Vincent Pastore, who played a tough-guy mobster in the early years of "The Sopranos,' has dropped out of "Dancing With the Stars" after a week of training.
At least this time he wasn't sent off to sleep with the fishes, the fate that befell his "Sopranos" character. "I didn't realize just how physically demanding it would be for me. Unable to put forth my best effort, I felt it appropriate to step aside and give someone else the opportunity," Pastore said in a statement Wednesday.
The 60-year-old actor had joined 10 other celebrities for the fourth season of ABC's 10-week dance competition, which returns March 19.
"ABC will be announcing a replacement shortly," said Conrad Green, executive producer of "Dancing With the Stars."
The new cast includes Olympic skater Apolo Anton Ohno, boxer Laila Ali, former 'N Sync member Joey Fatone, country singer-actor Billy Ray Cyrus and Paul McCartney's estranged wife, Heather Mills.
Mills, an activist for animal rights and the elimination of the use of land mines, will be the show's first contestant with an artificial limb. She told TV entertainment show "Extra" in an interview set to air Wednesday that "it's very unlikely" her prosthetic leg will "fly off." To prevent such an incident, she said she will wear a special strap. She lost her leg below the knee in a motorcycle accident in 1993.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Albert "The Old Man" Facchiano Pleads Guilty
Friends of ours: Albert "The Old Man" Facchiano, Genovese Crime Family
Albert Facchiano pleaded guilty Wednesday to racketeering conspiracy and other offenses prosecutors say he committed for the Genovese crime family, but its unlikely that the mobster will serve a day behind bars.
At 96, Facchiano, known in crime circles as "The Old Man," is in frail health and will likely be sentenced to house arrest, the Associated Press reports. Faces charges robbery, money laundering and bank fraud, the aged gangster pleaded guilty to a Florida charge of racketeering conspiracy and a New York charge of witness tampering.
Although Facchiano could have faced a maximum sentence of 30-years in prison and up to $500,000 in fines, under a plea agreement, prosecutors recommended that he be placed under house arrest, the AP reported. He's scheduled to be sentenced May 25.
Facchiano was among 30 alleged members of the Genovese crime family charged in a wide-ranging federal case.
What surprised some observers is that the charges against Facchiano stemmed from crimes committed late in his life. Prosecutors charged that from 1994 to 2006, Facchiano supervised associates who committed robberies, laundered money, engaged in bank fraud, and possessed stolen property. Prosecutors, defense attorneys and experts in organized crime say Facchiano may be the oldest racketeer ever prosecuted for crimes committed so late in life.
Facchiano's lawyer, Brian McComb told the AP that his client must see a doctor four times a week for back pain and other maladies, and "couldn't have stood trials in both Florida and New York."
Facchiano, who has an arrest record dating to 1932, walks with a cane and in court used a special headset to hear questions from the U.S. District Judge James Cohn.
A "made" man in the Genovese crime family, he spent eight years in prison on a 25-year sentence for racketeering after being arrested in 1979. The FBI, which monitors known members of organized crime, considers Facchiano a low-level figure.
Facchiano turns 97 on March 10.
Thanks to William Macklin
Albert Facchiano pleaded guilty Wednesday to racketeering conspiracy and other offenses prosecutors say he committed for the Genovese crime family, but its unlikely that the mobster will serve a day behind bars.
At 96, Facchiano, known in crime circles as "The Old Man," is in frail health and will likely be sentenced to house arrest, the Associated Press reports. Faces charges robbery, money laundering and bank fraud, the aged gangster pleaded guilty to a Florida charge of racketeering conspiracy and a New York charge of witness tampering.
Although Facchiano could have faced a maximum sentence of 30-years in prison and up to $500,000 in fines, under a plea agreement, prosecutors recommended that he be placed under house arrest, the AP reported. He's scheduled to be sentenced May 25.
Facchiano was among 30 alleged members of the Genovese crime family charged in a wide-ranging federal case.
