Organized Crime

Sex, Money, Murder Sticky

Dec. 18, 2009

Peter Rollack

Peter Rollack’s Sex, Money, Murder gang found its niche in running drugs from the projects of the Bronx to North Carolina in the early 1990s. By age 19, "Pistol Pete" was a millionaire and had thousands of "soldiers" in new chapters in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Patterson, Trenton and Philadelphia. He thought nothing of murdering slow payers or snitches, particularly snitches. Snitches would do him in at age 24.

by Randall Radic

Soundview is a low-income residential neighborhood located in the south central section of the borough of the Bronx in New York City. The low-income public housing development in Soundview is managed by the New York City Housing Authority. Soundview has a population of 80,000 people, primarily African-American and Hispanic. Most of these people live below the poverty line and receive public assistance, including AFDC, Home Relief, Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid.

In short, Soundview is hell on earth. Poverty, disease, drugs, and violence is a way of life. There’s no hope and only a few find a way out.

During the 1960s, youth gangs became part and parcel of the landscape. The first and most famous gang was The Black Spades, originating in the Bronxdale Houses. The Black Spades rapidly achieved renown and dominated the area, controlling every housing project in the neighborhood. Through sheer brutality, the Black Spades became the most feared gang in New York City.

Sex, Money, Murder (SMM) came on the scene in 1987. SMM was one of the sets (gangs) of the New York Gang Alliance. Because of an ongoing power struggle, where each gang wanted to be number one, SMM flipped. They left the NYG Alliance and became a sanctioned set of the Bloods. The various sets of the Bloods had decided it was in their interests to come together as the East Coast United Blood Nation (UBN). This was in 1993.

At this time, Peter Rollack was the unchallenged leader of Sex, Money, Murder. Because of his tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, Rollack was nicknamed Pistol Pete. And usually, Pistol Pete didn’t bother with the questions.

Scarface in Paradise Sticky

Nov. 30, 2009 Special to Crime Magazine

(This excerpt is from Ron Chepesiuk’s book, Gangsters of Miami, True Tales of Mobsters, Gamblers, Hitmen, Con Men and Gang Bangers from the Magic City, which Barricade Books (Barricadebook.com) published in November 2009. Available on Amazon.com. All rights reserved.)

by Ron Chepesiuk

In 1928 Al “Scarface” Capone became the first big-time mobster to journey to Miami and stay, at least for part of the year. Capone was at the pinnacle of a criminal career that was making him the most famous gangster in America history. By the late 1920s, Capone’s flamboyant style had captured the imagination of mainstream America, and he was a high-profile celebrity, just like the famous athletes and movie stars of his day.

Born on January 17, 1899, to Italian-American parents, Al grew up on the mean streets of Brooklyn. At 5’ 10’ tall and 225 pounds, the beefy gangster was a born street fighter. More than a few times Capone ended up in a vicious knife fight, which explains how Capone got his nickname. Tough men could wet their pants in his presence, knowing Scarface could have them killed with an eye blink.

Frank Sinatra and the Mob Sticky

Frankie and the Boys 1976 - Left to right: Paul Castellano, Gregory DePalma, Sinatra, Tommy Marson, Carlo Gambino, Aladena Fratianno, Salvatore Spatola, Seated: Joseph Gambino, Richard Fusco

The recent release of Sinatra's extensive FBI file exposes his mob connections in voluminous detail, putting to lie Ol' Blue Eyes' most celebrated claim that he did it his way.

by J.D. Chandler

Rumors of mob connections hounded Frank Sinatra throughout his storied, tumultuous life. His denials were as ready on his lips as his trademark song ''My Way'' became in his waning years. J. Edgar Hoover didn't buy it. He thought Ol' Blue Eyes was a murderer and a Mafioso with a golden voice. Despite Hoover's FBI amassing the largest file on Sinatra of any entertainer in U.S. history, none of the damning information there ever made it to a grand jury. Numerous times the government got close to indicting Sinatra, but it never did. Sinatra had friends in the highest places, first President Kennedy and then President Nixon and finally President Reagan. Each, in different ways and to varying degrees, came to his aid when he most needed them, enabling him to front for the mob with impunity.

