This Week In Gang Land
Jailed Mobster Vincent Basciano Still Fighting Legal War With Feds Over Prison Tapes
The
ghost of late Bonanno boss Joseph Massino continues to haunt his jailed
acting boss successor Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano in his so-far losing
legal battle with the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office.
The prosecutors were ordered to respond next month to a longstanding claim by the flashy Bonanno wiseguy that they violated his Fifth Amendment rights when they wired up turncoat Mafia boss Joe Massino to get Basciano to admit a murder under the penalty of death — and then used the tape recordings to convict him at trial, Gang Land has learned.
The Brooklyn prosecutors have managed to duck similar orders for three years now, so there's no guarantee the feds will finally offer up a legal defense to Basciano's claim that the feds knew that mob protocol required Vinny Gorgeous to answer all the questions that his boss asked him about the 2004 murder of gangster Randy Pizzolo — or be killed.
BOP Slashes Skinny Teddy's Sentence Of Nine Months Behind Bars To Four
Say
this about the Federal Bureau of Prisons: It doesn't hold a grudge. A year after Mafia boss Theodore (Skinny Teddy) Persico put one over on
the BOP while at a halfway house, the agency cut his nine-month prison term
for violating his supervised release (VOSR) to four months and placed him —
you guessed it — in the same halfway house, Gang Land has learned.
New Book On The History Of The Bonanno Family Co-authored By Joe Pistone In The Works
The
Bonanno crime family, for all its lethal infighting, treachery and
backstabbing across the decades since its long-ago inception, managed to
rise from the ashes of its past in the 1990s, dodging prosecutors focused on
the other New York crime families.