What surprised some observers is that the charges against Facchiano stemmed from crimes committed late in his life. Prosecutors charged that from 1994 to 2006, Facchiano supervised associates who committed robberies, laundered money, engaged in bank fraud, and possessed stolen property. Prosecutors, defense attorneys and experts in organized crime say Facchiano may be the oldest racketeer ever prosecuted for crimes committed so late in life.
Facchiano's lawyer, Brian McComb told the AP that his client must see a doctor four times a week for back pain and other maladies, and "couldn't have stood trials in both Florida and New York."
Facchiano, who has an arrest record dating to 1932, walks with a cane and in court used a special headset to hear questions from the U.S. District Judge James Cohn.
A "made" man in the Genovese crime family, he spent eight years in prison on a 25-year sentence for racketeering after being arrested in 1979. The FBI, which monitors known members of organized crime, considers Facchiano a low-level figure.
Facchiano turns 97 on March 10.
Thanks to William Macklin
Everybody Pays
Friends of ours: Harry Aleman
Bob Lowe's father told him not to get involved. Just keep his mouth shut and forget everything he saw. But to the 25-year-old blue collar mechanic, husband, and father, that was entirely out of the question. How could he? While walking his dog he saw his acquaintance, Billy Logan, murdered on the street right in front of him. And more importantly, he held the triggerman's gaze for four frightening seconds, enough to easily identify him in a mug shot book, lineup, or court chambers. In Lowe's mind, it was his simple duty as a citizen to I.D. the guy and put a killer behind bars.
But Bob Lowe's seemingly straightforward decision to do that duty in 1972 provided the catalyst for a 25-year hellish personal odyssey, all while being constantly on the move and looking over his shoulder for the bullet with his name on it. That's because the face that Lowe saw didn't belong to any garden variety street thug, but that of Harry Aleman, the feared, proficient and very busy hit man for the Chicago mob. And Harry had a lot of powerful friends.
EVERYBODY PAYS is not the story of Logan or even Aleman, but of how Lowe's life began to spiral out of control after his agreeing to testify. Little did he know that larger forces were literally conspiring against him. Although he positively identified Aleman immediately following the shooting, the corrupt investigating cops buried the information for four years. At the eventual trial, the presiding judge had been bribed, deeming Lowe "a liar" in open court. Left dangling when Aleman was acquitted --- and in real fear for their lives --- the Lowes entered the Witness Protection Program, beginning a harrowing litany of changes in their residence, job, lifestyles, and even identities.
The constant pressure drove Lowe to extended flirtations with booze, cocaine, petty crime, and estrangement from his family. After years of bitter thoughts and second-guessing of his actions, Lowe eventually does crawl back. The book closes with Aleman's 1997 retrial --- a historic overturning of the Constitutional "double jeopardy" clause --- and ultimate vindication for Lowe, who as an older, grayer man found himself giving the same testimony that he had 20 years earlier.
Possley and Kogan --- both experienced journalists for the Chicago Tribune --- keep the narrative fast-paced, to the point and interesting. They also know their turf well, particularly in their discussion of the hierarchy of the Chicago Mafia and how it differs from its flashier, more storied New York counterpart. Drawing on historical material as well as fresh interviews from most of the participants (save the incarcerated Aleman, who refused to talk with them), the pair paint a sympathetic but even-keeled portrait of Lowe, who was not entirely blameless for his subsequent misfortunes.
Ultimately, the large and looming question that hangs throughout the book is this: Was it all worth it? Was it worth it for Lowe to go through his own seven circles of hell for doing what he initially felt would be a simple and just action, or should he have heeded his father's advice to go deaf, dumb, and blind? The reader is left to ponder that for themselves --- as well as think about what they'd do in a similar situation. In either case, the book's title stands as both a warning and a thesis: in crime, everyone does pay --- and not just the guilty.
