Friday, August 28, 2009

Alex "Bobo" Rocco , Winter Hill hood and Hollywood actor

Hollywood actor Alex Rocco was born Alexander F Petricone in Boston.Mass Petricone was known by the nickname “Bobo” in his early years as a hard fisted hood in the infamous Winter Hill Gang

According to Vincent Teresa in “My Life in the Mafia,” it was Rocco whose girlfriend Charlestown mobster Georgie McLaughlin tried to pick up on Labor Day weekend 1961, setting off the bloody Irish Gang War.
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Rocco was arrested along with Winter Hill boss, Buddy McLean, as a suspect in the October 1961 murder of a gangster but was never charged.

.Petricone then bolted out of bullet riddled Boston and moved to Sunny California in 1962, and began using the name Alex Rocco. . He took acting classes and lost weight.

Rocco made his movie bones and scored the solid-gold role of Mobster,Moe Green, in the Godfather. The Winter Hill Mobs most famous felons watched the movie and rooted for Moe Green to whack out Michael Corleone

Thursday, August 27, 2009

The First Mafia Family


He came to New York City in 1892 from Corleone, the town in western Sicily whose name Mario Puzo borrowed to create literature's most famous Mafioso.

A half-century before The Godfather, he was the face of organized crime in America
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That's the takeaway from The First Family, Mike Dash's highly researched and smoothly written book on the origins of the Mafia in the United States
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Focusing primarily on New York City and using an infamous mob hit - the 1903 Barrel Murder - as the jumping-off point, the book, on one level, is a police procedural set against the backdrop of the Italian immigrant experience.

Dash's straightforward account - he accurately describes it as a "narrative history" - provides context for the birth of an American underworld institution, but he in no way glamorizes the gangsters who dominate his story. Morello, shrewd, ruthless and calculating, emerges as the prototype of the ethnic crime boss, the sine qua non of New World Mafiosi.

Known as "Clutch" or "The Clutch Hand" because he had been born with a deformed right arm, Morello was, in the words of one inve stigator, "conscientiously and zealously bad," an individual who "enjoyed" being a criminal Read More

Friday, August 14, 2009

Boston capo Jerry Angiulo reported near death


Former longtime Boston Mafia godfather Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo was near death yesterday from kidney failure, sources told the Herald.
The 90-year-old ex-mobster from Nahant has been on weekly dialysis treatments, sources said, and was hospitalized in Lynn where he was surrounded by family.

A call to Union Hospital in Lynn last night to check on Angiulo’s condition was referred to the intensive-care unit.
There, a medical official said the hospital was not allowed to discuss patients’ cases.
Angiulo was convicted of racketeering, loansharking and illegal gambling in 1986 and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison after his headquarters at 98 Prince St. in the North End was infamously bugged by the FBI with help from the agency’s star informants, James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi - the criminal kingpin’s underworld rivals in South Boston.
Angiulo, underboss of New England La Cosa Nostra from the late 1960s until he was busted, was not expected to be released from federal prison until next May, but was paroled in 2007 for good behavior.