On the Spot - The Only Regularly Published Magazine on Early 20th Century Crime and Crime Control Needs You!

Letter from Rick Mattix the force behind the excellent Early 20th Century Crime magazine - On the Spot.

First off, Thanks to all our loyal supporters who've kept this thing going for over two years! Thanks to our readers, Thanks to our advertisers, Thanks to those loyal subscribers who've chosen to stay with us, and another extra-special Thanks to our (unpaid) contributors who've furnished us with so many great historical articles!

Now, for the rest of you, On the Spot is ON THE SPOT! We're printing and mailing this -- THE ONLY REGULARLY PUBLISHED MAGAZINE ON EARLY 20TH CENTURY CRIME AND CRIME CONTROL -- out of our own pockets and, contrary to what some of you may think We Are Not Independently Wealthy! Virtually all money generated from sales of On the Spot Journal is spent printing and mailing it to our subscribers throughout North America, the UK, and Europe.

If you want to keep this thing afloat, or if you have any serious interest whatever in crime history, I urge those who haven't subscribed to do so and those subscribers who haven't renewed to do so. We simply can't keep going otherwise and that would be A REAL CRIME.

Authors and publishers, museums, event planners, etc.: We need advertisers. If you've got a book to sell, or other cops and robbers merchandise, stuff pertaining to Prohibition or Depression era, etc., write us for advertising rates (onthespotnewsletter@yahoo.com). Authors are again invited to donate promo books for new subscribers, which has aided our sales in the past.

Our planned move to MagCloud for future publishing and individual issue sales has been rescheduled to begin with our Fall 2009 issue, if we can keep going until then.

Here are some great articles scheduled for the near future that may never see
publication without your help:

Crime in the Catskills: The Capture of Waxey Gordon
by John Conway

Margaret Collins -- “The Kiss of Death Girl”
by Rose Keefe

Roy Gardner: The Last of the Old West Badmen
by Robert E. Bates

Eastern State Penitentiary: A Bastion of Solitude
by Gregory Peduto

Last Days of the Brady Gang
by Richard Shaw

Whiskey Women, Moonshining Mamas and Bootlegging Babes
by Kate Clabough

Plus book reviews, news of upcoming events, etc.

We need help to keep this thing going.

Yerz,
Rick Mattix
www.onthespotjournal.com/journal.html

Tweet

Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer Join Cast of Big Screen Adaption of "To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia"

Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken and Val Kilmer will play the leads in "The Irishman," a crime story that Jonathan Hensleigh will direct.

Code Entertainment is producing the action movie, which is based on the real story of mobster Danny Greene (Stevenson). Hensleigh and Jeremy Walters ("Dali") wrote the script, inspired by the book "To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia" by Rick Porrello.

Greene was a violent Irish-American gangster who competed with the Italian mob in 1970s Cleveland and ended up provoking a countrywide turf war that crippled the mafia. Walken will play the loan shark and nightclub owner Shondor Birns, and Kilmer is a Cleveland police detective who befriends Greene.

Code's Al Corley, Bart Rosenblatt and Eugene Musso are producing, along with Dundee Entertainment's Tommy Reid and Tara Reid, who brought the property to Code. Jonathan Dana, Peter Miller and Porrello are exec producers, with George Perez serving as co-producer.

The production has also hired cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub, production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein and editor Douglas Crise. Principal photography begins May 19 in Detroit.

Lightning Entertainment will shop the project to international buyers at Cannes, while ICM and Dana handle domestic sales.

The ICM-repped Hensleigh co-wrote and directed "The Punisher." The writer or co-writer of "Die Hard With a Vengeance" and "Jumanji" has the crime story "Nine Lives" in development with Jerry Bruckheimer Films.

Walken and Kilmer are repped by ICM and Affirmative Entertainment. Stevenson is repped by Endeavor.

