Crime Magazine is about true crime: organized crime, celebrity crime, serial killers, corruption, sex crimes, capital punishment, prisons, assassinations, justice issues, crime books, crime films and crime studies.
Organized Crime
Sex, Money, Murder
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.
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.
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Frank Sinatra and the Mob
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.
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.
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Nixon, Sinatra and the Mafia
July 11, 2009 Updated Feb. 23, 2010
Frank Sinatra
Both Nixon and Sinatra had deep ties to the Mafia. It was only natural that after President John Kennedy dumped Sinatra that Ole Blue Eyes hooked up with the biggest politician in the Mob’s pocket. Sinatra hung around with Nixon and Vice President Agnew so much he even acquired a Secret Service code name, “Napoleon.”
by Don Fulsom
John Kennedy banished Frank Sinatra from Camelot when the singer’s Mafia ties clashed with the President’s crackdown on organized crime. But those well-documented ties didn’t keep President Richard Nixon—a big recipient of Mob payoffs—from wooing the popular crooner away from the Democratic Party.
The courtship actually started with Nixon’s unsavory vice president, Spiro Agnew—who first got together with Sinatra during the Thanksgiving holiday in 1970. They enjoyed each other’s company so much that Agnew became a regular houseguest at Frank’s (Palm Springs) place, and made 18 visits in the months that followed.
The two men played golf together, dined out, talked through the night in Frank’s den, and on one occasion watched the porn movie Deep Throat together. Frank’s guest quarters, once remodeled for John F. Kennedy, were eventually renamed “Agnew House,” according to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan in Sinatra: The Life.
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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.
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The Murder of Rhys Jones
April 9, 2012
Rhys Jones
Teenage gang warfare in Liverpool claimed the life of an 11-year-old boy who was shot to death by a stray bullet on his way home.
On August 22, 2007, 11-year-old Rhys Jones was shot in the back by a stray bullet in the midst of a gang war that had plagued the Croxteth and Norris Green estates in Liverpool for almost a decade. Rhys Jones had no affiliation to the gangs in Liverpool and was merely making his way home from football practice when he and his friends made the fateful decision to cross the Fir Tree Pub car park.
Some time earlier in 2007, a “young scally,” as the locals would say, named Sean Mercer had received an Anti-Social Behaviour Order from the Courts for terrorising a security guard at a local Shopping Centre with close friend Dean Kelly, age 17. Mercer was 16 at this time and was keen to make a name for himself among the leaders of the “Crocky Crew” gang to whom he was affiliated. His desperation to escalate in the ranks of the Crocky Crew and his hatred of the rival Strand Gang member –Wayne Brady – is what eventually would lead to the untimely death of Rhys Jones.
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