Thanks to Bob Ruggiero
Bob Lowe's father told him not to get involved. Just keep his mouth shut and forget everything he saw. But to the 25-year-old blue collar mechanic, husband, and father, that was entirely out of the question. How could he? While walking his dog he saw his acquaintance, Billy Logan, murdered on the street right in front of him. And more importantly, he held the triggerman's gaze for four frightening seconds, enough to easily identify him in a mug shot book, lineup, or court chambers. In Lowe's mind, it was his simple duty as a citizen to I.D. the guy and put a killer behind bars.
But Bob Lowe's seemingly straightforward decision to do that duty in 1972 provided the catalyst for a 25-year hellish personal odyssey, all while being constantly on the move and looking over his shoulder for the bullet with his name on it. That's because the face that Lowe saw didn't belong to any garden variety street thug, but that of Harry Aleman, the feared, proficient and very busy hit man for the Chicago mob. And Harry had a lot of powerful friends.
EVERYBODY PAYS is not the story of Logan or even Aleman, but of how Lowe's life began to spiral out of control after his agreeing to testify. Little did he know that larger forces were literally conspiring against him. Although he positively identified Aleman immediately following the shooting, the corrupt investigating cops buried the information for four years. At the eventual trial, the presiding judge had been bribed, deeming Lowe "a liar" in open court. Left dangling when Aleman was acquitted --- and in real fear for their lives --- the Lowes entered the Witness Protection Program, beginning a harrowing litany of changes in their residence, job, lifestyles, and even identities.
The constant pressure drove Lowe to extended flirtations with booze, cocaine, petty crime, and estrangement from his family. After years of bitter thoughts and second-guessing of his actions, Lowe eventually does crawl back. The book closes with Aleman's 1997 retrial --- a historic overturning of the Constitutional "double jeopardy" clause --- and ultimate vindication for Lowe, who as an older, grayer man found himself giving the same testimony that he had 20 years earlier.
Possley and Kogan --- both experienced journalists for the Chicago Tribune --- keep the narrative fast-paced, to the point and interesting. They also know their turf well, particularly in their discussion of the hierarchy of the Chicago Mafia and how it differs from its flashier, more storied New York counterpart. Drawing on historical material as well as fresh interviews from most of the participants (save the incarcerated Aleman, who refused to talk with them), the pair paint a sympathetic but even-keeled portrait of Lowe, who was not entirely blameless for his subsequent misfortunes.
Ultimately, the large and looming question that hangs throughout the book is this: Was it all worth it? Was it worth it for Lowe to go through his own seven circles of hell for doing what he initially felt would be a simple and just action, or should he have heeded his father's advice to go deaf, dumb, and blind? The reader is left to ponder that for themselves --- as well as think about what they'd do in a similar situation. In either case, the book's title stands as both a warning and a thesis: in crime, everyone does pay --- and not just the guilty.
Thanks to Bob Ruggiero
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
After Winning Oscar, Scorsese to Direct "The Departed" Sequel?
The Academy Awards aired live from Hollywood Boulevard on Sunday. It was the most international awards show in Oscar history. Afterwards backstage, Martin Scorsese agreed to direct George Lopez, Carlos Mencia, and Paul Rodriguez in The Deported.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Goodbye Fellas
Friends of ours: Joseph Valachi, Bugsy Siegal, Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, John Gotti
The perspective on organized crime that Thomas A. Reppetto developed from his career in law enforcement and more than 20 years as president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, tempered by a Harvard Ph.D., paid off handsomely in his 2004 book, “American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power
,” which described the mob’s growth to its pinnacle in the mid-20th century. The writing was lucid, concise and devoid of sensationalism, rare qualities in the plethora of books by turncoat mobsters and their ex-wives, journalists, cops and aged Las Vegas insiders. This equally well-written sequel, “Bringing Down the Mob,” chronicles the Mafia’s near demise over the past 50 years. Following this specific thread of American history, general readers will benefit from Reppetto’s cogent examples of how changes in the culture at large affected both the mob itself and the tactics employed by law enforcement. Organized-crime buffs will be familiar with much of the material, but unaccustomed to seeing it assembled into so big and coherent a picture.
