Mob Informant Testifies that Actor Was Mobster On and Off the Screen

GOODFELLAS star FRANK SIVERO had links to real life mafia bosses and hitmen, a mob informant has testified in court.

On Wednesday (18Feb09), a New York court was shown photographs of Sivero posing with Charles Carneglia, who is on trial charged with five murders, including the slaying of an off-duty cop. Prosecution witness Kevin McMahon claims Sivero - who played Frankie Carbone in the 1990 movie - was a regular visitor at the Brooklyn junkyard where cops believe Carneglia dissolved the bodies of his victims in acid. And he suggested the 57-year-old actor, who is not accused of any crime, used his underworld connections to settle vendettas. McMahon, a former associate of jailed New York crime boss John Gotti, told the court, "(Sivero) had some kind of problem with somebody in jail, I am not exactly positive." When approached by the New York Daily News, Sivero's agent Mitchell Shankman declined to comment.

Tweet

Mob Informant Supports Las Vegas Mob Museum

Yesterday started and ended with the mob. It’s just like living in a Scorsese movie sometimes.

In the morning, mob-turned-informant Frank Cullotta, focus of crime author Denny Griffin’s gripping biography “Cullotta,” said in a phone interview from an undisclosed location (me, I was in my kitchen) that he thought the proposed Mob Museum in Las Vegas is a “great idea.” The former “Hole In The Wall Gang” member, friend and bodyguard/muscle guy of Tony “The Ant” Spilotro and admitted double-murderer also says he has been approached by someone who is involved in the development of the mob museum to help add some authenticity. Cullotta refuses to say who has contacted him, but that he has been asked to provide some personal items and personal, inside information and anecdotes about his days helping the “Chicago Outfit” skim profits from their Vegas casinos through abject violence, theft and intimidation.

I asked if that overture included audio narration for some of the displays, and Cullotta thought for a moment. “That could be. I haven’t thought of that, but I’ve got a distinctive voice,” he said in a thick Italian-type accent. “Maybe I should try to trademark my voice. It’s really recognizable. That’s why I was never good with a wiretap.”

You and me both, brother.

Later in the day, I got word that Cullotta, also famous as a technical advisor and bit actor in the film “Casino” (the Frank Vincent character was based on him) would appear on ABC’s “Nightline,” having been interviewed recently by reporter Neal Karlinsky for the piece. It was the third in a series of reports, the first being about repo men and the second about the chimp in L.A. that got free from a residence and nearly killed a woman. Click here for the report.

Karlinsky’s report treaded familiar territory. He spoke with Cullotta, a product of the Witness Protection Program who still uses a secret name. “I was a gangster, burglar, murderer, extortionist, arsonist,” he said to a dutifully impressed Karlinsky. “I was all the things you don’t want to be. But I'm not like that no more. I’m a different man now.”

Mayor Oscar Goodman was interviewed in his City Hall office, and took Karlinsky on a tour of the old downtown courthouse, which would be home to the $50 million Mob Museum. Goodman estimates 800,000 people a year would visit the attraction, which is equal parts fascinating and controversial.

“This is the quintessential mob museum, there’s nothing quite like it,” Goodman said. When asked if an art museum would be a more appropriate use of the space, Goodman said, “Anyone who says this should be an art museum should go jump in the lake, with concrete shoes on!”

Playing to the cameras was the mayor. He also said he was grateful for being known as a “mob attorney” because it “put me in financial position to run for mayor.”

During our phone conversation, Cullotta said the museum would certainly help preserve Las Vegas’ history – whether we like it or not. “We have too many people who don’t know how Vegas was built,” he said. “I mean, we are losing our history, tearing it down. We have kids who don’t even know who Frank Sinatra was.” As for the argument that the museum, by its very existence, would glorify crime and criminals, Cullotta said, “People want to know about this part of our past. You make a movie about Jack the Ripper, and people flock to see it. It’s the same with this museum.”

