You Can't Buy Publicity This Good

Well, Rudy has someone upstairs smiling upon him.

There's a story starting to get picked on this beautiful fall day that when he was going after La Cosa Nostra in the 80s, then-US Attorney Rudolph Giuliani was within one vote of being rubbed out by the Five Families in New York.

I'm sorry, but the guy was already running on a claim of having the biggest set east of the Mississippi, but this pretty much just made those puppies golden, too!

It's coming out as part of a trial, so I don't know how manipulatable all that is, but if it's not then the good Lord must really be a Boston(?) fan, too....

"You're Sicilian, huh?"

I was reading a nice blog the Chicago Sun Times has on the Lombardo trial, which I will probably post an update on later, but it drew me back to the classic scene from True Romance.  You'll notice a younger Tony Soprano in this scene, too.

This is why Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken make  the big bucks.

(Language not fit for little people, Leslie.)

Operation "Family Secrets" Trial Gets Under Way

The "Family Secrets" Trial began in Chicago federal court yesterday.  As we've discussed, the most notable Outfit figure on trial is Joey "The Clown" Lombardo.

The jury trial, in which  the jurors are being kept relatively anonymous, got off to an auspicious start when a fake explosive device was found outside the suburban home of Kurt Calabrese, one of the key witnesses expected to testify.  The home, described as one of the more modest on the block by the Trib, is in ritzy Kenilworth.

It is not known if it was merely a prank or some kind of message.  (Remember in Godfather when Pentangeli's brother was brought over from Sicily when he was to testify in front of the Congressional committee?)

At the top of this posting is Joe Pesci's character in Casino.  He was portraying the real-life Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, shown below with his then-lawyer, now-Las Vegas Mayor, Oscar B. Goodman.  His murder, also portrayed in the movie, is one of the alleged acts that are keeping these men behind bars on this Summer Solstice.

Blogging Should Pick Back Up

I was just feeling a bit lacking in anything to say the last few days and no urge to blog came up so...I didn't.

But that should end now that a big mob trial is starting in Chicago. This one has a lot of connections that I find interesting, and you may, too.

Among several other men of Italian heritage, on trial is one Joey "The Clown" Lombardo (pictured above).

As alleged members of the Chicago Outfit, they're accused of taking part in a wide range of mischief, including the murder of Tony "The Ant" Spilatro, which was also the cornfield killing (there's some debate if it actually took place there) of the Joe Pesci character in Casino.

So this also brings in a connection to current Las Vegas Mayor Oscar B. Goodman.

Here's the article from a newspaper I used to deliver when I was a kid...definitely more on this to come.

"There certainly is no indication there's a mafia war going on."

Those are the words of NYC Police Commish Ray Kelly.

But with two mob-related murders
in three days in New York,  the situation could get interesting.

Some folks are starting to wonder (wish?) if the city could see its first mob 'war' since the early 1990s.

Alla tua salute.

Phil Leotardo and the Pygmies in New Jersey

Once again, Frank Vincent got one of the best lines in last night's Sopranos.

Since I've been reading some of these mafia books lately, one little thing jumped out at me that made me snicker.

When he was putting out the order on Tony's head, he talked about how the Jersey family makes everyone, they don't do the initiation rites correctly and "they have no respect for this thing."

"This thing" was not a lazy use of language, but rather something kind of specific. La Cosa Nostra (LCN) translates to "this thing of ours."

The Mafia is also called the Syndicate, the Mob, and the Cosa Nostra (Our Thing).

Answers.com

I'm not breaking any ground here, uncovering a hidden truth, but it just kind of proved again how carefully David Chase writes this show.

I'll Recommend This Before Finishing It

I've been enjoying parts of the last two wonderful-weather weekends in Cleveland (insert oxymoron joke here) reading John L. Smith's Of Rats and Men, a biography of Las Vegas Mayor Oscar B. Goodman.

What an enormously-entertaining read.

While I knew that Goodman was known as a mob lawyer before entering politics, and that parts of the movie, Casino, were reputed to be true, I never knew just how much until I started getting into this.

Without recounting the whole story, Oscar grew up in Philadelphia and ended up in Vegas sort of by accident, if you believe him.  Among many others, he defended Tony "The Ant" Spilotro (the Joe Pesci character in Casino) and Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal (the DeNiro character in the same flick).  Both of them were at least as colorful in real life as they were in the movie.

The amazing thing to me is Goodman's ability (at this point, I'm up to the early 1990s, while he was still a practicing attorney) to fool us, himself, or both, in maintaining that 'there is no mob.'

I can't wait to read more of this highly entertaining book.  It would probably appeal to anyone who's visited Vegas (it's been a few years for me, but now I find myself getting a bit of a hankering), gets off on mob books and movies, or enjoys legal drama.

A little side trivia...in the court scene in Casino when Ace Rothstein is fighthing for his work permit from the Gaming Commission, Goodman plays himself in the fight against real-life butthead, Senator Harry Reid.   The Mormon was the former head of the Commission.

Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli.

While I've always been into movies like Godfather and Scarface, I'd not put much effort into reading non-fiction about it.  

This changed when I picked up Corn Sugar and Blood:  The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia, by Rick Porrello.  It's a quick read history of the Cleveland Mafia.

Porrello, a Cleveland-area cop, is a descendent of one of the two major 'families' in the corn sugar wars that ended up causing a lot of death and destruction in Cleveland during Prohibition.

The other major group in these wars was the Mayfield Road Mob, which was based out of Cleveland's Little Italy section where I now live.    It's got money, gambling, bootlegging,  sliced necks, sex, people getting shot, bombs going off....  all the things you kids love.

While it's certainly not the most amazing prose I've ever laid eyes on, I really enjoyed reading about events that happened at places near where I now live.... and some of which I walk by every day and can see from my living room window!

One thing I found out through a little more research is that the head of the Cleveland Mafia for a time in the late 70s lived in a house that is still just 3 doors down from me.   He died in prison in the 80s after a RICO conviction.

Luckily, this Porrello seems to have found his calling and I've picked up another one of his books, about the murder of Cleveland hood Danny Green.  More about how they blew up the Irishman in a later post.