In 1950 and ’51, the Kefauver Senate committee’s televised hearings on the Mafia introduced mobsters into American living rooms, the lasting images being close-ups of Frank Costello’s manicured hands — he did not want his face on camera. The public outcry was short-lived and the Mafia cruised comfortably until 1957, when, in Apalachin, N.Y. (population 350), more than 60 Mafia notables attended a conference that was raided by the state police. As Reppetto says, the media have often presented the raid as “some hick cops stumbling on a mob conclave.” He debunks that interpretation and shows how the publicity moved the resistant J. Edgar Hoover to action, so that “from Apalachin on, the United States government was at war with the Mafia.”
As attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy led the next sustained attack on organized crime. He focused obsessively and successfully on Jimmy Hoffa, who was allied with the Mafia while serving as president of the two-million-member Teamsters union. Kennedy also brought before the TV cameras Joe Valachi, a low-level Mafia soldier who, with some coaching, provided extensive information “without revealing that much of it had been obtained through legally questionable electronic eavesdropping.” A new name for the Mafia emerged from the hearings — La Cosa Nostra — which allowed Hoover to say he had been right all along: there was no Mafia; there was a Cosa Nostra organization, exposed by the F.B.I.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Las Vegas provided a battlefield on which the F.B.I., armed with bugging equipment (and caught using it illegally in 1965), defeated the mob, which had been involved from the start of significant gambling in Nevada in the 1940s. Bugsy Siegel put up one of the first casinos on the Strip, the Flamingo. Las Vegas was designated an “open city,” in which any mob family could operate. As Reppetto writes, mobsters “secured Teamster loans to build casinos that they controlled through fronts, or ‘straw men.’ ” (Frank Sinatra lost his license as owner of a Nevada resort for allowing the Mafia boss Sam Giancana, reputedly his “hidden backer,” to frequent the hotel.) These casinos had overseers appointed by the controlling family to run “the skim,” cash siphoned off before the casino take was put on the books for tax purposes. The poorly chosen overseers played a large role in bringing down the mob in Las Vegas, generally being far too violent and unsophisticated to operate in a milieu that demanded a veneer of respectability. Reppetto points out the factual basis of much of Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese’s script for the film “Casino
,” including the chilling scene of Joe Pesci squeezing a victim’s head in a vise until an eye pops out (although that incident actually happened in Chicago). The mob’s management of Las Vegas turned out to be “a disaster,” Reppetto says. “Once it was the Mafia that was well run, while law enforcement plodded along. ... The situation was now reversed.” In the 1980s, corporations began to take control of the casinos.
One of the great hurdles the government had to clear at the start of its war on the Mafia, Reppetto says, was that the approach required to bring down a criminal organization ran “counter to general principles of American criminal justice”: “The usual practice, investigating a known crime in order to apprehend unknown culprits, was reversed. Now the government was investigating a known criminal to find crimes he might be charged with.” The most potent weapon was developed in 1970 — the RICO statute, to which Reppetto devotes a full chapter, pointing out that it took its creator, G. Robert Blakey, a decade of proselytizing before prosecutors would employ it.
A minor quibble: I think the book gives short shrift to the effect of the witness protection program, without which far fewer mobsters could have “flipped” over the years. As to Reppetto’s belief that the Mafia is in serious decline? At any time in the past, asking an average American to name major mob guys might well have elicited several of the following: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, John Gotti. Who comes to mind today?
Thanks to Vincent Patrick whose novels include “The Pope of Greenwich Village
” and “Smoke Screen
.”