In front of the camera, Cullotta said “The Outfit” would help dig Vegas out of the recession if the crew were around today. He is the last survivor of the original Chicago team in Vegas. “Vegas is having a rough time,” he said, “but I guarantee if the Outfit was still around there would be money here, somehow.”

I expect we will hear from Cullotta again, as part of some sort of Vegas history reclamation project.

Thanks to John Katsilometes

Tweet

The Mob's Roach Motel

Kevin McMahon never had a chance. Both his parents were junkies.

McMahon was born addicted to heroin, he said Tuesday in Brooklyn Federal Court. Then, when he was 6, Mommy and her boyfriend killed Daddy. Mommy went away. Grandma took little Kevin in for a few years, but she couldn't handle him in their rough East New York neighborhood, so when, he said, he was 12 or 13, she threw him out into it. He slept in alleys and yards, and one day, he found a cabana and went inside. He was discovered by the owner. The good news: The owner and his wife took Kevin into their home, and over time, they essentially adopted him.

The bad news: The owner was top John Gotti hit man John Carneglia. And he took Kevin right under his gun-bearing wing.

A teenager. Perfect chum. Just the age when kids with not enough love or luck are feeling the most vulnerable. And McMahon isn't the only one the Mafia grabbed at this impressionable age. Peter Zucarro, who also testified at the ongoing trial of mob hit man Charles Carneglia, John's younger brother, said that he was about 13 when neighborhood mobsters started giving him money for doing errands, sucking him in. "I wanted to be just like them," Zucarro said.

One problem: The mob is like a Roach Motel. You crawl in, but you can't crawl out.

Both Zucarro and McMahon and other informants have referred to themselves as "property." The capos owned them. In this democracy, they volunteered to live in a military dictatorship. They obeyed any order. Anything to feel like they belonged.

It's like the story of the child soldiers in Africa, kidnapped and then rewarded for killing. In his great book "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," Ishmael Beah tells of a contest the grownups would hold between the kids "for who could slice the prisoners' throats quickest. ...A lot of things were done with no reason or explanation. Sometimes we were asked to leave in the middle of a movie. We would come back hours later after killing many people and start the movie where we left off as if we had just returned from intermission."

In the mob, you followed orders or you would be killed, as anyone who has a TV set knows. But with law enforcement's ongoing destruction of the Italian-American Mafia, why do we care? Because youth gangs have filled the void. "There are now a million gang members in the U.S., up 200,000 since 2005," according to a report released last week by the National Gang Intelligence Center, and they commit 80% of crimes in some communities.

The MS-13 gang, with roots in El Salvador, is particularly brutal, and many gangs are using the Internet "to develop working relationships with foreign drug traffickers."

"Gangs give a sense of feeling safe, of discipline, of belonging," FBI gang expert Linda Schmidt has said. Schmidt recommends that the government fund programs "that our young people can turn to" and that they be "24/7 - like gangs are."

Thanks to Joanna Molloy

Tweet

Convicted Chicago Outfit Extorter Suspected in String of Home Burglaries

Police have identified two ex-convicts -- one with ties to the Chicago Outfit -- as top suspects in a burglary ring traveling the North Shore and other suburbs lately.

Former mob extortionist Mario Rainone, 54, of 930 Grant St., Addison, and convicted burglar Vincent T. Forliano, 39, of 362 Glenwood Drive, Bloomingdale, were arrested Saturday and charged with burglarizing a Lincolnshire home on Trafalgar Square two days earlier.

Police would not disclose exact details of the arrests this week, except to say that investigators from various police departments had identified Rainone and Forliano as potential suspects in a string of area home burglaries.

"We started noticing there were patterns to other burglaries," explained Lincolnshire police Detective John-Erik Anderson. "Through intelligence sharing, we came up with these guys' names and put them under surveillance."

Police have not disclosed what evidence led to the arrests, but "they've been pretty much under regular surveillance for awhile now. It was a result of that regular surveillance that led us to arrest them," Anderson said.

Both men were picked up by Addison police and turned over to Lincolnshire on Saturday. They were charged and transferred to Lake County Jail on $500,000 bond.

