Former New York Mafia made member John Pennisi speaks to Insider about all the ways the mob make their money. John Pennisi was born and raised in an Italian New York neighborhood where the mob had huge influence. He became a made member of the Lucchese crime family in 2013. Pennisi says he decided to leave the mob in 2018 after members of his crew falsely accused him of cooperating with law enforcement. Since leaving the mob, Pennisi has been writing blogs on sitdownnews.com and producing a podcast covering topics of organized crime on
Category Archives: Organized Crime
Legal news for Mafia continually updated from thousands of sources on the web – Global Mafia News. News about organized crime. Commentary and archival information about organized crime from Lawstarz.
For decades a ruthless mafia has ruled in southern Italy. Now the state is fighting back
From the windows of Vittoria Sicari’s top-floor apartment in Vibo Marina, a village on the southern Italian coast, you can see the blue expanse of the Tyrrhenian Sea stretching out to the horizon. It’s a view Vittoria hasn’t seen in 23 years. Back then, she claims, her apartment was stolen.
According to Vittoria, in the late 90s, as she was getting ready to sell the property, a man attended the open house inspection. When he put in an offer, all the other buyers suddenly lost interest. It was the first hint of trouble ahead. But sensing her chance to make a quick sale, she accepted a holding deposit and agreed to hand over a set of keys so he could go inside to measure up.
Convicted hit man’s escape evokes mob’s ‘ruthless’ heyday in one American city
(CNN)Dominic Taddeo was in his early 20s when a US Justice Department lawyer appeared before a Senate subcommittee with a dire warning about the future mafia hit man’s hometown.”Rochester, the home of Kodak, Xerox, and other thriving corporations … is a wealthy city, a ripe plum ready to be plucked by the strongest and most ruthless mob,” Gregory Baldwin, an attorney with the department’s organized crime and racketeering section, said during the 1980 hearing.
In the upstate New York city, the mob was known for detonating homemade bombs by remote control under the cars of rivals, according to Baldwin’s testimony and news reports.But Taddeo plied his deadly trade in the 1980s with a more conventional weapon — a .22-caliber pistol.A man who federal officials say began a life of crime at the age of 16, Taddeo, 64, was a largely forgotten crime figure until his March 28 escape — less than a year before his likely release — from a Florida halfway house while on a medical appointment.
His short-lived breakout took mob observers back to the heyday of La Cosa Nostra in the Lake Ontario city of about 200,000 — where the tragicomedy antics of rival factions at times evoked the third-rate mobsters in Jimmy’s Breslin’s novel “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”
Criminal Record: Vladimir Putin’s relationship with the Russian mafia
While the criminal underworld is thriving in Europe nobody really paid much attention as the “Bratva” – various organised crime groups who originated in the former Soviet Union – rose to become the largest in the world.
When Vladimir Putin appeared on television surrounded by his silent stony-faced generals as he threatened to unleash terror on Ukraine I was reminded of a quote by Bill Browder – an anti-corruption campaigner and financier.
“Imagine that Russia is like The Sopranos. In The Sopranos you had the Philadelphia mafia, the New Jersey mafia, the Manhattan mafia and the Brooklyn mafia and then you had the head capo who is above all of them. Vladimir Putin is the head capo.”
El Chapo’s Wife Transferred to Minimum-Security Prison
It doesn’t seem like U.S. prison officials are too worried that El Chapo’s wife will follow in his footsteps… right out of custody. Emma Coronel Aispuro has been transferred to a minimum-security lockup in Texas to serve out the remainder of her three-year sentence for taking part in her husband’s drug trafficking operation. FMC Carswell is described by the Bureau of Prisons as a “federal administrative security medical center with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp.” El Chapo infamously escaped two high-security Mexican prisons before being captured and extradited to the U.S., where he was convicted and sentenced to life. Authorities are taking no chances with him; he’s at the Supermax prison in Colorado.