By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com April Brooks, whose career included investigations into children-related crimes and the mysterious death of a Baltimore federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna in 2003, has been named special agent in charge of the Criminal Division in the FBI’s very busy New York Division. Brooks, special assistant to the executive assistant director of the…
By Christopher Dickey Newsweek There’d been a crucial break in one of Manhattan’s most infamous unsolved murders. One after another, reports from NYPD detectives popped up on the New York City police commissioner’s BlackBerry. Ray Kelly was on a quick work trip to London, and here, by the Thames in the predawn hours of May…
Shoshanna Utchenik ticklethewire.com The U.S. feds met with Italian law enforcement counterparts in Italy last week to make sure everyone was on the same page on organized crime. The summit gave the FBI and several federal prosecutors from the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s office a chance to connect the dots with Italian officials on current investigations…
Shoshanna Utchenik ticklethewire.com Racketeering, narcotics trafficking, assault, extortion, murder? Just another day-in-the-life of a Gambino mobster. Five Gambino wise guys pled guilty this week to a range of nefarious charges, announced Preet Bharara, NY U.S Attorney in Manhattan. Working as “soldiers” and “associates” of the Gambino crime family, Vincenzo Frogiero, Todd Labarca, John Brancaccio, Christopher…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Keeping a record in court is a good idea. But mob expert Jerry Capeci of Gang Land News reports that some how that idea got the short shrift back on December 15, 2008, and no court transcript was ever produced when Colombo soldier Joseph (Joe Caves) Competiello admitted in a sealed…
By Shoshanna Utchenik ticklethewire.com It’s going to be a long time before international arms dealer Viktor Bout sees daylight again. The DEA announced late last week that Bout was sentenced in New York to 25 years in prison for conspiring to sell millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including hundreds of surface-to-air missiles and over…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com On the big screen and on TV, sometimes we forget the twisted plots aren’t simply made up, but actually come from real situations in the wiseguy world. Here’s a real story worthy of the big screen involving a mob hit and a secret recording in which an FBI audio expert accidentally…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Former Sen. John Edwards, who is already dealing with a mess of federal charges that he violated campaign finance laws to shield an affair, is going to have to deal with this latest public relations mess. The website DNAinfo reports a hooker working for the millionaire Mom Madam Anna Gristina told…
