The Game Is Rigged #1

The Game Is Rigged!

New Week, Same Story for the Mafia

I have been writing this blog in one form or another since 2003. First it was Crimeman and then Hollywood Mafia, now Breakshot Blog.  After hundreds of posts nothing much has changed, except that the guys are dying off and their world has grown smaller.

A few weeks ago I went to dinner with two friends, Andrew Didonato and Frank Calabrese Jr. We had a good time reminiscing about old days.  We all have been away from the life for more than a decade.  Some of our old friends are still in the life getting themselves in trouble. Some people never learn and the price they pay is high.  The three of usl agree that life is much better now than when we were in the life. I have spoken to a number of guys who left the life and not one has said he made a mistake to leave it behind him.

This week, several events took place.

Battista (Benny) Geritano, a Gambino associate and part of a bank robbery crew, found himself in trouble yet again.  He is already in prison for stabbing Nunzio Fusco in a Bayridge Brooklyn bar during a fight.  He got off the hook previously when he stabbed a famous pizza maker on the street in Brooklyn.

He is now in Federal court because of threatening letters he sent from prison to commit extortion.  He fired his court appointed lawyer and start asking everyone in the court what role they served in the court.  The Judge ordered him to have a mental health exam.

The Gambinos have some other headlines this week. Two associates were charged in a large scale pain pill ring.  Raymond Raimondi and Vincent Maniscalco and four others were charged with selling thousands of pills.  They filled prescriptions all over Staten Island and Brooklyn, so they could resell the pills. They sold twenty five thousand dollars in pills to undercover NYPD Detectives in front of Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn.

Carmine Avellino is a Lucchese family capo, who along with his brothers helped murder two innocent men in 1994.  Robert Kubecka and David Barstow, owners of an East Northport carting company, had helped the FBI investigate the mafia’s influence in waste hauling business and were shot to death in their office on Long Island.

Avellino plead guilty to a lesser charge that did not include the double murders and did seven years in prison.

He was back to his old tricks in 2010 when he worked with two cousins to put pressure on a man who owed a one hundred thousand dollar debt.  He was arrested in 2014 and last week he was sentenced to one year of house arrest.

Avellino, now seventy one years old, suffers from poor health. Two heart attacks and Parkinson's are just a few of his many ailments.

You have to love these guys who are perfectly able to commit crimes, but then claim sickness so they can stay home.

That wraps up the world of the Mafia for May 2017.  

I will be putting more of my writing efforts into other projects and blogs in the coming months, but I am sure the Mafia will still make headlines!