Word: capo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Federal Judge Eugene Nickerson disclosed that a trusted member of Gotti's Gambino crime family had secretly taped conversations between the capo and his confederates over a 30-month period. The informant, a self-styled former hit man named Dominick Lofaro, was brazen enough to carry a concealed wire right into Gotti's lair, the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, N.Y. His cooperation with authorities marked the first time that a Mafia "soldier" had ever worked as an informant while on active duty. The intelligence coup, said one New York City police officer, was "like penetrating...
...Irish electrician and an Italian mother, Hill entered the crime business at age eleven, when he took a part-time job at a Brooklyn taxi stand run by the brother of a local mob boss. Under the capo's tutelage, Hill slowly learned how to run crap games, pass off counterfeit money, torch buildings for a fee and, finally, how to take over businesses and squeeze them dry. Along the crooked way, he married a nice middle-class girl from Long Island, who realized rather late that her husband was not just another up-and- coming businessman...
Though Dellacroce was not very forthcoming about his own crimes, he offered the feds a wealth of information about those committed by his enemies and the Commission. After Carlo Gambino, the capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses), died in 1976, Dellacroce told the FBI that another would-be godfather, Carmine Galante, had been marked for death. Dellacroce had reason to know: plans for the Galante hit were hatched in his own headquarters, the Ravenite Social Club in Manhattan's Little Italy. The feds were able to isolate and protect Galante as long as he was in prison for parole...
Buscetta occasionally stood up in the cavernous courtroom to point at defendants he claimed to have known as Mafia members. He identified Gaetano Badalamenti as a onetime capo, or boss, of the ruling Mafia commission in Sicily. Badalamenti, the key defendant, stared back impassively. Gaetano Mazzara's bemused smile turned to a look of disgust when he was picked out at the crowded defense tables and identified as the American distributor for the imported heroin. More such fingering is expected as Buscetta continues to testify in a complex trial that could last as long as six months. Defense attorneys will...
Among the defendants, the big cheese for prosecutors is Gaetano Badalamenti, 50, a Mafia capo who fled Sicily after a bloody gang war erupted in the late 1970s over control of the heroin trade. Badalamenti and his son Vito were ^ arrested in Spain and extradited to the U.S. for trial. The star witness against them will be Tommaso Buscetta, the first Sicilian don to break the Mafia's code of silence and turn informant. The same bloodletting that chased Badalamenti from Sicily drove Buscetta to the protection of the authorities. Since he began talking last year, Buscetta has been shuttled...