Anderson expects other police departments in Lake, Cook and DuPage counties to file additional burglary charges in this case. Several burglaries have been reported in Deerfield, Buffalo Grove, Northbrook and elsewhere in the past month, though authorities had not officially tied those crimes together by the time the arrests were announced.

In 1992, Rainone pleaded guilty to six counts of racketeering and extortion in federal court. Prosecutors said he shook down several businesses for cash on behalf of a Chicago mob crew, including Francesco's Hole in the Wall Restaurant, which was then located in Wheeling.

Rainone was sentenced to 17 1/2 years but was released early, in December 2006, according to a Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate registry. He is still on parole and is wanted by South Barrington police on theft charges, Anderson said.

Forliano was paroled from the state's East Moline Correctional Center last May after being convicted of theft in Cook County. His record also includes burglary convictions in Cook and DuPage counties dating back the past two decades. In 2001, he was arrested by Winnetka police on suspicion of burglarizing condominiums on Green Bay Road.

Rainone was scheduled a Feb. 19 bond hearing in Lake County Court, while Forliano is to appear on Feb. 20.

Rainone's defense attorney, Sam Amirante, says he will ask the judge to reduce his client's $500,000 bond, which he described as unusually high for a burglary charge. Amirante could not say whether the arrest would lead federal authorities to revoke Rainone's parole. "Mr. Rainone should be presumed innocent, just like everyone else," he said.

Thanks to Matt Kiefer

Tweet

Chicago Outfit's Former "Go-To" Guy Busted for Burglary

Mobster Mario Rainone has crossed both sides of the law enough times, it is a wonder his legs aren't permanently tangled.

After a spasmodic career as both a criminal and a government witness, Mr. Rainone, 54, is once again sitting in jail. This time Rainone is in the Lake County lock-up on one count of residential burglary and on an outstanding retail theft warrant from South Barrington.

For years, the beefy hoodlum was considered a prime "go-to" guy for the Chicago Outfit's Northside Crew.

In the 1980's, when Mob bosses needed a job handled quickly and efficiently, Rainone was often enlisted to get things done according to Outfit investigators. He was especially adept at collecting unpaid debts, whether as a result of Mob juice loans or illegal gambling debts.

Among the legends of Mario Rainone is the time he informed a shakedown target that his family would pay if he didn't. The old man asked Rainone exactly what he meant. Rainone told the elderly extortion victim that if the debt wasn't handed over, he would kill his children and plant their heads in his front yard. The man settled up.

Rainone quit Organized Crime in late 1989, when he was deployed to murder a wayward mobster. As he prepared to take up a position for the hit, Rainone realized that he was actually the intended target. Rather than waiting to be whacked, Rainone escaped to his truck and sped away.

He went straight to the FBI in Chicago and spilled his story. Agents convinced him that he could only help himself by wearing a wire and working undercover against his one-time Mob bosses.

Rainone got a couple of wise-guys on tape but his cooperation was short-lived. He stopped helping the FBI in November, 1989 when a his mother's front stoop was blown up. The message-bombing freaked Rainone, who felt it was better that he spend a stretch in prison rather than his mother end up in pieces on her porch. So he gave up witness protection and in 1992 pleaded guilty to extortion and racketeering. He was sentenced to nearly 18 years and released in 2006.

Rainone, last known to reside in Bloomingdale, was arrested on Friday by Lincolnshire police and charged with the Feb 12 burglary of a home in the Trafalgar square subdivision. Also charged as an accomplice was Vincent T. Forliano, 39, of Addison.

Both men are being held on $500,000 bond. Rainone is schedule to appear in Lake County Court Tuesday at 9am. Forliano is due in court on Friday at 9am. The duo has been under investigation by several northwest suburban police departments in connection with a string of home invasions.

Other than the alleged burglary business, the connect between Rainone and Forliano is not known. Mobwatchers say if the accused break-in artists were not paying a kick-back to the Outfit, known as "tribute" or "street-tax," Rainone could once again find himself on short hit-list.

Thanks to Chuck Goudie

Tweet