Recently the FBI released on its web site all 1,275 pages of Sinatra's FBI file. His file may be viewed at http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/sinatra.htm. Beginning more than a year ago, the FBI began posting files of scores of other deceased celebrities it had maintained files on to the bureau's web site. There one can read about Charles A. Lindbergh (1,368 pages), Robert Kennedy (1,263), Joseph Kennedy (1,011), President Kennedy (178), Henry Ford (376), Abbie Hoffman (13,262), Martin Luther King Jr. (16,659), Malcolm X (11,674), Nelson Rockefeller (1,472), Cardinal Francis Spellman (536), Marilyn Monroe (80), Jackie Robinson (131), and, of course, the Mafiosi: Al Capone (2,397), Sam Giancana (2,781), and Carlo Gambino (1,239) to name a few.

The FBI in Boston: Hoover, Lies and Murder

May 13, 2013 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from George Hassett’s just released Gangsters of Boston, which is published by Strategic Media Books (www.strategicmediabooks.com). Gangsters of Boston is available at Amazon, bookstores, as an e-book and at special discount price at the Strategic Media Books web site

by George Hassett

In 1960, when Attorney General Bobby Kennedy launched his historic crackdown on organized crime he had to overcome resistance from the FBI and its director J. Edgar Hoover. For decades, Hoover had vehemently denied the existence of a national network of gangsters.

Privately, he knew that organized crime investigations made for bad statistics – lots of man hours resulting in a relatively small number of arrests. He also knew that mixing wealthy gangsters with underpaid agents – the FBI starting annual salary in the mid-1950s was a pitiful $5,500 – could undermine his FBI’s cherished reputation of incorruptibility.

But the Kennedy brothers would not let up. They had pressured Hoover to fight the Italian mob since John F. Kennedy was senator. Now that he was president and named Bobby his attorney general the campaign intensified.

Chicago’s Original Crime Boss: Michael Cassius McDonald

May 9, 2012

Michael Cassius McDonald

Long before Al Capone stormed into Chicago, a violent little Irish-American ruled the mean streets of Chicago.

by Kelly Pucci

Though long-forgotten by many, latecomers like Capone, Torrio and Colosimo owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Cassius McDonald, the man who brought togethercriminals and elected officials, setting the stage for organized crime in Chicago. During a 50-year career in the underworld, journalists, gangster, mayors and even one president of the United States took orders from Chicago original crime boss.

Michael Cassius McDonald arrived in Chicago just before the Civil War. A teen-aged runaway from Upstate New York, McDonald knew no one in Chicago. His childhood friend and fellow freight train jumper, Henry Marvin, died en route and was buried by McDonald without fanfare.

In the 1850s Chicago became the nation’s railroad hub opening the city to a flood of eager young men with big ideas. Young men like Marshall Field, who opened a retail emporium in downtown Chicago, and George Pullman, creator of the eponymous sleeping and dining cars that made travel by train comfortable and later carried President Abraham Lincoln’s body on a final journey from the White House to Springfield, Illinois.

But when Mike McDonald rode the rails in the 1850s, passengers sat on hard wooden benches as they stared at an unchanging landscape through sooty windows. With little to occupy bored passengers after consuming lunches brought from home, passengers eagerly welcomed the sight of boys called “candy butchers” who trudged through the aisles. In exchange for a few pennies and free transportation to Chicago, runaways and orphans clad in ragged clothing peddled goods for the railroad. Sympathetic passengers, mistakenly believing that the boys received their fair share of profits, bought poor quality goods from the candy butchers. And Michael Cassius McDonald was the most successful candy butcher of his time.

Introduction to Street Legends Vol. 3 – The Supreme Team

Sept. 24 2012

An excerpt from Seth Ferranti’s upcoming book on street gangs, Street Legends Vol. 3

An excerpt from Seth Ferranti’s upcoming book on street gangs, Street Legends Vol. 3. The book chronicles the story of the Supreme Team from its inception to its fall to its rise again. This legendary crew was organized in the early 1980s in Baisley Park Houses in Jamaica, Queens, New York, by a group of teenagers who were members of a quasi-religious sect known as the Five Percenters. Under the leadership of Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff and Gerald “Prince” Miller, his nephew, as second in command, the gang concentrated its criminal efforts on wide spread drug distribution.