Code last produced "You Kill Me" and "Spring Breakdown.

thanks to Jay A. Fernandez

Tweet

Mafia Cops Sent to Separate Prisons

Mafia cops Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were partners as detectives, partners in crime, neighbors in Las Vegas - and cellmates after being convicted as mob hit men.

Now, their illicit partnership has been broken up forever.

Caracappa, 67, who requested a prison on the East Coast, has been shipped out to Victorville Penitentiary in California to serve his life-plus-80-year sentence.

The high-security prison 86 miles northeast of Los Angeles was once home to notorious inmates John Walker Lindh - the so-called American Taliban - and Ingmar Guandique, suspected of killing Capitol Hill intern Chandra Levy.

Two prisoners have been slain there since it opened in 2004, and a bomb exploded in the prison in February. "It's not a good place to be, but it's better than where he was," said Caracappa's lawyer Daniel Nobel.

Sources said the laconic Caracappa was miserable having to spend every waking moment with a loudmouth like Eppolito in the Brooklyn federal lockup in Sunset Park.

Because they're ex-cops, they were locked down 23 hours a day as a safety precaution and kept away from other inmates.

"If you have two persons together in a small cell that is the size of a closet for some New Yorkers, most marriages would dissolve under those circumstances," Nobel said of their time at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Eppolito, 60, is still awaiting word from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons as to which cinder-block tomb he will be sent to die.

"It was very peculiar to me that they were housed together," said Eppolito's lawyer Joseph Bondy. "The alternative was solitary confinement."

Eppolito and Caracappa are appealing their convictions, arguing that their trial lawyers were incompetent.

In a letter to Judge Jack Weinstein, Eppolito's daughter Andrea wrote, "The rest of my life will be dedicated to bringing him home where he belongs."

Thanks to John Marzulli

Tweet

Reputed Genovese Made Member and Associated Arrested on Sports Betting Charges

A Dover man is among more than 30 people arrested Thursday in connection with a $1 million-a-week, multistate sports betting operation related to prominent organized crime families.

The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office said 36-year-old Dulo Bolijevic of Dover was charged with promoting gambling and conspiracy to promote gambling in connection with this week’s raids, which spanned Bergen, Essex, Somerset and Monmouth counties.

The was no immediate word, however, on what role Bolijevic, who works at Villa Pizza in Rockaway, played in the betting ring.

Authorities from the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, the FBI and other agencies began executing search and arrest warrants beginning Tuesday night. More than 30 arrests were made and more than $1.3 million was seized.

The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office said the North Jersey investigation began in September 2008 and focused on money-laundering. Undercover detectives infiltrated the bookmaking operation being run by Thomas Conforti of Hawthorne and John “Blue” DeFroscia of Saddle Brook.

DeFroscia is a documented “made” member of the Genovese organized crime family, and Conforti is a high-level associate, authorities said. Each ran separate bookmaking and money-laundering enterprises. and passed a portion of their earnings to Genovese Family.

Conforti and DeFroscia had a large network of agents, who were paid a commission on their profits. Mid-level members were responsible for numerous gambling packages and would meet with the individual agents or package holders and then pass the proceeds to DeFroscia and Conforti.

Investigators found that hundreds of bettors used a system of code names and passwords to place bets on sporting events each week. It was the agents who collected losses from or paid winnings to bettors. The wagers were placed via toll-free telephone numbers or the Internet.

The actual wire room providing betting lines and accepting the wagers is located in Costa Rica — a common practice employed by organized crime families to avoid apprehension of those running the wire room, authorities said.

The investigation revealed that DeFroscia and Conforti used “middle men” as a buffer between themselves and their agents to insulate themselves from law enforcement detection. In the case of Thomas Conforti, an individual identified as Michael Cirelli of Belleville helped run the operation for him. John DeFroscia employed Paul “Shortline” Weber of Aramark, Pa., and Gerald “Jay” Napolitano of Summit, among others, to help run his network of agents.

Napolitano would deliver weekly profits to DeFroscia by dropping envelopes of cash at Racioppi’s Taralles, a store on Bloomfield Avenue, Bloomfield. Nicholas “Pigeon” Restaino of Bloomfield would temporarily hold the cash at the store until DeFroscia picked it up.

