Vegas Killing Reminiscent of Mob Days

Friends of ours: Tony Spilotro

For some reason I had posted about the Explosive Device Used in Deadly Hit of Man at Las Vegas Casino and reported how the ATF Joins Vegas Police Investigating Homicide Bombing Outside the Luxor. However, I was asleep at the wheel and did not share this with my Mob Readers. Thanks to friends of mine at Brandolino's for bringing the oversight to my attention.

An apparent car bomb death at the Luxor Hotel Casino in Las Vegas sounds like a blast from the past for some residents in this Nevada gambling town, steeped in a history of mob "hits" and crime, greed and gambling.

The device was left on a car in the Luxor casino parking garage. It exploded early Monday killing a Luxor employee who police have not yet identified. Another person who was in the parking lot at the time received injuries in the blast.

The Las Vegas that draws millions of visitors each year was actually developed by active members of the Mafia, and for years the Mob ruled this desert city with an iron fist, with point men like the late murderer Tony Spilotro taking pride in devising new ways to inflict death and destruction upon those who challenged him.

In recent years this activity has waned, but today's car bomb explosion reminds all that Sin City is not out of the woods in terms of organized crime style "hits."

Police in Las Vegas are working with the FBI on the case. They say the 4:00 AM explosion was not a terrorist act, they say it is being investigated as a single murder.

Investigators say the man was moving the device from the top of the car when it exploded shortly after 4:00 AM. The car was parked on the second floor of a parking lot behind the Luxor hotel-casino. Apparently it was first reported that the device was in a backpack, police now say that it was not in a backpack.

Aerial video from Las Vegas TV stations shows no apparent damage to the Luxor's parking structure. The AP reports that the entrances were blocked while police, firefighters and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents investigated.

Las Vegas Metro Police say they are investigating the case as an homicide with an unusual weapon.

The Luxor is a pyramid-shaped hotel at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip which was completed in the late 1990's. The casino's design is a big draw for Vegas and the upper balcony has seen several full view suicides as people hurl themselves over the edge, straight to the casino floor. The Luxor has 6,000 employees and more than 4,000 rooms.

Thanks to Tim King

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Donnie Brasco Extended Cut

Friends of ours: Bonanno Crime Family, Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero
Friends of mine: Donnie Brasco

In the 1970s, FBI undecover agent Joe Pistone infiltrates the mob, leaving his family behind and assuming the false persona of the "jewel man" Donnie Brasco. His assignment: to become a trusted insider with the infamous Bonanno family by gaining the confidence of a low-level gangster.

Lefty Ruggiero is an aging, two-bit hit-man who sees a new future for himself with the smart, young thief Donnie Brasco and enlists him as his protege. Together the two men enter into a camaraderie that will not allow either one to distance himself emotionally. Meanwhile, Donnie begins to get lost in the distance between his real and undercover selves.

As Donnie moves deeper and deeper into the Mafia chain of command, he realizes he is not only losing the line between federal agent and criminal, between who he pretends to be and who he actually is, he is also leading Lefty, his closest friend, to an almost certain death sentence.

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Sopranos Item of the Week - 10% off The Purchase of Two or More T-Shirts

Celebrate the farewell season of one of the nation's most popular television shows with the Soprano's Deal of The Week. This week you can show their love for the Sopranos on your chest with 10% off the purchase of two or more t-shirts. Customers can mix and match shirts including the popular "Bada Bing" and the Sopranos Crest t-shirt. This special offer ends May 13th.

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Rat Pack Endorses Rudy Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani's first-quarter fundraising report showed he was the favorite candidate of the gambling, tobacco and alcohol industries. It makes perfect sense. Now that Rudy Giuliani is no longer prosecuting mobsters, he's got the Rat Pack's full support.

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Little Italy's Bonnie and Clyde were Gambino's Trophy

Friends of ours: Gambino Crime Family Bonanno Crime Family, Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia, Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, John "Junior" Gotti, Joseph Massino

Thomas and Rosemarie Uva were not exactly criminal geniuses.

The couple liked to rob Mafia-run social clubs in Little Italy and elsewhere around the city, which, as just about everyone knows, is a really good way to get killed.

They even had the audacity to force mobsters to drop their pants as they swiped their cash and jewelry and cleaned out their card games.

The holdups proved predictably hazardous: The Uvas got whacked on Christmas Eve 1992.

Fifteen years later, the story of the bandits who made the stupid mistake of stealing from the mob is playing out at the trial of the man accused of murdering them, a reputed Gambino crime family captain named Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia.

"There's virtually no greater insult than robbing the Gambino family where they socialized and hung out," federal prosecutor Joey Lipton said last month in opening statements in Brooklyn.

Prosecutors claim that John A. "Junior" Gotti, while acting boss of the Gambino family once led by his father, sanctioned the killings -- a charge he has denied.

Pizzonia's attorney, Joseph R. Corozzo Jr., told the jurors they would hear testimony that members of the Bonanno crime family were the real culprits.
Mafia 'turncoats'

Corozzo noted that the government was relying on an unsavory cast of Mafia turncoats to make their case, including former Gambino capo Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, who got his nickname as a child after a dog bit him in the face.

The case reflects a new willingness among several old-school gangsters -- some admitted killers like DiLeonardo -- to break the mob's vow of omerta, or silence, and help prosecute graying reputed gangsters like Pizzonia, 65, for crimes dating back decades.

In 2005, Bonanno boss Joseph "Big Joey" Massino stunned the underworld by becoming the first boss of one of New York's five Mafia families to flip.

Exactly why the Uvas gambled with their lives by robbing mobsters remains a mystery. But their former boss at a New York collection agency, Michael Schussel, offered some possible clues for resorting to making collections of a criminal kind.

Schussel testified that Thomas was a Mafia aficionado who asked for days off to attend the trial of the elder John Gotti, the Gambino don who died behind bars in 2002. The couple lived in Gotti's neighborhood in Ozone Park, Queens. "He was obsessed with the mob," the witness said.

Authorities say the Uvas began their robbery spree in 1991, apparently believing that social clubs -- home to high-stakes card games -- would provide an easy mark.

Rosemarie, 31, took the wheel of the getaway car and Thomas, 28, armed with an Uzi submachine gun, stripped patrons of their money and jewelry and made the men drop their pants. The couple became known on the street as Bonnie and Clyde.

The moonlighting was stressful: The day after one of the holdups made headlines, Rosemarie showed up for work looking pale and fainted to the floor, her ex-employer said.

By the time the Uvas had hit his Cafe Liberty in Queens a second time, Pizzonia had tired of their act, DiLeonardo testified.

Pizzonia "was very angry, as everybody else was, that these guys had the nerve to go around robbing clubs, like committing suicide," DiLeonardo said. A plan was hatched to track down the couple by getting their license plate number, he said.

On the morning of December 24, they were sitting in their Mercury Topaz at an intersection in Queens when they were each shot three times in the back of the head. The car rolled through the intersection and collided with another vehicle before it stopped; police officers found a stash of jewelry with the bloody corpses.

The killers vanished as mob bosses argued behind the scenes over who should get credit, DiLeonardo said. During a sitdown with his Bonanno counterpart Massino, the younger Gotti set the record straight.

The Bonnie-and-Clyde hit, Gotti said, was "our trophy."

Thanks to CNN

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