The Supreme Team was instrumental in the birth of hip-hop and it ushered in the crack era in New York City with devastating brutality. Its influence on hip-hop has lasted 25 years and is still going strong. This book is their story, in their words and the words of others who were there. It’s brought to you straight out of the penitentiary by Gorilla Convict Publications.

by Seth Ferranti

Just like Hollywood catapulted the Italian Mafia into the mainstream with the Godfather movies, New Jack City documented the devastating crack epidemic and the drug crews that terrorized and held court in the city’s projects. Nino Brown was a fictional character, as was his crew, but you didn't have to look far to find their real life counterparts who dominated the headlines of New York City’s tabloid newspapers. Characters and cliques that seemed to evolve straight out of the pages of a Donald Goines novel rose to prominence, becoming larger than life figures and ghetto stars in their respective hoods.

Street tales, real life crimes, newspaper headlines, Hollywood sensationalism, and rapper’s rhymes have perpetrated, promoted and created a legend of mythical proportions that has grown exponentially over the last 20 years, keeping the Supreme Team, the most infamous crew out of the Southside of Jamaica Queens, ringing bells from coast to coast. As one of the most notorious crews from a deadly era, the team towers above its contemporaries in stature, notoriety and infamy. But it’s not all convoluted hype. Infamy has its price.

Rogue Mobster: The Untold Story of Mark Silverman and the New England Mafia

April 24, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from Rogue Mobster: The Untold Story of Mark Silverman and the New England Mafia by Mark Silverman and Scott Deitche. (Published March 17, 2012 by Strategic Media Books, paperback, 298 pages, $24.95.)

Introduction

The New England underworld had a rough year in 2011. On January 20, 2011 the FBI coordinated the largest ever sweep of Mafia suspects in the country. Over 120 alleged mobsters and associates were taken in, encompassing a dozen different cases involving Mafia families in the Northeast. One of the coups was the arrest of the now-retired boss of the New England Mafia, Louis “Baby Shacks” Manocchio. Shacks led the New England Mafia from his headquarters in Providence, since the Boston faction of the family had faced numerous takedowns from state and federal police. Manocchio’s retirement brought the power base back to Boston, but the North End mob was still battling ghosts from a decade before.

Just under a month after the historic sweep, federal authorities closed in on a Boston mobster that had been on the run from the law since 1994, Enrico Ponzo. Back then, Ponzo was facing a drug indictment. He skipped town and headed west. He changed his name to Jeffrey John Shaw and was living on a small ranch in Marsing, Idaho, worlds away from the streets of Boston. On February 7, 2011, federal agents, acting on a tip, arrested Ponzo as he drove up to his home.

But the biggest catch for law enforcement came on June 22, 2011, when federal authorities, acting on a tip, finally nabbed James “Whitey” Bulger, in Santa Monica, California. Bulger had been there for over a decade with his girlfriend, Catherine Greig. He was No. 1 on the FBI’s Top Ten Wanted list. Sightings of the elusive Irish mob boss had taken agents around the world. Some speculated that he was dead. Others thought that because Bulger had knowledge of the pervasive corruption in the FBI's Boston office that the feds simply didn’t want to find him. And when they did arrest him and Greig they found an arsenal of guns, and $800,000 in cash. Bulger may have been long removed from the criminal underworld in New England but he obviously had the street smarts and connections to live a comfortable life on the run.

The Bulger and Ponzo arrests were parts of the final chapter of an underworld saga that had played out on the streets of Boston and Rhode Island since the late 1980s. Those events also helped Louis Manocchio ascend to the top spot in Rhode Island. The saga was a war for control of the New England Mafia, with the backdrop of Whitey Bulger and his Winter Hill Gang, a corrupt FBI department, and the shifting allegiances of mobsters looking to stay ahead of the law.

Mark Silverman was coming up in the New England underworld during these days. Mark got to see the Boston mob wars of the '90s from both sides. He was with a renegade faction that was challenging the traditional Mafia, which he terms LCN (La Cosa Nostra) and he was with the renegade faction. His ties to the Winter Hill gang, starting from childhood, also brought an element to the story that’s so typical of the New England underworld.