There's a lot of good articles about the mob at this site.
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ganglandnews.com
By Jerry Capeci
Bulls, Bears and Gangsters
When it comes to the stock market, the Lucheses are bears. The Gambinos are in the middle. And the Genoveses, Bonannos and Colombos are clearly the bulls.
These are the stock market profiles of New York's five Mafia families that have emerged in view of some amazingly lucrative stock fraud schemes that have plagued Wall Street over the last decade.
Earlier this month, a 20-count, 79-page federal racketeering indictment was handed up which never mentioned the Luchese crime family, headed by Vittorio Amuso who is now serving a life sentence for racketeering and murder in a federal prison in Atlanta.
The Gambinos, whose boss, John Gotti, is serving his life sentence in Marion, Illinois, only come up in one aspect of the case, in which 19 mobsters, brokers and reputed Russian organized crime figures are charged in a four-year, $41 million "pump and dump" scheme.
According to the indictment, when Gambino mobster Edward Garafola, 62, tried to flex his muscles in a $100,000 extortion, the Genoveses' Wall Street representative, soldier Ernest (Butchie) Montevecchi, 54, sent Garafola, (left) away empty handed. Montevecchi is serving 63 months for a similar stock fraud scheme.
Montevecchi and Bonanno and Colombo wiseguys "provided protection" and "resolved disputes relating to the fraudulent sale of stock and warrants" by a Manhattan brokerage, according to Brooklyn federal prosecutors Jonathan Sack and Eric Corngold.
The firm, White Rock Partners and Co., was in business from September, 1993 to September, 1996 for the "primary purpose of earning money through fraud involving the manipulation of the price of securities," the indictment charged.
Frank Coppa Sr., 58, a capo (right) from Manalapan, N.J., was the key representative of the Bonanno family, which also used the talents of beefy associate Eugene Lombardo to protect the family interests. Lombardo, who pleaded guilty in the same case as Montevecchi, is serving eight years.
The Colombo heavy was Daniel Persico, (left) a 38-year-old Brooklynite whose official crime family status is not clear to Gang Land's sources, (Some say he's been inducted into the crime family, others say no.) but whose bloodlines establish him as a player, regardless. Persico's father Theodore is a capo; his cousin Alphonse is the family's acting boss; his uncle is former boss Carmine (Junior) Persico. All three are in federal prison.
On two days in 1995, in the only detailed transaction listed in the indictment, the trio made $164,500 in profits from the sale of stock in a Queens construction company that was owned by a Gambino associate and that has since filed for bankruptcy protection.
Of the reputed mob defendants, all but Montevecchi and Lombardo, who have yet to arrive in Brooklyn from the federal prisons they currently call home, pleaded innocent and been released on bond to await trial. |