Weber, Napolitano and other ranking members would meet with agents in parking lots, bookstores, diners and on the street to exchange cash. Napolitano was seen several times meeting one of his agents, Louis Orangeo of Newark, in various parking lots in Clifton. Orangeo, a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, would meet with Napolitano while on duty in his mail truck. They would exchange an envelope through the mail truck window as if it were ordinary mail.

In addition, Weber, who is employed as a vendor at both CitiField and Yankee Stadium, arranged meetings and drop-offs in each stadium while working. Detectives who conducted surveillance of Weber at the stadiums with the assistance and cooperation of Major League Baseball security, observed him exchange cash proceeds from this enterprise with various co-conspirators.

Thanks to Daily Record

Tweet

Victoria Gotti Shouts Out in Court

The mother of John "Junior" Gotti interrupted a hearing on her son's racketeering case Friday by telling a federal judge that the government is trying to kill him before he even gets to trial.

"Why don't you just hang him now!" Victoria Gotti shouted from the spectator section of a room in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

She spoke out after Judge Kevin P. Castel asked lawyers at the end of the pretrial hearing whether there were any other matters to address.

"Excuse me, you honor, may I speak?" she asked as she stood up. "I'm his mother." The judge asked if she was a party to the proceedings. When she said she was not, he told her she could not speak.

Still, she asked him what he thought about perjury - a reference to claims a mob turncoat made that he had slept with her daughter, also named Victoria, the former star of the reality TV series "Growing up Gotti."

Then she made the reference to the hanging of her son and added: "They're trying to kill him before trial!"

Outside court she passed out copies of a lie detector test in which the younger Victoria Gotti said she never slept with the turncoat, John Alite, a Gambino organized crime family associate.

She also told reporters that the government was trying to ruin her daughter's reputation in pursuit of a conviction of Gotti, 44. "This trial is rigged before he sets foot in it," she said.

Before Victoria Gotti's outburst, the judge had rejected Gotti's request to have a public defender added to the case to assist his lawyer, Charles Carnesi. Castel said his review of Gotti's assets left him doubting he would qualify for a lawyer at taxpayer expense.

Carnesi said three trials for Gotti had taken a toll on the family's finances, forcing him to take out a $250,000 loan at 14 percent interest. Carnesi explained the high interest rate, saying: "Mr. Gotti's name, for better or worse, is a well known name which causes lenders pause before they're willing to make a loan to him."

He said Gotti had to spend $75,000 of the loan toward credit cards that have been used to pay the family's living expenses.

Carnesi told the judge he will file papers asking that the latest indictment be thrown out. He said the charges brought in August were "from my view, basically the same indictment" as Gotti's previous three trials. Prosecutors have said Gotti assumed control of the powerful Gambino family after his father's 1992 conviction on racketeering and murder charges. His father died in prison.

The current indictment accuses Gotti of involvement in three slayings in the late 1980s and early 1990s and of possessing and trafficking more than 5 kilograms of cocaine.

Gotti is being held at a federal lockup in Brooklyn. He has been tried three times in Manhattan on racketeering charges for an alleged plot to kidnap Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. Trials in 2005 and 2006 ended in hung juries and mistrials after Gotti's lawyers argued he had long since retired from organized crime.

Federal prosecutors announced after the third trial that they were giving up.

The hearing Friday was attended by Sliwa, who wore his red Guardian Angels jacket.

Sliwa, who testified at the earlier trials about the kidnapping attempt, which left him with bullet wounds and continuing injuries, said he won't be satisfied until Gotti "follows his father to hell without an asbestos suit."

He noted that Castel is different from the judge who presided over Gotti's earlier trials and suggested it will make a difference in the outcome.

"He's got a tough judge, a no-nonsense judge," Sliwa said. "He's been stripped of his Guardian Angel."

Thanks to TBO

Tweet