The perspective on organized crime that Thomas A. Reppetto developed from his career in law enforcement and more than 20 years as president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, tempered by a Harvard Ph.D., paid off handsomely in his 2004 book, “American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power
,” which described the mob’s growth to its pinnacle in the mid-20th century. The writing was lucid, concise and devoid of sensationalism, rare qualities in the plethora of books by turncoat mobsters and their ex-wives, journalists, cops and aged Las Vegas insiders. This equally well-written sequel, “Bringing Down the Mob,” chronicles the Mafia’s near demise over the past 50 years. Following this specific thread of American history, general readers will benefit from Reppetto’s cogent examples of how changes in the culture at large affected both the mob itself and the tactics employed by law enforcement. Organized-crime buffs will be familiar with much of the material, but unaccustomed to seeing it assembled into so big and coherent a picture.In 1950 and ’51, the Kefauver Senate committee’s televised hearings on the Mafia introduced mobsters into American living rooms, the lasting images being close-ups of Frank Costello’s manicured hands — he did not want his face on camera. The public outcry was short-lived and the Mafia cruised comfortably until 1957, when, in Apalachin, N.Y. (population 350), more than 60 Mafia notables attended a conference that was raided by the state police. As Reppetto says, the media have often presented the raid as “some hick cops stumbling on a mob conclave.” He debunks that interpretation and shows how the publicity moved the resistant J. Edgar Hoover to action, so that “from Apalachin on, the United States government was at war with the Mafia.”
As attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy led the next sustained attack on organized crime. He focused obsessively and successfully on Jimmy Hoffa, who was allied with the Mafia while serving as president of the two-million-member Teamsters union. Kennedy also brought before the TV cameras Joe Valachi, a low-level Mafia soldier who, with some coaching, provided extensive information “without revealing that much of it had been obtained through legally questionable electronic eavesdropping.” A new name for the Mafia emerged from the hearings — La Cosa Nostra — which allowed Hoover to say he had been right all along: there was no Mafia; there was a Cosa Nostra organization, exposed by the F.B.I.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Las Vegas provided a battlefield on which the F.B.I., armed with bugging equipment (and caught using it illegally in 1965), defeated the mob, which had been involved from the start of significant gambling in Nevada in the 1940s. Bugsy Siegel put up one of the first casinos on the Strip, the Flamingo. Las Vegas was designated an “open city,” in which any mob family could operate. As Reppetto writes, mobsters “secured Teamster loans to build casinos that they controlled through fronts, or ‘straw men.’ ” (Frank Sinatra lost his license as owner of a Nevada resort for allowing the Mafia boss Sam Giancana, reputedly his “hidden backer,” to frequent the hotel.) These casinos had overseers appointed by the controlling family to run “the skim,” cash siphoned off before the casino take was put on the books for tax purposes. The poorly chosen overseers played a large role in bringing down the mob in Las Vegas, generally being far too violent and unsophisticated to operate in a milieu that demanded a veneer of respectability. Reppetto points out the factual basis of much of Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese’s script for the film “Casino
,” including the chilling scene of Joe Pesci squeezing a victim’s head in a vise until an eye pops out (although that incident actually happened in Chicago). The mob’s management of Las Vegas turned out to be “a disaster,” Reppetto says. “Once it was the Mafia that was well run, while law enforcement plodded along. ... The situation was now reversed.” In the 1980s, corporations began to take control of the casinos.One of the great hurdles the government had to clear at the start of its war on the Mafia, Reppetto says, was that the approach required to bring down a criminal organization ran “counter to general principles of American criminal justice”: “The usual practice, investigating a known crime in order to apprehend unknown culprits, was reversed. Now the government was investigating a known criminal to find crimes he might be charged with.” The most potent weapon was developed in 1970 — the RICO statute, to which Reppetto devotes a full chapter, pointing out that it took its creator, G. Robert Blakey, a decade of proselytizing before prosecutors would employ it.
A minor quibble: I think the book gives short shrift to the effect of the witness protection program, without which far fewer mobsters could have “flipped” over the years. As to Reppetto’s belief that the Mafia is in serious decline? At any time in the past, asking an average American to name major mob guys might well have elicited several of the following: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, John Gotti. Who comes to mind today?
Thanks to Vincent Patrick whose novels include “The Pope of Greenwich Village
” and “Smoke Screen.”
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