Not the feds, not witness protection, not 14 murder confessions, not a new name, a new city, or a new life in a small town in Maine where nobody knew his face. None of it could stop him from going back to the exact streets that made him. And on Halloween morning, 2021 at…
March 1999, Ozone Park, Queens. Anthony Fat Andy Rugiano died at home. Natural causes, age 72. He’d been out of federal prison for 2 years. Served 13 years of a 40-year sentence for racketeering. 46 years in organized crime. Made by Albert Anastasia in 1953. Rose to captain in the Gambino family. Ran one of…
End of content
End of content